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      DeSantis Faces F.E.C. Complaint Over His Campaign’s Ties With Super PAC

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      The Florida governor has confronted scrutiny for offloading many of his campaign’s operations to an allied super PAC, which has in recent weeks been rocked by staff upheaval.A campaign watchdog group filed a complaint on Monday with the Federal Election Commission against the campaign of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and a super PAC backing his presidential bid, accusing them of a “textbook example” of illegal campaign coordination.In its complaint, the Campaign Legal Center argued that the super PAC, Never Back Down, had effectively served as Mr. DeSantis’s campaign, detailing work it has done like providing private air travel, bankrolling a costly ground game in early nominating states, providing debate strategies and hosting events on the road. In turn, Mr. DeSantis and his wife, the group says, provided guidance about messaging to Never Back Down.The complaint relies largely on news reports, in The New York Times and elsewhere, that for months have described Never Back Down’s extraordinary role in Mr. DeSantis’s candidacy. In recent weeks, the super PAC’s leadership has been roiled by concerns about advertising messaging and the legality of its close ties with the campaign, setting off a series of high-profile departures.“This baseless complaint is just another example of how the left is terrified of Ron DeSantis and will stoop to anything to stop him,” said Andrew Romeo, communications director for Mr. DeSantis’s campaign. “The F.E.C. has made clear they won’t take action based upon unverified rumors and innuendo, and that’s the false information this politically motivated complaint is based on.”Mr. DeSantis said on Monday that the upheaval at the deep-pocketed Never Back Down was “not a distraction for me.”Speaking to reporters after an event at a factory in Adel, Iowa, Mr. DeSantis said he didn’t have any thoughts on the weekend resignation of Jeff Roe, the influential chief strategist at Never Back Down.“I’m not involved in any of that,” he said. “As you guys know, it’s a separate entity and so, this stuff just happens and it’s not in my purview.”Mr. DeSantis has said he is the drama-free candidate, in comparison to former President Donald J. Trump. But the chaos at Never Back Down has undercut his narrative. When Mr. DeSantis addressed reporters after his Monday event, half of the questions were about Mr. Roe’s departure.For months, Never Back Down has been plagued by disagreements over its strategy and direction, as it became clear that former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina was threatening to usurp Mr. DeSantis’s position as the leading Republican alternative to Mr. Trump, who maintains a dominant lead in early state polls. Allies of Mr. DeSantis had wanted Never Back Down to focus more on its canvassing and voter turnout operation, and less on television advertisements.The complaint to the F.E.C. sets off a chain of events: Mr. DeSantis and his campaign have 15 days to respond to the complaint, after which the F.E.C.’s general counsel will review the case and make a recommendation to the six-member commission.The F.E.C., divided evenly between Democratic and Republican members, often deadlocks on questions of whether campaigns have broken the law. A spokeswoman for the F.E.C. said the commission would not comment on potential enforcement matters.While the backroom drama will probably go unnoticed by many voters, the chaos at Never Back Down is expected to be a cause for concern for Republican megadonors, who are increasingly looking to support Ms. Haley.The Campaign Legal Center has filed four complaints with the F.E.C. in connection with Mr. DeSantis and Never Back Down, including one accusing the PAC of violating the ban on “soft” money in federal elections. The group has also accused Mr. Trump and a committee backing him of violating the soft money ban, and has accused a super PAC backing former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey of accepting illegal contributions. More

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      The Secret to Trump’s Success Isn’t Authoritarianism

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      If the presidential election were held today, Donald Trump could very well win it. Polling from several organizations shows him gaining ground on Joe Biden, winning five of six swing states and drawing the support of about 20 percent of Black and roughly 40 percent of Hispanic voters in those states.For some liberal observers, Mr. Trump’s resilience confirms that many Americans aren’t wedded to democracy and are tempted by extreme ideologies. Hillary Clinton has described Mr. Trump as a “threat” to democracy, and Mr. Biden has called him “one of the most racist presidents we’ve had in modern history.”In a different spirit, some on the right also take Mr. Trump’s success as a sign that Americans are open to more radical forms of politics. After Mr. Trump’s win in 2016, the Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin crowed that the American people had “started the revolution” against political liberalism itself. Richard Spencer declared himself and his fellow white nationalists “the new Trumpian vanguard.”But both sides consistently misread Mr. Trump’s success. He isn’t edging ahead of Mr. Biden in swing states because Americans are eager to submit to authoritarianism, and he isn’t attracting the backing of significant numbers of Black and Hispanic voters because they support white supremacy. His success is not a sign that America is prepared to embrace the ideas of the extreme right. Mr. Trump enjoys enduring support because he is perceived by many voters — often with good reason — as a pragmatic if unpredictable kind of moderate.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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      With His Super PAC in Disarray, DeSantis Aims to Stay on Offense

