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    Why It’s Far Too Soon to Say DeSantis Is Done

    Despite his struggles, fortunes can change very quickly in presidential primaries.Will Ron DeSantis start attacking Donald Trump?Sophie Park for The New York TimesIs the Ron DeSantis campaign already over?After the last few months, it’s hard not to wonder. His poll numbers have plummeted. Would-be donors seem skeptical. Pundits have questioned whether he should even run at all.But as he finally announces a presidential bid, expected later today, it is worth mulling his path back to contention. Despite it all, Ron DeSantis could still be the next Republican nominee.That might seem hard to imagine, but fortunes can change astonishingly quickly in presidential primaries. There are still more than six months until the Iowa caucuses, and there will be plenty of opportunities for him to right his ship.In the end, the factors that made Mr. DeSantis formidable at the beginning of the year could prove to be more significant than the stumbles and miscues that have recently hobbled him. The damage is not yet irreparable.Of course, the fact that he could mount a comeback doesn’t mean he will come back. His campaign’s decision to announce his bid on Twitter tonight forfeits a rare opportunity to be televised live on multiple networks in favor of a feature, Twitter Spaces, that I don’t even know how to use as a frequent Twitter user. And even if his campaign is ultimately run differently than it has been so far, it’s not clear that even a perfectly run Republican campaign would defeat Donald J. Trump — at least if the former president survives his various legal challenges politically unscathed.But if you’re tempted to write off Mr. DeSantis, you might want to think again. The history of primary elections is littered with candidates who are written off, only to surge into contention. Unknown candidates like Herman Cain briefly become front-runners. Early front-runners like Joe Biden and John McCain are written off, then come back to win. Even Barack Obama spent six months struggling and trailing an “inevitable” Hillary Clinton by double digits.Perhaps one day we’ll say something similar about Mr. DeSantis’s candidacy. As with the candidates who ultimately surged back to victory, the strengths that made Mr. DeSantis seem so promising after the midterms are still there today. He still has unusually broad appeal throughout the Republican Party. His favorability ratings remain strong — stronger than Mr. Trump’s — even though his standing against Mr. Trump has deteriorated in head-to-head polling. He is still defined by issues — like the fight against “woke” and coronavirus restrictions — that also have broad appeal throughout his party. If this was enough to be a strong contender in January, there’s reason it might be again.While it’s easy to see Mr. DeSantis’s decline over the last few months as a sign of profound weakness, the volatility of the polling can also be interpreted to mean there’s a large group of voters open to both candidates. They might be prone to lurch one way or the other, depending on the way the political winds are blowing.Mr. DeSantis’s strategy so far this year may have also increased the likelihood of big swings. As I wrote last week, there are two theories for defeating the former president — Trumpism without Trump, and a reinvigorated conservative alternative to Trump. Of the two, the proto-DeSantis campaign can more easily be interpreted as a version of Trumpism without Trump. If his campaign has done anything, it’s to narrow any disagreement with Mr. Trump — even to a fault. Mr. DeSantis hasn’t really made either an explicit or implicit case against the former president. Perhaps worse, he hasn’t punched back after being attacked.This combination of choices has helped set up an unusually rapid decline in Mr. DeSantis’s support. After all, the only thing that unifies a hypothetical Trumpism without Trump coalition is opposition to Mr. Trump and the prospect of beating him. If you’re not attacking him and you’re losing to him, then you’re not saying or doing the only two things that can hold your supporters together.The evaporating basis for Mr. DeSantis’s support has played out subtly differently on two different fronts. On the right, conservative voters open to someone other than Mr. Trump nonetheless have returned to the side of the former president. What kind of conservative wants Trumpism without strength? Toward the center, the many relatively moderate and neoconservative establishment Republicans who yearn for a candidacy opposed to Trumpism, not just to the conduct of the man himself, have withheld crucial support for Mr. DeSantis and flirted with other options, from Chris Christie to Chris Sununu.But if the DeSantis campaign can revitalize the case for his Trumpism without Trump candidacy, he might quickly reclaim many of the voters who backed him a few months ago. Indeed, it’s even possible that the current media narrative and low expectations are setting the stage for a DeSantis resurgence.Imagine what it might feel like if he launched a successful, vigorous attack against Mr. Trump after all of these months on defense. What might have otherwise been a routine sparring match would be imbued with far greater significance, unleashing months of pent-up anxiety among his supporters. What if part of the reason he’s announcing his candidacy on Twitter is to mock Truth Social? Silly as it sounds, successfully putting down Mr. Trump might breathe life into his candidacy — and the media loves a comeback story.One important factor keeping Mr. DeSantis’s path open is that, so far, none of the potential moderate alternatives to him have gained a foothold in the race. If they did, it would deny him the moderate and neoconservative voters who supported the likes of John Kasich and Marco Rubio in the last primary. He would essentially become another Ted Cruz.But for now, Mr. DeSantis is the only viable not-Trump candidate in town. As long as that’s true, he will have every chance to rebound among the voters who would prefer someone other than Mr. Trump — if there is a market for someone other than Mr. Trump.In the end, whether there’s sufficient demand for a Trump alternative may be the bigger question than whether Mr. DeSantis can resuscitate his campaign. With Mr. Trump already holding more than 50 percent support in the polls, actually defeating Mr. Trump might require some breaks, like the possibility that his legal challenges are worse than we might assume. It might also require a DeSantis win in Iowa to break Mr. Trump’s grip on a crucial segment of the party, much as the midterms seemed to temporarily crack Mr. Trump’s base last winter.But even if Mr. Trump is a clear favorite, it’s easy to see how Mr. DeSantis can at least make this a competitive race again. When he’s able to focus on his own issues, he has a distinctive political brand with rare appeal throughout a divided Republican Party. With expectations so low, the groundwork for a recovery might even be in place. It’s happened before. More

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    Ron DeSantis Floats ‘7-2 Conservative Majority’ on Supreme Court

    With his 2024 campaign imminent, Ron DeSantis pointed to how he could tilt the court further to the right. He also highlighted his ability to serve for eight years as president, unlike Donald Trump.On the eve of declaring his candidacy for president, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has begun articulating a new rationale for why Republicans should nominate him over former President Donald J. Trump, saying he could “fortify” the Supreme Court’s conservative majority during a potential eight years in office.“You would have a 7-2 conservative majority on the Supreme Court that would last a quarter-century,” Mr. DeSantis said on Monday during an address to the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Orlando. “So this is big stuff, very important that that gets done right.”His comments seemed to signal a new avenue of attack against Mr. Trump, who could serve for only another four years in the White House. Conservatives have praised Mr. Trump for establishing a strong 6-to-3 majority on the court, which overturned Roe v. Wade last year, a decades-long ambition of Republicans.Mr. DeSantis, who is expected to declare his candidacy this week, suggested that he would appoint similarly conservative justices — but that he would have the opportunity to do so for longer than Mr. Trump.“I think if you look over, you know, the next two presidential terms, there is a good chance that you could be called upon to seek replacements for Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito,” Mr. DeSantis said, referring to two of the court’s most staunchly conservative members. “And the issue with that is you can’t really do better than those two. They are the gold standard for jurisprudence.”The governor also seemed to criticize Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who was appointed by President George W. Bush in 2005 but has sometimes voted with the court’s liberal wing. Mr. DeSantis warned that replacing a justice like Justice Thomas with a jurist in the mold of Justice Roberts would “actually see the court move to the left.” He also indicated that the next president could have an opportunity to replace Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal who has been on the court since 2009.In Florida, Mr. DeSantis has reshaped the State Supreme Court with conservative justices, removing a potential roadblock to enacting his agenda.While Mr. DeSantis has not talked much about his faith on a national tour ahead of his presidential run, he told the audience of Christian conservatives in Orlando about bringing home water from the Sea of Galilee in Israel to baptize his children. He also praised the nation of Israel, calling it “the cradle of our Judeo-Christian civilization.”“Those are the values that undergird our Constitution and our republic here in America,” Mr. DeSantis added. More

