Elections

The former president has found a way to connect with Florida’s congressional delegation in a way that Gov. Ron DeSantis has not.When Anna Paulina Luna’s father was killed in a car crash in January 2022, she received notes from two prominent Florida Republicans.One was from former President Donald J. Trump, a condolence letter that he signed‌, “Donald.”The second letter came not from Gov. Ron DeSantis, but from his wife, Casey.The letters meant something to Ms. Luna, who was endorsed by both Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis in the House race she won last year. But in the end, she backed Mr. Trump for president in 2024.“Trump’s operation is personal,” Ms. Luna said in an interview on Capitol Hill, hours before flying to Mar-a-Lago for a dinner with Mr. Trump and the Florida congressional lawmakers who have endorsed him. “You take the time to actually get to know the people you’re going to be working with and that does make a difference.”The different approaches to outreach underscore Mr. DeSantis’s political weakness as he finds himself in a heated endorsement battle with Mr. Trump.The personal touch also helps explain how Mr. Trump — despite one criminal indictment and potentially more to come — has continued to increase his support among Republican lawmakers at the expense of one of the nation’s most popular governors.Furthermore, it reflects a new approach for Mr. Trump, who appears to be playing the political game in a more traditional way than he has in the past.Mr. Trump has long been considered the Republican favorite and now holds a lead of almost 25 percentage points over Mr. DeSantis in a FiveThirtyEight national poll average.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida speaking at a county Republican Party breakfast in Michigan. He is trailing Mr. Trump in congressional endorsements.Kaytie Boomer/The Bay City Times, via Associated PressMr. DeSantis, meanwhile, has struggled to find his footing as he juggles duties as governor of the nation’s No. 3 state by population with preparations for his first national campaign. Since declaring himself “kind of a hot commodity” last month in an interview with The Times of London, he has drifted further behind in the polls to Mr. Trump.During that time, he has been criticized by fellow Republicans for referring to the war in Ukraine as a “territorial dispute.” He adopted a tougher tone about Mr. Trump’s arrest in New York after initially dismissing the case because Florida had “real issues” to focus on.Mr. DeSantis has also had difficulty at times connecting with potential supporters as he has traveled the country on a book tour. At an event this month in Michigan, he irritated some Republicans who said privately that he had spent little time with the crowd at a morning event and left another in the afternoon shortly after posing for pictures.Those differences have played out as the two men have pushed for endorsements in Congress: Mr. Trump has collected 47, and Mr. DeSantis, a former congressman, just three.Mr. Trump, according to congressional aides who have fielded calls from Mr. Trump’s team, has run an aggressive and organized effort to gain support from House Republicans.One of his top political advisers, Brian Jack, worked during the midterms for Kevin McCarthy, the California Republican whom Mr. Trump helped install as speaker. Mr. Jack, along with Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, two of the former president’s senior advisers, have used their connections to coordinate the outreach effort.Ultimately, it is Mr. Trump who closes the deal himself. He has made calls to lawmakers, many of whom he knows after years of providing endorsements and hosting dinners at his Mar-a-Lago club.In contrast, some members of Congress said they had not heard from Mr. DeSantis until one of his aides reached out to ask for their endorsements. Seventeen of the Republicans who have endorsed Mr. Trump served in the House with Mr. DeSantis, who left Congress after six years to run for governor in 2018.Endorsements, like political polls, suggest political strength but are not purely predictive. Mr. Trump, for example, had relatively few endorsements when he ran in 2016, but now shows his deep strength within a certain core of the party even as roughly half of all Republican voters still tell pollsters they are interested in moving on from him.But endorsements from other elected officials help give candidates an air of legitimacy and can help spread a presidential contender’s message in their home districts.For Mr. Trump, few political institutions better reflect his arc of power inside the party.“Trump’s operation is personal,” Representative Anna Paulina Luna said.Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images“The pendulum couldn’t have swung much further, and this time Trump is the establishment candidate,” said Dave Wasserman, who analyzes House races as a senior editor for The Cook Political Report.As a candidate in 2016, Mr. Trump had no congressional endorsements for the first six months of his campaign and the first two House members who eventually backed him — Chris Collins of New York and Duncan Hunter of California — both resigned after unrelated criminal convictions and were later pardoned by Mr. Trump.Since then, Republican House candidates have effectively crawled over one another to seek Mr. Trump’s seal.Mr. Trump’s endorsement advantage is most pronounced among Florida’s 20 Republican House members, nine of whom have already backed him, including Representative Michael Waltz, who succeeded Mr. DeSantis in Congress. Two more Florida House members, Gus Bilirakis and Carlos Gimenez, are expected to announce their support for Mr. Trump in the coming days, according to people familiar with the planning.Representative Greg Steube of Florida, who was