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      The Florida governor kept his focus trained on his opponents, even as Never Back Down, the group aligned with the governor, lost another key leader.A day after Ron DeSantis’s political operation suffered another major setback — the departure of a chief strategist — the Florida governor ignored the internal turmoil at an event in Iowa and did not take questions from reporters. Perhaps there just wasn’t much left to say.The group, Never Back Down — a super PAC formed to help Mr. DeSantis take on Donald J. Trump and serve as a powerful shadow campaign with a huge war chest and an influential political team — had lost another key player, the sixth senior leader to depart in recent weeks.In the months since it was founded, the super PAC has burned through tens of millions of dollars and changed its mission and strategy without much success. Four weeks before the first nominating contests in Iowa, it now faces questions about whether what remains is enough to have an impact, without much time to refocus or rebuild.So instead, Mr. DeSantis and his allies sought to go on offense against his rivals for the Republican nomination — most notably Mr. Trump, who is cruising in Iowa, and former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, who is challenging him most directly — something he has struggled to do on the debate stage.At a packed coffee shop on Sunday in Oskaloosa, Iowa, Mr. DeSantis assured voters that he would bolster the country’s military and said that, in contrast to Mr. Trump, his leadership was “not about entertainment.”While Mr. DeSantis has sought to project strength and competence on the campaign trail, behind-the-scenes infighting at Never Back Down has frequently overshadowed his efforts.The group, which had amassed $130 million to support his candidacy, was supposed to be a difference maker. Instead, it has sometimes been a distraction, even as it works to build a formidable get-out-the-vote operation in the early nominating states.The departure on Saturday of the strategist, Jeff Roe, an influential political consultant who seeded Never Back Down with allies from his firm, Axiom, followed the loss of the group’s first chief executive, Chris Jankowski, just before Thanksgiving. Mr. Jankowski’s replacement, Kristin Davison, was fired in early December, and Never Back Down’s chairman, Adam Laxalt, a longtime friend of Mr. DeSantis, also stepped down this month, as two other senior staff members were fired.Never Back Down is now in an uncertain place. The group has quickly burned through cash and its new chairman and interim chief executive, Scott Wagner, is a Miami lawyer and close college friend of Mr. DeSantis, rather than a seasoned political operative, although he has been a member of the group’s board. In a post on X, Mr. Roe seemed to place the blame for his resignation on negative comments Mr. Wagner made in a Washington Post article about the fired employees.Meanwhile, another group of DeSantis loyalists has created a new super PAC, Fight Right, that has been running advertisements against Ms. Haley, who has caught up with or surpassed Mr. DeSantis in many polls. The group’s latest ad referred to Ms. Haley as “Tricky Nikki,” accusing her of pushing “the woke corporate agenda” on immigration. The ad was the latest sign that Mr. DeSantis, who has predicted victory in Iowa over Mr. Trump, has instead found himself in a two-front war, battling Ms. Haley for anti-Trump voters while simultaneously trying to wrest Trump supporters from the former president.Never Back Down, or N.B.D., had previously handled advertising, but Mr. DeSantis’s campaign — which is not legally allowed to coordinate with the group — suggested that it would focus on turning out voters.“We have full confidence in the N.B.D. ground game and field operation, which is second to none,” Andrew Romeo, a spokesman for Mr. DeSantis, said in a statement on Sunday. “There is a stellar team in place and we appreciate their independent efforts to fight for Ron DeSantis.”A spokeswoman for Never Back Down did not respond to a request for comment.Instead of addressing the recent tumult, Mr. DeSantis sharpened his criticism of Ms. Haley and continued to attack Mr. Trump.Mr. DeSantis has recently urged voters to question why Ms. Haley has not given a firm answer about whether she would accept a role as Mr. Trump’s vice president, should he offer it after winning the Republican nomination. The implication is that Ms. Haley is aligning herself with Mr. Trump and attacking Mr. DeSantis on his behalf, rather than seeking the nomination herself. On Saturday, the DeSantis campaign sent out an email proclaiming that the governor was “Not Running to Be Anything Else.”“She owes you an answer to this,” Mr. DeSantis told the audience at a town hall in Concord, N.H., on Friday. It was a line of attack he repeated at another event later that night.Mr. DeSantis also pointed out that Mr. Trump had not ruled out selecting Ms. Haley during a recent radio interview. “Right now I’m not even thinking about that,” the former president had said when asked about the possibility. “I’ve always gotten along well with Nikki,” he added, but cautioned it was “unlikely” he would pick Ms. Haley. (For his part, Mr. DeSantis reiterated in New Hampshire that he would not run on Mr. Trump’s ticket, saying he could accomplish more as governor than vice president.)Ms. Haley has poured cold water on the charge without directly answering it. At a stop this month in Sioux City, Iowa, a voter asked if she would serve as Mr. Trump’s vice president. “I’ve never played for second,” she responded. (A spokeswoman for her campaign, Olivia Perez-Cubas, said Mr. DeSantis would “say anything to try to salvage his sinking ship of a campaign.”)On Sunday in Oskaloosa, Mr. DeSantis did not repeat his criticism. But one of his allies, Mark Chelgren, a former state senator in Iowa, opened the event by excoriating Mr. Trump as “self-serving” for denying his 2020 election loss.