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      Sean Patrick Maloney Repels Challenge to Win Bitterly Fought Primary

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      Representative Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, won his primary contest on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press, defeating Alessandra Biaggi, a state senator who challenged him from the left.The race for the newly redrawn 17th District of New York was a high-drama, divisive affair that drew involvement from an array of national figures. Democrats including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former President Bill Clinton backed Mr. Maloney, while Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and a number of progressive organizations supported the state senator.“Tonight, mainstream won,” Mr. Maloney said on Tuesday night. “Common sense won. Democrats want candidates who get results and bring home the win.”Alessandra Biaggi, a progressive state senator, argued that the Democratic Party’s leadership had been too timid in the face of urgent threats to the country — including the overturning of Roe v. Wade.Mary Altaffer/Associated PressThroughout the race, Mr. Maloney cast himself as a pragmatic politician who understood the needs of the region intimately and had a record of delivering for the area. He campaigned on recent Democratic legislative victories and suggested that Ms. Biaggi was too far to the left for the district on issues like public safety.“If you look around the country, I think what’s clear is that the common-sense wing of the Democratic Party that is focused on working with people to get things done is on the rise, and the socialist wing is on the decline, and it’s about time,” Mr. Maloney said in an interview last week. (Ms. Biaggi does not identify as a democratic socialist.)A number of Mr. Maloney’s supporters argued that Ms. Biaggi’s past criticism of the police could become a liability in November. And some of her past remarks were used against her as outside money poured in against Ms. Biaggi from groups including the Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York, which endorsed former President Donald J. Trump in 2020.Ms. Biaggi, whose grandfather, Mario Biaggi, served in Congress, rose to prominence in New York politics in 2018 after defeating a powerful incumbent. She became a leader of the state’s left wing and ran an energetic campaign for the 17th District in the northern exurbs of New York City. Ms. Biaggi argued that the party’s leadership had been too timid in the face of urgent threats to the country — especially the overturning of Roe v. Wade — and positioned herself as a fighter, deriding her opponent as a “selfish corporate Democrat.”But she had just three months to introduce herself to voters in the newly configured district, where she only recently moved (though she grew up in the area), and Mr. Maloney, who is well-known in the Hudson Valley area, had huge institutional advantages, especially on the fund-raising front and through his extensive labor support.The race was set in motion after a messy redistricting process that split Mr. Maloney’s current district in two. Instead of running for a reconfigured version of his seat, Mr. Maloney chose to contest a slightly more Democratic-leaning district now held by Representative Mondaire Jones.Though Mr. Maloney noted that his Cold Spring home was within the lines of the district — which under new boundaries includes parts of Westchester County and the Hudson Valley — the move infuriated colleagues, who denounced it as a power grab from the man tasked with protecting the Democratic House majority.Mr. Maloney has said he could have handled the process better, even as he strongly defended his tenure as chair of the House Democratic campaign arm.“I understand people have concerns about it,” he said. “I’ve heard that, and I’m accountable for that.”He now heads into what is expected to be a competitive general election.Kristin Hussey contributed reporting. More

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      Jerry Nadler Routs Carolyn Maloney in Hard-Fought Matchup of Allies