hospitalized for four days after falling 25 feet off a ladder at home this year, told Politico this week that Mr. DeSantis’s office had never reached out to him and also ignored multiple requests to connect. Mr. Trump was the first person to reach out to Mr. Steube while he was in the I.C.U., he said.Representative Vern Buchanan of Florida endorsed Mr. Trump on Wednesday after a personal call from the former president, who asked for the endorsement and extended an invitation to dinner on Thursday at Mar-a-Lago.Mr. DeSantis has support from one Floridian from Congress so far: Representative Laurel Lee, who served in Mr. DeSantis’s administration.Ms. Lee endorsed Mr. DeSantis on Tuesday when the governor made a special trip to Washington to meet with members of Congress. But Mr. Trump picked up multiple endorsements just before and after Mr. DeSantis’s meeting — including one from Representative Lance Gooden of Texas, who announced his endorsement of the president within minutes of leaving the meeting with the Florida governor.Still, Mr. Trump’s power has its limits — even in Congress.In the 36 most competitive House races during the 2022 midterms, Mr. Trump endorsed just five Republicans — all of whom lost.More than half of the nearly 50 endorsements he has received have come from members who won their races last year by 30 points or more, or represent such heavily Republican districts that Democrats didn’t field an opponent.When it comes to the most-watched Florida delegation, Ms. Luna said that most of them want Mr. DeSantis to continue furthering his conservative agenda from the Statehouse.The ideal situation, she said, was for Mr. DeSantis to hold off on his presidential ambitions until 2028. “If he does announce,” she added, “we’re going to be bummed.” More

False claims about election fraud remain a problem, spreading in various places online, voting and media experts said.There are 787 million reasons to consider Fox News’s settlement of the defamation lawsuit a stunning victory for Dominion Voting Systems. Whether the millions of dollars that Fox is paying to Dominion will put to rest false claims about the 2020 presidential election or help deter misinformation more broadly remains far less clear.In the blinkered information bubbles where the lies about Dominion’s rigging the vote were fabricated and spread, conspiracy theories about the company continue to thrive — at least among those resistant to overwhelming evidence, including new disclosures about Fox News and its most famous hosts that Dominion’s lawsuit revealed.And Dominion is only one part of a broader conspiracy theory that the American electoral system is corrupt. That view, despite all the proof to the contrary, is still cheered on by former President Donald J. Trump, who remains the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024.“Part of the strength of that conspiracy theory is that it has so many different strands that yield the conclusion of a rigged election that you could actually destroy one thread or one strand, and you’d still have enough strands to sustain it,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and a founder of FactCheck.org.The $787.5 million settlement, one of the largest ever for a defamation case, undoubtedly has a punitive effect on Fox, even though it allowed the company to avoid a potentially embarrassing trial. Like the verdicts last year against Alex Jones, the broadcaster who defamed the families of schoolchildren killed in Sandy Hook Elementary School and was ordered to pay them more than $1.4 billion, the outcome showed that lies can be costly for those who spread them.Alex Jones was found liable for defamation after spreading falsehoods about the Sandy Hook school shooting.Kirsten Luce for The New York TimesYet Mr. Jones has continued his broadcasts on Infowars, the conspiratorial news site, while employing legal strategies that could help him evade some of the financial penalty.For researchers who study disinformation, the abrupt end to the lawsuit against Fox dashed hopes that a lengthy trial — with testimony from hosts who repeated accusations against Dominion they knew to be false — would do more to expose the dangerous consequences of pushing falsehoods and conspiracies.Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press, an advocacy group for digital rights and accountability, was among those expressing disappointment. She said that the settlement — for half of what Dominion originally sought — reflected Fox’s “desire to avoid further damning facts coming out during trial.”“Yet money alone won’t bring us accountability, and it doesn’t correct the ongoing harms Fox News causes to democracy,” she said. “If $787.5 million is the cost to tell a lie, repeatedly, what’s the cost of curing that lie?”Fox was spared extended and potentially damaging testimony. The network did not have to issue an apology on air. Instead, in a carefully crafted statement, Fox acknowledged “the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false” and touted its “continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards.”While the major news networks pivoted to cover the trial’s abrupt end on Tuesday, Fox devoted just six minutes and 22 seconds to the topic across three segments. None of its prime time hosts, including Tucker Carlson, who had once bolstered the voter fraud myths and was named as a defendant in Dominion’s lawsuit, mentioned the case.Instead, Mr. Carlson began his show with a segment about violence in Chicago, airing video clips largely showing Black Chicagoans during a weekend of violence. “This is why we used to shoot looters,” he said. That was followed with an interview with Elon Musk, the entrepreneur and new owner of Twitter.