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    Tim Scott Begins Presidential Campaign, Adding to Trump Challengers

    The announcement from the South Carolina senator follows a tour of early nominating states. He enters the Republican primary field having raised $22 million.Tim Scott, the first Black Republican elected to the Senate from the South since Reconstruction, announced his campaign for president on Monday, adding to a growing number of Republicans running as alternatives to former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Scott’s decision, which followed a soft rollout in February and the creation of an exploratory committee in April, came this time with a signal to the Republican establishment that he was the candidate to rally around if the party is to stop Mr. Trump’s nomination. He was introduced by the Senate’s No. 2 leader, John Thune of South Dakota, and will immediately begin a $5.5 million advertising blitz in the early nominating states of Iowa and New Hampshire.“Our party and our nation are standing at a time for choosing: Victimhood or victory? Grievance or greatness?” he planned to say at a packed and boisterous morning rally in the gym of his alma mater, Charleston Southern University, according to prepared remarks. “I choose freedom and hope and opportunity.”Long considered a rising star in the G.O.P., Mr. Scott, 57, enters the primary field having amassed $22 million in fund-raising and having attracted veteran political operatives to work on his behalf.But the field of Republicans hoping to take the nomination from Mr. Trump is about to grow far more crowded. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, are expected to enter the race in the coming days. Chris Sununu, the popular Republican governor of New Hampshire, hinted over the weekend that he was likely to throw his hat in the ring as well, scrambling the battle for the state with the first Republican primary. Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s former vice president, is still mulling a run.With Mr. Trump’s most ardent followers unwilling to abandon their standard-bearer, the former president’s critics worry that more opponents will only split the anti-Trump vote and ensure his victory. Mr. Thune’s presence onstage Monday was an acknowledgment of that concern and a call to other elected Republicans to get on board with Mr. Scott.Aides to the Scott campaign said that his $22 million war chest was more than any presidential candidate in history, and that the $42 million he has raised since 2022 — much of which has been dolled out to other Republicans — had created a depth of loyalties other candidates do not have.The biggest question looming over Mr. Scott’s candidacy may be whether his message of positivity steeped in religiosity can attract enough Republican voters to win in a crowded primary. One of Mr. Scott’s rivals for the nomination is Nikki Haley, a former United Nations ambassador and South Carolina governor who appointed him to his Senate seat in 2012. The two have split allegiances and in-state support since Ms. Haley started her run in February, potentially complicating their efforts in a must-win early primary state.“I bet there’s room for three or four” candidates from South Carolina, Mr. Scott told the conservative radio personality Joey Hudson during a February interview. Mr. Scott has consolidated support from several top Republican donors and political consultants while touring Iowa and New Hampshire, key early nominating states, along with South Carolina, his home base. The longtime political operative Rob Collins and the former Colorado senator Cory Gardner, two well-known figures in Republican politics, are the leaders of his affiliated super PAC. Last month, two top South Carolina operatives, Matt Moore and Mark Knoop, were tapped to lead the group’s in-state operations.Mark Sanford, the disgraced former governor of South Carolina whose political comeback was cut short by his staunch criticism of Mr. Trump, joined the crowd.“I’m a huge fan of Tim Scott,” he said.A North Charleston native, Mr. Scott was raised by a single mother who worked long hours as a nursing assistant to raise him and his brothers. A car crash in high school sank his football dreams, but he attended Presbyterian College on a partial athletic scholarship before ultimately studying political science at Charleston Southern. His first foray into politics was through the Charleston County Council. After serving one term in the State House, he defeated the son of Strom Thurmond and won a seat for the First Congressional District in 2010, making him the first Black Republican House member from the Deep South since Reconstruction. Mr. Scott speaking with Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a Democrat. Mr. Scott’s support floats in the single digits, and several other national Republicans are also eyeing a presidential run.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesIn speeches, he often uses his biography — a story of humble beginnings and rapid rise on the political stage — to underline his view of America as a laudable work in progress rather than an irredeemably racist nation.“This is the freest and fairest land, where you and I can go as high as our character, our grit and our talent will take us,” he was set to say on Monday. “I bear witness to that.”The significance of his position is not lost on him. After a white gunman murdered nine Black parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, Mr. Scott condemned the act as a “crime of hate” and joined a bipartisan group of lawmakers in supporting Ms. Haley’s removal of the Confederate emblem from South Carolina’s state flag. As the nation reeled from the deaths of several Black men at the hands of the police in 2016, he gave a speech from the Senate floor describing instances when he was racially profiled, including by the Capitol Police.And the next year, after Mr. Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” of a white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Va., Mr. Scott criticized his words, compelling the former president to invite the senator to the White House for a meeting about it.Mr. Scott was a leading Republican voice on police reform negotiations after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, helping draft Republicans’ proposed legislation that called for narrow reforms but did not ultimately pass. In 2017, he spearheaded the creation of Opportunity Zones, an initiative that offers tax incentives to investors in low-income neighborhoods — many of which are predominantly Black.It’s not clear, however, whether those efforts will result in added support from Black voters on a national stage. For many Black Democrats, Mr. Scott’s race matters little in light of his conservative voting record.The biggest question looming over Mr. Scott’s candidacy is whether his message of positivity steeped in religiosity can attract enough Republican voters to win in a crowded primary.Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times“The same Black people that would normally vote Republican, those are the people that will vote for Tim Scott,” said Representative Jamaal Bowman, Democrat of New York. “The majority of Black people, the near majority or new Black voters aren’t going to come out for Tim Scott.”Mr. Scott has already been tested as a presidential candidate. Days after starting his exploratory committee, Mr. Scott waffled on questions about whether he would support a federal abortion ban and did not specify the number of weeks at which he would restrict access to the procedure if elected president.Mr. Scott’s entry to the race also comes amid soul-searching for Republicans on who will carry the party’s mantle in 2024. Mr. Trump has increased his edge in the polls even as he faces new personal and political controversies, including his indictment by a grand jury in Manhattan and subsequent liability in a sexual assault trial involving the columnist E. Jean Carroll. Mr. Scott has pointedly declined to criticize Mr. Trump head-on, preferring oblique references to his own rectitude.The senator’s supporters have lauded that message, mostly positive and peppered with biblical references, as a welcome contrast to the vitriol that has become a feature of national campaigns.“You haven’t seen him burned in effigy because of a side he’s taken,” said Mikee Johnson, a Columbia-area business owner and Scott donor. “He’s more the one who’s seemed to have brought some people together.”Mr. Johnson added, “And I love him, because that’s his place.”During a March presidential forum in Charleston hosted by the conservative Christian Palmetto Family Council, Mr. Scott highlighted themes likely to take center stage during his presidential campaign.“There are two visions: One that feels like it’s pulling us down and another one that wants to restore faith in this nation,” he told the crowd after quoting the Epistle to the Galatians. “We believe that we need more faith in America, more faith in Americans, not less.” More

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    Tim Scott’s Run for President Shines a Spotlight on Black Republicans

