Conservatism (US Politics)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      DeSantis Greets a Friendly Crowd After a Strong Week for Trump

      by

      Speaking at the conservative Heritage Foundation, the Florida governor doubled down on his 2024 pitch, ignoring headlines about worried donors and Republican consolidation behind Donald Trump.After a week in which little seemed to go his way, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida got back into his comfort zone: talking up his lengthy list of policy achievements in front of a receptive conservative audience outside Washington.“We’ve really become the beating heart of the conservative movement in these United States,” Mr. DeSantis said of his state on Friday morning as he addressed the Heritage Foundation, an influential conservative think tank celebrating its 50th anniversary. “Florida is the state where our shared ideas and values actually become political reality.”But outside that packed Maryland ballroom — where the foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, suggested Republicans were “craving a bold and visionary leader” like the Florida governor — the conservative movement has signaled some hesitation about Mr. DeSantis as he prepares for a likely 2024 presidential bid. Prominent donors have expressed concern, and Florida Republicans in Congress have so far shown little inclination to back him.Underscoring Mr. DeSantis’s biggest challenge is his continued avoidance of mentioning former President Donald J. Trump, who is well ahead in polls and has kept up a whirlwind of attacks on his potential rival. Even as Mr. DeSantis spoke, Mr. Trump shared several critical posts about him on Truth Social, the former president’s social media website.Mr. Trump’s posts focused on days of negative headlines challenging Mr. DeSantis’s political acumen and his handling of the fallout from a huge rainstorm in South Florida. The storm, which hit last week, flooded the Fort Lauderdale area and set off a severe gas shortage in the state’s most populous region.Both of Florida’s Republican senators, in implicit swipes at Mr. DeSantis, have complained about the lack of fuel.“They’ve got to get this thing fixed, this is crazy,” Senator Marco Rubio said in a video on Twitter, without naming the governor. Senator Rick Scott wrote that “Florida families shouldn’t have uncertainty about their next tank of gas.”Jeremy Redfern, the governor’s deputy press secretary, defended the way the state had handled the gas shortage.“At the direction of Governor DeSantis, the state emergency response apparatus has been at work since the flooding occurred and continues in full swing, responding to the needs of the localities as they are communicated to us,” he said in an email.At the Heritage event, which was attended by a mix of policy professionals, conservative activists and think-tank donors, the crowd greeted Mr. DeSantis with a standing ovation. Organizers estimated that roughly 1,000 people had shown up to hear him.In his remarks, Mr. DeSantis leaned into his pitch that he would be the most electable Republican in 2024: He won the governor’s office in a tight 2018 race, governed aggressively as a conservative and then earned a landslide re-election that included flipping liberal Miami-Dade County to the Republican column.“We reject the culture of losing that has infected the Republican Party in recent years,” he said before cycling through conservative highlights of his record, including his decision to reopen Florida’s economy early in the coronavirus pandemic, his handling of Hurricane Ian and his signing of a new law prohibiting abortion in the state after six weeks of pregnancy.Despite his electoral success, Mr. DeSantis has at times faced criticism for lacking a personal touch on the campaign trail. On Friday, he spent a few minutes shaking hands with attendees after his speech, at one point affably helping a woman navigate the camera on her phone for a selfie.Ross Schumann, an attendee from Midland, Texas, who said he worked in the oil and gas industry and who ran for Congress in 2020, managed to get a brief handshake with the governor as his security detail ushered him toward the exit. He said Mr. DeSantis had hit all the right notes in his speech. But Mr. Schumann did not think the time was right for Mr. DeSantis to run for president.“He’s been very strong on getting policy wins, but this primary is Trump’s to lose,” he said.Mr. DeSantis is learning just how tightly the party is wedded to the former president.On Tuesday, he traveled to Washington seeking to court Republican members of Congress. But so far, the effort has resulted in little success. Several representatives, including some from Florida, have instead endorsed Mr. Trump. One of those lawmakers, Representative Anna Paulina Luna, tweeted a photo from a celebratory dinner at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Palm Beach residence, where the former president hosted members of Florida’s congressional delegation on Thursday night.Other vulnerabilities have emerged as well. Potential rivals for the White House are slamming Mr. DeSantis over his fight with Disney, one of Florida’s economic engines.All of it is having an effect on the race for dollars. A prominent conservative donor, Thomas Peterffy, told The Financial Times last week that he was putting his donations to Mr. DeSantis “on hold,” citing the governor’s far-right stance on social issues.Even little things seem to be going awry. Early Thursday morning, the state mistakenly sent a noisy emergency alert message to cellphones across Florida — waking up startled residents and leading Mr. DeSantis to promise “swift accountability” on Twitter. (The state soon announced that it had terminated its contract with the software firm responsible.)Soon after the governor ended his speech at the Heritage event, Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said in an email that Mr. DeSantis had “spent more time playing public relations games instead of actually doing the hard work needed to improve the lives of the people he represents.”Still, Mr. DeSantis’s allies have dismissed recent skepticism of his prospects as Beltway hand-wringing that will not matter when voting begins in the early primary states next year.“If you ask an Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina or Nevada voter if he had a bad week, they won’t see it that way,” said Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II, who is leading Never Back Down, the main super PAC backing the governor’s expected presidential bid.Mr. Cuccinelli, who served in the Trump administration, said conservative voters were responding to Mr. DeSantis’s record as governor and his biography as a veteran, husband and father.“When we tell that story, people get very excited,” he said. “They see the fighter. They see the winner.”Although polls show the governor lagging well behind Mr. Trump, he is often pegged as voters’ second choice — suggesting he could coalesce support should the former president falter. Mr. DeSantis will next seek to elevate his foreign policy credentials on a state trade mission to Japan, South Korea, Israel and Britain that will start Monday.And he retains the backing of the political donor Robert Bigelow, a Las Vegas real estate and aerospace mogul. Mr. Bigelow donated $20 million to Never Back Down — roughly two-thirds of its recent fund-raising — according to a person familiar with the super PAC’s activities.“I will give him more money and go without food,” Mr. Bigelow told Time magazine.While the Heritage event focused on the conservative policies that the group hopes the next Republican administration will embrace — the think tank is working to build a database that could help staff the next G.O.P.-led White House and federal agencies — it also demonstrated how conspiracy theories continue to course through parts of the party’s base.Before Mr. DeSantis arrived, an audience member raised a question during a panel discussion on the Justice Department, falsely telling the speakers that the Sept. 11 attacks had been an inside job.The panel’s moderator, the conservative writer Mollie Hemingway, interrupted to ask for the next question. More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      Heritage Foundation Makes Plans to Staff Next G.O.P. Administration