“So what would you be thinking about when you’re watching Tucker Carlson?” Ms. Jamieson said. “Not the Fox settlement, but crime in the cities, interesting interview with Musk. And now our media diet for the day has told you what matters.”None of Fox’s prime time hosts, including Tucker Carlson, mentioned the settlement on air.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesA similar phenomenon unfolded in other news organizations on the political right in the wake of the settlement. The Gateway Pundit, a site known for pushing voter fraud conspiracy theories, devoted one 55-word story to the settlement on Tuesday, which was not updated.Far more words were expressed in comments left by readers, where nearly 4,000 missives raised fresh conspiracy theories. Among them was a tale that Fox News’s settlement was actually a shrewd maneuver that would help Dominion extract debilitating sums from Fox competitors, including the conservative news networks One America News and Newsmax, which have also been sued by Dominion.In the two hours following the settlement’s announcement, there was a significant spike in references online to the discredited film “2000 Mules,” which spun an elaborate theory of people delivering thousands of ballots in drop boxes, according to Zignal Labs, a company that tracks activity online. The references surged again on Wednesday after a prominent commentator on Twitter, Rogan O’Handley, chided those “cheering over” the settlement. “We know it was rigged,” he wrote.On Telegram, the freewheeling social media app,users claimed without evidence that the deal was a way for Fox to launder money; that the network was in cahoots with Dominion to engineer an election coup; that Dominion was trying to avoid a trial that would expose its corrupt practices; and that the judicial system was controlled by the Mafia.Even if the Dominion victory makes news organizations think twice before reporting lies about election technology vendors in the future, the damage has already been done.Lawrence Norden, the senior director of the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, said the settlement would do little to protect election workers who were abused by anonymous conspiracy theorists or voters led astray by false narratives about ballot fraud.“Lies about our elections have really inundated our society, and I don’t think that’s changing,” he said. “Not all of those lies involve the potential for a defamation suit; it’s really the extreme cases where people are going to be able to collect monetary damages.”Legal experts said that the Dominion case against Fox had several important characteristics that set it apart. The voting technology company had compiled evidence suggesting that some Fox hosts had shared the false election fraud narrative with viewers despite privately expressing serious misgivings about the claims. The company had also submitted filings claiming that the election lies repeated by Fox caused Dominion to lose business.In fact, the judiciary has emerged as a bulwark in the fight against false information, and not only in extreme cases focused on defamation, like those involving Fox News or Mr. Jones. Court after court rejected legal challenges to the balloting in 2020 for lack of evidence. This week, an arbitration court ordered Mike Lindell, the chief executive of My Pillow, who claimed among other things that China had rigged the vote, to pay a $5 million reward to a software engineer who debunked the claims as part of a “Prove Mike Wrong” contest.The legal traditions that allowed Dominion’s lawyers to receive the damning emails of Fox executives and anchors and make them part of the public record were essential in proving the allegations were baseless as a matter of record.“Before we give up on the capacity of the system to work to determine what constitutes knowable fact in the moment, we should say the courts have worked well up to this point,” Ms. Jamieson said.Election misinformation will almost certainly remain a problem heading into the 2024 presidential election. Dealing with it will be difficult, but not hopeless, Mr. Norden said. While some hard-core conspiracy theorists may never be convinced of the legitimacy of the vote, many people are simply unfamiliar with the mechanics of American elections and can have more faith in the system if exposed to accurate information.“We know what’s coming, and there’s an opportunity ahead of the next election to build more resilience against that with most of the public,” Mr. Norden said. “I don’t think we’re going to solve this problem through defamation suits alone, but there’s a lot that we can be doing between now and November 2024.” More

An arbitration panel ruled that the MyPillow founder had failed to pay a computer software expert who disproved his false election claims as part of a contest.Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder and Trump ally who has been a leading voice in pushing conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, must pay $5 million to a software forensics expert who debunked a series of false claims as part of a “Prove Mike Wrong” contest, an arbitration panel said on Wednesday.Mr. Lindell issued the challenge at a “cyber symposium” in South Dakota in 2021, saying he had data that would support his claims that there was Chinese interference in the election and offering the seven-figure prize to anyone who could prove the data had no connection to the 2020 election.Because the software expert Robert Zeidman successfully did so, the panel, composed of three members of the American Arbitration Association, ordered that Mr. Lindell would have to pay up.