    The South Carolina senator’s bid for the White House — as the sole Black Republican in the Senate — could raise not only his profile, but those of Black conservatives across the country.Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, addressed the Charleston County Republican Party at a dinner in February, offering a stirring message of unity and American redemption that has become the center of his stump speech. The next day, he called the chairman of the county party to ask for his support.Mr. Scott told the chairman that he was considering a presidential run. The chairman, who had planned to endorse former President Donald J. Trump, told the senator he would switch allegiances and back him instead.The exchange was, in some ways, traditional party politicking as Mr. Scott works to build support in his home county and in his home state. But it also underscored a subtle change shaping G.O.P. politics — both men are Black Republicans.“I’m pretty locked in helping Senator Scott in every way that I possibly can,” said the former county party leader, Maurice Washington, who stepped down from his role as chairman in April. It was Mr. Washington, Charleston County’s first Black Republican chairman and a longtime ally of Mr. Scott’s, who first encouraged him to run for a county council seat nearly 30 years ago.Mr. Scott, who plans to formally announce his presidential campaign on Monday, will become one of a handful of Black conservatives to run for president in recent years. Herman Cain made a bid for the White House in 2011 and Ben Carson did so in 2016, but neither garnered widespread support. Mr. Scott will be the second Black conservative to enter the 2024 race: Larry Elder, a talk radio host who ran unsuccessfully for governor in California’s 2021 recall election, announced his long-shot campaign last month.Mr. Scott has been popular among Republicans — and has a sizable campaign fund — but his campaign is seen as a long shot.Patrick Semansky/Associated PressAs a U.S. senator and a former member of the House of Representatives with roughly $22 million in campaign funds, Mr. Scott will begin as more of a contender than most of his predecessors, and he will be one of the best-funded candidates in the 2024 presidential primary. His support is currently in the low single digits, according to public polling. But his candidacy could raise not only his profile, but those of Black conservatives across the country.Black Republicans are a small group of voters and politicians who say they often feel caught in the middle — ignored and subtly discriminated against by some Republicans, ridiculed and ostracized by many Democrats. Those elected to office have expressed frustration that they are viewed not simply as conservatives but as Black conservatives, and they often decry what they describe as the Democratic obsession with identity politics.“I think the commonality of virtually all Black conservatives is that we don’t think we’re victims,” said Mr. Elder, who has emphasized his roots in both California and the segregated South. “We don’t believe we’re oppressed. We don’t believe that we’re owed anything.” He and Mr. Scott share a belief in “hard work and education and self-improvement,” Mr. Elder added. “So it would not surprise me that he and I are saying the same things, if not in different ways.”Other Black Republicans have won state races and primaries since the 2022 midterms. On Tuesday, Daniel Cameron defeated a well-funded opponent in Kentucky’s Republican primary for governor. Mr. Cameron, the first Black man to be elected attorney general in Kentucky, is the Trump-endorsed protégé of Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader. Last year, a record number of Black Republican candidates ran for state offices. With Mr. Scott in the Senate and four Republicans in the House, there are now five Black Republicans in Congress — the most in more than a century.“I’m pretty locked in helping Senator Scott in every way that I possibly can,” said Maurice Washington, Charleston County’s first Black Republican chairman, who stepped down in April.Travis Dove for The New York TimesStill, the number of Black Republicans who won seats last year is a fraction of the total number who ran for state and local office under the G.O.P. — more than 80. And the Republican Party’s inroads with Black candidates have yet to overcome enduring feelings of distrust among Black voters toward the party. The ascension of Black Republicans such as Mr. Scott and Mr. Cameron comes against the backdrop of a Republican Party that has largely stood by as some of its members have employed overtly racist rhetoric and behavior.Shermichael Singleton, a Black Republican strategist and a former senior adviser to Mr. Carson, said that he spent a lot of time in 2016 determining how Mr. Carson’s hyper-conservative campaign message could remain in step with the party line without alienating critical voting groups. The challenge was twofold: overcoming Black voters’ negative perceptions about Republicans while building a winning coalition that could include some of them.“It’s just more unique and more challenging if you’re a Black person because of our unique experiences politically and the distrust that most of us have for both parties, but the overwhelming distrust that we have is for Republicans,” Mr. Singleton said. “Because they are perceived as being anti-progressive on race.”Much of the party’s base and its presidential contenders have become focused on opposing all things “woke,” using the term as a catchall pejorative for the broader push for equity and social justice. In the party’s embrace of being anti-woke, several Republican-led state legislatures have aimed to ban books written by Black authors and limit conversations about slavery, the civil rights movement and systemic racism in the classroom and elsewhere.For many in the Republican Party, its members of color are proof of its inclusivity. The success of a candidate like Mr. Scott — the first Black Republican to represent South Carolina in the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction — helps in part to rebut claims that the G.O.P. is inherently racist or, more broadly, that systemic racism remains an issue in America, Republicans say.In speeches, Mr. Scott has criticized the “victim mentality” he believes exists in American culture, and has blamed the left for using racial issues as a means of further dividing the electorate. Mr. Elder said racism “has never been a less important factor in American life than today.”Daniel Cameron, the first Black attorney general of Kentucky, won the primary race for governor on Tuesday. He will face Andy Beshear, a popular Democrat who is seeking re-election in a typically deep-red state.Jon Cherry for The New York Times“What Black Republicans have to do is they either have to lean all in and just be an unapologetic, uncritical supporter for where the Republican Party is now, or they have to find a way to walk that tightrope of not alienating the party, but also not alienating their community,” said Leah Wright Rigueur, an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. “Somebody like Scott has to find a space to navigate those worlds.”J.C. Watts, who was the first Black Republican to represent Oklahoma in Congress, said he believed Mr. Scott could be “a great asset” to the party’s presidential primary, based on his personal experiences. “Whether or not the party listens,” he added, “that’s something else.”“He will have some that will try to force him to be ‘the Black Republican,’” Mr. Watts continued. “While I don’t think you should run from being Black, or run from being conservative, some will try to force him to play that role.”Nathan Brand, Mr. Scott’s spokesman, pointed to the senator’s remarks at the dinner in Charleston in February, in which he acknowledged “the devastation brought upon African Americans” before extolling America as “defined by our redemption” — themes that have formed the base of his campaign message. The campaign declined to comment further.Like many Black Republicans, Mr. Scott has been reluctant to discuss race as it relates to his party, preferring to focus on policy matters. In recent years, however, he has been called on to weigh in further. In 2020, he was the lead Republican in negotiations on failed police reform legislation.The senator was also a leading conservative voice against Mr. Trump’s comments about a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, when the president said there were people to blame on “both sides.” Mr. Scott’s criticisms later spurred Mr. Trump to invite him to the White House.After a series of police killings in the summer of 2016, Mr. Scott gave a detailed speech on the Senate floor about instances when he was racially profiled by law enforcement, including by U.S. Capitol Police. These were moments, he said, when he “felt the pressure applied by the scales of justice when they are slanted.”Now, as he becomes a presidential candidate and the nation’s highest-ranking Black Republican, Mr. Scott will likely have to answer questions about how he and the rest of his party navigate a tenuous relationship with Black voters.“It could be a little bit of a problem to me down the road,” said Cornelius Huff, the Republican mayor of Inman, S.C., who is Black. “You have to have somebody in the family that calls it what it is and straightens those things out.”At a recent town hall in New Hampshire, Mr. Scott told a mostly white audience of supporters that he saw an opportunity to increase the party’s gains with voters of color, particularly men. Despite winning re-election by more than 25 points in 2022, Mr. Scott lost to or narrowly defeated his Democratic challenger in nearly all of South Carolina’s predominantly Black counties. Policy conversations about school choice and economic empowerment, he said, could create an opening with men of color, a group that polling shows has been more open to supporting the Republican Party in recent election cycles.“When we go where we’re not invited, we have conversations with people who may not vote for us,” Mr. Scott said at the event. “We earn their respect. If we earn their respect long enough, we earn their vote. What is disrespectful is to show up 90 days before an election and say, ‘We want your vote.’”The senator appeared to be speaking to a common grievance among Black voters that Democrats often count on and court their votes before major elections, and then fail to deliver on their policy promises. Yet, even as some Black voters bemoan what they see as Democrats’ empty promises on the issues they care most about, they remain the party’s most loyal constituency. More than 90 percent of Black voters voted for President Biden in 2020.Mr. Washington, 62, the former Charleston County Republican chairman, helped found South Carolina State University’s Republican Club while in school there nearly four decades ago. Though he has run for office as a Democrat before, Mr. Washington says his values, and those of many in Black communities, are more conservative and thus more aligned with Republican values. The weeks after Mr. Scott starts his campaign will amount to a waiting game, he added.“Let’s see what happens,” Mr. Washington said. “We’ll know sooner rather than later whether or not that message of unity, of working hard towards rebuilding trust in our nation — in America and its citizenry and in its race relations — is going to be one that is embraced or rejected.” More

