Evelyn Reynolds

The Republican South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace faced widespread accusations of hypocrisy after she endorsed Donald Trump – the presidential candidate she previously said she held “accountable” for the January 6 attack on Congress.On Monday, Mace announced her endorsement, a day before the New Hampshire primary, in which Trump enjoys comfortable polling leads over the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, his only remaining opponent.“I don’t see eye to eye perfectly with any candidate,” Mace said. “And until now I’ve stayed out of it. But the time has come to unite behind our nominee.”Saying “it’s been a complete shit show since [Trump] left the White House”, the congresswoman said the US “needs to reverse all the damage Joe Biden has done”. Trump, she said, would be better on the economy, immigration and national security.“Donald Trump’s record in his first term should tell every American how vital it is he be returned to office,” Mace said.“Good Lord,” said Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican who sat on the House January 6 committee then quit Congress over his opposition to Trump. “Nancy Mace is just the worst.”At present, Trump faces 91 criminal charges (17 for election subversion), attempts to keep him off the ballot for inciting an insurrection and assorted civil trials. Still, he has dominated the Republican primary, winning comfortably in Iowa last week.Observers were quick to point to what Mace made of Trump at the end of that term, in the aftermath of January 6.On that day, supporters Trump told to “fight like hell” to block certification of his defeat by Biden attacked Congress, seeking lawmakers to capture and possibly kill in a riot now linked to nine deaths, more than 1,200 arrests and hundreds of convictions.“Everything that he’s worked for … all of that, his entire legacy, was wiped out yesterday,” Mace told CNN on 7 January 2021. “We’ve got to start over.”On 11 January, Mace said: “We have to hold the president accountable for what happened. The rhetoric leading up to this vote, the lies that were told to the American people – this is what happens, rhetoric has real consequences. And people died.”Trump was impeached a second time for inciting the Capitol attack.On 13 January, Mace said on the House floor she would vote against impeachment but added: “I believe we need to hold the president accountable. I hold him accountable for the events that transpired for the attack on our Capitol last Wednesday.”While 10 House Republicans voted to impeach Trump, he was acquitted at his Senate trial when enough members of his party stayed loyal.Trump turned against Mace, endorsing a primary rival in her district in South Carolina. Mace fought off the challenge – with campaign help from Haley.Also on Monday, Steve Benen, an MSNBC producer, said: “Remember when Trump called Nancy Mace ‘absolutely terrible’ and tried to end her career? And when Nikki Haley scrambled to rescue her? A lot can happen in 18 months.”Mace is not the only senior South Carolina Republican to desert the former governor: the US senator Tim Scott, who Haley appointed in 2012, endorsed Trump on Friday.Jose Pagliery, a politics reporter for the Daily Beast, pointed to another widely remarked irony in Mace’s decision to endorse Trump this week, writing: “Rape survivor Nancy Mace just endorsed Donald Trump in the middle of his second rape trial.”In April last year, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Mace discussed both her work to improve the processing of rape kits by law enforcement and her support for exceptions for victims of rape or incest in abortion bans passed in Republican states.She also said: “I am a victim of rape, I was raped by a classmate at the age of 16. I am very wary and the devil is always in the details, but we’ve got to show more care and concern and compassion for women who’ve been raped.”In August, a New York judge dismissed a counterclaim by Trump in a defamation suit brought by the writer E Jean Carroll over her claim that Trump sexually assaulted her in a department store changing room in the 1990s.Explaining why the jury decided Trump “sexually abused” Carroll but did not endorse Carroll’s claim that he raped her, Lewis A Kaplan discussed the difference, under New York law, between forcible penetration with the penis or with fingers.The jury said Trump did the latter to Carroll. Kaplan, however, wrote: “Mr Trump did in fact ‘rape’ Ms Carroll as that term is commonly used and understood in contexts outside of the New York penal law.”The case has now reached a second trial, though a hearing scheduled for Monday was postponed due to juror illness.A representative for Mace did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Speaking to Fox News, Mace said Haley had been a “great governor” but voters in her South Carolina district were “overwhelmingly with Donald Trump”.“People want the primary to be over,” Mace said, pointing to an eventuality most pundits expect sooner rather than later, given Trump’s leads over Haley in New Hampshire, South Carolina (the third state to vote) and elsewhere.Mace also said that for voters in her district, “women’s issues” including abortion were “gonna be really important in the 2024 cycle”. More

Kamala Harris kicked off her much-vaunted abortion rights nationwide tour in Wisconsin on Monday as Joe Biden convened a meeting of his taskforce on reproductive healthcare access, in a tag-team effort to double down on what is likely to be a key campaign issue this year.The vice-president chose the 51st anniversary of the Roe v Wade ruling to begin the Reproductive Freedoms Tour, announced in December, in the battleground state of Wisconsin, which the president won in the 2020 presidential election by just over 20,000 votes.Roe v Wade, the supreme court decision that enshrined the federal right to abortion, was overturned in June 2022 after then president Donald Trump nominated three conservative justices to the nation’s highest court.The decision was a major blow to supporters of reproductive rights, but since the ruling seven states – including the conservative strongholds of Kentucky, Kansas and Montana – have held ballot referendums where voters chose to protect abortion rights. The issue also appeared to hurt Republicans in the 2022 midterm elections.Wisconsin is a notable starting point for Harris’s reproductive freedoms tour. Last year, abortion rights propelled a Democratic victory in a critical election for the state supreme court.In the first of many similar scheduled events, Harris is expected to announce support for increased access to abortion and contraceptives through the new emergency care law, Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (Emtala).She will also denounce Trump, the runaway frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, for his hand in overturning the federally protected right to abortion.