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      A Radical Proposal for Nikki Haley: Try to Win More Votes

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      Nikki Haley lost the New Hampshire primary but found a cause: getting under Donald Trump’s not exactly rhinoceros-thick skin. The story of the Republican primary campaign in the days since Trump’s victory has been one where the victor acts like a sore loser and the likely loser loosens up, goads her stronger rival and finds a pool of small-dollar donors to keep her in the race.Haley’s turn toward mockery and confrontation has created modest excitement in the disillusioned world of NeverTrump punditry. Maybe the remaining non-Trump Republican is giving up on being vice president or winning some future G.O.P. primary campaign. Maybe she’s ready to make Trump’s unfitness her exclusive theme. Maybe, as The Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio speculates, by needling and attacking and bringing out Trump’s worst behavior, she can even bring about the long-awaited Republican crackup that would finally defeat Trump on the scale that he deserves.I don’t think this hope makes a lot of sense. The idea that there exists some form of elite Republican denunciation, combined with egregious Trumpian misbehavior, that could shatter the G.O.P. coalition and send him to a Barry Goldwater or George McGovern-style defeat, seemed plausible enough eight years ago. It’s what I expected and what Republicans deserved.But I should have heeded the wisdom of Bill Munny in Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven”: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.” Because since then we’ve seen all kinds of terrible behavior, coupled with attempted repudiations from all sorts of Republicans, including Trump’s own aides and cabinet appointees. And yet the rule has held: Ask people if they like Trump and majorities do not, but put Trump up against the current Democratic Party, and he becomes a viable candidate for president.Maybe Haley is the right figure to change that. But she has nowhere near the pre-Trump fame of a Mitt Romney or the ideological credibility of a Liz Cheney. And based on what we saw from Chris Christie’s campaign, a pure repudiate-Trump candidacy is only likely to enhance Trump’s margins in the remaining primaries, emphasizing Haley’s hopelessness rather than her gumption.Moreover, wouldn’t there be something a little bit strange, after two consecutive primary campaigns in which Republicans desperately competed for a chance to face off with Trump one-on-one, for the winner of that prize to immediately give up on winning any more supporters? Haley’s consolidation of gentry Republicans succeeded in boxing out Ron DeSantis’s attempt to build a larger non-Trump coalition. Is she really not even going to attempt to build a larger coalition of her own?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Economists Predicted a Recession. So Far They’ve Been Wrong.

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      A widely predicted recession never showed up. Now, economists are assessing what the unexpected resilience tells us about the future.The recession America was expecting never showed up.Many economists spent early 2023 predicting a painful downturn, a view so widely held that some commentators started to treat it as a given. Inflation had spiked to the highest level in decades, and a range of forecasters thought that it would take a drop in demand and a prolonged jump in unemployment to wrestle it down.Instead, the economy grew 3.1 percent last year, up from less than 1 percent in 2022 and faster than the average for the five years leading up to the pandemic. Inflation has retreated substantially. Unemployment remains at historic lows and consumers continue to spend even with Federal Reserve interest rates at a 22-year high.The divide between doomsday predictions and the heyday reality is forcing a reckoning on Wall Street and in academia. Why did economists get so much wrong, and what can policymakers learn from those mistakes as they try to anticipate what might come next?It’s early days to draw firm conclusions. The economy could still slow down as two years of Fed rate increases start to add up. But what is clear is that old models of how growth and inflation relate did not serve as accurate guides. Bad luck drove more of the initial burst of inflation than some economists appreciated. Good luck helped to lower it again, and other surprises have hit along the way.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Airlines Hoping for More Boeing Jets Could Be Waiting Awhile