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    Two Theories for Beating Trump in the Primary

    A successful campaign will probably need the traits of both Trumpism and an alternative to Trumpism.Ronald Reagan rode the issues of 1979, some similar to today’s, to the Oval Office. George Tames/The New York TimesThere are two basic theories for how Donald J. Trump might be defeated in a Republican primary. It’s possible that neither, both or some combination of the two can actually work in practice. But by considering them in depth, it becomes easier to think about and judge the various efforts to beat him — and why so many haven’t pulled it off.In our next article, we’ll consider whether and how Ron DeSantis fits into the picture — and why his campaign has struggled to meet the very real challenge of defeating a former president.Theory One: Trumpism Without TrumpThis type of candidacy assumes that Mr. Trump’s populist conservatism reoriented the Republican Party in irreversible and advantageous ways, but that his personal conduct has been a disaster for conservatives.In this view, his poor hires and lack of experience and focus prevented him from being an effective president. His coarse remarks, tweets, election denialism and ultimately Jan. 6 not only cost Republicans the White House and the Senate, but also the opportunity for a truly decisive victory — like the one Mr. DeSantis won in 2022 in Florida.According to this theory, these same personal weaknesses are his vulnerability in a Republican primary in 2024. A challenger to Mr. Trump, therefore, ought to hew as close as possible to him on the issues, while distinguishing himself or herself on electability, competence and character.If you imagine yourself in a hypothetical brainstorming session for the Trumpism Without Trump campaign, you can imagine the kinds of attacks that might add up to a critique of a hapless, weak president who wasn’t up to the job of making America great again. In this view, Mr. Trump presided over rising crime, a strengthening China, growing trade deficits, rising drug overdose deaths and a stronger Democratic Party. He talked a big game, but didn’t accomplish much. He failed to build a wall. He lost to sleepy Joe Biden. He’s old. The election was stolen from under his nose. He let the Deep State drag him down and did nothing to dismantle it. He let Dr. Fauci into our lives, and the vaccine into our bodies. He didn’t command the respect of the military and hired countless people he now considers disloyal. Not every one of these attacks is ready for prime time, but some combination could work, and you could undoubtedly come up with other examples.The logic of Trumpism Without Trump has merit, but it’s not as simple as it sounds. Indeed, it suffers from an obvious and fundamental problem: It doesn’t work if Republicans still want Mr. Trump.There’s another, less obvious issue: It’s hard for this type of candidate to unite the various skeptical-of-Trump factions. After all, many of the most vocal opponents of Mr. Trump oppose both Trumpism and the man himself. This sets up routine clashes between a Trumpism Without Trump candidate and his or her likeliest own supporters. It could even lead many of those supporters to seek an explicitly anti-Trump candidate.Theory Two: An alternative to TrumpismThis theory is a little more complicated. It describes something that doesn’t yet exist. But the case for this theory picks up with the last critique of Trumpism Without Trump.An anti-Trump candidate will probably need to be something more than Trumpism Without Trump: A reinvigorated brand of conservatism would be needed to pull off the challenging task of unifying everyone from the Trumpist types to the supporters of Mitt Romney’s Reaganism to the Ted Cruz Tea Partiers.Needless to say, this would be challenging. To do it, a conservative would need to find a message that at once checks the boxes and wins the hearts of various factions — without alienating the rest. This is not easy, given the many disagreements between the different factions of the Republican Party. But something like this has happened before under circumstances that in some ways resemble today’s.Recall the conditions that brought about the last great renewal of conservatism, in the 1970s. The parallels to today are striking. In both 1979 and 2023, conservatives could say inflation and crime was high; the Kremlin had decided to invade a neighbor; and a new class of young, highly educated activists was at once driving some old-school liberals to the right and sparking a full-blown conservative reaction. In each case, it was 15 years after an epochal breakthrough for Black Americans (the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the election of Barack Obama in 2008).As with today, the right was fractured. The politicians who embodied the different wings of a possible Republican coalition — Barry Goldwater, George Wallace and Gerald Ford — were every bit as ideologically diverse as Mr. Cruz, Mr. Trump and Mr. Romney. But the events of the 1960s and 1970s created conditions that allowed these groups to come together around a reinvigorated conservatism that dominated the Republican Party for the next 30 years.The reaction against the New Left of the 1960s and ’70s was strong enough to bring some once-liberal intellectuals and the religious right together against the excesses of the counterculture. The backlash against the civil rights era, rising crime and the failings of the Great Society brought blue-collar, urban, white ethnic Reagan Democrats together with Sun Belt suburbanites. High inflation and a growing tax burden offered a way for neoliberal economics to align big business, working-class economic interests and white resentment.The conditions for a rejuvenated conservatism today aren’t nearly as favorable as they were in 1979. They don’t even seem as favorable as they were in 2021. But it’s not 2015 anymore, either. Many of the conditions that helped lead to Trumpian populism are gone. Fear of economic stagnation, high unemployment and low interest rates have been replaced by inflation and high interest rates. Globalization is unequivocally in retreat. The Forever Wars are gone, and Great Power politics is back. Meanwhile, the rise of a new “woke” left and lingering resentment over coronavirus restrictions have brought a new set of issues that didn’t exist a decade ago.If you look in the right corners of the internet, you can see these changes congealing into new kinds of conservatives. You can spot neo-neo-cons on Substack, where Obama-era liberals who insist they aren’t conservatives rail against “woke” and forge unusual alliances with longtime conservatives. There’s even a neo-neoliberalism of sorts, as a small corner of the right mulls deregulation to contain costs, and even progressives find themselves mulling “supply side” policies. Many of the people dabbling in these ideas were also skeptics of coronavirus restrictions, especially school closings. Rising concern about Russia and China needs no explanation.If you put all of these various strands together, you can imagine the outlines of a reinvigorated conservatism tied to the challenges of 2023, not 2015 or 1979. Compared with 2015, it would be distinguished by anti-woke cultural politics, a stronger approach to Russia or China, and deregulation aiming to tackle inflation and promote “freedom.” It also fulfills the most important element for the Alternative to Trumpism theory: Moderate elites and Obama-era Tea Partiers can find common ground on all of these issues or at least tolerate the other side.But like Trumpism Without Trump, this approach faces a fundamental problem: It’s not obvious whether these new issues are strong enough to hold the disparate elements of the anti-Trump coalition together through a primary campaign.Over the last year or so, new developments have tended to weaken the punch of the new issues. The pandemic is past, at least politically. “Wokeness” may be fading somewhat as an issue. Meanwhile, the old issues are making a comeback. Inflation is edging down, but the end of pandemic-era restrictions has renewed focus on the border. The end of Roe v. Wade has thrust abortion back to the center of American life. Nothing similar could be said in 1979, when older divisive fights over civil rights or Medicare had plainly given way to a new set of more acute challenges. Imagine how much harder it would have been for Ronald Reagan to balance winning the South and the rest of the country in the Republican primary if Brown v. Board had been overturned by conservative judges in 1978.There’s another reason the new issues might not be enough: They don’t always offer easy avenues for attack against Mr. Trump. There are a few obvious but fundamentally limited opportunities, like Russia and China. But after that, it gets tougher. Inflation could be a plausible path: The argument would go that Mr. Trump’s tariffs, push for lower interest rates, immigration restrictions, government spending, stimulus checks and big tax cuts all contributed to supply chain issues, labor shortages and excess demand. This would even allow for a natural comparison lumping him in with Mr. Biden. But this attack is complicated to pull off, and it doesn’t seem to be political gold.Importantly, it is hard to attack Mr. Trump on “woke,” which is probably still the single new issue with the most resonance across the Republican Party, even if it isn’t quite as salient as it was a year or two ago. The attack on woke does offer some opportunity for a contrast with Mr. Trump, by embracing American Greatness as an explicit critique of woke anti-Americanism and an implicit critique of dystopian MAGA-ism. Nikki Haley has taken this tack. But it is not at all obvious whether this sunnier brand has any resonance with conservative voters.Realistically, a successful campaign will need the traits of both Trumpism Without Trump and an Alternative to Trumpism. Alone, neither quite seems like enough. The strongest candidacy will benefit a bit from some aspects of the other. Done right, perhaps no one would be quite sure which category it falls into.Next, we’ll consider why Mr. DeSantis is a distinct candidate who comes close to pulling off both, but so far hasn’t done either — with poll numbers to show for it. More