“Proud that women across our nation are suffering?” Harris will say, according to excerpts from her speech obtained by the Associated Press. “Proud that women have been robbed of a fundamental freedom? That doctors could be thrown in prison for caring for patients? That young women today have fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers?”The following day, Harris will be joined by Biden for another abortion-focused event, along with their spouses, Jill Biden and Doug Emhoff.Biden’s re-election campaign also rolled out a new campaign ad Sunday, titled Forced, which aims to tie Donald Trump directly to the abortion issue.In Dobbs v Jackson, the 2022 supreme court case that overturned Roe, a Mississippi law that banned most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy with certain medical exceptions was upheld, negating the constitutional right to abortion and overruling the precedent set by Roe more than half a century ago.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a statement on the 51st anniversary of Roe V Wade, Biden said: “Fifty-one years ago today, the Supreme Court recognized a woman’s constitutional right to make deeply personal decisions with her doctor – free from the interference of politicians. Then, a year and a half ago, the Court made the extreme decision to overturn Roe and take away a constitutional right.“As a result, tens of millions of women now live in states with extreme and dangerous abortion bans. Because of Republican elected officials, women’s health and lives are at risk.”When announcing her tour in December, Harris said: “Extremists across our country continue to wage a full-on attack against hard-won, hard-fought freedoms as they push their radical policies – from banning abortion in all 50 states and criminalizing doctors, to forcing women to travel out of state in order to get the care they need.“I will continue to fight for our fundamental freedoms while bringing together those throughout America who agree that every woman should have the right to make decisions about her own body – not the government.” More

A Georgia judge on Monday unsealed the divorce case involving a special prosecutor at the center of allegations concerning an improper relationship with the Fulton county district attorney who brought the racketeering case against Donald Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.The judge also stayed the deposition of the Fulton county district attorney Fani Willis in the divorce, until the special prosecutor Nathan Wade – whom she hired for the high-profile Trump case – had first testified about his relationship and financial conditions himself.Trump’s co-defendant and 2020 campaign elections day operations chief, Michael Roman, has put forward a motion seeking to have the district attorney’s office disqualified from bringing the case because the alleged relationship between Willis and Wade was a conflict of interest.The judge vacated the consent order sealing the divorce proceeding because no court hearing had been held at the time to shield the records. Roman and a coalition of media organizations, including the Guardian, had separately filed to unseal the case.The allegations made by Roman threaten to undercut one of the most complex and high-profile criminal cases against Trump that could go to trial before the 2024 election. Trump, who won the Iowa caucuses last week with a 30-point margin, is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination.Trump and his allies, including Roman, were charged last year with violating the Georgia racketeering statute over their efforts to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election in the state, including by advancing fake Trump slates of electors and pressuring state officials to toss vote totals.The complaint about the relationship inside the district attorney’s office surfaced in January after Roman sought the dismissal of Willis, alleging that she personally profited from hiring Wade because he billed at least $653,000 in fees and used that money to pay for vacations together.The reasoning from Roman, as it goes, suggests that even though Wade could spend his earnings as he liked, it was a conflict of interest when the money was being used to benefit Willis.Roman’s filing included no concrete proof that Willis personally benefited from hiring Wade. Roman’s lawyer Ashleigh Merchant, a respected local attorney who once endorsed Wade to be a judge in 2016, said the claims were based on sources and records from Wade’s divorce proceeding.But in a court filing submitted by Joycelyn Mayfield Wade in the divorce case last week, Wade’s bank records attached as exhibits showed that he had paid for at least two trips to Miami, Florida, and to Napa Valley, California, with Willis as the listed travel companion.The first trip, dated 4 October 2022, showed Wade paid for flights from Atlanta to Miami for himself and for Willis. Separately, on the same date and without names listed, Wade made two purchases with Royal Caribbean Cruises, for $1,248 and $1,387.The second trip, dated 25 April 2023, showed Wade paid for flights from Atlanta to San Francisco for himself and for Willis. On 14 May 2023, Wade made two purchases, for $612 and $228, at a Doubletree hotel in Napa Valley.Willis has not directly addressed the allegations. A spokesperson has said the district attorney’s office would speak through its court filings.The allegations are scheduled to be addressed next month after the Fulton county superior court judge Scott McAfee, who is presiding in the Trump case, set an evidentiary hearing for 15 February. The date comes two weeks after the judge in the divorce case holds a hearing on whether to unseal.Wade