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      The Federal Aviation Administration’s decision to limit Boeing’s production of 737 Max planes could hurt airlines that are struggling to buy enough new aircraft.Boeing hoped 2024 would be the year it would significantly increase production of its popular Max jets. But less than a month into the year, the company is struggling to reassure airline customers that it will still be able to deliver on its promises.That’s because the Federal Aviation Administration said on Wednesday that it would limit the plane maker’s output until it was confident in Boeing’s quality control practices. On Jan. 5, a panel blew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 body shortly after takeoff, terrifying passengers on an Alaska Airlines flight and forcing the pilots to make an emergency landing at Portland International Airport in Oregon. Almost immediately, the F.A.A. grounded some Max 9s.Since then, details have emerged about the jet’s production at Boeing’s facility in Renton, Wash., that have intensified scrutiny of the company’s quality control. Boeing workers opened and then reinstalled the panel about a month before the plane was delivered to Alaska Airlines.The directive is another setback for Boeing, which had been planning to increase production of its Max plane series to more than 500 this year, from about 400 last year. It also planned to add another assembly line at a factory in Everett, Wash., a major Boeing production hub north of Seattle.As part of the F.A.A.’s announcement on Wednesday, it also approved inspection and maintenance procedures for the Max 9. Airlines can return the jets to service once they have followed those instructions. United Airlines said on Thursday that it could resume flying some of those planes as soon as Friday.The move is another potential blow to airlines. Even though demand for flights came roaring back after pandemic lockdowns and travel restrictions eased, the airlines have not been able to take full advantage of that demand. The companies have not been able to buy enough planes or hire enough pilots, flight attendants and other workers they need to operate flights. A surge in the cost of jet fuel after Russia invaded Ukraine also hurt profits.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Is the American Economy on the Mend?

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      Almost four years have passed since Covid-19 struck. In America, the pandemic killed well over a million people and left millions more with lingering health problems. Much of normal life came to a halt, partly because of official lockdowns but largely because fear of infection kept people home.The big question in the years that followed was whether America would ever fully recover from that shock. In 2023 we got the answer: yes. Our economy and society have, in fact, healed remarkably well. The big remaining question is when, if ever, the public will be ready to accept the good news.In the short run, of course, the pandemic had severe economic and social effects, in many ways wider and deeper than almost anyone expected. Employment fell by 25 million in a matter of weeks. Huge government aid limited families’ financial hardship, but maintaining Americans’ purchasing power in the face of a disrupted economy meant that demand often exceeded supply, and the result was overstretched supply chains and a burst of inflation.At the same time, the pandemic reduced social interactions and left many people feeling isolated. The psychological toll is hard to measure, but the weakening of social ties contributed to a range of negative trends, including a surge in violent crime.It was easy to imagine that the pandemic experience would leave long-term scars — that long Covid and early retirements would leave us with a permanently reduced labor force, that getting inflation down would require years of high unemployment, that the crime surge heralded a sustained breakdown in public order.But none of that happened.You may have heard about the good economic news. Labor force participation — the share of adults in today’s work force — is actually slightly higher than the Congressional Budget Office predicted before the pandemic. Measures of underlying inflation have fallen more or less back to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target even though unemployment is near a 50-year low. Adjusted for inflation, most workers’ wages have gone up.For some reason I’ve heard less about the crime news, but it’s also remarkably good. F.B.I. data shows that violent crime has subsided: It’s already back to 2019 levels and appears to be falling further. Homicides probably aren’t quite back to 2019 levels, but they’re plummeting.None of this undoes the Covid death toll or the serious learning loss suffered by millions of students. But overall both our economy and our society are in far better shape at this point than most people would have predicted in the early days of the pandemic — or than most Americans are willing to admit.For if America’s resilience in the face of the pandemic shock has been remarkable, so has the pessimism of the public.By now, anyone who writes about the economic situation has become accustomed to mail and social media posts (which often begin, “You moron”) insisting that the official statistics on low unemployment and inflation are misleading if not outright lies. No, the Consumer Price Index doesn’t ignore food and energy, although some