      by

      No matter the Republican, the effort has set a goal of up to 20,000 potential officials in a database akin to a right-wing LinkedIn.If a Republican enters the Oval Office in 2025, whether it’s Donald J. Trump or someone else, there is a good chance that president will turn to the same electronic database to staff the White House and federal agencies.Think of it as a right-wing LinkedIn. This so-called Project 2025 — part of a $22 million presidential transition operation at a scale never attempted before in conservative politics — is being led by the Heritage Foundation, a group that has been staffing Republican administrations since the Reagan era.Heritage usually compiles its own personnel lists, and spends far less doing so. But for this election, after conservatives and Mr. Trump himself decried what they viewed as terrible staffing decisions made during his administration, more than 50 conservative groups have temporarily set aside rivalries to team up with Heritage on the project, set to start Friday.They have already identified several thousand potential recruits and have set a goal of having up to 20,000 potential administration officials in their database by the end of 2024, according to Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage. Heritage has contracted the technology company Oracle to build a secure personnel database, Dr. Roberts said.“In 2016, the conservative movement was not prepared to flood the zone with conservative personnel,” Dr. Roberts said. “On Jan. 20, 2025, things will be very different. This database will prepare an army of vetted, trained staff to begin dismantling the administrative state from Day 1.”Heritage and its project partners have already briefed Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and their teams, Dr. Roberts said, as well as staff members for other current and potential candidates, including Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations; the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy; and former Vice President Mike Pence. They plan to give private briefings to all conservative candidates. The glaring problem with such an effort is that the various Republican hopefuls would most likely use different staffing criteria. Mr. Trump, the clear front-runner, cares far more about personal loyalty than ideological convictions.Indeed, he spent the bulk of his presidency trying to root out people whom he perceived as aligned with political critics, such as the Bush family, or Obama administration officials.In meetings at Mar-a-Lago over the past two years, Mr. Trump has repeatedly complained that his first administration was full of “snakes” and “traitors.” Those he complains about the most are not career bureaucrats but instead people like William P. Barr, a former Barry Goldwater supporter whom Mr. Trump himself selected as his attorney general.Dr. Roberts has anticipated the Trump challenge — and, though he doesn’t advertise it this way, he has built his project around it. The key people involved with the Heritage-led database served in the former president’s administration. They include James Bacon, a Trump loyalist who worked in the White House Office of Presidential Personnel under one of Mr. Trump’s most trusted aides, John McEntee. In the final year of the Trump administration, Mr. Bacon helped Mr. McEntee overhaul the government’s hiring process. They developed a questionnaire to vet government employees’ loyalty to Mr. Trump and his “America First” agenda.Typically, a new president is allowed to replace around 4,000 “political appointees” — a revolving layer that sits atop the federal work force. Below the political layer lies a long-term work force of more than two million, who have strong employment protections meant to make it harder for a new president of a different political party to fire them. These protections, enshrined in law, established a civil service that is supposed to be apolitical — with federal officials accumulating subject matter and institutional expertise over long careers in the service of both Republican and Democratic presidents.Mr. Trump wants to demolish that career civil service — or what he pejoratively calls “the deep state.” He has privately told allies that if he gets back into power he plans to fire far more than the 4,000 government officials that presidents are typically allowed to replace. Mr. Trump’s lawyers already have the legal instrument in hand.In late 2020, Mr. Trump issued an executive order that would establish a new employment category for federal workers, called “Schedule F.” Barely anyone noticed because the order was developed in strict secrecy over more than a year and issued only two weeks before the 2020 election.The news was lost amid the postelection chaos as Mr. Trump desperately tried to overturn the result.But key officials involved with the federal civil service immediately grasped the significance of Schedule F and its potential to create a new federal work force in which loyalty to Mr. Trump was the highest criteria, they said. Everett Kelley, who as national president of the American Federation of Government Employees represents more than half a million government workers, described Schedule F, at the time it was released, as “the most profound undermining of the civil service in our lifetimes.”Mr. Trump’s staff estimated that Schedule F would give the president the power to terminate and replace as many as 50,000 career government officials who served in roles that influenced federal policy.President Biden rescinded the Schedule F order on his third day in office, but over the past two years, several of Mr. Trump’s confidants, including his former budget director Russell T. Vought, have been working on a plan to re-enact the order and gut the federal civil service in a second Trump administration.Now, the two plans — Mr. Trump’s and Heritage’s — are dovetailing, even as Mr. Trump himself has shown no interest in the details. Conveniently, Dennis Kirk, a former Trump administration lawyer who was involved with the adoption of Schedule F, is now employed by Heritage. Mr. Kirk is busy at work on Project 2025, Dr. Roberts said. More