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      Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the powerful West Side Democrat and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, handily won a bruising primary contest on Tuesday, defeating his longtime congressional neighbor, Carolyn B. Maloney, according to The Associated Press.The highly charged summertime skirmish in the heart of Manhattan was unlike any New York City had seen in a generation and rivaled any intraparty House battle in recent memory. It pitted two committee chairs who have served side by side for three decades against each other and compelled some party faithful to pick sides.The star-crossed matchup emerged from a state court ruling that unexpectedly combined their districts this spring. Mr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney ultimately chose to run against each other in her 12th District, as talks to have one of them seek a neighboring seat went nowhere.Oddsmakers initially rated the contest a tossup, and Ms. Maloney doggedly trawled the district for votes. But Mr. Nadler quietly managed to assemble an enviable roster of endorsements, while capitalizing on his notoriety as a leading antagonist of former President Donald J. Trump in ways that proved impossible for his opponent to overcome.“Here’s the thing: I’m a New Yorker, just like Bella Abzug, Ted Weiss and Bill Fitts Ryan,” Mr. Nadler told supporters after his victory, referencing liberal lions who represented New York in Congress. “We New Yorkers just don’t know how to surrender.”He was winning the contest with a commanding 56 percent of the vote, compared with Ms. Maloney’s 24 percent, with 90 percent of the vote counted. A third candidate, Suraj Patel, earned 19 percent, siphoning crucial votes away from Ms. Maloney, whom he nearly beat two years ago.An old-school progressive first elected in 1992, Mr. Nadler, 75, is expected to easily win a 16th full term this fall in the overwhelmingly Democratic district. But with his advancing age and noticeably halting debate performances, questions are likely to accelerate about who might succeed him in representing one of the nation’s wealthiest congressional seats.Given those uncertainties and the ideological similarities between Mr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney, the outcome offers relatively little insight into the future direction of the Democratic Party.For Ms. Maloney, 76, the defeat is likely to spell a painful end to a pathbreaking career in elected office. A former teacher and legislative aide, she first won a seat on the City Council from East Harlem in 1982 and a seat in Congress representing the East Side’s famed “Silk Stocking” district a decade later, eventually rising to become the first woman to lead the House Oversight and Reform Committee.In the shadow of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Ms. Maloney campaigned aggressively on her record of fighting for feminist causes. She pointedly accused Mr. Nadler of trying to take credit for her legislative priorities, like the Second Avenue Subway, and ran a television ad for weeks telling New Yorkers, “You cannot send a man to do a woman’s job.” And as she veered toward defeat in recent days, her campaign fanned questions about Mr. Nadler’s physical health and mental acuity.A third candidate, Suraj Patel, 38, tried to make the race about generational change, arguing that the Democratic Party needed fresh leaders rather than failed “1990s politicians” like Mr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney.Neither frame ultimately proved persuasive to voters, though, or at least not enough to overcome the enthusiastic base of support that turned out for Mr. Nadler on the Upper West Side.On the campaign trail, the congressman cast himself as a consistent warrior for civil rights and civil liberties whose experience is needed as the former president and his acolytes shake some of the foundations of American government.Mr. Nadler sought to galvanize voters in what may be the most Jewish district in the country around his status as the last remaining Jewish congressman in New York City. As the race stretched on, he also went on the attack against Ms. Maloney, accusing her of poor judgment when she voted for the Iraq War (he voted against) and when she helped amplify questions about debunked ties between vaccines for children and autism. A shadowy super PAC that has yet to disclose its donors picked up on the attack and spent more than $200,000 on television ads driving it home.But above all, Mr. Nadler played a deft inside game, calling on decades-long relationships to build a stable of powerful supporters, including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, New York’s Working Families Party and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, who was the only member of the state’s congressional delegation to wade into the race. More

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      Rebekah Jones Will Face Matt Gaetz in Florida in November

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      Representative Matt Gaetz, the far-right Republican who easily won his primary on Tuesday in Florida’s First Congressional District, will face a Democratic challenger in November who made national headlines early in the coronavirus pandemic.Rebekah D. Jones, a former data manager for the Florida Department of Health, defeated Peggy Schiller in the Democratic primary, according to The Associated Press, after a confusing legal back-and-forth over whether Ms. Jones was eligible to appear on the ballot.Just a day before the primary, a Florida appeals court ruled that Ms. Jones could remain on the ballot. That reversed the decision of a lower court judge who had said that she was ineligible because state law requires a candidate running in a partisan primary to sign an oath declaring membership in that party for at least the previous year.During a daylong trial this month, lawyers for Ms. Schiller had showed that Ms. Jones switched her party registration from Democrat to unaffiliated for two months in 2021, while she was briefly living in Maryland after clashing with the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida over coronavirus statistics.That clash put a spotlight on Ms. Jones in 2020, when she claimed that she had been fired from her government job for refusing to suppress virus data from the public. In what became a monthslong saga, Ms. Jones filed a whistle-blower complaint, turned into a vocal critic of Mr. DeSantis and was eventually criminally charged with accessing a state computer and downloading a file without authorization.The criminal case against Ms. Jones is pending. In May, an inspector general for the Department of Health found that three allegations that Ms. Jones had made against several health officials were “unsubstantiated.”Ms. Jones returned to Florida from Maryland in July last year. She filed to run for Congress against Mr. Gaetz in his heavily Republican district in the Panhandle.A three-judge panel from the state First District Court of Appeal ruled on Monday that the candidate oath signed by Ms. Jones could not be enforced because the law “provides no express authority to disqualify a party candidate if she was not in fact a registered party member during the 365-day window.”In the ruling, Judge Rachel E. Nordby, who was appointed by Mr. DeSantis, acknowledged that the decision “could invite bad actors to qualify for the ballot using false party affiliation statements to inject chaos into a party’s primary.”The ruling allowed any votes cast for Ms. Jones to count, and preliminary results showed she defeated Ms. Schiller. More