“The reality was, the week prior to absentee ballots going out, he had a debate with Joe Biden, and they both looked immature, selfish and petty,” Mr. Chelgren told voters. “That is why Donald Trump lost the last election.”As for Mr. Roe and the turmoil with Never Back Down, most voters said they were more concerned with policy differences between candidates rather than political infighting.Jordan Padgett, an undecided voter, said he had not even heard of Never Back Down. “I know the movie, great movie,” he said, referring to the 2008 action film by the same name.But Shari Dayton, who is supporting Mr. DeSantis, said the fact that the governor’s PAC seemed to be in disarray could affect how she votes in January’s caucuses.Hearing the news of the organization’s travails, her eyes widened. “I will have to look into that,” she said. “That’s interesting.”Shane Goldmacher More

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      Jeff Roe, Top Strategist for Star-Crossed DeSantis Super PAC, Resigns

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      Mr. Roe, who helped lead Never Back Down, the super PAC behind the Florida governor’s presidential campaign, resigned Saturday, the latest shake-up in the group.Jeff Roe, the chief strategist for the leading super PAC supporting Gov. Ron DeSantis’s presidential bid, resigned on Saturday night, the latest and perhaps most significant departure from the group, which has been consumed by turmoil in recent weeks.Since the day before Thanksgiving, the pro-DeSantis super PAC, which is called Never Back Down, has seen the resignation of one chief executive and one board chairman; the firing of a second chief executive, along with two other top officials; and now the late-night quitting of Mr. Roe. All have come after intense infighting and finger-pointing as Mr. DeSantis has slipped in the polls.“I can’t believe it ended this way,” Mr. Roe wrote in a statement he posted on X on Saturday night. The news of Mr. Roe’s resignation was first reported by The Washington Post.His decision to quit followed comments from the new chairman of the super PAC’s board, Scott Wagner, a DeSantis loyalist and appointee in Florida. Mr. Wagner had explained to The Washington Post why the previous chief executive and two others — all of whom had worked for Mr. Roe — had been fired.Mr. Wagner accused them of “mismanagement and conduct issues” as well as “numerous unauthorized leaks.” The Post reported that a lawyer for those employees contacted Mr. Wagner, who then revised his statement to add hedges to those accusations.“I cannot in good conscience stay affiliated with Never Back Down given the statements in The Washington Post,” Mr. Roe wrote in a statement. He said he still hoped Mr. DeSantis would be the next president and praised the Never Back Down team as “political warriors.”Mr. Wagner did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.From the start, Never Back Down has been something of a Frankenstein’s monster in its composition, with Mr. Roe and some of his top lieutenants forced to coexist with a decision-making board comprised primarily of longtime friends and loyalists of Mr. DeSantis. The arrangement has raised questions about how closely the campaign and the super PAC have adhered to rules barring coordination.Former President Donald J. Trump, who was in Las Vegas for a U.F.C. match and who has routinely mocked Mr. Roe privately, celebrated the departure in a post on his social-media site, Truth Social. “Jeff Roe is out — GAME OVER for DeSanctimonious,” he wrote.The future of internal operations at Never Back Down, which had raised more than $130 million as of July, is unclear. Mr. Roe’s allies hold many of the most important positions in the group, and his company, Axiom, has helped staff early state efforts for the super PAC. Whether they all remain in place is unclear.Word that Mr. Roe was departing the super PAC began to spread shortly before 8 p.m. on Saturday. But Mr. Roe and several people connected to Never Back Down did not respond to multiple messages seeking confirmation. Mr. Roe ultimately delivered his news to The Washington Post and posted it on X.Mr. Roe had long ago aggravated Mr. DeSantis with unwanted headlines, among them a New York Times story about a memo narrating debate strategy for the candidate before the first primary debate that was posted on his company’s website, and then taken down after The Times learned of it. The campaign found the memo’s existence embarrassing.Later, at the end of August, Mr. Roe was secretly recorded at a meeting with donors pitching them for tens of millions of dollars, as well as saying that Mr. DeSantis needed to beat Mr. Trump over the following 60 days.The Trump campaign has seized on the “60 days” comment, referring to it in an often vicious daily email as Mr. Roe’s “kiss of death.” That 60-day period has passed, with Mr. DeSantis still well behind the former president in the polls.Never Back Down has been hobbled by infighting for weeks, as senior staff members quit or were fired. Mr. DeSantis and his team had been unhappy with the group’s operations, particularly its focus on television advertising, and they had signaled that they wanted it to work more substantially on getting out the vote.Tensions reached a breaking point in November when another super PAC, Fight Right, was formed by a trio of DeSantis loyalists. The board of Never Back Down directed $1 million to that group, and, soon after, the initial chief executive, Chris Jankowski, resigned, followed by the resignation of the board chairman, Adam Laxalt.The person named as Mr. Jankowski’s replacement, Kristin Davison, was then fired, along with two other top officials.Mr. DeSantis has since met with prospective donors for Fight Right, and his campaign manager wrote a memo that embraced the group as the preferred entity to do its political advertising. The new super PAC’s first ad attacked Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina by invoking past comments she had made about Hillary Clinton — a line of attack that the campaign had just prominently featured in its own anti-Haley materials.Although Mr. DeSantis entered the race as the leading challenger to Mr. Trump, his campaign has sputtered in recent months. Ms. Haley has now equaled or surpassed Mr. DeSantis in many early state polls.The constant drama at the super PAC has infuriated some campaign staff members, who see it as a needless, constant distraction. The campaign itself was once the source of that drama, undergoing mass layoffs and seeing the elevation of a campaign manager who had never worked on a campaign. More