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    Analysis: Durham Report Failed to Deliver After Years of Political Hype

    A dysfunctional investigation led by a Trump-era special counsel illustrates a dilemma about prosecutorial independence and accountability in politically sensitive matters.The limping conclusion to John H. Durham’s four-year investigation of the Russia inquiry underscores a recurring dilemma in American government: how to shield sensitive law enforcement investigations from politics without creating prosecutors who can run amok, never to be held to account.At a time when special counsels are proliferating — there have been four since 2017, two of whom are still at work — the much-hyped investigation by Mr. Durham, a special counsel, into the Russia inquiry ended with a whimper that stood in contrast to the countless hours of political furor that spun off from it.Mr. Durham delivered a report that scolded the F.B.I. but failed to live up to the expectations of supporters of Donald J. Trump that he would uncover a politically motivated “deep state” conspiracy. He charged no high-level F.B.I. or intelligence official with a crime and acknowledged in a footnote that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign did nothing prosecutable, either.Predictably, the report’s actual content — it contained no major new revelations, and it accused the F.B.I. of “confirmation bias” rather than making a more explosive conclusion of political bias — made scant difference in parts of the political arena. Mr. Trump and many of his loyalists issued statements treating it as vindication of their claims that the Russia inquiry involved far more extravagant wrongdoing.“The Durham Report spells out in great detail the Democrat Hoax that was perpetrated upon me and the American people,” Mr. Trump insisted on social media. “This is 2020 Presidential Election Fraud, just like ‘stuffing’ the ballot boxes, only more so. This totally illegal act had a huge impact on the Election.”Mr. Trump’s comparison was unintentionally striking. Just as his and his supporters’ wild and invented claims of election fraud floundered in court (Fox News also agreed to pay a $787.5 million settlement for amplifying lies about Dominion Voting Systems), the political noise surrounding Mr. Durham’s efforts ultimately ran up against reality.In that sense, it was less that Mr. Durham failed to deliver and more that Attorney General William P. Barr set him up to fail the moment he assigned Mr. Durham to find evidence proving Mr. Trump’s claims about the Russia investigation.There were real-world flaws with the Russia investigation, especially how the F.B.I. botched applications to wiretap a former Trump campaign adviser. But the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, found those problems, leaving Mr. Durham with depleted hunting grounds.Indeed, credit for Mr. Durham’s only courtroom success, a guilty plea by an F.B.I. lawyer who doctored an email during preparations for a wiretap renewal, belongs to Mr. Horowitz, who uncovered the misconduct.At the same time, Mr. Horowitz kneecapped Mr. Durham’s investigation by finding no evidence that F.B.I. actions were politically motivated. He also concluded that the basis of the Russia inquiry — an Australian diplomat’s tip related to the release of Democratic emails hacked by Russia — was sufficient to open a full investigation.Before Mr. Horowitz released his December 2019 report, Mr. Durham lobbied him to drop that finding, arguing the F.B.I. should have instead opened a preliminary inquiry. When Mr. Horowitz declined, Mr. Durham issued an extraordinary statement saying he disagreed based on “evidence collected to date” in his inquiry.But even as Mr. Durham’s report questioned whether the F.B.I. should have opened it as a lower-level investigation, he stopped short of stating that opening a full one violated any rule.Mr. Durham also used court filings in those cases to insinuate that the Clinton campaign framed former President Donald J. Trump for collusion.Sophie Park for The New York TimesA remaining rationale for the Durham investigation was that Mr. Horowitz lacked jurisdiction to scrutinize spy agencies. But by the spring of 2020, according to officials familiar with the inquiry, Mr. Durham’s effort to find intelligence abuses in the origins of the Russia investigation had come up empty.Instead of wrapping up, Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham shifted to a different rationale, hunting for a basis to blame the Clinton campaign for suspicions surrounding myriad links Trump campaign associates had to Russia.By keeping the investigation going, Mr. Barr initially appeased Mr. Trump, who, as Mr. Barr recounted in his memoir, was angry about the lack of charges as the 2020 election neared.But Mr. Barr’s public statements about Mr. Durham’s investigation also helped foster perceptions that he had found something big. In April 2020, for example, he suggested in a Fox News interview that officials could be prosecuted and said: “The evidence shows that we are not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness. There is something far more troubling here.”Mr. Trump and some of his allies in the news media went further, stoking expectations among his supporters that Mr. Durham would imprison high-level officials. Those include the former directors of the F.B.I. and C.I.A., James B. Comey and John O. Brennan, and Democratic leaders like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joseph R. Biden Jr.In fact, Mr. Durham only ever developed charges against two outsiders involved in efforts to scrutinize links between Mr. Trump and Russia, accusing them both of making false statements to the F.B.I. and treating the bureau as a victim, not a perpetrator.While in office, Mr. Barr worked closely with Mr. Durham, regularly meeting with him, sharing Scotch and accompanying him to Europe. When it became clear that Mr. Durham had found no one to charge before the election, Mr. Barr pushed him to draft a potential interim report, prompting Mr. Durham’s No. 2, Nora R. Dannehy, to resign in protest over ethics, The New York Times has reported.Against that backdrop, the first phase of Mr. Durham’s investigation — when he was a U.S. attorney appointed by Mr. Trump, not a special counsel — illustrates why there is a recurring public policy interest in shielding prosecutors pursuing politically sensitive matters from political appointees.But the second phase — after Mr. Barr made him a special counsel, entrenching him to remain under the Biden administration with some independence from Attorney General Merrick B. Garland — illustrates how prosecutorial independence itself risks a different kind of dysfunction.The regulations empowered Mr. Garland to block Mr. Durham from an action, but only if it was “so inappropriate or unwarranted under established departmental practices that it should not be pursued” and required him to tell Congress. Mr. Garland gave Mr. Durham free rein, avoiding Republican accusations of a cover-up.Mr. Durham continued for another two and a half years, spending millions of dollars to bring the two demonstrably weak cases involving accusations of false statements; in each instance, a jury of 12 unanimously rejected the charges. One of Mr. Durham’s handpicked prosecutors resigned from his team in protest of the first of those indictments, The Times has reported.But Mr. Durham’s use of his law enforcement powers did achieve something else. He used court filings to insinuate a theory he never found evidence to charge: that the Clinton campaign conspired to frame Mr. Trump for collusion. Those filings provided endless fodder for conservative news media.Even after Mr. Durham’s cases collapsed, some Trump supporters held out hope that his final report would deliver a bombshell. But it largely consisted of recycled material, interlaced with conclusions like Mr. Durham’s accusation that the F.B.I. had displayed a “lack of analytical rigor.”Attorney General William P. Barr bestowed Mr. Durham with special counsel status.Doug Mills/The New York TimesMr. Durham’s own analytical rigor was subject to scrutiny. At one point he wrote that he had found “no evidence” that the F.B.I. ever considered whether Clinton campaign efforts to tie Mr. Trump to Russia might affect its investigation.Yet the same page cited messages by a top F.B.I. official, Peter Strzok, cautioning colleagues about the Steele dossier, a compendium of claims about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia that, it later became clear, were Clinton campaign-funded opposition research. He wrote that it “should be viewed as intended to influence as well as to inform” and whoever commissioned it was “presumed to be connected to the campaign in some way.”As Mr. Horowitz uncovered and criticized, the F.B.I. later cited the Steele dossier in wiretap applications, despite learning a reason to doubt its credibility. But Trump supporters often go further, falsely claiming that the F.B.I. opened the entire Russia investigation based on the dossier.Mr. Durham’s report appeared to nod to that false claim, saying that “information received from politically affiliated persons and entities” in part had “triggered” the inquiry. Yet elsewhere, his report acknowledged that the officials who opened the investigation in July 2016 had not yet seen the dossier, and it was prompted by the Australian diplomat’s tip. He also conceded that there was “no question the F.B.I. had an affirmative obligation to closely examine” that lead.Tom Fitton, a Trump ally and the leader of the conservative group Judicial Watch, expressed disappointment in the Durham investigation in a statement this week, while insisting that there had been a “conspiracy by Obama, Biden, Clinton and their Deep State allies.”“Durham let down the American people with few and failed prosecutions,” Mr. Fitton declared. “Never in American history has so much government corruption faced so little accountability.”But Aitan Goelman, a lawyer for Mr. Strzok, said that while the special counsel accused the F.B.I. of “confirmation bias,” it was Mr. Durham who spent four years trying to find support for a preformed belief about the Russia investigation.“In fact, it is Mr. Durham’s investigation that was politically motivated, a direct consequence of former President Trump’s weaponization of the Department of Justice, an effort that unanimous juries in each of Mr. Durham’s trials soundly rejected,” he said.Adam Goldman More