    • 88 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      The New Demands of the MAGA Right

      by

      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

    • 75 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Republicans Hit DeSantis Over Disney Feud

      by

      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

    • 100 Shares139 Views

      in Elections

      How a Campaign Against Transgender Rights Mobilized Conservatives

      by

      When the Supreme Court declared a constitutional right to same-sex marriage nearly eight years ago, social conservatives were set adrift.The ruling stripped them of an issue they had used to galvanize rank-and-file supporters and big donors. And it left them searching for a cause that — like opposing gay marriage — would rally the base and raise the movement’s profile on the national stage.“We knew we needed to find an issue that the candidates were comfortable talking about,” said Terry Schilling, the president of American Principles Project, a social conservative advocacy group. “And we threw everything at the wall.”What has stuck, somewhat unexpectedly, is the issue of transgender identity, particularly among young people. Today, the effort to restrict transgender rights has supplanted same-sex marriage as an animating issue for social conservatives at a pace that has stunned political leaders across the spectrum. It has reinvigorated a network of conservative groups, increased fund-raising and set the agenda in school boards and state legislatures.The campaign has been both organic and deliberate, and has even gained speed since Donald J. Trump, an ideological ally, left the White House. Since then, at least 20 states, all controlled by Republicans, have enacted laws that reach well beyond the initial debates over access to bathrooms and into medical treatments, participation in sports and policies on discussing gender in schools.“We knew we needed to find an issue that the candidates were comfortable talking about,” said Terry Schilling, the president of American Principles Project, a social conservative advocacy group. “And we threw everything at the wall.”Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesAbout 1.3 million adults and 300,000 children in the United States identify as transgender. These efforts have thrust them, at a moment of increased visibility and vulnerability, into the center of the nation’s latest battle over cultural issues.“It’s a strange world to live in,” said Ari Drennen, the L.G.B.T.Q. program director for Media Matters, a liberal media monitoring group that tracks the legislation. As a transgender woman, she said, she feels unwelcome in whole swaths of the country where states have attacked her right “just to exist in public.”The effort started with a smattering of Republican lawmakers advancing legislation focused on transgender girls’ participation in school sports. And it was accelerated by a few influential Republican governors who seized on the issue early.But it was also the result of careful planning by national conservative organizations to harness the emotion around gender politics. With gender norms shifting and a sharp rise in the number of young people identifying as transgender, conservative groups spotted an opening in a debate that was gaining attention.“It’s a sense of urgency,” said Matt Sharp, the senior counsel with the Alliance Defending Freedom, an organization that has provided strategic and legal counsel to state lawmakers as they push through legislation on transgender rights. The issue, he argued, is “what can we do to protect the children?”Mr. Schilling said the issue had driven in thousands of new donors to the American Principles Project, most of them making small contributions.The appeal played on the same resentments and cultural schisms that have animated Mr. Trump’s political movement: invocations against so-called “wokeness,” skepticism about science, parental discontent with public schools after the Covid-19 pandemic shutdowns and anti-elitism.Nadine Smith, the executive director of Equality Florida, a group that fights discrimination against L.G.B.T.Q. people, said there was a direct line from the right’s focus on transgender children to other issues it has seized on in the name of “parents’ rights” — such as banning books and curriculums that teach about racism.“In many ways, the trans sports ban was the test balloon in terms of how they can frame these things,” she said. “Once they opened that parents’ rights frame, they began to use it everywhere.”For now, the legislation has advanced almost exclusively in Republican-controlled states: Those same policies have drawn strong opposition from Democrats who have applauded the increased visibility of transgender people — in government, corporations and Hollywood — and policies protecting transgender youths.The 2024 presidential election appears poised to provide a national test of the reach of this issue. The two leading Republican presidential contenders, Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has not officially declared a bid, have aggressively supported measures curtailing transgender rights.“The trans sports ban was the test balloon in terms of how they can frame these things,” Nadine Smith, the executive director of Equality Florida, said. “Once they opened that parents’ rights frame, they began to use it everywhere.” Octavio Jones for The New York TimesIt may prove easier for Republicans like Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis to talk about transgender issues than about abortion, an issue that has been a mainstay of the conservative movement. The Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion created a backlash among Democrats and independents that has left many Republicans unsure of how — or whether — to address the issue.Polling suggests that the public is less likely to support transgender rights than same-sex marriage and abortion rights. In a poll conducted in 2022, the Public Policy Research Institute, a nonpartisan research group, found that 68 percent of respondents favored allowing same-sex couples to marry, including 49 percent of Republicans.By contrast, a poll by the Pew Research Center found that 58 percent of Americans supported requiring that transgender athletes compete on teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth; 85 percent of Republicans held that view.