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      Florida Sex Scandal Shakes Moms for Liberty, as Group’s Influence Wanes

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      The conservative group led the charge on the Covid-era education battles. But scandals and losses are threatening its power.Moms for Liberty, a national right-wing advocacy group, was born in Florida as a response to Covid-19 school closures and mask mandates. But it quickly became just as well known for pushing policies branded as anti-L.G.B.T.Q. by opponents.So when one of its founders, Bridget Ziegler, recently told the police that she and her husband, who is under criminal investigation for sexual assault, had a consensual sexual encounter with another woman, the perceived disconnect between her public stances and private life fueled intense pressure for her to resign from the Sarasota County School Board.“Most of our community could not care less what you do in the privacy of your own home, but your hypocrisy takes center stage,” said Sally Sells, a Sarasota resident and the mother of a fifth-grader, told Ms. Ziegler during a tense school board meeting this week. Ms. Ziegler, whose husband has denied wrongdoing, said little and did not resign.Ms. Sells was one of dozens of speakers who criticized Ms. Ziegler — and Moms for Liberty — at the meeting, an outcry that underscored the group’s prominence in the most contentious debates of the pandemic era.Perhaps no group gained so much influence so quickly, transforming education issues from a sleepy political backwater to a rallying cry for Republican politicians. The organization quickly became a conservative powerhouse, a coveted endorsement and a mandatory stop on the G.O.P. presidential primary campaign trail.Yet, as Moms for Liberty reels from the scandal surrounding the Zieglers, the group’s power seems to be fading. Candidates endorsed by the group lost a series of key school board races in 2023. The losses have prompted questions about the future of education issues as an animating force in Republican politics.Donald J. Trump, the dominant front-runner for the party’s nomination, makes only passing reference in his stump speeches to preserving “parental rights” — the catchphrase of the group’s cause. Issues like school curriculums, transgender students’ rights and teaching about race were far less prominent in the three Republican primary debates than abortion rights, foreign policy and the economy. And the most prominent champion of conservative views on education — Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — has yet to unite conservatives behind his struggling presidential bid.John Fredericks, a Trump ally in Virginia, said the causes that Moms for Liberty became most known for supporting — policies banning books it deemed pornographic, curtailing the teaching of L.G.B.T.Q. issues and policing how race is taught in schools — had fallen far from many voters’ top concerns.“You closed schools, and people were upset about that. Schools are open now,” he said. “The Moms for Liberty really have to aim their fire on math and science and reading, versus focusing on critical race theory and drag queen story hours.”He added: “It’s nonsense, all of it.”The two other founders of Moms for Liberty, Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice, have distanced themselves from Ms. Ziegler, saying she has not been an officer in the national organization since early 2021. Ms. Ziegler did not respond to a request for comment.In a statement, Ms. Descovich and Ms. Justice dismissed criticism that the group was hypocritical. They argue that it is not opposed to racial justice or L.G.B.T.Q. rights, but that it wants to restore control to parents over their children’s education.“To our opponents who have spewed hateful vitriol over the last several days: We reject your attacks,” Ms. Descovich and Ms. Justice said. “We are laser-focused on fundamental parental rights, and that mission is and always will be bigger than one person.”Ms. Justice declined to answer questions about the continued influence of their organization or their electoral losses.Tina Descovich, left, and Tiffany Justice, the two other founders of Moms for Liberty, distanced themselves from Ms. Ziegler.Matt Rourke/Associated PressNearly 60 percent of the 198 school board candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty in contested races across 10 states were defeated in 2023, according to an analysis by the website Ballotpedia, which tracks elections.The organization claims to operate 300 chapters in 48 states and to have about 130,000 members.Jon Valant, the director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, a left-leaning think tank, found in a recent study that the group had an outsize presence in battleground and liberal counties. Yet in those areas, the policies championed by Moms For Liberty are broadly unpopular.