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      Hold the Victory Party for Senate Democrats

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      The recent notion that Democrats will hold the Senate might be wrong. Here’s why some Democratic strategists are nervous.It has recently become conventional wisdom that Democrats have a pretty good chance of clinging to the Senate — despite a national political environment that has looked dire for their party throughout most of this year.I’ve written about this a fair bit myself. And even Mitch McConnell, the once and possibly future Senate majority leader, has taken to complaining lately that Republicans have a “candidate quality” problem.McConnell’s deputies use other words in private that cannot be printed here — a reflection, in part, of the tensions between his camp and the network around Senator Rick Scott of Florida, who is officially running the G.O.P.’s Senate campaign efforts. In the view of McConnell’s team, it should be Scott’s responsibility to clear the field of fringe candidates who can’t win general elections, and he failed to do so in many of the biggest Senate races. Adding to those tensions is the fact that Donald Trump has openly feuded with McConnell and threatened to muscle him out of the role of Senate leader in favor of Scott.So when McConnell complains about “candidate quality,” he’s also taking a shot at his own rival, Scott.With those caveats out of the way, let me say this: Republicans might very well do better than the pundits expect. And that is keeping some Democratic strategists up at night.This is true for two main reasons: a flood of outside money that is about to hit the airwaves on Republicans’ behalf, and polling that indicates that the political environment remains a problem for Democratic candidates, despite their party’s recent string of accomplishments.First, the moneySenate Democrats have been able to outspend and out-fund-raise Republicans so far this year.That’s partly a function of incumbency. G.O.P. candidates have spent the bulk of their money and energy attacking one another and vying for Trump’s favor, and Democrats have well-established email lists and national infrastructure to support them.With the primaries wrapping up, however, that’s about to change in a big way. Outside groups are tooling up tens of millions of dollars in ad spending on behalf of Republican candidates, according to public reports. And television advertising still matters a great deal with the older voters who traditionally dominate midterm elections.There’s the Senate Leadership Fund, a group close to McConnell, which has announced $141 million in advertising reservations. That compares with just $106 million announced by Senate Majority PAC, the counterpart on the Democratic side.Already, the leadership fund has ramped up its spending in key states, adding more than $9 million in spending in Georgia, $20 million in Ohio and at least $1 million in Pennsylvania.Another group affiliated with McConnell, One Nation, lifted its spending by nearly $2.6 million in Georgia, $1.24 million in Wisconsin and a little over a quarter-million dollars in Nevada.Outside conservative groups are flush with cash, too, with the Senate Leadership Fund reporting $104 million on hand as of late June. In contrast, the liberal Senate Majority PAC is wheezing a bit, reporting just $72 million cash on hand as of late July.Raising money outside the official campaign apparatus has frequently been an advantage for Republicans, who tend to have a much easier time enticing single megadonors to cut large checks. Democrats have plenty of megadonors of their own, of course. But liberal funders are often pulled in multiple directions, driven by causes like climate change, women’s rights or L.G.B.T.Q. issues rather than electoral politics.Whether Republicans will see their usual monetary advantage is more in question this time. In the past, Republicans have relied on individual billionaires like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers to bankroll super PACs and other kinds of groups. But Adelson died in 2021, and his wife, Miriam, has not indicated the same level of interest in financing politics. The Koch brothers have loudly declared that they are no longer as engaged in donating to political campaigns and would prefer to work on issues like criminal justice reform. More

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      New York: How to Vote, Where to Vote and Candidates on the Ballot