“For many religious and political conservatives, the same-sex marriage issue has been largely decided — and for the American public, absolutely,” said Kelsy Burke, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. “That’s not true when it comes to these transgender issues. Americans are much more divided, and this is an issue that can gain a lot more traction.”The singer Anita Bryant championed the “Save Our Children” campaign in 1977 to repeal a local ordinance in Dade-Miami County that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation, a historic setback for the modern gay rights movements.Bettmann/Getty ImagesThe focus on perceived threats to impressionable children has a long history in American sexual politics. It has its roots in the “Save Our Children” campaign championed in 1977 by Anita Bryant, the singer known for her orange juice commercials, to repeal a local ordinance in Dade-Miami County that prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation, a historic setback for the modern gay rights movements.The initial efforts by the conservative movement to deploy transgender issues did not go well. In 2016, North Carolina legislators voted to bar transgender people from using the bathroom of their preference. It created a backlash so harsh — from corporations, sports teams and even Bruce Springsteen — that lawmakers eventually rescinded the bill.As a result, conservatives went looking for a new approach to the issue. Mr. Schilling’s organization, for instance, conducted polling to determine whether curbing transgender rights had resonance with voters — and, if they did, the best way for candidates to talk about it. In 2019, the group’s research found that voters were significantly more likely to support a Republican candidate who favored a ban on transgender girls participating in school sports — particularly when framed as a question of whether “to allow men and boys to compete against women and girls” — than a candidate pushing for a ban on transgender people using a bathroom of their choosing.With that evidence in hand, and transgender athletes gaining attention, particularly in right-wing media, conservatives decided to focus on two main fronts: legislation that addressed participation in sports and laws curtailing the access of minors to medical transition treatments.In March 2020, Idaho became the first state to bar transgender girls from participating in girls’ and women’s sports, with a bill supporters in the Republican-controlled legislature called the “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act.”A burst of state legislation began the next year after Democrats took control of Congress and the White House, ending four years in which social conservatives successfully pushed the Trump administration to enact restrictions through executive orders.In the spring of 2021, the Republican-controlled legislature in Arkansas overrode a veto by Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, to enact legislation that made it illegal for minors to receive transition medication or surgery.It was the first such ban in the country — and it was quickly embraced by national groups and circulated to lawmakers in other statehouses as a road map for their own legislation. The effort capitalized on an existing disagreement in the medical profession over when to offer medical transition care to minors. Despite that debate, leading medical groups in the United States, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, say the care should be available to minors and oppose legislative bans.Later that spring, Mr. DeSantis, the Florida governor, traveled to a private Christian school in Jacksonville to sign a bill barring transgender girls from playing K-12 sports. With his approval, Florida became the largest state to date to enact such restrictions, and Mr. DeSantis signaled how important this issue was to his political aspirations.“In Florida, girls are going to play girls’ sports and boys are going to play boys’ sports,” he said, winning applause from conservatives he would need to defeat Mr. Trump.To some extent, this surge of legislation was spontaneous. Ms. Drennen, of Media Matters, said state lawmakers appeared to be acting out of a “general animus” toward transgender people, as well as a fear of political reprisals. “They are worried about this coming up in a primary,” she said.But for several years, conservative Christian legal groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Liberty Counsel have been shifting their resources.For now, the legislation has advanced almost exclusively in Republican-controlled states: Those same policies have drawn strong opposition from Democrats.Joseph Prezioso/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe 2024 presidential election appears poised to provide a national test of Americans’ support for transgender rights.Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn 2018, Kristen Waggoner, then the general counsel of the Alliance Defending Freedom, was the lead counsel in the Supreme Court defending a Colorado baker who, citing religious beliefs, refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. The court ruled narrowly in favor of the baker.The next year, the Alliance took on a case involving a group of high school girls in Connecticut who challenged the state and five school boards for permitting transgender students to participate in women’s sports. Their lawsuit was rejected by a federal appeals court.Mathew D. Staver, the founder and chairman of the Liberty Counsel, which was a major force behind a 2008 voter initiative in California that banned same-sex marriage, said the group is now fighting gender policies in the courts. It has challenged laws, often enacted in states controlled by Democrats, that restrict counseling services designed to change a person’s gender identity or sexual orientation, often referred to as conversion therapy.“Those counseling bans violate first-amendment speech, because they only allow one point of view on the subject of sexuality,” he said.In March 2021, Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota declined to sign a bill that would have banned transgender girls from sports teams. She later reversed course. Cooper Neill for The New York TimesThough some on the left are still uncertain about how to best navigate the fraught politics of transgender issues, there’s an emerging consensus on the right. The case of what happened to Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, a rising star in the Republican Party, is instructive.In March 2021, Ms. Noem declined to sign a bill passed by her state’s Republican-controlled legislature that would have banned transgender girls from sports teams from kindergarten through college. Conservative groups accused her of bowing to “socially left-wing factions.” Tucker Carlson of Fox News, in a tense interview with Ms. Noem, implied she was bowing to “big business” in refusing to sign the bill.“There’s a real political effort now that will extract a punishment from you if you betray the social conservatives,” said Frank Cannon, a founder of the American Principles Project. He said the episode with Ms. Noem “sent a signal to every other governor in the country.”Eleven months later, the governor appeared to have received the message, signing a similar version of the bill in the interest, she said that day, of “fairness.” More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Pressured by Their Base on Abortion, Republicans Strain to Find a Way Forward