started divorce proceedings the day after he was hired as a special prosecutor on the Trump case. The divorce turned contentious last year, after Joycelyn Mayfield Wade complained that her husband had failed to disclose his finances, including income from working on the Trump case.The complaint resulted in Wade being held in contempt by the Cobb county superior court judge and, in January, Willis herself was subpoenaed for information relating to Wade’s work.The subpoena ordered Willis to sit for a taped deposition on 23 January. At the hearing on Monday, the judge also stayed the subpoena until after Wade himself had been deposed by his wife about his financial situation.Willis accused Wade’s wife of “conspiring with interested parties in the criminal election interference case to use the civil discovery process to annoy, embarrass and oppress District Attorney Willis” in a motion to quash, and sought a protective order to avoid the deposition. More

Plodding across frigid New Hampshire ahead of Tuesday’s primary, Nikki Haley offered the state’s proudly freethinking voters a tantalizing proposal: choose her and save America from the presidential rematch seemingly nobody wants.“Seventy percent of Americans have said they don’t want to see a Donald Trump-Joe Biden rematch,” Haley exclaimed on Sunday, drawing head nods and murmurs of agreement from attendees packed into a middle school library in Derry. Haley leaned in: “Do we really want to have two presidential candidates in their 80s?”Biden, the 81-year-old Democratic president, is coasting to his party’s nomination and Trump, the 77-year-old former president, is marching toward the Republican one as the field narrows and he consolidates support from across the party. But Haley, who celebrated her 52nd birthday hopscotching the state on Saturday, insisted there was a different – viable – path.Haley, the former “Tea Party governor” of South Carolina who served as Trump’s first United Nations ambassador, has staked her presidential aspirations on a strong showing in the first-in-the-nation primary.“New Hampshire is do-or-die for Nikki Haley,” said Mike Dennehy, a veteran Republican strategist in New Hampshire who worked on John McCain’s winning presidential primary campaigns in the state in 2000 and 2008 and is unaffiliated. “She needs to go all in and speak specifically to independent voters who want change in this country.”Trump demolished his rivals in the Iowa caucuses. Haley finished third, behind the Florida governor Ron DeSantis who dropped out of the race on Sunday and threw his support behind Trump, the latest sign of Republicans closing ranks around the former president.A Suffolk University/Boston Globe/NBC10 Boston daily tracking poll of New Hampshire voters on Monday had Trump ahead of Haley by double digits, 57% to 38%, with his lead ticking slightly higher in recent days.A competitive night in the Granite state, she hopes, will deliver enough momentum to vault her campaign into her home state of South Carolina, which holds the south’s first presidential primary next month.The secretary of state is predicting record turnout for the Republican primary. And unlike in Iowa, where arctic temperatures likely dampened turnout, Tuesday’s forecast in New Hampshire is several degrees above freezing, or, as locals joke, “shorts weather”.High turn-out is expected to favor Haley, who is relying on outsized support from the nearly 40% of registered voters who do not belong to a political party and can choose to participate in either primary. New Hampshire’s famously freethinking independents have long injected a degree of unpredictability into the state’s contest, setting it apart from socially conservative Iowa.Haley’s best chance of wresting the nomination from Trump may depend on voters like Marie Mulroy, 76, a self-described political moderate from Manchester who despises Trump and voted for Biden in 2020.“I’m sick of it,” Mulroy said. “Two incumbents. Two lame ducks. I’m tired of the forced choices.” On Tuesday, she’ll choose a Republican ballot and vote for the candidate she has seen on the campaign trail 12 times and believes could be the nation’s first female president.Though Mulroy disagrees with Haley on some social issues, particularly abortion, she is impressed by Haley’s approach to foreign policy and the federal debt. Importantly, Mulroy added, she was confident that if Haley were the Republican nominee and lost the election, she would concede. “We won’t have a January 6th with her,” Mulroy said.Haley will also need support from conservative voters like Erin Williams of Newmarket. Williams supported Trump in 2020 but says it’s time to usher in a younger generation of leaders. Drawn to Haley’s “energy and no-nonsense approach,” Williams cringed at the possibility of a Biden-Trump repeat.“I don’t even want to think about that,” she said after Haley’s Sunday night rally at a high school in Exeter.‘One fella and one lady’On Sunday, just two days before voters go to the polls, DeSantis’s departure set the stage for the one-on-one showdown with Trump in New Hampshire that Haley has been seeking.Moments after DeSantis announced his departure Haley shared the news with the mix of patrons and supporters gathered at Brown’s Lobster Pound on New Hampshire’s seacoast.“It’s now one fella and one lady left,” she said, sending the crowd into a frenzy of cheers and applause. “May the best woman win.”Haley has invested heavily in New Hampshire, where Trump is potentially more vulnerable in the highly educated, less religious state. Deep-pocketed allies have helped knock doors and troll Trump on her behalf.SFA Fund Inc, a Haley aligned Super Pac, taunted Trump with mobile billboards outside one of his rallies this week. A spokesperson for the group said the ads were targeting “Trump supporters who are tired of losing”.Americans for Prosperity Action, the political network backed by conservative billionaire Charles Koch, has contacted more than 210,000 voters in the state since endorsing Haley in November, said Greg Moore, the group’s New Hampshire director.In a briefing with reporters, he said that those conversations made it clear that, true to form in a state known for “breaking late”, many voters were still making up their minds.