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      For the second time in two months, New Yorkers are voting in primary races, this time for Congress and the State Senate.There are several competitive congressional primaries and special elections, but there’s concern that a rare August primary, when many New Yorkers are distracted or away, will drive low turnout even lower than it usually is.How to votePolls are open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday. In New York State, you must be enrolled in a party to vote in its primary; independents cannot do so.Early voting ended on Sunday. If you have an absentee ballot but have not mailed it yet, today is the deadline; the ballot must have a postmark of Aug. 23 or earlier. You can also hand it in at a polling site before 9 p.m. (If you have requested to vote absentee but cannot mail your ballot, you may use an affidavit ballot at a polling place — but not a voting machine.)New Yorkers having trouble voting can call the state’s election protection hotline at 866-390-2992.Where to voteFind your polling place by entering your address at this state Board of Elections website.Who is on the ballotEarlier this year, the state’s highest courts ruled that district maps created by Democrats were unconstitutional and ordered them to be redrawn. That’s why primaries for Congress and State Senate were pushed back to August from June.If you’re in New York City, go here to see what’s on your ballot. Ballotpedia offers a sample ballot tool for the state, as well.The marquee contest is in the 12th Congressional District in Manhattan, where Representative Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat who represents the Upper West Side, is facing Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, who represents the Upper East Side. A third candidate, Suraj Patel, is running on generational change.The 10th District, covering parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn, has a rare open seat that has drawn many Democratic entrants, including Daniel Goldman, an impeachment investigator in the trial of former President Donald J. Trump; Representative Mondaire Jones, who now represents a different district; and Elizabeth Holtzman, 81, who was once the youngest woman elected to the House of Representatives. Two local women, Councilwoman Carlina Rivera and Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, have surged in the race.Two strong conservatives and Trump supporters are running in the 23rd District: Carl Paladino, a developer with a history of racist remarks, and Nick Langworthy, the state Republican Party chairman.In the revised 17th District, Alessandra Biaggi, a state senator, is challenging Sean Patrick Maloney, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, from the left. Mr. Maloney drew heavy criticism after the districts were redrawn and he chose to run in a safer district held by Mr. Jones, one of the first Black, openly gay men elected to Congress.The 19th District’s seat was vacated when Gov. Kathy Hochul chose former Representative Antonio Delgado as lieutenant governor. Two county executives are in a special election to finish his term: Marc Molinaro, a Republican, and Pat Ryan, a Democrat.Another special election is being held in the 23rd District to complete the term of Representative Tom Reed. Joe Sempolinski, a former congressional aide, is expected to keep it under Republican control. More

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      The Idea That Letting Trump Walk Will Heal America Is Ridiculous