“Almost everyone there was pro-Trump, and everyone said, ‘This data is nonsense,’” Mr. Zeidman said in an interview on Thursday, identifying himself as a Republican who voted twice for former President Donald J. Trump. “A false narrative about election fraud is just really damaging to this country.”The ruling against Mr. Lindell was earlier reported by The Washington Post.Mr. Zeidman, 63, who is from Las Vegas, filed the arbitration claim against Mr. Lindell in November 2021 after the contest’s organizers rejected his findings. The claim was filed in Minnesota, Mr. Lindell’s home state.The arbitrators ordered him to pay Mr. Zeidman within 30 days.Mr. Lindell, who has spent millions of dollars on partisan reviews of voting data and efforts to bolster election skeptics across the country, vowed in an interview to challenge the panel’s ruling.“This is disgusting,” he said. He questioned Mr. Zeidman’s credentials and mused about how he had been granted admission to the symposium.Mr. Zeidman, who described himself as a “well-known” pioneer in the field of software forensics, said that he used his connections in the Trump world to obtain an invitation to Mr. Lindell’s symposium. “Friends of mine said, ‘You should go because you might win $5 million,’” he said.When conference organizers gave Mr. Zeidman and other attendees data to dissect, he said that he expected it might take weeks to analyze. But once he started going through the files, he said he quickly concluded that the data was bogus. He presented his findings to Mr. Lindell’s representatives in a 15-page report.The $5 million claim against Mr. Lindell is a pittance compared with a pending $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit that the election equipment company Dominion Voting Systems filed against him in 2021 over his assertions that its machines were part of a plot to steal the election. This week, the company reached a $787.5 million settlement with Fox News as part of a similar defamation lawsuit.Brian Glasser, a lawyer for Mr. Zeidman, cast doubt on whether Mr. Lindell would be able to successfully challenge the arbitration decision in court, saying the bar was particularly high. Mr. Lindell would have to prove “manifest injustice,” a legal term for an unduly harsh outcome, he said.Mr. Glasser also noted that the contest rules set by Mr. Lindell prescribed binding arbitration in the event of a dispute.Still, Mr. Lindell insisted: “It’s going to end up in court.”Mr. Zeidman said he planned to give some of the money to nonprofit groups, use part for a start-up business and spend some supporting a voter integrity project. He does believe there was voter fraud in 2020. “The question is how much and was it actually enough to swing the election? I can’t say that,” Mr. Zeidman said.He has joined the bipartisan political organization No Labels, he said, and won’t be supporting Mr. Trump for president in 2024.“I’d rather see a presidential candidate who is not an extremist,” he said. More

He was a successful businessman before taking office in 1993 amid civil unrest after the police beating of Rodney King. He became known for impolitic wisecracking.Richard J. Riordan, a Queens-born lawyer, businessman and former mayor of Los Angeles who led the city at a particularly divisive time and brought a free-enterprise approach to rebuilding the city’s infrastructure after a devastating earthquake in 1994, died on Wednesday at his home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. He was 92.His daughter Patricia Riordan Torrey confirmed his death.Mr. Riordan, whose unfiltered speech occasionally got him into trouble, began his career in business and turned to politics later in life. He was elected mayor in 1993, in his first effort at electoral politics, and served until 2001, prevented by term limits from seeking a third term.Before that, he was a shrewd investor who turned a modest inheritance into a large personal fortune. He was a venture capitalist in the 1960s, before such investors had acquired that name, and gave his own money away well before philanthropy came into vogue among California’s newly wealthy.A moderate Republican, Mr. Riordan came to politics in 1992, when it became clear that Tom Bradley, the Democratic five-term incumbent mayor, would not seek re-election. Mr. Riordan, then 62, was encouraged by friends to run, in part because of his solid ties across the political spectrum. He won handily, with 54 percent of the vote.But Mr. Riordan was bequeathed a city that was still reeling from riots stemming from the acquittal of four white police officers in 1992 after the beating of Rodney King, an unarmed Black motorist, the year before.“The city was out of control,” said Patrick Range McDonald, a journalist who ghostwrote Mr. Riordan’s 2014 memoir, “The Mayor: How I Turned Around Los Angeles After Riots, an Earthquake and the O.J. Simpson Murder Trial.” “Residents did not feel safe.”Mr. Riordan expanded the police department to 10,000 officers and generally brought a “calming influence to the city,” Mr. McDonald said.A section of the vital Santa Monica Freeway collapsed in the Northridge earthquake in 1994. Mr. Riordan took an unorthodox approach to repairing it, and the work was completed 74 days ahead of schedule.Eric Draper/Associated PressMr. Riordan’s most dramatic moment came with the 6.7-magnitude Northridge earthquake in 1994 that destroyed buildings and roads throughout the Los Angeles region.“Dick worked day and night, visited neighborhoods throughout the city, made sure people received supplies and health care, and constantly sounded a theme that Angelenos needed to work together,” Mr. McDonald said. “So while the rest of the world was waiting for post-riot Los Angeles to descend into complete chaos, residents instead banded together, with Dick leading the charge.”Mr. Riordan took an unorthodox approach to rebuilding the Santa Monica Freeway, a vital connector between downtown Los Angeles and the city’s coastal regions. City officials had estimated a loss to the local economy of $1 million for every day the freeway was closed.Mr. Riordan offered contractors a $200,000-a-day bonus for finishing ahead of schedule. The work was finished 74 days before the contracted deadline. “This demonstrates what can happen when private sector innovation and market incentives replace business as usual,” he said at the time.He also had a longtime interest in education and was a strong believer in the effectiveness of charter schools..