“The politics have flipped on the Moms for Liberty, and they’re turning more people to vote against them than for them,” Mr. Valant said.In November, the group announced that it had removed the chairwomen of two Kentucky chapters after they had posed in photos with members of the Proud Boys, a far-right group with a history of violence. That came several months after a chapter of Moms for Liberty in Indiana quoted Adolf Hitler in its inaugural newsletter. The year before, Ms. Ziegler publicly denied links to the Proud Boys after she had posed for a photo with a member of the group at her election night victory party.The episodes have transformed the group’s image and alienated it from the voters it once claimed to represent. The group was at one time particularly strong in the suburbs of Northern Virginia, where education issues helped spur Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, to victory in the 2021 governor’s race. (This year, Mr. Youngkin failed in his high-profile attempt at a Republican takeover of the Virginia Statehouse.)Anne Pogue Donohue, who ran for a school board seat in Loudoun County, Va., against a candidate endorsed by the group, said she saw a disconnect between the cause of Moms for Liberty and the current concerns of voters.On social media, Ms. Donohue, a former government lawyer and mother of two young children, faced a barrage of personal insults, death threats and accusations that she was trying to “groom” children to become transgender, she said. But during her in-person interactions with voters, she added, a vast majority of parents seemed more concerned with practical issues like math and reading scores, support for special education and expanding vocational and technical programs.Ms. Donohue won her seat by nearly seven percentage points.“There is a pushback now,” she said. “Moms for Liberty focuses heavily on culture-war-type issues, and I think most voters see that, to the extent that we have problems in our educational system that we have to fix, the focus on culture-war issues isn’t doing that.”One place where Moms for Liberty maintains a stronger hold is the state where the group has had perhaps the most influence: Florida.Since forming in 2020, the group has aligned itself with Mr. DeSantis, backing his parental-rights-in-education law that critics nicknamed “Don’t Say Gay.” The law prohibits classroom instruction on L.G.B.T.Q. topics.Mr. DeSantis then campaigned for conservative candidates for local school boards, turning nonpartisan races into ones heavily influenced by politics. Several school boards with newly conservative majorities ousted their superintendents.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has been aligned with Moms for Liberty, with the group backing his controversial parental-rights-in-education law.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesIn Brevard County, the school board is now entirely conservative except for Jennifer Jenkins, whom Mr. DeSantis has already listed as someone he would like to help defeat in 2024.Ms. Jenkins, an outspoken Moms for Liberty critic who wrested Ms. Descovich’s school board seat from her in 2020, said the organization, while small, had remained a vocal fixture in school board meetings, with about 10 regulars who sometimes bring along people from Indian River and other nearby counties.“Their members are definitely more extreme than they ever were before,” said Ms. Jenkins, who has been a frequent target of the group. They have picketed outside her house, sent her threatening mail and, she said, taken photos of her in the grocery store as recently as a couple of weeks ago.On Tuesday, some Moms for Liberty members from Brevard and Indian River Counties attended a Brevard County School Board meeting to protest books that they say should be pulled from schools. Most of the books they named had already been formally challenged.Still, one by one, group members stood behind the lectern and read explicit scenes from the books until the board’s chairwoman — whom Moms for Liberty and Mr. DeSantis endorsed last year — warned them to stop.It was what the speakers wanted: Under a Florida law enacted this year, if a school board denies a parent the right to read passages deemed “pornographic,” then the school district “shall discontinue the use of the material.” In other words, cutting off the reading would effectively result in pulling the book from schools, board members said.“I highly encourage all of you to look at this statute,” Julie Bywater, a member of the Brevard County chapter of Moms for Liberty, told the school board.Such tactics have become typical for Moms for Liberty members. In response, opponents have started showing up to school board meetings in force, trying to counter the group’s message — including in Sarasota, where Ms. Ziegler’s critics turned out to try to push her out.The school board, which includes several conservatives who have aligned with Ms. Ziegler before, voted 4 to 1 on Tuesday for a nonbinding resolution urging her to resign; Ms. Ziegler was the only one on the board to vote against it. More

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      DeSantis Says Trump Will Declare Iowa Caucuses Stolen if He Loses