      by

      Some in the party are urging compromise, warning of dire electoral consequences for 2024, while other stances, on guns and gay rights, also risk turning off moderates.Republican leaders have followed an emboldened base of conservative activists into what increasingly looks like a political cul-de-sac on the issue of abortion — a tightly confined absolutist position that has limited their options ahead of the 2024 election season, even as some in the party push for moderation.Last year’s Supreme Court decision overturning a woman’s constitutionally protected right to an abortion was supposed to send the issue of abortion access to the states, where local politicians were supposed to have the best sense of the electorate’s views. But the decision on Friday by a conservative judge in Texas, invalidating the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of the abortion pill mifepristone, showed the push for nationwide restrictions on abortion has continued since the high court’s nullification of Roe v. Wade.Days earlier, abortion was the central theme in a liberal judge’s landslide victory for a contested and pivotal seat on the state Supreme Court in Wisconsin. Some Republicans are warning that the uncompromising position of their party’s activist base could be leading them over an electoral cliff next year.“If we can show that we care just a little bit, that we have some compassion, we can show the country our policies are reasonable, but because we keep going down these rabbit holes of extremism, we’re just going to keep losing,” said Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, who has repeatedly called for more flexibility on first-term abortions and exceptions for rape, incest and the life and health of the mother. “I’m beside myself that I’m the only person who takes this stance.”She is far from the only one.The chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, has been showing polling to members of her party demonstrating that Americans largely accept abortion up to 15 weeks into a pregnancy and support the same exemptions that Ms. Mace wants. Dan O’Donnell, a conservative radio host in Wisconsin, wrote after the lopsided conservative defeat in the state Supreme Court contest that abortion was driving young voters to the polls in staggering numbers and that survival of the party dictated compromise.“Because we keep going down these rabbit holes of extremism, we’re just going to keep losing,” said Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, a Republican who supports flexibility on abortion rights.Kenny Holston/The New York Times“As difficult as this may be to come to grips with, Republicans are on the wrong side politically of an issue that they are clearly on the right side of morally,” he wrote.The problem goes beyond abortion. With each mass shooting, the G.O.P.’s staunch stand against gun control faces renewed scrutiny. Republicans courted a backlash last week when they expelled two young Democratic lawmakers out of the Tennessee state legislature for leading youthful protests after a school shooting in Nashville that left six dead. Then on Monday came another mass shooting, in Louisville, Ky.“My kids had friends on Friday night running for their lives,” said Ms. Mace, referring to a shooting on South Carolina’s Isle of Palms, which elicited no response from most of her party. “Republicans aren’t showing compassion in the wake of these mass shootings.”The party’s stand against legislation to combat climate change has helped turn young voters into the most liberal bloc of the American electorate. And Republican efforts to roll back L.G.B.T.Q. rights and target transgender teenagers, while popular with conservatives, may be seen by the broader electorate as, at best, a distraction from more pressing issues.Representative Mark Pocan, an openly gay Democrat from Wisconsin, said on Monday that in the short term, the Republican attacks on transgender Americans were having a real-world effect, with a rise in violence and bigotry. But he said it is also contributing to the marginalization of the party, even in his swing state.He pointed to the “WOW counties” that surround Milwaukee — Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington — where then-Republican Gov. Scott Walker won 73 percent in 2014, and where the Republican, Dan Kelly, won 58.7 percent in the state Supreme Court race last week.“We keep seeing our numbers increase in those counties because those Republicans largely are economic Republicans, not social Republicans,” Mr. Pocan said, adding that G.O.P. candidates “definitely are chasing their people away.”Ms. Mace does appear to be correct that her desire for compromise is not widely shared in a party where analysts continue to look past social issues to explain their electoral defeats.Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, has been showing polling to members of her party about Americans’ views on abortion.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Kelly was a poor candidate who lost by an almost identical margin in another state Supreme Court race in 2020, noted David Winston, a longtime pollster and strategist for House Republican leaders. And, Mr. Winston added, Republicans may have lost female voters by 8 percentage points in the 2022 midterm elections, but they lost them by 19 points in 2018.If inflation and economic concerns remain elevated, he added, the 2024 elections will be about the economy, not abortion or guns..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Republicans greeted the abortion-drug ruling on Friday, by Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, with near total silence. The judge gave the Biden administration seven days to appeal, and on Monday, senior executives of more than 250 pharmaceutical and biotech companies pleaded with the courts to nullify the ruling with a scorching condemnation of Judge Kacsmaryk’s reasoning.Most anti-abortion advocates are not backing down. Katie Glenn Daniel, the state policy director for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, one of the most powerful anti-abortion groups, said Wisconsin’s results were more about anti-abortion forces being badly outspent than about ideology. In her state, Florida, she noted, Democrats scorched Republicans with advertising in 2022 saying they planned to ban abortion without exceptions. Republicans, from Gov. Ron DeSantis on down, easily prevailed that November.Republicans need to keep pressing with abortion restrictions that will affect Democratic states as well as Republican ones, she said.“A national minimum standard is incredibly important. Without it there will continue to be late-term abortions, and governors like Gavin Newsom are very motivated to force his views on the rest of the country,” she said of California’s Democratic governor.Last week, the Florida State Senate approved legislation pushing the state’s ban on abortion from the current 15 weeks into pregnancy to six weeks. If the state’s House of Representatives approves it, Mr. DeSantis has said he will sign it. If Mr. DeSantis runs for president as expected, his signature would thrust abortion squarely into the 2024 race for the White House.Last year, John P. Feehery, a former Republican leadership aide in the House, urged his party to find a defensible position on abortion that included flexibility on abortion pills, allowed early pregnancies to be terminated and detailed a coherent position on exceptions for rape, incest and health concerns. He said on Monday that he was repeatedly told abortion would be a state-level issue and federal candidates should just stay quiet.“They didn’t want to do the hard work on abortion,” he said, blaming “a lack of leadership” in the party that still has the Republican position muddled.Guns are another issue where silence is not working. The shooting in Louisville, which left six dead, including the gunman, and eight wounded, kept the issue of guns in the spotlight after last week’s heated showdown in Tennessee — and ahead of a three-day gathering of the National Rifle Association on Friday in Indianapolis. The Kentucky attack was the 15th mass shooting this year in which four or more victims were killed, the largest total in a year’s first 100 days since 2009, according to a USA Today/Associated Press/Northeastern University database.“You can’t stop paying attention after one horrible event happens. You have to watch what happens afterward,” said Representative Maxwell Frost, 26, a Florida Democrat who last year became the first member of Generation Z to be elected to the House.Voices for compromise are beginning to bubble up, in some cases from surprising sources. Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life Committee, one of the country’s largest anti-abortion groups, said on Monday that even she was “somewhat concerned” that the Republican Party might be getting ahead of the voters on abortion. Her organization has drafted model legislation to ban abortion at the state level in every case but when the life of the mother is in grave danger. But, Ms. Tobias said, that legislation comes with language to extend those exceptions to the “hard cases,” pregnancies that result from rape or incest, or that might harm a mother’s health.“We’ve always known the American public does not support abortion for all nine months of a pregnancy,” she said. “They want some limits. We are trying to find those limits.”She added, “If we can only at this time save 95 percent of the babies, I am happy to support that legislation.” More