“That wasn’t within his formal job description of mayor,” said former California Gov. Pete Wilson, whose tenure as governor overlapped with Mr. Riordan’s time as mayor. “Nonetheless, he really took it up.”Neither a polished nor eloquent public speaker, Mr. Riordan was well known for his impolitic wisecracking. In one famous incident in 2004, during a brief stint by Mr. Riordan as California’s secretary of education, a 6-year-old girl at a library event in Santa Barbara told him that her name, Isis, meant “Egyptian goddess.” He responded that “it means stupid, dirty girl.”He later apologized, saying it was a failed attempt at humor. The remark was widely reported and caused public outcry, with some advocacy groups calling for his resignation, but Mr. Riordan remained in his state government role.In an interview with The Los Angeles Times, when asked if he was sorry for some of the jokes he had cracked over the years, Mr. Riordan said: “I’ve learned to count to three before I tell a joke. Usually something’s funny, click click, and you forget you’ve just insulted every Italian in the city.”Mr. Riordan announced his candidacy for governor of California in November 2001. He lost in a Republican primary contest the next year. At right was the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was elected governor in 2003.Jim Ruymen/ReutersRichard Joseph Riordan was born on May 1, 1930, in Flushing, Queens, to William and Geraldine (Doyle) Riordan, the last of nine children in an Irish Catholic family. He grew up in New Rochelle, N.Y. His father was a successful department store executive. His mother taught prisoners to read and write.Mr. Riordan entered Santa Clara University in California on a football scholarship in 1948 and two years later transferred to Princeton. He received his bachelor’s degree in philosophy there in 1952.Soon after graduating, he joined the Army and served in the Korean War as a first lieutenant. After the war, he entered the University of Michigan Law School, graduating in 1956.He returned to California, a state that had always fascinated him, and began working for a large law firm in Los Angeles. In the late 1950s, after his father died, he inherited $80,000. A neighbor who was a stockbroker recommended that Mr. Riordan invest in technology companies. Three decades and many ventures later, he was worth tens of millions of dollars.Mr. Riordan also liked to give money away, “almost as if it burns his hands,” The Los Angeles Times wrote in a 1988 profile. He created the Riordan Foundation with a narrow goal: to promote childhood literacy. The foundation, which has given away more than $50 million, has expanded over the years to include broader educational and civic initiatives.Mr. Riordan’s first marriage, to Eugenia Waraday, lasted nearly 25 years but ended in divorce, as did his second marriage, to Jill Noel. He married Nancy Daly in 1998, and they divorced in 2008.Mr. Riordan’s life was scarred by personal tragedy. Three of his siblings, including his twin brother, died young. Mr. Riordan had five children with his first wife. His only son, Billy, drowned in a scuba diving accident in 1978, at age 21. His youngest daughter, Carol, died in 1982, at 18, of cardiac arrest associated with anorexia.In 2017, Mr. Riordan married Elizabeth Gregory, who survives him. In addition to Patricia, a child from his first marriage, he is survived by two more daughters from his first marriage, Mary Elizabeth Riordan and Kathleen Ann Riordan; a stepdaughter, Malia Gregory; a sister, Betty Hearty; and three grandchildren.Mr. Riordan ran unsuccessfully for governor of California in 2002. He became secretary of education under Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2003, but, frustrated by the bureaucracy he encountered, left the post after 17 months.Mr. Riordan also owned restaurants around Los Angeles, including the Original Pantry Café, a popular diner. Mr. Riordan said he first fell in love with the Pantry when a waiter decided he was taking too long to eat his meal.“I had a book I was reading,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 2008. “I was very relaxed, and the waiter came over and said, ‘If you want to read, the library’s at Fifth and Hope.’” Instead, he bought the restaurant.Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

We look at the costs of Dianne Feinstein’s absence to the Democratic Party’s agenda.President Biden and Senate Democrats have a numbers problem.With Republicans controlling the House — and showing little interest in bipartisan legislation there — the appointment of judges is one of the few ways that Biden can get something done on Capitol Hill: The Senate confirms federal judges, and the Democrats narrowly control the Senate.But Senator Dianne Feinstein’s failing health has frozen the Senate Judiciary Committee, the group that must consider any judicial nominees before the full Senate votes on them. Feinstein, who’s 89 and has represented California since 1992, has been ill with shingles since February. She has also been struggling with her ability to hold conversations and the deterioration of her short term memory for more than a year. It is unclear when she will return to the Senate.Biden and other Democrats had hoped for the appointment of judges — both to federal trial courts (known as District Courts) and to appeals courts (known as Circuit Courts) — to be a major accomplishment this year. That plan is now in doubt because Democrats do not have the votes to