DeSantis, Ron

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      Trump Thanks DeSantis for Endorsement, Calling Him ‘Gracious’

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      Former President Donald J. Trump on Sunday thanked Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida for endorsing him after suspending his campaign, calling Mr. DeSantis — once a top rival whom Mr. Trump spent significant time bashing in his speeches — “gracious.”Speaking to a packed house at a historic theater in Rochester, N.H., Mr. Trump called Mr. DeSantis’s wife, Casey, a “really terrific person.” And he said that Mr. DeSantis “ran a really good campaign.”“I will tell you, it’s not easy,” Mr. Trump said. “They think it’s easy to run this stuff, right? It’s not easy.”He went on: “But as you know, he left the campaign trail today at 3 p.m.,” adding, “And in so doing, he was very gracious, and he endorsed me, so I appreciate that.”For months, Mr. Trump made attacking Mr. DeSantis a focal point of his campaign speeches, particularly in Iowa. He bashed Mr. DeSantis as disloyal, called him a poor governor and suggested he was a political opportunist whose positions had shifted as he ran for president.But after Mr. Trump’s dominant victory in the Iowa caucuses, in which Mr. DeSantis finished a distant second, Mr. Trump shifted his sights to Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who is his closest-polling competitor in the New Hampshire primary race.In speeches this past week, Mr. Trump mostly swiped at Mr. DeSantis in casual asides that suggested he wasn’t worth the time.“You notice I haven’t mentioned the name of Ron DeSanctimonious yet,” Mr. Trump said at a rally in Manchester on Saturday, using a derisive moniker he bestowed on the Florida governor last year. “I think he’s gone.”Sunday was perhaps the first day in months that Mr. Trump did not use that nickname. Earlier in the day, he told supporters at his campaign headquarters in Manchester that he would stop using that nickname after Mr. DeSantis left the race.“Will I be using the name Ron DeSanctimonious?” Mr. Trump said. “I said that name is officially retired.” More

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      Haley Reacts as DeSantis Exits 2024 Race: ‘May the Best Woman Win’

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      Nikki Haley entered a seafood shack in Seabrook, N.H., on Sunday afternoon with some news for the crowd: Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, was no longer running for president.“We just heard that Ron DeSantis has dropped out of the race,” Ms. Haley, the former South Carolina governor, said to cheers from the several dozen attendees. “And I want to say to Ron, he ran a great race, he’s been a good governor and we wish him well.”“Having said that, it’s now one fella and one lady left,” she continued, holding up two fingers, to more cheers. She added: “For now, I’ll leave you with this: May the best woman win.”Ms. Haley and her allies have long sought to frame the presidential race as being between herself and former President Donald J. Trump, even as she finished third in the Iowa caucuses. With Mr. DeSantis now out of the race, that argument became much more salient — though recent polling averages put her 15 percentage points behind Mr. Trump in New Hampshire.She furthered that argument in a statement issued by her campaign, in which she noted that “only one state has voted” and that “half of its votes went to Donald Trump, and half did not.” (Mr. Trump received 51 percent of the vote in the Iowa caucuses.)“Voters deserve a say in whether we go down the road of Trump and Biden again, or we go down a new conservative road,” Ms. Haley said in the statement. “New Hampshire voters will have their say on Tuesday.”Ms. Haley also committed to staying in the race through the South Carolina primary and Super Tuesday on March 5, regardless of what happens in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday.Rather than deliver remarks in Seabrook, as she has at recent retail stops, Ms. Haley went straight to taking selfies and speaking one-on-one with supporters — a small victory lap, of sorts.Speaking with CNN’s Dana Bash after the event, Ms. Haley escalated her attacks against Mr. Trump, whom she has hit harder in recent days, as well as President Biden. She said they were “equally bad” for the country.“If either one of them was good, I wouldn’t be running,” she added.Ms. Haley told CNN that Mr. DeSantis, who endorsed Mr. Trump in his announcement dropping out of the race, had not called to inform her of his departure.She also said that Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina did not tell her that he would endorse Mr. Trump earlier this week — though Mr. Scott told CNN that he had texted her the day before endorsing Mr. Trump. “He didn’t tell me that he was going to do this,” Ms. Haley said. More

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      DeSantis Appears to Misattribute a Quote to Churchill as He Drops Out of Primary

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      WHAT WAS SAID“‘Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.’ — Winston Churchill”— Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, in a post on X announcing the end of his presidential campaign.This appears to be falsely attributed.There is no record of the former British prime minister, who died in 1965, saying those words, according to the International Churchill Society, which features the statement on a list of quotes that are wrongly tied to Mr. Churchill.Another quote, “Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm,” is listed alongside it.“We can find no attribution for either one of these, and you will find that they are broadly attributed to Winston Churchill,” the organization reports. “They are found nowhere in his canon, however.” More

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      Why DeSantis Says Trump’s Iowa Win Is a Sign of Weakness