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    Pence Looks Toward 2024 Run, Using Reagan’s Playbook, Not Trump’s

    A pro-Pence super PAC is being formed, and so is a plan to barnstorm Iowa. “This campaign is going to reintroduce Mike Pence to the country as his own man,” a G.O.P. operative said.Former Vice President Mike Pence is expected to soon declare a long-shot campaign for the White House against the president under whom he served, pitching himself as a “classical conservative” who would return the Republican Party to its pre-Trump roots, according to people close to Mr. Pence.Mr. Pence is working to carve out space in the Republican primary field by appealing to evangelicals, adopting a hard-line position in support of a federal abortion ban, promoting free trade and pushing back against Republican efforts to police big business on ideological grounds. He faces significant challenges, trails far behind in the polls and has made no effort to channel the populist energies overtaking the Republican Party.In a sign his campaign will be announced in the coming weeks, a pro-Pence super PAC called Committed to America is being set up. A veteran Republican operative, Scott Reed, who ran Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign and was the longtime top political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, will lead the group alongside Jeb Hensarling, a close friend of Mr. Pence’s who served with him in Congress.Mr. Pence finds himself in the highly unusual position of being a former vice president trying to squeeze back into the national conversation. The political profile he built under former President Donald J. Trump was more supplicant than standard-bearer, at least until the rupture in their relationship on Jan. 6, 2021. He would begin far behind Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in early national and state polls of 2024 Republican primary voters.The Pence team’s bet is that a “Reagan coalition” can be reassembled within a party transformed by Mr. Trump.Eduardo Munoz/ReutersThe Pence candidacy will focus heavily on winning over evangelical voters, especially in Iowa, where the super PAC is already preparing to organize all 99 counties. Iowa’s caucuses are the first contests for Republican presidential contenders early next year.“Iowa feels more like Indiana than any other state in the union,” Mr. Pence, a former governor of Indiana, said in a recent interview. “It just feels like home.”On a recent call with reporters, Mr. Reed, who will help lead the pro-Pence super PAC, described the Iowa caucuses as the “defining event” of Mr. Pence’s candidacy and foreshadowed an old-fashioned blitz of retail politics. “We’re going to organize Iowa, all 99 counties, like we’re running him for county sheriff,” he said.If Mr. Trump represents the populist New Right, Mr. Pence is preparing to run for president in the mold of Ronald Reagan. His team’s improbable bet is that a “Reagan coalition” — composed of the Christian right, fiscal conservatives and national security hawks — can be reassembled within a party transformed by Mr. Trump.“We have to resist the siren song of populism unmoored to conservative principles,” Mr. Pence said in the interview.In a Tuesday night speech in New Hampshire focused on economics, Mr. Pence is expected to call for “free trade with free nations,” according to a person familiar with the draft.He is casting himself as a “Reagan conservative” and staking out sharply different positions from Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis on the most important policy questions framing the Republican 2024 race. Still, running against Mr. Trump so directly will force Mr. Pence to confront the contradictions inherent in having served as the president’s yes-man for four years through the turmoil of the Trump administration.“This campaign is going to reintroduce Mike Pence to the country as his own man,” Mr. Reed said. “People know Mike Pence. They just don’t know him well.”It remains to be seen how frequently Mr. Pence will discuss the moment that has defined him for the last two years: his rejection on Jan. 6 of Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign to get him to exceed his constitutional authority while President Biden’s Electoral College victory was certified.That issue is not a winning one with the base of the Republican Party. But Mr. Pence’s team believes there are enough Republicans who might be won over by Mr. Pence describing the moment as adhering to constitutional principles.Mr. Pence finds himself in the highly unusual position of being a former vice president trying to squeeze back into the national conversation.Mario Tama/Getty ImagesMr. Pence stands almost alone among the prospective Republican field in advocating views that were once standard issue for his party.Case in point: Mr. Pence says Social Security and Medicare must be trimmed back as part of any serious plan to deal with the national debt. Before Mr. Trump entered national politics in 2015, cutting entitlement programs was Republican orthodoxy. But Mr. Trump changed that. The former president has promised in his third campaign not to cut either program and he has attacked Mr. DeSantis on the issue, claiming the governor would cut those programs.“It is fairly remarkable that Joe Biden and Donald Trump have the same position on fiscal solvency: The position of never going to touch Social Security and Medicare,” Mr. Pence said.Mr. Pence said he would “explain to people” how the “debt crisis” would affect their children and grandchildren. He says his plan to cut benefits won’t apply to Social Security and Medicare payments for people in retirement today or who will retire in the next 25 years. But he will pitch ideas to cut spending for people under 40.Mr. Pence is also drawing a stark contrast on foreign policy. Both Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis have questioned whether the United States should be supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion. Mr. Pence sees the battle as a modern version of the Cold War.“There’s a bit of a movement afoot in the Republican Party that would abandon our commitment to being the leader of the free world and that questions why we’re providing military support in Ukraine,” Mr. Pence said.Unlike almost every major Republican running for president, Mr. Pence still defends former President George W. Bush’s decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, though he acknowledged in the interview that the “weapons of mass destruction” intelligence that Mr. Bush used to justify the Iraqi invasion was wrong.“In the aftermath of September 11th, the president articulated a doctrine that I wholly supported,” Mr. Pence said, “which was that it’s harder for your enemies to project force if they’re running backward.”Mr. Pence supports a national ban on abortion. “For the former president and others who aspire to the highest office in the land to relegate that issue to states-only I think is wrong,” he said.Allison Joyce/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMr. Pence is also resisting the anti-corporate furies that are dominating Republican politics today, arguing limited government means not intervening in the private sector. He was one of the first major Republicans to criticize Mr. DeSantis for his fight against Disney.In the view of New Right politicians such as Mr. DeSantis, limited-government conservatives are naïve to the fact that liberals have overtaken major American institutions — academia, Fortune 500 companies, the news media — and conservatives need to use governmental power to fight back.Mr. Pence will run as a staunch social conservative, drawing a contrast with Mr. Trump on abortion policy. In his town hall with CNN last week, Mr. Trump repeatedly refused to say he would support a federal ban on abortion. He has said the issue should be left to the states.Mr. Pence unapologetically endorses a national ban on abortion.“For the former president and others who aspire to the highest office in the land to relegate that issue to states-only I think is wrong,” Mr. Pence said. His senior adviser, Marc Short, said Mr. Pence regarded a 15-week national ban as a “minimal threshold” and would support federal efforts to “protect life beginning at conception.”There is little chance Mr. Pence will receive many endorsements from members of Congress. His team insists that Mr. Pence does not need elected officials to vouch for his credentials. Yet, it’s also unclear how many Republican donors will back his bid. An early sign of interest came last week in Dallas when the billionaire Ross Perot Jr., a real estate developer and son of the former presidential candidate, hosted a lunch for Mr. Pence with other major donors, according to two people with direct knowledge of the gathering.Among the hires for the super PAC supporting Mr. Pence is Bobby Saparow, who led the ground game for Gov. Brian Kemp’s successful re-election campaign in Georgia in 2022, one of the few brights spots for Republicans in the midterms. Mr. Saparow promised to “replicate” the effort with Mr. Pence.For now, Mr. Pence is signaling he’s willing to do without a staple of Republican presidential campaigns in the modern era: Mr. Trump’s smash-mouth politics and constant warfare against the media.“People want to see us get back to having a threshold of civility in the public debate,” Mr. Pence said. “And when I say that, when I tell people that I think democracy depends on heavy doses of civility, I get a very visceral response from crowds.” More