confirm judges without Feinstein.Instead, about 20 Biden nominees are in limbo, and 9 percent of District Court and Circuit Court judgeships remain vacant. Among Biden’s unconfirmed nominees: Mónica Ramírez Almadani, a civil rights lawyer; Robert Kirsch, a former prosecutor who focused on white collar crime; and Kato Crews, an expert in labor law.Trump’s recordUntil recently, Republicans often put more emphasis on appointing judges than Democrats did. That focus has contributed to conservative policy victories, with federal courts stymying liberal policies on climate change, immigration and workers’ rights.The past few weeks have brought another such issue — abortion. Republican-appointed judges have issued rulings that would restrict the distribution of pills used to end pregnancies, an increasingly important part of abortion practice. The Supreme Court has paused the effect of those rulings through Friday while it considers the case.Donald Trump, with help from Mitch McConnell and other Senate Republicans, was especially aggressive about appointing judges. Trump appointed more federal judges in his four-year term than any other recent president did in his first term:Judicial appointments in presidents’ first terms More

The former president’s rivals are seeking to tap into Republican frustration with recent election disappointments to urge a new face for the party in 2024, but it is proving to be a tough sell.Ron DeSantis knows the statistics by heart.He ticks them off as he contrasts his sweeping re-election as Florida governor with Republican losses nationwide last fall: a flip of traditionally “very blue” Miami-Dade County; the narrowness of his 2018 victory versus his landslide in 2022; the remarkable Republican voter registration gains in the state on his watch.“There is no substitute for victory,” Mr. DeSantis said last week during his first trip to New Hampshire in his still-undeclared presidential bid. He denounced the “culture of losing” that he said had engulfed Republicans in recent years, swiping at Donald J. Trump in all but name.“If the election of 2024 is a referendum on Joe Biden and his failed policies — and we provide a fresh vision for American renewal — Republicans will win the White House, the House and the U.S. Senate,” he told the crowd. “So we cannot get distracted, and we cannot afford to lose, because freedom is hanging in the balance.”Electability has emerged as one of the early pressure points in the 2024 Republican presidential primary.That amorphous, ill-defined, eye-of-the-beholder intangible — the sense of whether voters believe a politician can actually win — was supposed to be one of Mr. DeSantis’s strengths, tapping into the genuine Republican frustration with years of ballot box disappointments to urge a new face for the party in 2024. Republicans lost with Mr. Trump, the argument goes, but can win with Mr. DeSantis.But there are growing questions about Mr. DeSantis’s own ability to win over the independent and suburban voters who delivered the White House to President Biden, and whether the hard-line stances the governor has taken, including on abortion, will repel the very voters he promises to win back. His feuding with Disney — including an offhand remark this week suggesting he would put a state prison next to Disney World — has raised alarms, even among would-be allies.For years, electability has been the fool’s gold of Republican politics.Since the rise of the Tea Party more than a decade ago, Republican primary voters have consistently cast ballots with their hearts, sneering at so-called experts to select uncompromising hard-liners as nominees. Even as losses in winnable races have mounted, the mere perception of running as electable has repeatedly backfired, giving off for many Republicans the stench of the reviled establishment.Core to Mr. DeSantis’s particular electability pitch is that he won in Florida despite not shifting to the middle.Scott McIntyre for The New York Times“It has sounded like an excuse to get conservative voters to support somebody they don’t really want, even though the argument may very well be true,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster. Citing G.O.P. losses while Mr. Trump has defined the party — in 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2022 — Mr. Ayres added of the former president and the G.O.P. 2024 front-runner, “There is no education in the fifth kick of a mule, and yet it appears that’s where we’re headed.”For Mr. Trump’s rivals, hitting him as an electoral loser is central to chiseling away at the crucial bloc of voters who liked his presidency but might be willing to move on. It also allows them to create contrast without directly crossing him; Nikki Haley, for instance, talks about the need for a “new generation” to win.Core to Mr. DeSantis’s particular electability pitch is that he won in Florida despite not tacking to the middle: that voters, in other words, can have both a fighter and a winner.But his recent signing of a six-week abortion ban puts him on the far right on an issue that Democrats have used to mobilize their base with great success since Roe v. Wade was overturned. And congressional Republicans, who have had a front-row seat to the party’s Trump-era struggles, have pointedly delivered far more endorsements to Mr. Trump, including from Mr. DeSantis’s home state delegation during his visit to Washington this week, in a sign of the governor’s slipping traction.Mr. Trump’s team has pushed an electability case against Mr. DeSantis. A Trump-allied super PAC has run ads warning that Mr. DeSantis would go after Social Security and Medicare, touchstone issues that Democrats have used to defeat Republicans nationwide.