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      The One Thing Trump Has That DeSantis Never Will

      by

      Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is in a trap of his own devising. His path to the Republican presidential nomination depends on convincing Donald Trump’s base that he represents a more committed and disciplined version of the former president, that he shares their populist grievances and aims only to execute the Trump agenda with greater forcefulness and skill. But it also depends on convincing a G.O.P. elite grown weary of Mr. Trump’s erratic bombast (not to mention electoral losses and legal jeopardy) that he, Mr. DeSantis, represents a more responsible alternative: shrewd where Mr. Trump is reckless; bookish where Mr. Trump is philistine; scrupulous, cunning and detail-oriented where Mr. Trump is impetuous and easily bored. In short, to the base, Mr. DeSantis must be more Trump than Trump, and to the donors, less.Thus far, Mr. DeSantis has had greater success with party elites. By pairing aggressive stances on the culture wars with free-market economics and an appeal to his own competence and expertise, Mr. DeSantis has managed to corral key Republican megadonors, Murdoch media empire executives and conservative thought leaders from National Review to the Claremont Institute. He polls considerably higher than Mr. Trump with wealthy, college-educated, city- and suburb-dwelling Republicans. Mr. Trump, meanwhile, retains his grip on blue-collar, less educated and rural conservatives. For the G.O.P., the primary fight has begun to tell an all-too-familiar story: It’s the elites vs. the rabble.Mr. Trump, for his part, appears to have taken notice of this incipient class divide (and perhaps of the dearth of billionaires rushing to his aid). In the past few weeks, he has skewered Mr. DeSantis as a tool for “globalist” plutocrats and the Republican old guard. Since his indictment by a Manhattan grand jury, Mr. Trump has sought to further solidify his status as the indispensable people’s champion, attacked on all sides by a conspiracy of liberal elites. While donors and operatives may prefer a more housebroken populism, it is Mr. Trump’s surmise that large parts of the base still want the real thing, warts and all.If his wager pays off, it will be a sign not just of his continued dominance over the Republican Party but also of something deeper: an ongoing revolt against “the best and brightest,” the notion that only certain people, with certain talents, credentials and subject matter expertise, are capable of governing.During his second inaugural speech in Tallahassee in January, Mr. DeSantis embraced the culture wars pugilism that has made him a Fox News favorite; he railed against “open borders,” “identity essentialism,” the “coddling” of criminals and “attacking” of law enforcement. “Florida,” he reminded his audience, with a favored if clunky applause line, “is where woke goes to die!”But the real focus — as with his speech at the National Conservatism conference in Miami in September — was on results (a word he repeated). Mr. DeSantis promised competent leadership; “sanity” and “liberty” were his motifs. For most of the speech, the governor sounded very much the Reaganite conservative from central casting. “We said we would ensure that Florida taxed lightly, regulated reasonably and spent conservatively,” he said, “and we delivered.”In general, Mr. DeSantis’s populism is heavy on cultural grievances and light on economic ones. The maneuvers that tend to endear him to the nationalist crowd — flying a few dozen Venezuelan migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, attempting to ban “critical race theory” at public colleges and retaliating against Disney for criticizing his “Don’t Say Gay” bill — are carefully calibrated to burnish his populist bona fides without unduly provoking G.O.P. elites who long for a return to relative conservative normalcy.Indeed, Republican megadonors like the Koch family and the hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin appear to admire Mr. DeSantis in spite of the populist firebrand he periodically plays on TV. Mr. Griffin recently told Politico’s Shia Kapos he aims, as Ms. Kapos described it, to “blunt” the populism that has turned some Republican politicians against the corporate world. Mr. Griffin gave $5 million to Mr. DeSantis’s re-election campaign.Mr. DeSantis’s principal claim to being Mr. Trump’s legitimate heir, perhaps, is his handling of the Covid pandemic in Florida. Mr. DeSantis depicts his decision to reopen the state and ban mask mandates as a bold move against technocrats and scientists, denizens of what he calls the “biomedical security state.”But his disdain for experts is selective. While deciding how to address the pandemic, Mr. DeSantis collaborated with the Stanford epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya (“He’d read all the medical literature — all of it, not just the abstracts,” Dr. Bhattacharya