analytical measures do; no, grocery prices aren’t still soaring.Rather than get into more arguments with people desperate to find some justification for negative economic sentiment, I find it most useful to point out that whatever American consumers say about the state of the economy, they are spending as if their finances are in pretty good shape. Most recently, holiday sales appear to have been quite good.What about crime? This is an area in which public perceptions have long been notoriously at odds with reality, with people telling pollsters that crime is rising even when it’s falling rapidly. Right now, according to Gallup, 63 percent of Americans say that crime is an “extremely” or a “very” serious problem for the United States — but only 17 percent say it’s that severe a problem where they live.And Americans aren’t acting as if they’re terrified about crime. As I’ve written before, major downtowns have seen weekend foot traffic — roughly speaking, the number of people visiting the city for fun rather than work — recover to prepandemic levels, which isn’t what you’d expect if Americans were fleeing violent urban hellscapes.So whatever Americans may say to pollsters, they’re behaving as if they live in a prosperous, fairly safe (by historical standards) country — the country portrayed by official statistics, although not by opinion polls. (Disclaimer: Yes, we have vast inequality and social injustice. But this is no more true now than it was in earlier years, when Americans were far more optimistic.)The big question, of course, is whether grim narratives will prevail over relatively sunny reality in the 2024 election. There are hints in survey data that the good economic news is starting to break through, but I don’t know of any comparable hints on crime.In any case, what you need to know is that America responded remarkably well to the economic and social challenges of a deadly pandemic. By most measures, we’re a nation on the mend. Let’s hope we don’t lose our democracy before people realize that.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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Living and Struggling With Long Covid

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      More from our inbox:Being Jewish in AmericaBlack Voters, Beware the G.O.P.Liz Cheney’s Book: ‘Too Little, Too Late’Students Know We Need Free SpeechHolly StapletonTo the Editor:Re “What Reporting on Long Covid Taught Me,” by Ed Yong (Opinion guest essay, Dec. 22):As a Covid long-hauler (going on three years now!), I found it validating and even supportive to read Mr. Yong’s essay. It was particularly validating to have the acknowledgment of post-exertional malaise (PEM). This so aptly describes much of my life.For example, I apologize to my dog before going on a shorter-than-usual walk. I have to plan for seemingly mundane tasks of self-care and home care: taking a shower, changing clothes, doing the dishes, sweeping my apartment, doing laundry, etc. I put these tasks in my calendar, and even then the expectation of the aftermath makes me feel incapable, desperate and overwhelmed.I appreciated Mr. Yong’s astute acknowledgment that symptoms are often dismissed because of sexism (I’m transgender). And I was denied disability because it was determined that I was functional enough to wrap silverware in napkins. Yes indeed, treatment is not only a medical issue, but also a social one.Mr. Yong made it clear that his journalism has been transformed by doing research in a more integrative manner, especially actually being with current long-haulers. I’m immensely grateful to him for his journalism and to The Times for publishing it.(I earned my Ph.D. in 2012, and it’s taken me two days to write this.)River Jackson-PatonDallasTo the Editor:Ed Yong’s guest essay is right on point. Long Covid is real, and the public needs to be educated about it.My experience with Covid is that of a former registered nurse in the thick of it. I watched so many patients and co-workers get sick, some dying, some getting better, and some who are still struggling with long Covid.It is very hard for me to hear someone, usually an anti-vaxxer, say, “They should just let everyone get Covid and get it over with.”I hear this quite often and my response is always, “Are you familiar with long Covid?” I always get one of two responses: “No” or “That’s made up.” Then I try to educate.Donna HuntAtascadero, Calif.To the Editor:I appreciate Ed Yong’s extraordinary reporting on long Covid and his opinion piece about the health care system’s failure to take chronic illness patients seriously. What many do not realize is that years and even decades before the pandemic caused long Covid, many patients, including me, struggled to find doctors and treatments for many of the same health problems that long Covid patients face.I cannot give you a single name for our illness because it does not yet exist. I and countless other patients have a slew of diagnoses, including autoimmune diseases, mast cell disorders, connective tissue disorders and dysautonomia. Many of us