“Some of the narrative is that it’s all moderates for Haley and all conservatives for Trump. I know that’s not true,” Moore said. “She is pulling from both conservatives and moderates.”A Monmouth poll released on Monday found that the number of registered independents who planned to take a Republican ballot has increased from 52% in November to 63%, suggesting a “measurable influx of Democratic-leaning independents” in Tuesday’s primary.Haley is walking a fine line in icy New Hampshire, chasing both independent voters who despise Trump and conservatives who voted for him but are open to an alternative.The effort has earned her the backing of New Hampshire’s popular Republican governor, Chris Sununu, who has escorted her around the state. On Sunday, Haley won the endorsement of the Union-Leader, a state newspaper which praised her as a candidate who could “run circles around the dinosaurs from the last two administrations, backwards and in heels”.“She has the difficult task of trying to reach out to two very different parts of the electorate,” said Dante Scala, a professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the University of New Hampshire. “There’s a real chasm.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn stops around the state, Haley has played up her conservative credentials and hawkish foreign policy, rebutting Trump’s attacks on her, with vows to crack down on the southern border, stand up to China and never raise taxes.Early in her 2024 campaign, Haley stepped gingerly around the topic of her former boss. But with Trump holding firmly to his lead in New Hampshire – and several of her would-be supporters in the state clamoring for more – Haley began to confront him head-on.On the eve of Tuesday’s contest, she questioned Trump’s mental acuity, accused him of spreading “lies” about her record, berating his relationship with dictators and slamming his support from “Washington insiders”.Yet she continues to sidestep questions about Trump’s web of legal troubles, which has only hardened the extraordinary loyalty he inspires from the Republican base. As president, she said she would pardon Trump if he’s convicted but not preemptively. Separately, she has committed to supporting the Republican nominee.One of her campaign’s most consistent knocks on Trump is that he’s bad for Republicans. During his time in office, the party lost the House, Senate and White House during his time in office. They also repeatedly lost New Hampshire in the general election. Even then, she has left some of the sharpest attacks to her allies.“I am tired of losing,” Sununu, his voice hoarse from days of campaigning, told a crowd in Exeter. “I’m tired of losers. And I’m sure as hell tired of Donald Trump.”‘The sound of a two person race’Trump hopes to extinguish Haley’s path with a decisive victory on Tuesday before the race turns to an even friendlier contest in Nevada.“We need big margins,” Trump said at a rally in Manchester.A memo by the Trump campaign argued that Haley “must win” in New Hampshire. If she doesn’t, it said, she had two choices: suspend her campaign and endorse Trump or prepare to be “absolutely DEMOLISHED and EMBARASSED [sic] in her home state of South Carolina”.Haley has vowed to ride on. Her campaign scheduled a rally in South Carolina on Wednesday, 24 hours after polls close in New Hampshire.Part of Haley’s pitch is that she is more electable than the former president. She frequently points to polling that shows her beating Biden in a hypothetical matchup. But there is a creeping sense that the race for the Republican nomination is a foregone conclusion no matter what happens in New Hampshire.In Manchester, Carter Crumley, 60, a retired engineer and registered independent, said Haley had “a lot of great qualities” but felt she didn’t have a chance. He plans to vote for Trump.“You don’t just want to waste a vote because you like someone,” he said. “You want them to be electable.”Haley is embracing her status as an underdog, reminding voters that she’d been underestimated and counted out for much of her career only to prove the “fellas” wrong: besting a 30-year Republican incumbent to win a seat in the state legislature and surging past a field of more prominent Republicans when she ran for governor in 2010.And unlike Trump’s rowdy rallies, Haley has been doing the time-honored work of retail politics that New Hampshire voters expect – and demand – of their candidates. In recent days, she has answered interrogatories at Mary Ann’s diner in Amherst, tossed back a Guinness at the Peddler’s Daughter Irish Bar in Nashua before zipping to Chick-fil-A in the governor’s red mustang.At a seafood restaurant in Epping, Haley dropped down to sign a drawing made for her by five-year-old Cora. The girl’s mother, who gave only her first name, Jessica, said her daughter was drawn to Haley because she was the only woman in the stack of campaign literature flooding their mailbox.As for herself, she had hoped to support the former Arkansas governor, Asa Hutchinson, who dropped out of the presidential race after his anti-Trump candidacy failed to break through. Now, she said she will follow Hutchinson’s lead and support Haley.In a sign of the times, protesters have disrupted multiple Haley’s events in recent days. As supporters booed, Haley quieted the crowd to say that she is always “happy to see a protester” because her husband, who is deployed, and other armed service members are serving to protect their right to free speech. It is one of her strongest applause lines.An electric crowd filled a high school gymnasium in Exeter for Haley’s final campaign stop on Sunday. Her campaign shot T-shirts into the audience. A young supporter danced on stage.“Can you hear that sound?” Haley asked as she began her remarks. “That’s the sound of a two-person race.”But it was Judy Sheindlin, the straight-talking television arbiter known and loved by American viewers as Judge Judy, who delivered Haley’s closing argument.“Please, New Hampshire. Use your brains and your heart,” Sheindlin said. “Bring her home on Tuesday.”David Smith contributed reporting. More