told The New Yorker) and followed the recommendations of a group of epidemiologists from Stanford, Harvard and Oxford who pushed for a swifter reopening. Mr. DeSantis’s preference for their recommendations over those of Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn’t signify a rejection of expertise as such, only an embrace of alternative expertise. Mr. DeSantis wanted to save Florida’s tourism economy, and he found experts who would advise him to do so.In reality, Mr. DeSantis is not against elites, exactly; he aims merely to replace the current elite (in academia, corporations and government) with a more conservative one, with experts who have not been infected, as Mr. DeSantis likes to say, by “the woke mind virus.” The goal is not to do away with the technocratic oligarchy, but to repopulate it — with people like Ron DeSantis.Earlier generations of American thinkers had higher aspirations. “The reign of specialized expertise,” wrote the historian Christopher Lasch in 1994, “is the antithesis of democracy.” In the 19th century, European visitors were impressed (and unnerved) to find even farmers and laborers devouring periodicals and participating in the debating societies of early America. The defining feature of America’s democratic experiment, Mr. Lasch insisted, was “not the chance to rise in the social scale” but “the complete absence of a scale that clearly distinguished commoners from gentlemen.”Twentieth-century capitalism, Mr. Lasch thought, had resulted in a perilous maldistribution of intelligence and competence; experts had usurped governance, while the value of practical experience had plummeted.Mr. Lasch briefly came into vogue among conservatives during the Trump years, but they never grasped his central claim: that generating equality of competence would require economic redistribution.In his 2011 book, Mr. DeSantis railed against the “‘leveling’ spirit” that threatens to take hold in a republic, especially among the lower orders. His principal target in the book is “redistributive justice,” by which he apparently means any effort at all to share the benefits of economic growth more equitably — whether using government power to provide for the poor or to guarantee health care, higher wages or jobs.The essential ingredients of his worldview remain the same. Mr. DeSantis has adopted a populist idiom, but he has no more sympathy now than he did 12 years ago for the “‘leveling’ spirit” — the ethos of disdain for expertise that Mr. Trump embodied when he burst onto the national political stage in 2015. In fact, Mr. DeSantis’s posture represents a bulwark against it: an effort to convince G.O.P. voters that their enemies are cultural elites, rather than economic ones; that their liberty is imperiled, not by the existence of an oligarchy but by the oligarchs’ irksome cultural mores.Mr. DeSantis has honed an agenda that attacks progressive orthodoxies where they are most likely to affect and annoy conservative elites: gay and trans inclusion in suburban schools, diversity and equity in corporate bureaucracies, Black studies in A.P. classes and universities. None of these issues have any appreciable impact on the opportunities afforded to working-class people. And yet conservative elites treat it as an article of faith that these issues will motivate the average Republican voter.The conservative movement has staked its viability on the belief that Americans resent liberal elites because they’re “woke” and not because they wield so much power over other people’s lives. Their promise to replace the progressive elite with a conservative one — with men like Ron DeSantis — is premised on the idea that Americans are comfortablewith the notion that only certain men are fit to rule.Mr. Trump, despite what he sometimes represents, is no more likely than Mr. DeSantis to disrupt the American oligarchy. (As president, he largely let the plutocrats in his cabinet run the country.)Few politicians on either side appear eager to unleash — rather than contain — America’s leveling spirit, to give every American the means, and not merely the right, to rule themselves.To break through the elite standoff that is our culture war, politicians must resist the urge to designate a single leader, or group of leaders, distinguished by their brilliance, to shoulder the hard work of making America great. It would mean taking seriously a proverb frequently quoted by Barack Obama, but hardly embodied by his presidency: that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” It would also mean, to quote a line from the Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle favored by Christopher Lasch, that the goal of our republic — of any republic — should be to build “a whole world of heroes.”Sam Adler-Bell (@SamAdlerBell) is a writer and a co-host of “Know Your Enemy,” a podcast about the conservative movement.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      How Fox Chased Its Audience Down the Rabbit Hole