are disabled and homebound or bedbound.Doctors for these disorders were already hard to find, and the surge of long Covid patients has made accessing knowledgeable care more difficult. I hope the increased demand will inspire more doctors to study and treat these conditions. Now that even more patients are suffering, we need to stop dismissing this constellation of illnesses.Rachel GravesTacoma, Wash.Being Jewish in AmericaPhotographs of some of the hostages captured by Hamas on display by the Western Wall in Jerusalem.Ohad Zwigenberg/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “Why I Can’t Stop Writing About Oct. 7,” by Bret Stephens (column, Dec. 20):American democracy has promised a land, as Mr. Stephens says, “in which you didn’t have to hide.” Mr. Stephens writes despairingly about the loss of this promise, and there’s no doubt that, today, America’s promise feels remote to many. For Jews, an eroding democracy brings with it a profound sense of trauma and fear.Yet the most appropriate Jewish response to this challenge is not despair, but determination. If our institutions are buckling, let’s reinforce them with forums for civic learning. If our civic culture is fraying, let’s repair it with opportunities for dynamic and respectful conversation. If our democracy is under threat, let’s take actions that strengthen it — right now, and in communities across the country.For nearly two and a half centuries, even amid painful setbacks, the United States has offered one of the last, best places to be Jewish — not because it catered to Jews, but because its democratic pluralism, albeit aspirational and imperfect from the beginning, allowed minorities like ours an opportunity to live freely.When that democratic pluralism struggles, we shouldn’t prematurely mourn its loss. We should repair it instead. This is not naïveté; it’s the agency our parents and grandparents came here looking for.Aaron DorfmanNew YorkThe writer is the executive director of A More Perfect Union: The Jewish Partnership for Democracy, a network of synagogues and Jewish groups.Black Voters, Beware the G.O.P.Kshaun Williams says he has seen his life become harder because of rising inflation under President Biden.José Ibarra Rizo for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Black Voters in Georgia Say Biden Has Forgotten Them,” by Mara Gay (Opinion, Dec. 24):Ms. Gay cautions that Black voters in Georgia feel ignored and abandoned and may desert the Democratic Party in the coming presidential election. While her conclusions are highly debatable, there is no such doubt regarding the alternative.The Republican Party of Donald Trump has rolled back voting rights, gerrymandered predominantly Black districts, eliminated or scaled back social programs that aid the poor and sent federal troops to crack down on anti-racism protests.Should Georgia’s Black voters leave the Democrats for the Republicans, they will quickly learn the real meaning of abandonment.Tom GoodmanPhiladelphiaLiz Cheney’s Book: ‘Too Little, Too Late’Jonathan Ernst/ReutersTo the Editor:It’s with some relief that I read Carlos Lozada’s Dec. 21 column, “Liz Cheney’s Checkered History of the Trump Era.”Ms. Cheney worries about the prospect of another Donald Trump tenure in the White House, but I worry just as much about Ms. Cheney’s rush to sainthood as she plugs her new book and her ostensibly revised views.As Mr. Lozada reminds us, Ms. Cheney, right along with other Trump molls and henchmen in the G.O.P., long pledged obeisance to Mr. Trump. She — no less than the people she now criticizes — got us to this awful, scary time and place, and she shouldn’t get a pass now for what is at best a clear case of “too little, too late.”Beth Z. PalubinskyPhiladelphiaStudents Know We Need Free SpeechTim EnthovenTo the Editor:Re “Students Can Show Us the Way to Free Speech,” by Sophia Rosenfeld (Opinion guest essay, Dec. 18):Ms. Rosenfeld’s essay thoughtfully reminds us that we, as the parenting, teaching and older generations, don’t always have better answers to questions about free speech than our children and students. Indeed, as Ms. Rosenfeld writes, “The sky really isn’t falling.” Our youth are more capable of finding reasonable solutions than we think.I recently attended my son’s college graduation. For weeks before going, I loathed what I thought would surely be a depressing carnival of elite righteousness. Instead, I experienced something far more reassuring about our future.I conversed with my son’s classmates to hear their views about free speech, wokeness and education. Not surprisingly, they are intelligent, insightful, compassionate, but most of all, keenly aware of what is broken. They are respectful and friendly to each other, even when they disagree.Now is the time for the preachy older generations to step aside and trust the younger generations. They can and are navigating the treacherous waters of our time just fine.Nao MatsukataBethesda, Md. More

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      How Trump Is Running Differently This Time