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      To Donald J. Trump’s campaign, his win in the Iowa caucuses by a record 30-point margin was a sign he would steamroll to the nomination. To hear Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida tell it, the result was actually a sign of the former president’s weakness.Mr. DeSantis began offering on Friday a public version of private commentary he has been making: that Mr. Trump’s failure to get much more than roughly 50 percent of the vote during caucuses with the lowest turnout in decades indicates an inability to galvanize the Republican base in a way that signals danger in a general election.Speaking at a news conference outside the site of a planned debate that was canceled after Nikki Haley, a former United Nations ambassador under Mr. Trump, said she would not take part without her former boss onstage, Mr. DeSantis declared that Mr. Trump’s performance in Iowa was a “warning sign for the party in November.”“It’s not that it was a weak result to win the caucus,” Mr. DeSantis said. “It’s a question of what does that portend for November and how the Republican base is going to be energized or not energized.”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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      Republicans Predict Turnout in New Hampshire’s Primary Could Set a Record

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      Republicans are predicting that Tuesday’s vote in New Hampshire could break primary turnout records in the state, as former President Donald J. Trump seeks another strong showing against his rivals, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis.The current Republican primary record of about 285,000 votes was set in 2016, when Mr. Trump defeated a crowded G.O.P. field and set the tone for his eventual clinching of the party’s nomination. It would also eclipse the total from the Democratic primary in 2020, when about 297,000 votes were cast.The potential surge would represent a stark contrast from the meager turnout last week in Iowa’s Republican caucuses, which was the lowest in more than a decade as people contended with subzero temperatures.“We’re expecting a record or a near record,” Chris Ager, the chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party, said in an interview on Friday.Mr. Ager suggested that as many as 300,000 people could participate in the primary, the nation’s first, which is also open to independent voters. That key voter bloc accounts for about 39 percent of New Hampshire’s roughly 900,000 voters, according the Secretary of State — the remaining electorate is split between Republicans and Democrats.Some Republicans set even higher expectations for turnout on Tuesday, including Americans for Prosperity Action, a political network founded by the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch. The group, which is supporting Ms. Haley, said that its data partner was predicting that turnout could approach 330,000 voters.“The one thing that distinguishes New Hampshire from other states: It’s just the breadth of participation in the primary,” Greg Moore, a regional director for Americans for Prosperity Action, said at a news conference on Friday.David M. Scanlan, New Hampshire’s secretary of state and a Republican who oversees elections, on Friday predicted that 322,000 people would turn out for the G.O.P. primary.Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, a Republican who has also endorsed Ms. Haley, took a swipe at Iowa’s low turnout during an event for Ms. Haley on Tuesday night in Bretton Woods, N.H., where more than 100 people showed up in a snowstorm.“Iowa didn’t do a very good job with it,” he said. “Voter turnout was very, very low in Iowa. But here in New Hampshire we understand what this is all about, and we understand the rest of the country is watching and praying that we get this one right.” More

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      Why Wasn’t DeSantis the Guy?

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      Right before the blizzard conditions hit Iowa ahead of the caucus, in a barbecue place with arcade games and waiters in red T-shirts weaving through reporters with beers and baskets of fried food, Ron DeSantis came onstage, as he does, to Poison’s “Nothin’ but a Good Time.”This is a fratty song, and the vibe of the place was retro, much like a T-shirt I saw a guy wearing at a DeSantis event in 2022. The back read “Can’t Miss DeSantis” and featured a cartoon drawing of Mr. DeSantis, flanked by palm trees, playing beer pong.The existence of the T-shirt suggests that it once seemed possible, to someone anyway, to adopt the MAGA intellectual ethos of using the state to rebalance society and smash ideological enemies, and also be relaxed, normal, above it. Or maybe the intellectual part was never involved: There was a kind of conservative who liked the idea of a young governor making the libs cry from time to time, but whose fundamental premise was “the Free State of Florida” where a person could get back to living their lives, unbothered. And that’s where you’d find the theoretical Mr. DeSantis, ironically playing beer pong at a Bucs tailgate after church and a Home Depot run.This is reading a lot into a T-shirt, but ideas and realities about who candidates are, and what voters really want, seem central to understanding the last few years in politics. And even in 2022 that T-shirt stood out for the way its relaxed, fun bro diverged from the harder, more lawyerly governor who promised an updated, aggressive social conservatism that would use most tools of the state to battle academics and bureaucrats.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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      Why Is There No Effective Anti-Trump Constituency?

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      Michelle Cottle, Ross Douthat, Carlos Lozada and Listen to and follow ‘Matter of Opinion’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThis week on “Matter of Opinion,” the hosts take apart why Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis can’t seem to form competitive coalitions against Donald Trump, and whether Haley, DeSantis, the Supreme Court “or God himself” can keep the former president from becoming the Republican nominee.Plus, Michelle Cottle reveals her Plan B if her political reporting career doesn’t work out.(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)Illustration by The New York Times; Photograph by Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImagesMentioned in this episode:Suffolk University-Boston Globe poll of likely New Hampshire Republican primary votersHot dog car sketch on “I Think You Should Leave”Thoughts? Email us at matterofopinion@nytimes.com.Follow our hosts on X: Michelle Cottle (@mcottle), Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) and Carlos Lozada (@CarlosNYT).“Matter of Opinion” is produced by Derek Arthur, Phoebe Lett and Sophia Alvarez Boyd. It is edited by Alison Bruzek and Jordana Hochman. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Sonia Herrero, Isaac Jones, Pat McCusker, Carole Sabouraud and Efim Shapiro. Our fact-checking team is Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser. More