      by

      Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmOn the evening of Nov. 19, 2020, Rupert Murdoch was watching TV and crawling the walls of his 18th-century mansion in the British countryside while under strict pandemic lockdown. The television hosts at Murdoch’s top cable network, Fox News, might have scoffed at such unyielding adherence to Covid protocols. But Jerry Hall, his soon-to-be fourth ex-wife and no fan of Fox or its conservative hosts, was insisting that Murdoch, approaching his 90th birthday, remain cautious.The big story that day, as it had been every day in the two weeks since the election, was election theft, and now Rudolph W. Giuliani was giving a news conference at the Republican National Committee. With Sidney Powell, the right-wing attorney and conspiracy theorist, at his side, Giuliani, sweating profusely, black hair dye dripping down the side of his face, spun a wild fantasy about Joe Biden’s stealing the election from President Donald J. Trump. Dizzying in its delusional complexity, it centered on a supposed plot by the Clinton Foundation, George Soros and associates of Hugo Chávez to convert Trump votes into Biden votes by way of software from Smartmatic and voting machines from Dominion Voting Systems.Murdoch wasn’t pleased. He had built the most powerful media empire on the planet by understanding what his audience wanted and giving it to them without fear or judgment. But Trump now appeared to be making a serious bid to overturn a legitimate election, and his chaos agents — his personal lawyer Giuliani chief among them — were creating dangerous new appetites. Now Murdoch was faced with holding the line on reporting the facts or following his audience all the way into the land of conspiracy theories. Neither choice was necessarily good for business. At 5:01 p.m. London time, he sent an email to his friend Saad Mohseni — an Afghan Australian media mogul sometimes referred to as the Afghan Rupert Murdoch — from his iPhone. “Just watched Giuliani press conference,” he wrote. “Stupid and damaging.” Shortly after, he sent another email, this one to his Fox News chief executive, Suzanne Scott: “Terrible stuff damaging everybody, I fear. Probably hurting us, too.”Murdoch had for weeks — for years, really — avoided making a choice. Trump and his supporters were already furious at Fox News for being the first network to call Biden the victor in Arizona, and two newer cable networks were offering them a version of reality more fully on Trump’s terms. One of them, Newsmax, was moving up in the ratings while refusing to call Biden the winner. When Murdoch’s own paper, The Wall Street Journal, reported a few days before Giuliani’s news conference that Trump allies were considering pouring money into Newsmax to help it mount a stiffer challenge to Fox, Murdoch alerted Scott to the piece. Fox would have to play this just right, he said in an email. Take Giuliani with “a large grain of salt,” he wrote, but also be careful not to “antagonize Trump further.”The network’s coverage of the Giuliani news conference showed just how impossible this balancing act would be. Immediately afterward, a Fox News White House correspondent, Kristin Fisher, went to the network’s camera position outside the West Wing and fact-checked the allegations. “So much of what he said was simply not true,” she told Fox viewers. Giuliani, she said, provided no hard proof for a claim that “really cuts to the core of our democratic process.” Fox’s opinion hosts, who had been broadcasting the Giuliani-Powell Dominion fantasies to varying degrees themselves — some appearing to endorse them outright — had been complaining internally that the news division’s debunking efforts were alienating the core audience. An executive at the Fox Corporation, the network’s parent company, had recently started a brand protection effort to, among other tasks, “defend the brand in real time.” After Fisher’s segment, the group sent an alert to top news executives. In a follow-up email, Scott vented to a deputy. “I can’t keep defending these reporters who don’t understand our viewers and how to handle stories,” she wrote. “We have damaged their trust and belief in us.” One of Fisher’s bosses told her that she needed to do a better job of “respecting our audience,” and Fisher later complained of feeling sidelined. More