“If anyone thinks throwing seniors under the bus is a winning argument, they are seriously out of touch,” said Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesman. “There is only one electable candidate in 2024, and that is President Trump.”The DeSantis team did not respond to a request for comment.Sarah Longwell, a Republican who holds regular focus groups with G.O.P. voters, said in the immediate aftermath of the 2022 midterm losses, many Republicans had come to view Mr. Trump as an electoral loser.“Baggage is the word you’d hear,” she said.Mr. DeSantis was the beneficiary, rising as voters looked for a less polarizing alternative. “Trump with a mute button,” one voter memorably described a dream Republican candidate, she recalled.Vivek Ramaswamy, a former biotechnology executive, said the belief that electability would carry the day in 2024 was “somewhere between a wish and a mirage.”Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesThat trend, however, has dissipated of late, said Ms. Longwell, who is involved with several groups that oppose Mr. Trump.“The electability pitch really only works if there is lots and lots of polling showing Trump losing by a wide margin,” she said. In a 50-50 nation, Mr. Trump remains competitive with Mr. Biden in almost every public poll, even if Mr. DeSantis often performs marginally better.Then there are the known unknowns of 2024 for Republican voters. If Mr. Trump loses the primary, would he sabotage the winner? And what would be the impact of further potential criminal indictments?Vivek Ramaswamy, a former biotechnology executive running a long-shot Republican presidential campaign, said the belief that electability would carry the day in 2024 was “somewhere between a wish and a mirage.”“It is fatally hubristic for anybody to think they can run that math equation,” Mr. Ramaswamy said in an interview aboard his campaign bus, adding that whoever was strongest would shift with debates and world events in the coming months.Mr. Trump’s pundit-defying victory in 2016 has uniquely inoculated him from charges that he cannot win. And as Mr. Trump’s rivals in 2016 learned — like when Jeb Bush called him the “chaos candidate” — it can be especially hard to press a case about electability when trailing badly in the polls, as Mr. DeSantis does now.In interviews, Trump supporters note that he only narrowly lost in 2020 despite a pandemic that crippled American life for months, circumstances that almost certainly won’t repeat. For all the turbulence Mr. Trump creates, they say he has been tested on the national stage in a way his opponents have not.The who-can-win debate plays out strikingly differently between the two parties. In 2020, Democratic primary voters obsessed over electability before nominating Mr. Biden, who made his strength against Mr. Trump a centerpiece of his candidacy.In New Hampshire, interviews with Republican voters, activists and party officials revealed both the fertile ground for and the challenges of any electability campaign against Mr. Trump. Mr. DeSantis arrived in the state for his first appearance on Friday, headlining a dinner for the state party that the chairman said had broken fund-raising records. More than 500 people attended, arriving from across New Hampshire and beyond, as Trump loyalists waved flags outside the downtown Manchester hotel.“If I had a magic wand, I would like Trump,” said Sue Higgins, 53, a dental hygienist from Belknap County, a conservative stronghold in central New Hampshire. “He’s the only person who has the chutzpah to save America. But I’m not sure he’s the most electable.” As she waited for Mr. DeSantis to speak, she said she might support Mr. Trump again anyway.Trump supporters at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference this year.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesAllison Chaffee, 36, who drove up two hours from Massachusetts to see Mr. DeSantis, described herself as an emissary “from the group that sways elections: suburban moms.” And her message was to move on.“I hear what the moms say,” she said. “They are speaking Republican and then they vote Democrat. They only just hate Trump.”But Lynda Payette, 68, of Bethlehem, N.H., waved away any talk of Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities. “I believe that God placed him there and no man is going to take him down,” she said. “He’s electable, same as 2015.”Then she turned the electability question on Mr. DeSantis, pointing to his decision to sign a six-week abortion ban, which she called extreme. “I really think we’ve got to give a little on this abortion thing,” she said, as a friend nodded in agreement.For the sizable faction of the G.O.P. that has swallowed Mr. Trump’s falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen, electability is a particularly moot argument. They don’t think he lost.If an anti-Trump electability message were to gain ground anywhere, it might be New Hampshire, where multiple competitive seats were fumbled away in 2022 by Republican candidates whom party leaders had warned were out of the mainstream, including in a marquee Senate race.The state’s governor, Chris Sununu, who has teased a possible 2024 bid of his own, warned that Don Bolduc, the Republican who ran for Senate in New Hampshire, was a “conspiracy-theory type” candidate who would lose. Mr. Bolduc won the primary and lost in November.“What I hear from some of our activists is we’re tired of losing,” said Christopher Ager, who took over the chairmanship of the New Hampshire Republican Party in a contested fight.Fergus Cullen, a former New Hampshire Republican Party chairman, is less sanguine. He is the lone elected Republican on the City Council in Dover, where he needs to win over Democratic voters in a ward carried by Mr. Biden.“I don’t see any signs of pragmatic, strategic voting among primary voters,” said Mr. Cullen, a critic of Mr. Trump. “I fully believe he has the ability to get the lemmings to follow him off the cliff again, no matter how far down it goes.” More