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      The former president “will try to delegitimize the results,” Mr. DeSantis said while campaigning in New Hampshire on Friday.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said on Friday that he expected Donald J. Trump to claim that the Iowa caucuses had been “stolen” if the former president, who currently leads Mr. DeSantis by roughly 30 points in that state, is defeated there next month.“If Trump loses, he will say it’s stolen no matter what, absolutely,” Mr. DeSantis said, responding to a reporter in New Hampshire who had asked whether Mr. Trump would accept the results of the first contest in the Republican presidential primary on Jan. 15, or of the New Hampshire primary roughly a week later. “He will try to delegitimize the results. He did that against Ted Cruz in 2016.”Mr. DeSantis added that Mr. Trump had protested “even when ‘The Apprentice’ didn’t get an Emmy,” referring to the former president’s onetime television show.Throughout the 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump and his allies have continued to insist that he defeated President Biden in 2020. The constant chorus of falsehoods seems to have seeped into the consciousness of many Republicans. Nearly 60 percent of G.O.P. voters believe Mr. Biden’s election was illegitimate, a survey by The Associated Press found earlier this year.For several years, Mr. DeSantis appeared to play both sides of the manufactured controversy over the 2020 election. As governor, he set up a new police unit to monitor the integrity of Florida elections. Before last year’s midterms, he campaigned with Republicans who had vociferously denied the results. But he never explicitly endorsed the theory that the election had been stolen, and he repeatedly dodged questions about whether he accepted Mr. Biden’s victory.During his presidential campaign, Mr. DeSantis has courted voters from the Trump wing of the Republican Party, making it difficult for him to say that the former president was wrong.Only in August, after being repeatedly pressed during an interview with NBC News, did Mr. DeSantis acknowledge the truth, saying of Mr. Trump: “Of course he lost. Joe Biden’s the president.”In 2016, Mr. Trump claimed to have defeated Mr. Cruz, a Republican senator from Texas, in that year’s Iowa caucuses, although in reality he suffered a narrow defeat.Those repeated claims of election fraud, Mr. DeSantis argued during Friday’s appearance in New Hampshire, have led voters to take Mr. Trump less seriously.“I don’t think people are going to buy it,” he said.In response to Mr. DeSantis’s remarks, Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, accused the Florida governor of “reciting Democrat talking points.”“When Ron’s political career is finished in a few weeks, he can start moonlighting as a Democrat surrogate because he’s showing everyone his true colors,” Mr. Cheung said in a statement on Friday.The Trump campaign has already accused Mr. DeSantis’s team of trying to “rig” the caucuses because of comments made by his wife, Casey DeSantis. Last week, Ms. DeSantis encouraged out-of-state supporters to participate in the caucuses. But only Iowa residents are allowed to vote in state elections, and Ms. DeSantis later clarified that she had been asking people to volunteer for her husband.Whether Mr. Trump ends up claiming fraud in Iowa may well remain a hypothetical. Polls show that the former president’s support in Iowa would have to collapse in order for him to lose. And he leads his primary challengers in New Hampshire by an average of more than 25 points.So far in the campaign, Mr. DeSantis has spent more time battling for second place against Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, than taking on Mr. Trump. More

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      Chris Christie Rebukes Rivals Not Named Trump in First TV Ad

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      Mr. Christie, attacking higher-polling opponents Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, accused them of spending too much time attacking each other.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey turned his fire on Friday from former President Donald J. Trump, his usual subject of attack, to his higher-polling Republican rivals for the nomination.Mr. Christie’s campaign released its first television advertisement of the campaign cycle, which blasted Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, for targeting each other instead of the former president, whom they all trail by a wide margin.“Chris Christie is the only one who can beat Trump because he’s the only one trying to beat Trump,” the narrator in Mr. Christie’s 30-second spot says.The six-figure ad buy, first reported by Axios, is airing in New Hampshire on local broadcasts and on national outlets including CNN, CNBC and MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”It comes as Mr. Christie tries to boost himself before the Jan. 23 primary in New Hampshire, where he is in third place behind Mr. Trump and Ms. Haley. He has bet that a strong showing in the Granite State, forgoing Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses, will keep his campaign afloat in future contests.The ad cited polls that showed Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis behind Mr. Trump by double digits.“Nikki Haley, down by 26 in her home state to Trump, attacks DeSantis,” a voice-over says, citing an ad from the super PAC supporting Ms. Haley that called him “too lame to lead, too weak to win.” The ad then pivots to Mr. DeSantis: “DeSantis, down 32 to Trump in Iowa, attacks Nikki Haley,” the narrator says, airing a clip from Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC that said “you can’t trust Tricky Nikki.”“There’s only one candidate trying to stop Trump,” the ad says, before airing footage of Mr. Christie bashing Mr. Trump on the debate stage.The Times reported last month that Ms. Haley’s super PAC had spent $3.5 million on ads attacking Mr. DeSantis but none specifically attacking Mr. Trump. (On Friday, Ms. Haley called on the former president to participate in the Iowa debate, saying, “It’s getting harder for Donald Trump to hide.”)While Mr. DeSantis has attacked Mr. Trump’s record more in recent weeks, his super PAC, Never Back Down, spent 10 times more on efforts to criticize Ms. Haley than Mr. Trump.Mr. Christie trails Mr. Trump by more than 50 points in national polls, with his support hovering in the low single digits.He has spent the fewest days campaigning of the remaining Republican Party candidates, an analysis from The New York Times showed. The campaigns and super PACs supporting Mr. DeSantis, Ms. Haley and Mr. Trump have far outspent him. More

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      The Real Reason Ron DeSantis’s Campaign Is Rotting