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      The main argument against prosecuting Donald Trump — or investigating him with an eye toward criminal prosecution — is that it will worsen an already volatile fracture in American society between Republicans and Democrats. If, before an indictment, we could contain the forces of political chaos and social dissolution, the argument goes, then in the aftermath of such a move, we would be at their mercy. American democracy might not survive the stress.All of this might sound persuasive to a certain, risk-averse cast of mind. But it rests on two assumptions that can’t support the weight that’s been put on them.The first is the idea that American politics has, with Trump’s departure from the White House, returned to a kind of normalcy. Under this view, a prosecution would be an extreme and irrevocable blow to social peace. But the absence of open conflict is not the same as peace. Voters may have put a relic of the 1990s into the Oval Office, but the status quo of American politics is far from where it was before Trump.The most important of our new realities is the fact that much of the Republican Party has turned itself against electoral democracy. The Republican nominee for governor in Arizona — Kari Lake — is a 2020 presidential election denier. So, too, are the Republican nominees in Arizona for secretary of state, state attorney general and U.S. Senate. In Pennsylvania, Republican voters overwhelmingly chose the pro-insurrection Doug Mastriano to lead their party’s ticket in November. Overall, Republican voters have nominated election deniers in dozens of races across six swing states, including candidates for top offices in Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin.There is also something to learn from the much-obsessed-over fate of Liz Cheney, the arch-conservative representative from Wyoming, who lost her place on the Republican ticket on account of her opposition to the movement to “stop the steal” and her leadership on the House Jan. 6 committee investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the presidential election to keep himself in office. Cheney is, on every other issue of substance, with the right wing of the Republican Party. But she opposed the insurrection and accepted the results of the 2020 presidential election. It was, for Wyoming voters, a bridge too far.All of this is to say that we are already in a place where a substantial portion of the country (although much less than half) has aligned itself against the basic principles of American democracy in favor of Trump. And these 2020 deniers aren’t sitting still, either; as these election results show, they are actively working to undermine democracy for the next time Trump is on the ballot.This fact, alone, makes a mockery of the idea that the ultimate remedy for Trump is to beat him at the ballot box a second time, as if the same supporters who rejected the last election will change course in the face of another defeat. It also makes clear the other weight-bearing problem with the argument against holding Trump accountable, which is that it treats inaction as an apolitical and stability-enhancing move — something that preserves the status quo as opposed to action, which upends it.But that’s not true. Inaction is as much a political choice as action is, and far from preserving the status quo — or securing some level of social peace — it sets in stone a new world of total impunity for any sufficiently popular politician or member of the political elite.Now, it is true that political elites in this country are already immune to most meaningful consequences for corruption and lawbreaking. But showing forbearance and magnanimity toward Trump and his allies would take a difficult problem and make it irreparable. If a president can get away with an attempted coup (as well as abscond with classified documents), then there’s nothing he can’t do. He is, for all intents and purposes, above the law.Among skeptics of prosecution, there appears to be a belief that restraint would create a stable equilibrium between the two parties; that if Democrats decline to pursue Trump, then Republicans will return the favor when they win office again. But this is foolish to the point of delusion. We don’t even have to look to the recent history of Republican politicians using the tools of office to investigate their political opponents. We only have to look to the consequences of giving Trump (or any of his would-be successors) a grant of nearly unaccountable power. Why would he restrain himself in 2025 or beyond? Why wouldn’t he and his allies use the tools of state to target the opposition?The arguments against prosecuting Trump don’t just ignore or discount the current state of the Republican Party and the actually existing status quo in the United States, they also ignore the crucial fact that this country has experience with exactly this kind of surrender in the face of political criminality.National politics in the 1870s was consumed with the question of how much to respond to vigilante lawlessness, discrimination and political violence in the postwar South. Northern opponents of federal and congressional intervention made familiar arguments.If Republicans, The New York Times argued in 1874, “set aside the necessity of direct authority from the Constitution” to pursue their aims in the South and elsewhere, could they then “expect the Democrats, if they should gain the power, to let the Constitution prevent them from helping their ancient and present friends?”The better approach, The Times said in an earlier editorial, was to let time do its work. “The law has clothed the colored man with all the attributes of citizenship. It has secured him equality before the law, and invested him with the ballot.” But here, wrote the editors, “the province of law will end. All else must be left to the operation of causes more potent than law, and wholly beyond its reach.” His old oppressors in the South, they added, “rest their only hope of party success upon their ability to obtain his goodwill.”To act affirmatively would create unrest. Instead, the country should let politics and time do their work. The problems would resolve themselves, and Americans would enjoy a measure of social peace as a result.Of course, that is not what happened. In the face of lawlessness, inaction led to impunity, and impunity led to a successful movement to turn back the clock on progress as far as possible, by any means possible.Our experience, as Americans, tells us that there is a clear point at which we must act in the face of corruption, lawlessness and contempt for the very foundations of democratic society. The only way out is through. Fear of what Trump and his supports might do cannot and should not stand in the way of what we must do to secure the Constitution from all its enemies, foreign and domestic.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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      The Florida Primary for Governor is Mostly About Ron DeSantis