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      A wrecking ball. A bull in a China shop. A “chaos candidate.” During Donald Trump’s whirlwind rise to the presidency, his opponents and critics frequently noted his penchant for havoc. Surely, they believed, voters would not want to steer the country toward disorder and mayhem.The problem? In 2016, being a chaos candidate turned out to be a feature, not a bug, of American politics: Enough voters were tired of bland, establishment candidates and a system that didn’t improve their lives, and they put Mr. Trump over the top. The Trump team was so confident that these voters and the president were in sync that by the summer of 2020, one of his re-election campaign’s most oft-aired ads used those exact “bull in a china shop” words again.But if Mr. Trump ran before as the disrupter, don’t count on him doing so a third time in 2024. Voters don’t want chaos anymore. In my assessment of the dynamics of this election, what I see and hear is an electorate that seems to be craving stability in the economy, in their finances, at the border, in their schools and in the world. They want order, and they are open to people on the left and the right who are more likely to provide that, as we saw with the rejection of several chaos candidates in 2022, even as steady-as-she-goes incumbents sailed to re-election.And though Mr. Trump may seem a poor fit for such a moment, with his endless drama and ugly rhetoric, much of his candidacy and message so far is aimed at arguing that he can restore a prepandemic order and a sense of security in an unstable world. And unlike 2020, there’s no guarantee most voters will see President Biden as the safer bet between the two men to bring order back to America — in no small part because Mr. Biden was elected to do so and hasn’t delivered.By 2020, some of those voters who originally took a chance on President Chaos turned to what they viewed as the safer choice in Mr. Biden. Following a first Trump term marked by tweets that threatened to set off geopolitical firestorms, the global upheaval of the Covid-19 pandemic and rising domestic unrest around race, voters instead opted to send Mr. Biden to the White House with the ostensible mandate to unify the country and make politics boring again.To be fair, Mr. Trump at times seemed to see where things were headed, and tried to paint Mr. Biden as the more chaotic of the two for a brief spell in that 2020 campaign. Back then, clearly, it didn’t work — the argument that “Sleepy Joe” was secretly going to usher in more mayhem fell flat. Even Mr. Trump’s advantage over Mr. Biden among voters in exit polls on the issue of the economy was not enough to secure victory. And on potential factors like Mr. Biden’s own health, a theme Mr. Trump relished, voters in 2020 decided that Mr. Biden was healthy enough to handle the presidency by a slim 53-47 margin. Fine, they said, give us the sleepy guy who spent the campaign in his basement — he’s better than the alternative.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      The New Republican Party Isn’t Ready for the Post-Roe World

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      Ohio is not a swing state, not any longer. Donald Trump won it by eight points, twice. It has a Republican governor, and while its senators are split between the parties, its U.S. House delegation is made up of 10 Republicans and five Democrats. And yet Ohio just passed an abortion-rights referendum by a margin of more than 13 points.There’s no way to spin this result. There’s no way to spin every other pro-choice result in every other red-state referendum. The pro-life movement is in a state of electoral collapse, and I think I know one reason.In the eight years since the so-called New Right emerged on the scene and Trump began to dominate the Republican landscape, the Republican Party has become less libertarian but more libertine, and libertinism is ultimately incompatible with a holistic pro-life worldview.I’m not arguing that the pro-choice position is inherently libertine. There are many millions of Americans — including pro-choice Republicans — who arrive at their position through genuine philosophical disagreement with the idea that an unborn child possesses the same inherent worth as anyone else. But I’ve seen Republican libertinism with my own eyes. I know that it distorts the culture of the Republican Party and red America.The difference between libertarianism and libertinism can be summed up as the difference between rights and desires. A libertarian is concerned with her own liberty but also knows that this liberty ends where yours begins. The entire philosophy of libertarianism depends on a healthy recognition of human dignity. A healthy libertarianism can still be individualistic, but it’s also deeply concerned with both personal virtue and the rights of others. Not all libertarians are pro-life, but a pro-life libertarian will recognize the humanity and dignity of both mother and child.A libertine, by contrast, is dominated by his desires. The object of his