Listen and follow ‘The Run-Up’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicFor Republican presidential hopefuls, the Conservative Political Action Conference has played a very specific role in the election cycle. It’s where candidates try to establish their grass-roots credibility and convince conservatives that those running are listening to what they want. The conference culminates in a closely-watched straw poll — an early indicator of the candidates who have momentum.This year is an unusual one. After the midterms, the big story was that CPAC had become a place for has-beens and losing ideas. And with Donald Trump in the race, few candidates wanted to come and publicly challenge him in front of his base.But after spending time inside the political establishment of both parties, Astead felt that this was still a must-see event. Any candidate with a hope of securing the nomination is still going to need to speak the language of the grass roots.So, what do they want? We headed to CPAC to find out.Photo Illustration: The New York Times; Photo: Alex Wong/Getty ImagesAbout ‘The Run-Up’First launched in August 2016, three months before the election of Donald Trump, “The Run-Up” is The New York Times’s flagship political podcast. The host, Astead W. Herndon, grapples with the big ideas already animating the 2024 presidential election. Because it’s always about more than who wins and loses. And the next election has already started.Last season, “The Run-Up” focused on grass-roots voters and shifting attitudes among the bases of both political parties. This season, we go inside the party establishment.New episodes on Thursdays.Credits“The Run-Up” is hosted by More

As Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida escalates a fight against his state’s largest private employer, his potential rivals for the White House see an opening to attack.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is taking heat from fellow Republicans over his feud with Disney, as his potential rivals for the White House see an opportunity to call him out as flouting traditional conservative values.Former President Donald J. Trump this week slammed the governor’s efforts as a “political stunt” and said Mr. DeSantis was being outplayed by the company.“DeSanctus is being absolutely destroyed by Disney,” Mr. Trump wrote on Tuesday on Truth Social, his media site, using a dismissive nickname for the governor. Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey also took a shot, suggesting Mr. DeSantis’s talk of punishing a business defied principles about small government.“I don’t think Ron DeSantis is conservative, based on actions towards Disney,” he said at an event on Tuesday hosted by the news outlet Semafor. “Where are we headed here now that, if you express disagreement in this country, the government is now going to punish you? To me, that’s what I always thought liberals did, and now all of a sudden here we are participating in this with a Republican governor.”The criticism reflects a growing effort by Mr. Trump and other prospective candidates to try to undermine the core argument of Mr. DeSantis’s case for the nomination: that he is the Republican most likely to win a general election. Advisers to Mr. Trump and other possible rivals believe moves like going after Disney will be damaging in a general election, if not necessarily in the G.O.P. primary.Some Republican strategists even argued that the move risked turning off the party’s primary voters, saying they were confused by Mr. DeSantis’s decision to dig into a fight against a company with broad appeal and considerable resources to fight back.The dispute between Mr. DeSantis and Disney — Florida’s largest private employer and corporate taxpayer — started when company officials criticized a bill that Mr. DeSantis signed into law last year. The law, which critics called a “Don’t Say Gay” bill, curtails instruction and discussion of gender and sexuality in some elementary school grades. (It was extended to cover all grades, including high school, on Wednesday.)In response to the criticism, Mr. DeSantis moved to exert greater control over the company through a district board, but officials at the company quietly found a way to strip that board of power. Mr. DeSantis has since moved to try to take control again, and floated the possibilities of imposing new taxes on Disney — which would most likely be passed along to people using Disney’s park — as well as building a state prison nearby.A spokesman for the governor said Mr. DeSantis believed Disney had “an unfair special advantage” over other businesses in the state.“Good and limited government (and, indeed, principled conservatism) reduces special privilege, encourages an even playing field for businesses, and upholds the will of the people,” said Bryan Griffin, the governor’s press secretary.In his post, Mr. Trump suggested that the threats could backfire and that the company could respond by pulling out of Florida. “Watch!” he wrote. “That would be a killer. In the meantime, this is all so unnecessary, a political STUNT!”The former president himself has never shied away from attacking companies he doesn’t like.Despite a steady stream of criticism from fellow Republicans — former Vice President Mike Pence, who is considering a campaign of his own, chided Mr. DeSantis on the issue in February — it’s not clear that Mr. DeSantis’s actions have hurt him uniformly on the right.The Wall Street Journal editorial board, on Tuesday evening, criticized the governor for the arc of the feud with Disney but took greater issue with Mr. Trump for his attack.“You’d think the former president would be critical of Disney’s woke turn, but his only abiding political conviction is personal advantage,” the board wrote. More