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    When Their Idea of Liberty Is Your Idea of Death

    At the heart of the American ethos is the contested idea of freedom.In the video announcing his 2024 re-election bid — pointedly called “Freedom” — President Biden staked out his vision, declaring:Around the country, MAGA extremists are lining up to take on bedrock freedoms, cutting Social Security that you’ve paid for your entire life, while cutting taxes from the very wealthy, dictating what health care decisions women can make, banning books and telling people who they can love all while making it more difficult for you to be able to vote.“The question we’re facing,” Biden told viewers, “is whether in the years ahead, we will have more freedom or less freedom. More rights or fewer,” adding:Every generation of Americans will face the moment when they have to defend democracy. Stand up for our personal freedom. Stand up for the right to vote and our civil rights. And this is our moment.The 2024 election shows every sign of becoming a partisan battle to claim ownership of the ideal of freedom, with each side determined to persuade voters that the opposition’s assertions are not just false but a threat to individual and group rights.This dispute is possible because freedom as an abstraction is fraught with multiple and often conflicting meanings. The debate over where to draw the lines between freedom, liberty, rights, democracy, responsibility, autonomy, obligation, justice, fairness and citizenship has been going on for centuries, but has steadily intensified with the success of the liberation movements of the past seven decades — the civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights and sexual rights revolutions.In sharp contrast to Biden, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, in “The Courage to Be Free” — his campaign book, published in February — warns that “the threat to freedom is not limited to the actions of governments, but also includes a lot of aggressive, powerful institutions hellbent on imposing a woke agenda on our country.”The enemies of freedom, DeSantis contends, are “entrenched elites that have driven our nation into the ground,” elites that “control the federal bureaucracy, lobby shops on K Street, corporate media, Big Tech companies and universities.”These privileged few, DeSantis argues, “use undemocratic means to foist everything from environmental, social, and governance (E.S.G.) policies on corporations, forcing as well critical race theory on public schools,” in what the Florida governor calls “an attempt to impose ruling class ideology on society.”This debate fits into a larger context famously described by the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin in his 1958 Oxford University speech, “Two Concepts of Liberty”:If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved.Positive freedom, Berlin continued,derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men’s, acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an object.Jefferson Cowie, a history professor at Vanderbilt, captured the intensity and depth of division over freedom during the civil rights movement in his book “Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for history this week.Cowie wrote that the governor of Alabama, George Wallace, in his “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever” inaugural speech, on Jan. 14, 1963,invoked “freedom” 25 times — more than Martin Luther King Jr. used the term later that year in his “I Have a Dream” address at the March on Washington. “Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us,” Wallace told his audience, “and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South.”For Wallace, in other words, the right to maintain segregation was a form of freedom.The dichotomy between the notions of freedom promulgated by George Wallace and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. continues to polarize the nation today.Rogers M. Smith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote by email in response to my inquiry about the contest over freedom:Biden stands in the liberal tradition going back to F.D.R., which holds that to be truly free, people have to be able to meet their material needs, so that they have opportunities for their diverse pursuits of happiness; and they also need democratic institutions giving them a share in shaping their collective destinies.Ronald Reagan, according to Smith, “thought freedom meant being largely free of government interference in people’s lives, whether through regulation or assistance. He did believe in freedom as democratic self-governance.”For Trump and DeSantis, Smith argued, freedom is more constrained and restrictive. For these two:Freedom means having governmental policies that protect the ways of life they favor against those they don’t. Their notion of freedom is the narrowest: in fact, it is primarily an argument for using coercive governmental power, and in Trump’s case private violence, against all who they see as threats to their preferred ways of life. They support democracy as long as, but only as long as, it produces the results they want.Jack Citrin, a political scientist at Berkeley, pointed out in his email that different types of freedom can impinge on each other as well as create different winners and losers:Negative liberty is freedom from external constraints, particularly from the government. This is the dominant idea, I think, in the Bill of Rights. It is linked to individualism and libertarianism. So I am free to carry a gun on the right, free to have an abortion or change my sex on the left. Positive liberty means the freedom to act to provide collective goods so it is easy to see that there can be a tension between the two.As with many political concepts, Citrin continued:There is an elasticity in this term that allows competing parties to stake a claim for their version of freedom. Biden paints Trump as a threat to one’s freedom to have an abortion or to vote; Trump claims the deep state is a threat to your privacy or legal rights. In addition, one group’s freedom constrains another’s.On April 29, Conor Friedersdorf published “Ron DeSantis’s Orwellian Redefinition of Freedom” in The Atlantic. As its headline suggests, the essay is a wide-ranging critique of the policies adopted under the DeSantis administration in Florida.Friedersdorf cited a recent DeSantis speech — “I don’t think you have a truly free state just because you have low taxes, low regulation, and no Covid restrictions, if the left is able to impose its agenda through the education system, through the business sphere, through all these others. A free state means you’re protecting your people from the left’s pathologies across the board” — which, Friedersdorf remarks, he would describe instead “as an anti-woke nanny state, not a state that values and protects freedom.”Friedersdorf does not, however, limit his critique to the conservative governor and quite likely presidential candidate, pointedly noting that in his own state of California, a Democratic bastion,Our dearth of freedom to build new dwellings has burdened us with punishing housing costs and immiserating homelessness. Our dearth of educational freedom consigns kids from poor families to failing schools. Our higher-than-average taxes do not yield better-than-average public services or assistance. And during the coronavirus pandemic, far from being a refuge of sanity, California responded with a lot of unscientific overzealousness, like the needless closure of beaches and parks.In practice, neither the left nor right has clean hands on the question of freedom.Conservative Republicans, including but not limited to DeSantis, have enacted restrictions on teaching about race and sex in public schools; have banned books in public libraries; barred cities from passing ordinances on the minimum wage, paid sick leave, firearms policy, plastic bags and marijuana decriminalization; and purposefully sought to suppress voting by minorities and college students.While certainly not equivalent, left-leaning students and faculty have led the charge in seeking to “cancel” professors and public figures who violate progressive orthodoxy, in disrupting conservative speakers on campuses and in seeking to bar or restrict teaching material considered hurtful or harmful to marginalized groups.Isabel V. Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, proposed in an email that Biden and the Democratic Party are well positioned to claim the freedom mantle:I want to suggest two reasons why this focus may not only be warranted but also have great appeal. The first is the battle over abortion rights. The second is the new attitude of Republicans toward the business community.On abortion, she continued, “I would argue that the ability to choose whether or not to have a child is a fundamental right,” adding her belief that:Before the Dobbs decision, we had found a workable compromise on this issue: no or limited abortions after fetal viability around 24 weeks. But the kind of six-week limit that is now the law in Florida and Georgia, not to mention the total ban in 14 other states, is an almost complete abrogation of the rights of women.On the treatment of business, Sawhill wrote: “Republicans have always been the party of corporate America, dedicated to limiting regulation and keeping taxes low. Gov. DeSantis’s attack on Disney and other so-called ‘woke’ companies is beginning to undermine the party’s reputation.”The bottom line, she concluded, was that “when Democrats talk about freedom, it’s not just rhetoric. There is substance behind the message.”Francis Fukuyama, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford, makes the case that the threats to freedom from the right are far more dangerous than those from the left.In an April 24 essay, “When Conservatives Used to be Liberals,” he argues that traditionally American conservatives differed from their European counterparts in “their emphasis on individual liberty, a small state, property rights and a vigorous private sector.” These principles, he continued, “defined the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan, which wanted lower taxes, deregulation, federalism and multiple limits on state power.”This understanding of conservatism, Fukuyama writes, “has been upended with the rise of Trumpist populism.”The result: “American conservatives are now talking more like older European ones,” older ones “like Spain’s Francisco Franco or Portugal’s Antonio Salazar, who were happy to see democracy abolished in their countries altogether.”Fukuyama acknowledged:There is plenty to criticize on the woke left, but this new type of conservative is not talking about rolling back particular policies; they are challenging the very premises of the liberal state and toying with outright authoritarianism. They are not simply deluded by lies about the 2020 election, but willing to accept nondemocratic outcomes to get their way.How, Fukuyama asks, could such a dire situation occur in this period of American history?The new illiberal conservatives talk about an “existential” crisis in American life: how the United States as traditionally understood will simply disappear under pressure from the woke left, which then justifies extreme measures in response.In fact, Fukuyama counters:It is hard to think of a time when the United States has been more free than it is in 2023. The much-feared tyranny of the woke left exists only in certain limited sectors of U.S. society — universities, Hollywood, and other cultural spaces, and it only touches on certain issues related to race, ethnicity, gender and sexual identity. It can be bad in these spaces, but most Americans don’t live there.Fukuyama is correct in citing the right’s exaggerated fears of the “woke” political agenda to justify authoritarian assaults on democracy, but he underestimates the adverse consequences of what many voters view as the freedom-threatening excesses of unrestrained liberalism.These include progressive policies that support the release of potentially violent criminals without bail; progressive prosecutors who refuse to press gun cases; the presence of homeless camps with open drug dealing on the sidewalks of Democratic cities; and the mentally ill roaming urban neighborhoods.For many voters, the consequences of these policies and situations are experienced as infringing on their own freedom to conduct their lives in a safe and secure environment, protected from crime, disease and harassment.Homelessness has become the subject of an ongoing debate over the meaning of freedom, a debate taking place now in New York City, where Mayor Eric Adams provoked angry protests — even before the chokehold death of a homeless man, Jordan Neely, by a passenger on an F train in Manhattan on May 1 — with his call to “involuntarily hospitalize people” who are a danger to themselves.In city centers large and small across the country, advocates for the homeless argue that street people without homes should be allowed to live and camp in public places, while others argue that the state should be empowered to close camps that allegedly pose threats to sanitation and public health — with no resolution in sight.William Galston, a senior fellow at Brookings, argues in a 2005 essay, “Taking Liberty,” that “for much of the 20th century, progressives took the lead in both defining freedom and advancing its borders.”From Teddy Roosevelt’s expansion of “the 19th-century laissez-faire conception of freedom to include the liberties of workers and entrepreneurs to get ahead in the world” to F.D.R.’s redefinition “to include social protection from the ills of want and fear,” to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s appeal to a “civil and political freedom that included all Americans,” Galston maintains that liberals have successfully argued that freedom often can “be advanced only through the vigorous actions of government.”Liberals began to lose command of freedom in the 1960s, Galston concludes:What began honorably in the early 1960s as the effort to expand freedom of speech and self-fulfillment was transformed just a decade later into an antinomian conception of freedom as liberation from all restraint. Enthusiasts could no longer distinguish between liberty and license, and so lost touch with the moral concerns of average citizens, especially parents struggling to raise their children in what they saw as a culture increasingly inhospitable to decency and self-restraint.“As progressives abandoned the discourse of freedom,” Galston writes, “conservatives were more than ready to claim it.”I asked Galston whether he stood by what he wrote 18 years ago. He replied by email:Mostly, but some of it is dated. I did not anticipate that a commitment to fairness and equality of results would morph into a culture of intolerance on college campuses and other areas where a critical mass of progressives has been reached.Looking toward Election Day, Nov. 5, 2024, there are conflicting signs favoring both left and right in the competition to determine which side is a more effective proponent of freedom.On the right, conservatives can point to two positive developments, both reflected in polls.The first was the May 7 ABC News/Washington Post survey that suggested Joe Biden is more vulnerable than previously recognized. Both Donald Trump and DeSantis led Biden — Trump by 45 percent to 38 percent, DeSantis by 42 percent to 37 percent.The second survey was a May 5 Washington Post-KFF poll showing that “Clear majorities of Americans support restrictions affecting transgender children” and “Most Americans (57 percent) don’t believe it’s even possible to be a gender that differs from that assigned at birth.”By nearly two-to-one margins, respondents said, “trans women and girls should not be allowed to compete in sports with other women and girls” — in high school sports, 66 percent to 34 percent, and in college sports, 65 percent to 34 percent.These data points are politically significant because Biden is a strong proponent of trans rights, committed to protecting the “fundamental rights and freedoms of trans Americans,” including challenges to state laws barring transgender students from “playing on sports teams” consistent with their gender identity.Conversely, there is no question that Republican state legislators and governors have initiated concerted attacks on freedoms supported by liberals, and that many of these freedoms have wide backing among the public at large.These attacks include book banning, opposed by at least four to one, and bans on abortion as early as six weeks into pregnancy. A Wall Street Journal poll in September 2022 found that “62 percent opposed an abortion ban at 6 weeks of pregnancy that only included an exception for the health of the mother, and 57 percent opposed a ban at 15 weeks with an exception only for the health of the mother.”The outcome of the election will determine, at least for a brief period, the direction in which the nation is moving on freedom and liberty. Given the near parity between Republicans and Democrats, neither side appears to be equipped to inflict a knockout blow. But the ABC/Washington Post survey showing both Trump and DeSantis easily beating Biden is a clear warning signal to the Democratic Party and to liberals generally that they cannot — and should not — take anything for granted.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