life is to do what he wants, and the object of politics is to give him what he wants. A libertarian is concerned with all forms of state coercion. A libertine rejects any attempt to coerce him personally, but he’s happy to coerce others if it gives him what he wants.Donald Trump is the consummate libertine. He rejects restraints on his appetites and accountability for his actions. The guiding principle of his worldview is summed up with a simple declaration: I do what I want. Any movement built in his image will be libertine as well.Trump’s movement dismisses the value of personal character. It mocks personal restraint. And it’s happy to inflict its will on others if it achieves what it wants. Libertarianism says that your rights are more important than my desires. Libertinism says my desires are more important than your rights, and this means that libertines are terrible ambassadors for any cause that requires self-sacrifice.I don’t think the pro-life movement has fully reckoned with the political and cultural fallout from the libertine right-wing response to the Covid pandemic. Here was a movement that was loudly telling women that they had to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, with all the physical transformations, risks and financial uncertainties that come with pregnancy and childbirth, at the same time that millions of its members were also loudly refusing the minor inconveniences of masking and the low risks of vaccination — even if the best science available at the time told us that both masking and vaccination could help protect others from getting the disease.Even worse, many of the same people demanded that the state limit the liberty of others so that they could live how they wanted. Florida, for example, banned private corporate vaccine mandates.This do-what-you-want ethos cost a staggering number of American lives. A 2022 study found that there were an estimated 318,981 vaccine-preventable deaths from January 2021 to April 2022. Vaccine hesitancy was so concentrated in Republican America that political affiliation was more relevant than race and ethnicity as an indicator of willingness to take the vaccine. Now there’s evidence from Ohio and Florida that excess mortality rates were significantly higher for Republicans than Democrats after vaccines were widely available.And this is the party that’s now going to tell American women that respect for human life requires personal sacrifice?It’s not just that libertinism robs Republicans of moral authority; it’s that libertinism robs Republicans of moral principle. The Ohio ballot measure could fail so decisively only if Republicans voted against it. The same analysis applies to ballot referendum losses in pro-Trump states like Kansas, Montana and Kentucky.In each state, all the pro-life movement needed was consistent Republican support, and it would have sailed to victory. All the Democrats in the state could have voted to protect abortion rights, and they would have lost if Republicans held firm. But they did not.“Do as I say and not as I do” is among the worst moral arguments imaginable. A holistic pro-life society requires true self-sacrifice. It asks women to value the life growing inside of them even in the face of fear and poverty. It asks the community to rally beside these women to keep them and their children safe and to provide them with opportunities to flourish. It requires both individuals and communities to sublimate their own desires to protect the lives and opportunities of others.As the Republican Party grows more libertine, the pro-life movement is going to keep losing. Of course, it’s going to keep losing with Democrats and independents, many of whom have always been skeptical of pro-life moral and legal arguments. But it’s also going to lose in the Republican Party itself, a party that is increasingly dedicated to outright defiance.An ethos that centers individuals’ desires will bleed over into matters of life and death. It did during Covid, and it’s doing so now, as even Republicans reject the pro-life cause.The challenge for pro-life America isn’t simply to raise more money or use better talking points. As Republican losses in Virginia demonstrate, advocating even a relatively mild abortion ban — a 15-week law, not a so-called heartbeat six-week bill — is fraught. The challenge is much more profound. Pro-life America has to reconnect with personal virtue. It has to model self-sacrifice. It has to show, not just tell, America what it would look like to value life from conception to natural death.At present, however, the Republican Party is dominated by its id. It indulges its desires. And so long as its id is in control, the pro-life movement will fail. There is no selfish path to a culture of life.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

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      DeSantis Leans Into Vaccine Skepticism to Energize Struggling Campaign