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      Democrats would love to defeat Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in November. But first they must nominate a challenger who can win in a state where they seem to perpetually fall short.HOLLYWOOD, Fla. — On the first day of early voting in Broward County, Florida’s Democratic mecca, Jared Brown, a 41-year-old lawyer who until recently had never attended a Democratic Party meeting, drove to the polls in suburban Hollywood, slipped on a party T-shirt and grabbed a clipboard to go knock on voters’ doors.He was motivated by anger.Anger at Republicans in general — for appointing conservative judges, redirecting money from public schools and governing in a way that struck him as “authoritarian” — and anger at one Republican in particular: Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose polarizing persona has come to suck up all of the state’s political oxygen.“It’s too offensive,” Mr. Brown said of the culture wars stoked by the governor and state lawmakers. “If you don’t fight them now,” he added, “it’s just not going to get any better.”Going into Tuesday’s primary election, Florida Democrats like Mr. Brown are angry, especially at the ascendant Mr. DeSantis and the way he seems to them to act like someone who already has his eye on the White House. But it is not clear that in the choices they have to challenge him — Representative Charlie Crist, who served as governor from 2007 to 2011, and Nikki Fried, the state’s agriculture commissioner — they have someone who can beat him.“DeSantis is running for president,” said Ann Ralston, 69, as she prepared for a long, sweaty day volunteering for no fewer than seven down-ballot Democratic candidates, whose logos she had pinned on her clothes, turning herself into a human billboard. “It’s a foregone conclusion,” she said.Representative Charlie Crist, who served as Florida governor from 2007 to 2011, greeted people at Mo’s Bagels & Deli in Aventura this month.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesMs. Fried and Mr. Crist have each cast themselves as the more viable alternative and the truer Democrat, but each is defined as much by their perceived limitations as their strengths: Mr. Crist for already losing two statewide races since being elected governor, and Ms. Fried for her short time in public life.To win, Democrats are fighting history as well as themselves. After four election cycles of close losses, the national donors whom they need to help finance expensive statewide campaigns appear unengaged this time. So do some voters.“It’s an emotional narrative about Florida,” said Andrea Cristina Mercado, the executive director of Florida Rising, a racial justice organization. “‘Florida has broken my heart too many times.’”Money usually flows into the state after the primary. But this year, she worries that Florida is not even on some donors’ radar.More Coverage of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsLiz Cheney’s Lopsided Loss: The Republican congresswoman’s defeat in Wyoming exposed the degree to which former President Donald J. Trump still controls the party’s present — and its near future.2024 Hint: Hours after her loss, Ms. Cheney acknowledged that she was “thinking” about a White House bid. But her mission to thwart Donald J. Trump presents challenges.The ‘Impeachment 10’: With Ms. Cheney’s defeat, only two of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump remain.Alaska Races: Senator Lisa Murkowski and Sarah Palin appeared to be on divergent paths following contests that offered a glimpse at the state’s independent streak.“The right wing says every chance they can that ‘Florida is red, Florida is red,’ and it seems that Democrats are buying into that,” she said, noting that people who live in the state know it feels more closely divided than it looks.“We don’t want DeSantis to just walk into the White House,” she added. “We’re trying to do what needs to be done with Scotch tape and paper clips.”Whether Democrats nominate the more disciplined happy warrior Mr. Crist or the more unpredictable, feisty Ms. Fried might matter less than the state party’s longstanding problems. The failings have been clear for years — a thin candidate bench, weak party infrastructure, undisciplined messaging, mounting losses with Latinos — but leaders have struggled with how to address them. Last year, the number of active voters registered as Republicans surpassed Democrats for the first time in history, and the G.O.P. edge has only continued to grow.Nikki Fried, Florida’s agriculture commissioner, is the only Democrat elected to statewide office since 2018.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesManny Diaz, the executive director of the Florida Democratic Party, said in an interview that since taking over in 2021, he had built an internal voter database, trained volunteers and created a detailed county-level campaign plan. Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, who is friendly with Mr. Diaz, recently gave the party $1 million, which is far less than the tens of millions Mr. Bloomberg spent in Florida two years ago.“I’m confident that we will get funding,” Mr. Diaz said.In 2018, Mr. DeSantis defeated Andrew Gillum, who would have become Florida’s first Black governor, by about 32,000 votes — less than half a percentage point — making the state a rare bright spot for Republicans. Some Democrats concluded that they would have won with a more moderate candidate, a hypothesis that Mr. Crist would now test. Others insisted that they only came as close as they did because of the excitement surrounding Mr. Gillum. Ms. Fried would be Florida’s first female governor.For now, Democrats’ most buzzy statewide candidate is Val B. Demings, the Orlando congresswoman challenging Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican. Ms. Demings and Mr. Rubio have already attacked each other in ads, and recent Democratic polls have shown the race to be close, though Mr. Rubio is still considered the favorite. More

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      There Is No Happy Ending to America’s Trump Problem