‘Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts,” Ron DeSantis said, as he pulled out of the race to lead the Republican party. It was a strange way to announce that what counts – the continuing bit – is the thing you don’t have. Also, it is quite contestable, for such a short statement; failure isn’t necessarily fatal, but it does depend on what you have failed at. Still, what set most pedants afire wasn’t the substance but the attribution: DeSantis said it was Winston Churchill; the International Churchill Society disagreed. Meh, let’s not split hairs. It is a sort of obvious notion, made of words, so it is surely the kind of thing Churchill would have said, had he said it.This is my favourite kind of Churchill-eering, where politicians summon his ghost simply by adopting similar rhetoric. Penny Mordaunt’s fabulous “Stand up and fight! Stand up and fight!” before going on to add, “Never forget those who went before us and remember that without a Churchill, you can’t have a Zelenskiy” during her speech to last year’s Tory conference was a classic of the genre: a pitch-perfect throwback to “We shall fight on the beaches”, having first removed the beaches, the landing grounds, the fields, the streets, the hills, any obvious enemy, any clear sense of what was being defended and any endgame. Churchill here stands in as an all-purpose fighty-man, and as such wouldn’t make much of a cultural export, since everyone’s history has those.It took Boris Johnson to repackage Churchill for an international audience, not so much with his book, The Churchill Factor, as in his strategically idiotic attack on Barack Obama in 2016. He was mayor of London then, when the most he could screw up was planning on the Vauxhall gyratory which, to be fair, quickly cohered as a literal and figurative shrine to the emptiness of late capitalism, and is probably the most coherent thing he ever did. But in his downtime, he wrote a column for the Sun, enraged that Obama had moved a bust of Churchill out of the Oval Office (a full seven years previously), contending that the “part-Kenyan president” was motivated by anti-colonialism, “ancestral dislike” of the British empire. To follow the logic, Johnson, having German heritage, would also have reason to dislike Churchill, but he is not doing logic, he is focusing on Obama’s race, which I feel Obama should have met with unending hellfire, rather than a mild: “No, we just moved Churchill to a different corridor.”Too late to worry about that now: Churchill, in Johnson’s new frame, stood not only for nostalgia, a comforting world order with the posh at the top, but also for white supremacy and colonial brutality as an essential part of that past. Winston was now a mascot for the anti-woke warriors, the embodiment of their core principles: the past is better than the present; the world makes more sense with the posh at the top, just listen to their lovely cadence; the dicey bits – racist exploitation and carnage – are expiated by nostalgia (it was all a long time ago) and implicitly celebrated by it (weren’t things better then?), and anyone who disagrees hates their country.It makes no sense as an export, least of all to the US, which had made its feelings plain about the yoke of the British empire 99 years before Churchill was born. It doesn’t even make much sense as a British narrative, which had previously been happy to dial down Churchill’s imperialism, concentrating on its more nuanced expressions, and use him mainly as the totem of Britain’s successful fight against fascism. In Johnson’s revision, Churchill the Coloniser is as valorised as Churchill the anti-Nazi. Its nonsensical nature is why it’s the perfect cultural export: stripped of all meaning, just some loud, posh vibes, caricatured to the point where you can’t remember what the original looks like, political rhetoric’s answer to Saltburn.Loth as I am to get into combat about who knows Churchill the best, between me, Johnson and DeSantis, we all know this, right? He was a lot of things, but he wasn’t stupid; he would have hated this. He would be turning in his grave. More

The ignominious end of Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign is unlikely to boost Donald Trump’s last challenger, Nikki Haley, to the Republican nomination , according to two New Hampshire polls released on the eve of the primary in the north-eastern state.DeSantis also endured a round of scathing critiques of his campaign which started off being seen as a major source of opposition to Trump. But his White House bid never fully took off and fizzled into failure and a major blow to the rightwing Florida governor’s political reputation.In a poll released on Sunday, the day the hard-right Florida governor contradicted his own Super Pac, Never Back Down, and backed down, NBC News, the Boston Globe and Suffolk University put Trump 19 points clear of Haley, at 55% to 36% support.Ending his campaign, DeSantis looked past months of personal attacks from Trump to offer the twice-impeached, 91-times criminally charged former president – whose lie about a stolen 2020 election DeSantis has disowned – his endorsement to face Joe Biden.On Monday, the Washington Post and Monmouth University put Trump at 52% support in New Hampshire, to 34% for Haley.That represented a near-doubling of support for the former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador since November. But, the Post said, that was primarily a result of the withdrawal of Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who campaigned as an anti-Trump candidate.DeSantis had 8% support in the Post-Monmouth poll, which was carried out before he ended his campaign.“If DeSantis’s supporters in the poll are allocated based on their second choice,” the Post said, “Trump’s support rises by four points while Haley’s increases by two.”On Sunday, Haley staged a rally in New Hampshire with Judy Sheindlin, better known to millions of Americans as Judge Judy, a former Manhattan family court judge made famous by a small claims, arbitration-based TV show.“What a crowd, Exeter!” she said. “The energy on the ground is electric, and it’s clear Granite Staters are ready to make a difference on Tuesday! An extra special thanks to America’s favorite judge, Judge Judy Sheindlin, for joining us! She gets it: this country needs no drama, no chaos, no nonsense – just results!”But despite such determined boosterism, polling results undeniably show Haley well adrift of Trump in New Hampshire and even further behind in South Carolina, her home state which next month will be the third to vote.According to the polling site FiveThirtyEight.com, Trump leads Haley by 61% to 25% in the southern state.Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said: “I wish I had a dollar for every Republican who’s told me over the last three years, ‘We’ve learned our lesson. No way will Trump be our nominee again.’”Speaking to CNN, Sabato added: “If [Haley] loses on Tuesday, it almost certainly marks the end of her run. She may continue through her home state of South Carolina though I think she’d be hesitant to do it because she wouldn’t want to lose her home state. That’s really difficult to explain to people.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“But for all practical purposes, once DeSantis left and once the other candidates were knocked out of the race, it was Trump’s to lose and Trump has to lose significantly and he’s not going to lose it.”DeSantis exited the race with a statement containing both a Churchill quote it turned out Churchill never said and his endorsement of Trump.Sabato was asked about DeSantis’s decision to back Trump after, only last week, attacking Republicans he said had chosen to “kiss the ring” and endorse the former president.“I guess he saw some good examples of ring kissing and decided to imitate it,” Sabato said.“Look, who knows what was going through his mind other than the fact that he certainly wants to run the next time. Now, whether he’ll be credible as a candidate after this disastrous run? Remember, he was supposed to be Trump’s main challenger and most of the establishment in the Republican party was betting on him. And his campaign crashed and burned.“This was really a disgraceful enterprise in so many different ways. But in [DeSantis’s] mind, at least right now, as he’s coming to terms with the the demise of his dream, he’s thinking about running in 2028. Well, being associated with Nikki Haley is not going to help you, because this party has already become the Donald Trump party or the Maga party and it will be in all likelihood even more so as the years go on.” More

Within the subterranean levels of a fancy hotel in downtown Washington, just a few days before the 51st anniversary of Roe v Wade, the anti-abortion movement was trying to mount a comeback.Kevin Roberts stood on stage in a cavernous ballroom aglow with neon shades of blue, purple and pink. As president of the Heritage Foundation, Roberts leads one of the main thinktanks behind recent conservative attacks on abortion. And he is not happy with how things are going.“We meet today amid a pro-abortion media narrative of smug triumphalism,” Roberts told hundreds of young abortion foes, who had gathered in the ballroom from across the country to hear him and other anti-abortion leaders speak.“You’ve heard the story. Less than two years after the supreme court overturned Roe, the abortion-industrial complex is celebrating an unprecedented political winning streak. Across the country, pro-life bills have failed. Abortion referenda have passed. Democrat leaders are crowing while too many Republican leaders are cowering from the fight.”Roberts was speaking at the annual National Pro-Life Summit, a one-day organizing camp for high school- and college-aged anti-abortion activists. This year, the summit faced a monumental task: organizers and attendees alike hoped to reinvigorate a movement that, 18 months ago, soared to the height of its power with the overturning of Roe – and then, in the months that followed, has repeatedly crashed-landed back on earth.Since Roe’s demise, seven states have voted on abortion-related ballot referendums. In each case, voters have decisively moved to protect abortion rights, even in ruby-red states like Kentucky, Kansas and Montana.The stakes are even higher in 2024. Not only are roughly a dozen more states gearing up to potentially vote on abortion-related referendums, but the future of the White House is on the line. If abortion hurts Republicans the election – as it’s widely thought to have done in the 2022 midterms – anti-abortion activists may see the GOP brand their movement as ballot-box poison.The National Pro-Life Summit is generally a peek into what the anti-abortion movement is telling itself about itself – and at present, it is not happy with Republicans. For years, the anti-abortion movement has corralled voters for Republicans. On Saturday, they repeatedly condemned the GOP for failing to adequately support their cause.The last Republican president appointed the justices who overturned Roe, while red states have enacted more than a dozen near-total abortion bans since the ruling fell. But many Republicans have begun to back away from the issue. Before the 2022 elections, several quietly downplayed their stances, while dozens of House Republicans have delayed signing onto a bill to nationally ban abortions.“Our friends in the Republican party need to touch some grass,” said Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America, the organization behind the summit. “Those who say now that we shouldn’t be talking, that Republican candidates, those seeking for office, should hide from the abortion issue – they continue to be wrong. We won’t win if we put our head in the sand.”Democrats are already attempting to use Roe’s impact on doctors to win votes, as Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has launched a blitz of events and ads timed to the Roe anniversary on Monday. Vice-President Kamala Harris will kick off a tour devoting to spotlighting abortion access, while Biden will assemble a meeting of his reproductive health taskforce.His administration has also announced plans to expand access to contraception under the Affordable Care Act as well as an initiative to spread information about a law that, the administration says, guarantees Americans’ legal rights to emergency abortions, even in states that ban the procedure.A thin lineThe mood on Saturday wasn’t totally dour.Attendees could buy baseball caps that read “I’m just out here saving babies,” sweatshirts that bore an image of a newspaper front page that proclaimed “ROE REVERSED”, as well as red hats adorned with the words “Make America Pro-Life Again” in the unmistakable style of Trump’s Maga hats. Young people excitedly posed for group photos in front of a backdrop that read, “EQUAL RIGHTS FOR THE PREBORN!” An illustrated fetus was curled up in one corner.Yet, in speech after speech, activists told young people that they were the victims of vast forces arrayed against them. They accused abortion rights supporters of spreading misinformation about ballot referendums and said they were simply outspent by the opposition. In Ohio, abortion rights supporters reported receiving about three times as much money as a coalition that opposed abortion rights.