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      The Florida governor has so far found little success in getting his criticism of the Trump administration’s Covid-19 policies to stick, but that has not stopped him from trying.Gov. Ron DeSantis had hoped that his response to the coronavirus pandemic, which helped propel him to a resounding re-election in Florida last year, would produce similar results in the Republican presidential primary.But despite leaning into his record on Covid-19, Mr. DeSantis remains adrift in the polls and badly trailing former President Donald J. Trump, whose administration he has castigated for how it handled the pandemic. Mr. DeSantis points to how he guided Florida through the pandemic — reopening schools and businesses early and forbidding local governments and businesses from imposing mask and vaccine mandates — as a model for the nation.While Mr. Trump recently warned against the return of “Covid hysteria,” his administration led the rapid development of the Covid-19 vaccines that many Republicans now question. Studies show the shots prevented millions of deaths and hospitalizations in the United States. But over the summer, Mr. Trump acknowledged to Fox News that the shots were “not a great thing to talk about” in his party.Mr. DeSantis has sought to exploit that anti-vaccine sentiment as a way to pry primary voters away from Mr. Trump, publicly casting doubt on their safety and effectiveness against the coronavirus. Scientific experts have labeled his views — and his administration’s decision to recommend that Floridians under 65 not receive the updated Covid-19 shot — as dangerous and extreme, even as many acknowledge that the school closures that Mr. DeSantis opposed went on for too long in some states.On Wednesday, Mr. DeSantis again tried to rally vaccine-skeptic voters to his side, headlining a “Medical Freedom” town hall at a ski area in Manchester, N.H., alongside Florida’s Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo. During the event, which was hosted by Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC, the Florida governor insisted that federal public health agencies had spewed “nonsense” throughout the pandemic and needed a complete overhaul.He claimed that the Covid shots have been rolled out without proper clinical studies and that federal officials had either lied or were flatly wrong about the benefits and risks — a view that has been roundly condemned by a wide array of public health experts, academics and scientists. “We know the federal government muffed this in many different ways and we need a reckoning,” the governor said.Mr. DeSantis has found little success in getting his criticism of the Trump administration’s Covid-19 policies to stick, demonstrating the former president’s remarkable resilience with Republicans in the face of criminal indictments, growing attacks from rival candidates and his own verbal missteps.In interviews with The New York Times across the early nominating states, many voters have said they do not fault Mr. Trump for his response to a new and unknown virus, saying that he did his best in an uncertain situation. Such attitudes are common even among some of Mr. DeSantis’s supporters.“I’m always inclined to cut President Trump some slack on the epidemic because he was listening to people who supposedly knew what they were talking about,” said Richard Merkt, 74, who attended the town hall on Wednesday and said he plans to vote for Mr. DeSantis in the New Hampshire primary. Mr. Merkt is a former New Jersey assemblyman who has run for office in New Hampshire, where he retired. Bob Wolf, an undecided Iowa voter, said he admired Mr. DeSantis’s handling of the pandemic but did not blame Mr. Trump. “When Trump was in charge, I don’t think everyone knew what the facts were,” Mr. Wolf, a 44-year-old firefighter, said in an interview this fall.Still, Mr. DeSantis is clinging to his Covid policies as a pillar of a campaign. In September, he and Dr. Ladapo recommended that Floridians under the age of 65 should not get the updated Covid shot that targets the virus’s more recent variants. That guidance contradicted the advice of the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which had recommended the shot for most Americans six months and older.At the town hall, Dr. Ladapo praised Mr. DeSantis.“To read the data, to reach a conclusion, to know that conclusion is right, and all of these Harvard Ph.D’s and M.D.’s are wrong? That takes courage,” said Dr. Ladapo, who himself holds degrees from Harvard.Florida’s Surgeon General, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, regularly appears with Gov. Ron DeSantis at events in the state, but this week joined him on the campaign trail. Chris O’Meara/Associated PressMore than 1.13 million Americans have died from Covid-19 since the pandemic began, with the fatality rate far higher for the unvaccinated than for the vaccinated. A partisan divide has emerged in the nation’s death rate, which has been greater in Republican-leaning counties. Republicans now tend to be more skeptical than Democrats of vaccines of all types, a post-pandemic development.Florida was an early leader in vaccinating older residents against Covid, but achieved far lower vaccination rates for younger age groups as the governor shifted from a vocal advocate to a skeptic of shots. A New York Times analysis in July found that unlike the nation as a whole, Florida lost more lives to Covid after vaccines became available to all adults, not before.Mr. DeSantis has suggested that he is the only Republican who can capture general election voters who are angry about the government’s response to the pandemic, particularly with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist, in the race as a third-party candidate.