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      Debate about the search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence has settled into well-worn grooves. Mr. Trump and many Republicans have denounced the act as illegitimate. Attorney General Merrick Garland is staying mostly mum. And Democrats are struggling to contain their enthusiasm.Liberal excitement is understandable. Mr. Trump faces potential legal jeopardy from the Jan. 6 investigation in Congress and the Mar-a-Lago search. They anticipate fulfilling a dream going back to the earliest days of the Trump administration: to see him frog-marched to jail before the country and the world.But this is a fantasy. There is no scenario following from the present that culminates in a happy ending for anyone, even for Democrats.Down one path is the prosecution of the former president. This would be a Democratic administration putting the previous occupant of the White House, the ostensible head of the Republican Party and the current favorite to be the G.O.P. presidential nominee in 2024, on trial. That would set an incredibly dangerous precedent. Imagine, each time the presidency is handed from one party to the other, an investigation by the new administration’s Justice Department leads toward the investigation and possible indictment of its predecessor.Some will say that Mr. Trump nonetheless deserves it — and he does. If Mr. Garland does not press charges against him for Jan. 6 or the potential mishandling of classified government documents, Mr. Trump will have learned that becoming president has effectively immunized him from prosecution. That means the country would be facing a potential second term for Mr. Trump in which he is convinced that he can do whatever he wants with complete impunity.That seems to point to the need to push forward with a case, despite the risk of turning it into a regular occurrence. As many of Mr. Trump’s detractors argue, the rule of law demands it — and failing to fulfill that demand could end up being extremely dangerous.But we’ve been through a version of the turbulent Trump experience before. During the Trump years, the system passed its stress test. We have reason to think it would do so again, especially with reforms to the Electoral Count Act likely to pass during the lame duck session following the upcoming midterm elections, if not before. Having to combat an emboldened Mr. Trump or another bad actor would certainly be unnerving and risky. But the alternatives would be too.We caught a glimpse of those alternative risks as soon as the Mar-a-Lago raid was announced. Within hours, leading Republicans had issued inflammatory statements, and these statements would likely grow louder and more incendiary through any trial, both from Mr. Trump himself and from members of his party and its media rabble-rousers. (Though at a federal judge’s order a redacted version of the warrant affidavit may soon be released, so Mr. Trump and the rest of his party would have to contend with the government’s actual justification of the raid itself.)If the matter culminates in an indictment and trial of Mr. Trump, the Republican argument would be more of what we heard day in and day out through his administration. His defenders would claim that every person ostensibly committed to the dispassionate upholding of the rule of law is in fact motivated by rank partisanship and a drive to self-aggrandizement. This would be directed at the attorney general, the F.B.I., the Justice Department and other branches of the so-called deep state. The spectacle would be corrosive, in effect convincing most Republican voters that appeals to the rule of law are invariably a sham.But the nightmare wouldn’t stop there. What if Mr. Trump declares another run for the presidency just as he’s indicted and treats the trial as a circus illustrating the power of the Washington swamp and the need to put Republicans back in charge to drain it? It would be a risible claim, but potentially a politically effective one. And he might well continue this campaign even if convicted, possibly running for president from a jail cell. It would be Mr. Trump versus the System. He would be reviving an old American archetype: the folk-hero outlaw who takes on and seeks to take down the powerful in the name of the people.We wouldn’t even avoid potentially calamitous consequences if Mr. Trump somehow ended up barred from running or his party opted for another candidate to be its nominee in 2024 — say, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. How long do you think it would take for a freshly inaugurated President DeSantis to pardon a convicted and jailed Donald Trump? Hours? Minutes? And that move would probably be combined with a promise to investigate and indict Joe Biden for the various “crimes” he allegedly committed in office.The instinct of Democrats is to angrily dismiss such concerns. But that doesn’t mean these consequences wouldn’t happen. Even if Mr. Garland’s motives and methods are models of judiciousness and restraint, the act of an attorney general of one party seeking to indict and convict a former and possibly future president of the other party is the ringing of a bell that cannot be unrung. It is guaranteed to be undertaken again, regardless of whether present and future accusations are justified.As we’ve seen over and over again since Mr. Trump won the presidency, our system of governance presumes a certain base level of public spiritedness — at the level of the presidency, in Congress and in the electorate at large. When that is lacking — when an aspersive figure is elected, when he maintains strong popular support within his party and when that party remains electorally viable — high-minded efforts to act as antibodies defending the body politic from the spread of infection can end up doing enduring harm to the patient. Think of all those times during the Trump presidency when well-meaning sources inside and outside the administration ended up undermining their own credibility by hyping threats and overpromising evidence of wrongdoing and criminality.That’s why it’s imperative we set aside the Plan A of prosecuting Mr. Trump. In its place, we should embrace a Plan B that defers the dream of a post-presidential perp walk in favor of allowing the political process to run its course. If Mr. Trump is the G.O.P. nominee again in 2024, Democrats will have no choice but to defeat him yet again, hopefully by an even larger margin than they did last time.Mr. Trump himself and his most devoted supporters will be no more likely to accept that outcome than they were after the 2020 election. The bigger the margin of his loss, the harder it will be for Mr. Trump to avoid looking like a loser, which is the outcome he dreads more than anything — and one that would be most likely to loosen his grip on his party.There is an obvious risk: If Mr. Trump runs again, he might win. But that’s a risk we can’t avoid — which is why we may well have found ourselves in a situation with no unambivalently good options.Damon Linker, a former columnist at The Week, writes the newsletter “Eyes on the Right” and is a senior fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center.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