“These people love chaos. That is the left. The left is inherently chaotic at its core,” said Will Witt, a conservative influencer who, like Roberts, spoke at the morning address to all attendees.After quoting from the Bible in an effort to demonstrate that God originated order, Witt continued: “This is why the left, this is why these pro-choicers, this is why they hate God. Because God represents order in the world, whereas they love chaos.”The summit speakers were attempting to walk a fine line. At the same time that they were attempting to convince attendees that they were the victims of a world turned against them, they also had to make the case that opposition to abortion is a majority view – and one issue that can get Republicans elected.“Our opinion on this issue, the issue, is not outside of the mainstream, no matter how many times ABC wants to try to tell me it is,” Hawkins told attendees at a workshop dedicated to understanding what went wrong with the abortion referendums. Most millennials and members of Gen Z, she added, “want some sorts of limits on abortion”.Polling on abortion is complex, since respondents’ answers can vary widely depending on how a question is asked or how much context is provided. Most Americans believe that abortion should be restricted after the first trimester of pregnancy, according to polling from Gallup. However, over the last two decades, more and more people have become open to keeping abortion legal later into pregnancy. Republicans in Virginia failed to take control of the state legislature last year after they ran on a promise of banning abortion past 15 weeks of pregnancy.Gallup has also found that, since 2020, more Americans identify as “pro-choice” than “pro-life”. More people have started to call themselves “pro-choice” since the US supreme court overturned Roe in 2022.Hawkins is not in favor of only “some sorts of limits on abortion”.“I want to see no abortions be legal, ever,” she said in an interview. She rejected the notion that abortions performed to save women’s lives qualify as abortions. “When you’re looking at a case where a woman’s life is at risk, where the physician believes that she can no longer safely carry her child in her womb, or she may lose her life – we wouldn’t consider that an abortion unless the abortionist goes in with the intention to killing the child.”Instead, she said, it’s a “maternal-fetal separation”.Hawkins’ point was an effort to contend with a phenomenon that has been particularly damaging for the movement: stories from women who have sued after they said they were denied medically necessary abortions.Every state with an abortion ban has some kind of exception for cases of medical emergencies, but doctors in those states have widely said that the exceptions are so vague as to be unworkable. In a recent study of 54 OB-GYNs in states with post-Roe abortion restrictions, more than 90% said that the law prevented them from adhering to the best clinical standards of care.‘You vote pro-life’Last year, when the National Pro-Life Summit held a straw poll asking attendees about their preferred 2024 president candidate, Ron DeSantis won. This year, with DeSantis a day away from dropping out of the presidential primary, Hawkins cheerfully proclaimed the latest straw poll victor: Donald Trump.As much as their leaders may lock heads with Republicans or Trump – who has suggested that hardline abortion stances hurt Republicans – they are ultimately unlikely to withhold votes from the GOP. Even Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, who was a target of the January 6 riot and who spoke at the summit, indicated that people need to simply get on with it.“That’s why we have primaries. We sort ’em out at every level. But after the primary’s over, you vote pro-life,” Pence said. “You go get behind men and women who are going to stand for the right to life.”A booth for the Heritage Foundation was emblazoned with logos for its “Project 2025”, which includes a playbook for the next conservative president. It recommends that the US government stop funding or promoting abortion in international programs, turbocharge the government’s existing “surveillance” efforts to collect data about abortion, and enforce the 19th-century Comstock Act to ban the mailing of abortion pills. That would effectively result in the removal of abortion pills from the market, which Hawkins said is a policy goal of hers.“If Donald Trump would be elected again, the people he would appoint to his presidential administration would not be abortion activists,” Hawkins said in an interview. “Hands down, that’s a guarantee. And they’re going to be coming to Washington to protect the people and the people includes the pre-born children.” More

While Donald Trump and Nikki Haley might draw focus, a shadow presidential primary is taking place in New Hampshire, where Joe Biden could stumble at the first hurdle of his bid to run for president again in 2024 following an internal Democratic party feud.As a consequence of the party scrap, Biden’s name will not even appear on the ballot in the Granite state on Tuesday. While the president remains the favorite to win his party’s overall nomination, his absence here has opened a window for Dean Phillips, a Democratic congressman from Minnesota, and Marianne Williamson, an author and self-help guru who ran for president in 2020, to mount longshot presidential bids.The pair have spent weeks campaigning in the state, pitching different visions for the future. Phillips, 55, has touted his reputation as a centrist; his record of working with Republicans to get things done; and the fact that he is 26 years younger than Biden.Williamson, who withdrew from the 2020 race before the Iowa caucuses, is selling more of a deviation from the current administration. A progressive, she would introduce free college tuition, declare a climate emergency and “Department of Peace” which would be tasked with avoiding war abroad and tackling white supremacy at home.So far it is Phillips who seems to be drawing the most attention from Granite staters, even if, as he told voters in Salem on Friday, challenging Biden has meant being “excommunicated” from the wider Democratic party.