“RFK Jr. will be a vessel for anti-lockdown and anti-Fauci voters, if Trump is the nominee,” Mr. DeSantis said last month, in a reference to Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s former top infectious disease expert, whom he has said should be prosecuted. “If I’m the nominee, they all go to me.”When Mr. Kennedy was still running in the Democratic primary against President Biden, Mr. DeSantis even suggested that the longtime liberal might have a place in his presidential administration — a clear sign that he hoped to court supporters of Mr. Kennedy who share his views on vaccines.But so far, Mr. DeSantis’s efforts to break through in the Republican field have failed.Although the Florida governor generally has high favorability ratings among G.O.P. voters, Mr. Trump has maintained his dominant lead in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. One recent poll showed that former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina had caught up to Mr. DeSantis in Iowa — where he has staked his entire campaign. Polling averages put Ms. Haley ahead of him in both New Hampshire and South Carolina.Not only have the governor’s criticisms of Covid vaccines produced few political dividends in the primary, scientific experts characterize them as dangerous public health policy.Dr. Paul A. Offit directs the vaccine education center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and serves on the F.D.A.’s panel of outside vaccine experts that authorized the vaccines. He said tens of millions of Americans under the age of 65 suffer from underlying medical conditions that increase their risk of severe disease or death from Covid.“Does he think that only those over 65 are at risk?” he asked, referring to Mr. DeSantis’s refusal to recommend the shots for younger age groups. “We’ve moved, sadly, from scientific illiteracy to scientific denialism. Science doesn’t matter.”Dr. Scott Rivkees, Florida’s state surgeon general for more than two years under Mr. DeSantis, said the state was now quite isolated in its approach to Covid vaccinations.“I’m not aware of other states that have said that individuals younger than 65 should not get vaccinated against Covid,” said Dr. Rivkees, who left the administration in September 2021 and is now a professor at Brown University’s School of Public Health.Mr. DeSantis’s team dismisses such criticism as more grousing from a “tyrannical medical establishment” that led the nation astray during the pandemic.“His actions have exposed the ‘experts’ for the political actors that the country now knows them to be — and that’s why they continue to attack him with failed science and fake narratives,” Bryan Griffin, press secretary for the DeSantis campaign, said in a statement. He said that Mr. DeSantis had “prioritized the truth” as governor and would “do the same for our nation as president.”Sarafina Chitika, a spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement: “Ron DeSantis’s attempt to resurrect his old and tired anti-vaccine tantrum today is a reminder to voters that he played political games with Florida’s Covid response at every turn in a cheap effort to score political points with the extreme MAGA movement.” Public health authorities give Mr. DeSantis credit for insisting that Florida schools open their doors to students in the fall of 2020. Many experts now agree that too many school districts offered only remote learning for far too long. But they have heaped criticism on him for casting doubt on Covid shots.Mr. DeSantis claimed Wednesday, as he has previously, that federal authorities misled people into believing that the vaccines prevented infection. In fact, shots were authorized based on evidence that they reduced risks of severe disease and death, not infection.The governor also claimed that Dr. Ladapo had properly identified risks of the shots for young men. But the heads of the F.D.A. and the C.D.C. publicly warned Dr. Ladapo that his statements were misleading, saying such misinformation “puts people at risk of death or serious illness.”Mr. DeSantis also played up a state grand jury investigation he instigated nearly a year ago into what he claimed was possible criminal misconduct by Covid vaccine manufacturers. Critics labeled it a political stunt, and it has so far come to naught.But at the town hall Mr. DeSantis suggested that the issue would continue to come up on the campaign trail, saying: “There may be a report or something like that pretty soon.” More