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      Over the past two weeks, I’ve been awash in condolences. Friends tell me how deeply sorry for me they feel. They say they can only imagine my pain. They wonder how I’ve gotten through it.They’re talking about the hours I had to spend with Ron DeSantis.To be more specific, they’re talking about my coverage first of his televised face-off with Gavin Newsom and then, six days later, his debate with Nikki Haley, Chris Christie and (is there no mercy in this world?) Vivek Ramaswamy, whose singularly manic smugness makes him the political equivalent of one of those carnival rides that just spin you in circles, faster and faster. I’ve endured many presidential candidates who had me reaching for a cocktail. Ramaswamy is the first who has me looking for Dramamine.But he isn’t the great puzzle of the race for the White House. That honor belongs to DeSantis, who won a second term as Florida governor in 2022 by an indisputably wowie margin of nearly 20 percentage points, had donors lining up for the pleasure of hurling big wads of cash at him, and was supposed to be MAGA magic — Donald Trump’s priorities without Donald Trump’s pathologies.He performed a nifty trick, all right. Abracadabra: His early promise disappeared.And while DeSantis’s downward trajectory recalls the sad arcs of Rudy Giuliani in the 2008 presidential race and Scott Walker eight years later, a big part of the explanation is peculiar to him. It’s a deficit of joy.His joylessness is why it’s so unpleasant to watch him, whether he’s at a lectern or a state fair, dressed up or dressed down, demonizing schoolteachers or migrants or Mickey Mouse.Oh, sure, there’s the demonizing itself, which positions him contemptuously and censoriously far to the right. But the scornful manner completes the spiteful message. You can get away with an air of meanness if there are gusts of exuberance along with it — if you relish your rants and exult in your evil, as Trump seems or long seemed to. But not if you project the sense that campaigning is some nuisance you’ve deigned to put up with. Not if you’re put out. Not if your every smile comes across as an onerous homework assignment in a class you were forced to take for your major.“Grinding away methodically” — that’s how Dan Balz, in an article in The Washington Post last weekend, described both DeSantis’s county-by-county trudge across Iowa and his point-by-point slog through debates. Balz was sizing up Haley’s surge past DeSantis into second place in many polls, and he was kinder than the CNN senior political commentator Ana Navarro, who several days later said that the DeSantis campaign had “that certain stench of political death.”It’s not moribund yet. As Balz rightly noted, Iowa is famously unpredictable and DeSantis has garnered some important endorsements in the state. He’s also concentrating his resources there in a manner that could well lift him above Haley (though not Trump) in the end.But even before his campaign’s stench of death, he often bore the expression of someone catching a whiff of something foul. And a sour puss is not the sweetest bait. It’s not the smartest presidential audition.Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump all had moments when they communicated an outsize delight at drawing near, and then reaching, the pinnacle of American politics. They had their resentments, too, and their degrees of interest in masking those, along with their success in doing so, varied widely. Trump devolved into all resentment all the time. It’s where he dwells — or, rather, rages — now.But a while back he, like the others, could flash a certain spark. Joe Biden still can — he clearly regards the presidency as a great privilege.Maybe DeSantis does, too, and perhaps his quest for it really does excite and inspire him. You wouldn’t know it from his debates or from his CNN town hall in Des Moines on Tuesday night, when his diminished chances to win his party’s nomination prompted a salvo of negative comments about Trump that he should have been firing off all along.Maybe he’s just terrible at glee or at anything glee adjacent. Maybe that won’t matter: We’ve entered a scarier, stranger chapter of American political life — of American life, period — in which a genuine smile may seem discordant and a grudging one in tune with mournful times.Whatever the case, it’s possible that DeSantis will be back on a debate stage just before the Iowa caucuses. I apparently haven’t suffered enough.For the Love of SentencesGetty ImagesIn The Washington Post, Monica Hesse marveled at the extent to which Paris Hilton has outsourced her newborn’s diaper changing to a nanny and has thus been spared “close encounters of the turd kind.” (Thanks to Trish Webster of Hudson, Ohio, and Marjorie Hollis of Port Angeles, Wash., for nominating this.) Also in The Post, Sally Jenkins deconstructed the wild finish of the N.F.L. game last Sunday between the Buffalo Bills and the Kansas City Chiefs: “It’s the time of year when some teams flex and some teams fold. The Chiefs have been hanging on to their accustomed dominance with their fingernails, and you can almost hear the titch, titch of them slipping.” (George Gates, Greensboro, N.C.)And Shane Harris and Samuel Oakford observed that the National Guardsman Jack Teixeira’s alleged leaking of classified documents reflected “an omnivorous appetite for information about global affairs.” “It was as if he had gone to the secrets buffet and sampled one of every dish,” they wrote. (Terry Burridge, Arlington, Va.)In The Times, Lindsay Zoladz nailed a seasonal annoyance: “When a nonholiday song is suddenly reclassified in the cultural imagination as a holiday song, often, one must blame Pentatonix.” (Chris Winters, Seattle)Also in The Times, Sarah Isgur defined the challenge of discussing Vivek Ramaswamy: “I think I speak for the entire pundit class when I tell you that we’re