“I was a darling as of 90 days ago, and now I’m the devil somehow,” Phillips told the Guardian after the event.“But that’s how it works. I expected this because it is a nonsensical culture, of standing in line playing your role waiting your turn. We can’t do that if we hope to save this country.”Phillips, who ran his family’s hundred million dollar brewing company before winning a seat in the House of Representatives in 2018, only launched his campaign in October 2023, but he has established a large political operation in the state.At his events his volunteers scurry around gathering signatures from people in the crowd, and hand out T-shirts and buttons with the legend: “I like Dean” written on the front. Frequently the crowds are large.An event in Nashua on Saturday, a bitterly cold day with wispy snow falling from the sky, drew more than 200 people, who heard Phillips tout his record as “the second most bipartisan” Democrat in the House of Representatives.“We believe it is time to segregate the far-left and the far-right and give voice to the exhausted majority of America. Are you ready for that?” Phillips said, to applause.A man who clearly has a passion for language, Phillips then addressed a Democratic effort to write-in Biden’s name on the ballot on Tuesday by suggesting: “If he wrote you off, why would you write him in,” and claimed that Biden “took the granite state for gran-ted”.On the stump Phillips sometimes adds: “I did torpedo my career in Congress, so that this country will not be torpedoed by this nonsense.”New Hampshire polling shows Biden with a commanding lead over Phillips, and an even more commanding lead over Williamson. But given Biden’s name isn’t on the ballot, there’s a possibility Phillips could win.The unusual situation stems from the Democratic national committee’s decision to ditch decades of tradition this year in choosing South Carolina, a much more racially diverse state, to host the first presidential primary. When New Hampshire said it would host its primary first anyway – South Carolina will vote next week – the Democratic National Committee essentially said it would ignore the state’s results.It means that Phillips’s and Williamson’s efforts here won’t actually help them become a presidential candidate, but that doesn’t render the time they spend here completely redundant, said Dante Scala, a professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire.“New Hampshire historically has not been about delegates, because we have relatively few to offer in the big scheme of things,” Scala said.“It’s about the publicity that comes with a victory or even a better-than-expected performance in an early voting state in the nomination process, and I think they’ve been following that playbook.”Biden might be absent from the state, but a movement has emerged encouraging people to write his name on voting slips, and in a sign that the Biden campaign sees the potential for embarrassment, a series of high-profile Biden supporters have been dispatched to New Hampshire in recent weeks.Ro Khanna, a rising Democratic congressman from California, held an event for Biden on Saturday, while Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, is among a slew of Biden’s cabinet officials who have pitched up here since the start of December.Another problem for Phillips and Williamson is a liberal-led effort to get independent New Hampshirites to vote for Haley in the Republican primary, in an attempt to damage Trump’s chances in the state. PrimaryPivot, the organization running the campaign, has been a regular presence at Republican events.“There’s a difference between a regular conservative Republican and someone who is an autocrat,” said Robert Schwarz, co-founder of PrimaryPivot.“For the issues most important to our democracy, Nikki Haley and Donald Trump are night and day.”For Phillips and Williamson, the write-in Biden campaign, and a separate effort to write-in “ceasefire” on Democratic ballots to critique Biden’s handling of Israel’s actions in Gaza, is an unwanted distraction.“President Biden doesn’t really care about a write-in campaign. The president would care if a candidate, such as myself, who has called for a ceasefire from the very beginning, got a lot of votes,” Williamson said at a campaign event in Manchester on Saturday.“I find [the campaign] kind of self-indulgent, performative.”Williamson, who after dropping out of the 2020 race endorsed Bernie Sanders for president, has a much broader critique of the US than Phillips. Political elites, Williamson said, have a “business model” of “job elimination, and worker exploitation, and demonization of unions, and tax cuts for the very, very wealthy”.“A majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. The majority of Americans can’t even dream of homeownership at this point. A majority of Americans cannot afford to absorb a $500 unexpected expenditure. One in four Americans live with medical debt, 75 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured,” Williamson said.She has found some support among people like Lisa Swanson, a student at Quinnipiac university who voted for Sanders four years ago. Speaking after the Manchester event, Swanson said she found Williamson “very reasonable”.“She shares a lot of the beliefs that I’ve had for a very long time, as if she’s plucked them right out of my own brain. So that’s very refreshing,” Swanson said.But while the campaigns of Williamson and Phillips might be winning support, there is still a sense that this could all be for naught. Neither is expected to seriously challenge Biden in South Carolina primary, let alone in the states to follow.Like others who attended events for these rebel candidates, Swanson was angry at the Democratic party skipping their state.“I feel like it’s pretty anti-democratic, quite frankly. It is the opposite of democracy. We are supposed to vote as the people to show what we want, and the DNC doing that with Joe Biden, quite frankly, says that they don’t trust the people to make a decision,” Swanson said. More