all running out of synonyms for ‘jerk.’” (Dave Powell, Longboat Key, Fla.)And Andrew Solomon, reviewing “The Covenant of Water,” by Abraham Verghese, defended Verghese’s idealistic sensibility, asking, “Why should we assume that sophistication requires cynicism?” “People may not be as good as Verghese’s characters,” he added, “but neither are they as bad as Philip Roth’s or Saul Bellow’s. Ugliness is not truer than loveliness, nor cruelty more so than kindness.” (Florence Nash, Durham, N.C.)On Semafor, Liz Hoffman surveyed the witnesses called by a Senate committee pondering new banking rules. “We all know the image: C.E.O.s lined up behind a wood table, wearing a practiced look of contrition and their third-best watch,” she wrote. (Alan Stamm, Birmingham, Mich.)On the music blog Stereogum, Tom Breihan noted the link of a No. 1 Kelly Clarkson hit, “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You),” to a certain German philosopher: “For a proto-fascistic theorist who died in an insane asylum after a syphilis-induced nervous breakdown, Nietzsche had a real knack for a catchy phrase.” (Mark Pitcock, Merrimack, N.H.)And in an article in The New Yorker with the terrifically clever (and frightening) headline “All the Carcinogens We Cannot See,” Siddhartha Mukherjee described a conversation with a researcher named William Hill: “Hill reached into a drawer and pulled out a vial filled with a coal-black sludge. ‘That’s a solution of suspended particles of dust and soot,’ he explained. ‘It’s liquid air pollution.’ I shook the vial, watching the particles rise and settle. It was as if someone had made a hideous snow globe with the grime wiped from my windows in New York.” (Susan Hacker, Willingboro, N.J.)To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.What I’m WatchingJoJo Whilden/NetflixMy end-of-year movie binge continues, at least to the extent that it can amid a storm of work obligations. Students’ final papers! Proofreading the pages of my forthcoming book! This newsletter! I was so far behind last weekend that I couldn’t use the ticket I bought to a Sunday night showing of “Maestro.”But I found time days before that for “May December,” which I enjoyed less than most critics apparently did. I found its jumble of tones and its melodramatic score distancing, though I’m never sorry to spend time watching Julianne Moore, who plays a woman who went to prison for the sexual abuse of a minor; married and had children with him; and is trustingly but tentatively welcoming an actress (Natalie Portman) who is about to play her into the couple’s home.I’m also never sorry to spend time with Tilda Swinton, whose one extended scene with Michael Fassbender is the high point of “The Killer,” an otherwise uneven, underbaked affair about a professional assassin (Fassbender) who botches a job, is marked for elimination and strikes back against the people coming after him.“Leave the World Behind” — about strangers warily sizing up one another as they confront what just might be the end of the world — held my interest more effectively than either of those other movies did. While it plays heavy-handedly with the question of whether we humans are worse than we admit or better than we realize — whether we’re drowning in our own malice or buoyed by our fugitive grace — it expertly builds tension and has a few bravura sequences. It also has a quartet of excellent performances by Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Mahershala Ali and Myha’la. On a Personal NoteTravis Dove for The New York TimesBoth courses that I taught this semester ended last week, and in the waning minutes, my students and I allowed ourselves conversations far afield of the topics at hand. That always seems to happen. I asked them questions about their lives that I hadn’t asked before. They asked me questions about mine. A few of them, eyeing the vast and scary expanse beyond college, were curious about my path to where I am now. Did I plan it all out?Yes.And no.“Plan” is a flexible verb, an elastic concept. The students were talking about a meticulous choreography, a step-by-step progression. That’s how many people approach the future, and for some of them, it’s the right call. But what those people see as a risk-minimizing strategy always seemed dangerous to me, because it presumes a degree of control over events that most of us don’t really have and a predictability by which the world doesn’t operate. It also creates a merciless yardstick: If things don’t happen a certain way by a certain point, you’re off course. You’re behind schedule. You’ve failed.But there’s another kind of planning. It involves knowing generally what you’re after, preparing for a range of possibilities therein, not so much writing a script as sculpting a space: You want a career in the law, but you choose your focus — or it chooses you — as you go along. You want to arm yourself with the skills and sensibility to start a business, but the nature of that enterprise will be determined by circumstances that you can’t, and shouldn’t, guess right now. You want to lavish your energy on — and earn your keep with — words, but whether they’re in screenplays, novels, magazines or newspapers is up for grabs.We talk too little about that kind of map, though it has much to recommend it, including its allowance for serendipity, for surprise, which can thrill as often as it disappoints.My students asked me: Did I plan to leave New York for North Carolina and trade the churn of Manhattan for the calm of my suburb? Was I determined to become a professor? Was I set on Duke?I wasn’t set at all. I didn’t time this to happen when it did, two and a half years ago. I felt an itch for just a bit of an adventure. I felt a pang for new scenery and a new challenge. I craved more green, less noise. And I’d arranged my life so that I could make such a pivot when the pivot made sense. Then I got an email about my current job, and I let life fill in the blanks. More