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      For Gaetz, Washington Drama Could Fuel Florida Ambitions

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      As rumors swirl about a 2026 bid for governor of Florida, Matt Gaetz said his only political goal was “electing President Trump again.”Representative Matt Gaetz’s successful push to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy has ratcheted up speculation that the fourth-term Republican congressman already has his eye on his next target, still three years away: the Florida governor’s mansion.Mr. Gaetz, a close ally of former President Donald J. Trump, has swatted away rumors that he is planning to run statewide in 2026. But that hasn’t stopped Florida’s political class from chattering. A lot.“He’d be the front-runner in any Republican primary he wants to run in right now,” said State Representative Alex Andrade, a Republican who represents the Pensacola area, which is in Mr. Gaetz’s Panhandle district. “He’s got his finger on the pulse of the Republican base better than anyone I see.”The ambitious Mr. Gaetz boasts significant name recognition and is a favorite to receive Mr. Trump’s endorsement. He knows how to dominate the news spotlight. And he has extensive connections with political operatives, lobbyists and donors from across Florida, dating back to his and his father’s years in the State Legislature and to his role leading Gov. Ron DeSantis’s transition in 2018.Much could happen between now and 2026. But the potential for a new job outside of Washington might be a welcome notion for Mr. Gaetz, who was first elected to the U.S. House in 2016.Ousting Mr. McCarthy showed how few allies he has within his party in Congress, where he is openly reviled — just seven members joined him to help topple the speaker. Many Republican lawmakers accused Mr. Gaetz of knifing Mr. McCarthy with no endgame beyond pursuing his own personal interests.Should he choose to run, Mr. Gaetz will still have liabilities as a statewide candidate. Federal prosecutors targeted him as part of a sex-trafficking investigation that did not lead to charges against him but revealed embarrassing personal details that opponents would no doubt reprise. Influential conservative media pundits have turned on him over removing Mr. McCarthy.And while Mr. Gaetz may have Mr. Trump’s strong support now, if the former president loses his 2024 bid to return to the White House, it is unclear if he would continue to play kingmaker in future elections.Speculation about Mr. Gaetz’s political future is happening unusually early, before next year’s presidential election — a sign, Florida Democrats say, that Republicans are ready to move on from Mr. DeSantis, who is running for president.“They want to look forward because they’re tired of this chaos, but obviously Matt Gaetz is not the solution to that,” said Nikki Fried, the chairwoman of the Florida Democratic Party, who ran in the primary for governor last year and could try for the job again. But, she added: “Everybody’s attention needs to be on 2024.”Unlike Mr. Gaetz, Mr. DeSantis was a largely unknown congressman from Northeast Florida when he ran for governor in 2018. His candidacy succeeded in large part thanks to Mr. Trump’s endorsement. Now in his second term, Mr. DeSantis has made the governorship an even more attractive job, expanding its authority to make the office perhaps more powerful than ever before.If the current Republican dynamics persist, the 2026 race could turn into a proxy fight between a candidate backed by Mr. Trump and one backed by Mr. DeSantis — keeping Florida at the center of the nation’s political conversation.Speculation about Mr. Gaetz’s political future is happening unusually early — a sign, Florida Democrats say, that Republicans are ready to move on from Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is running for president.Joe Raedle/Getty ImagesFor now, Mr. Gaetz insists he has no plans to seek the office, saying in a text message this week that he is “not running for governor.”“I’m exactly where I am supposed to be. And I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing,” he said. “My only political ambition is electing President Trump again.”He called a recent NBC News report that he planned to run “overblown clickbait.” But in August, Mr. Gaetz seemed to acknowledge that leading Florida had crossed his mind.“I would definitely enjoy that job so much,” Mr. Gaetz said during a livestream appearance with Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle, who encouraged him to run. “I would never leave it if I ever got that opportunity.”Among the other possible Republican contenders are the entire Florida Cabinet — Ashley Moody, the attorney general; Wilton Simpson, the agriculture commissioner, and Jimmy Patronis, the chief financial officer — as well as Lt. Gov. Jeanette M. Núñez and several members of Congress, including Representatives Byron Donalds and Michael Waltz.Mr. Donalds is seen as being particularly close to Mr. Trump. Mr. Simpson has at times clashed with Mr. DeSantis, who is term-limited. Ms. Moody and Ms. Núñez have endorsed the governor for president.There is no doubt that Mr. Gaetz is polarizing. Steve Vernon, a former chairman of the Republican Party of Manatee County, in Southwest Florida, called Mr. McCarthy’s ouster “a total mistake” by Mr. Gaetz.“Democrats are all cheering and laughing,” Mr. Vernon said. “All of the attention has switched from Biden” and immigration and other issues, he added, “and now we’re in limbo.”Were Mr. Gaetz to run for governor, Mr. Vernon said, he would have “no chance.”“He’s too extreme,” he said, “and he wouldn’t win.”Republicans in Florida’s congressional delegation, who are usually deferential to their colleagues, were angry at Mr. Gaetz and the other Republicans who ousted Mr. McCarthy. “Fringe hostage takers,” Representative Carlos A. Gimenez of Miami called them.Representative John Rutherford of Jacksonville blasted Mr. Gaetz by name. “Rep. Gaetz’s ‘concern’ for the American people is hollow,” he said. “Rep. Gaetz is driving our nation toward the brink of another government shutdown, all for clicks and cash and a boost in his national profile.”Despite his hard-line conservative views, Mr. Gaetz has also taken positions on marijuana policy and other issues that have made him friends across the aisle. One of them is John Morgan, a major Florida political donor who describes himself as a “Biden Democrat” but is registered without a party affiliation. Mr. Gaetz recently had him on when he guest-hosted a show on Newsmax.Mr. Morgan said that if the Republican field for governor is as crowded as expected, Mr. Gaetz would be well positioned to get enough votes — perhaps 30 percent — to win. “It’s kind of the Trump formula,” he said.Most people do not follow the ins and outs of Congress, Mr. Morgan added. Their takeaway from the McCarthy ouster will be that Mr. Gaetz is a “fighter,” he said, and that he is tight with Mr. Trump.Mr. Gaetz could also be helped by his family. His father, Don Gaetz, served for a decade in the Florida Legislature, including two years as Senate president, until 2016. This week, he filed to run for Senate again.In an interview, the elder Mr. Gaetz dismissed the suggestion that he was running again to be positioned to help his son, saying he was encouraged to return to politics by people in Northwest Florida.“He and I talk almost every day, and I can tell you that he is singularly focused on budget issues and spending issues and trying to get a vote on term limits in Washington,” he said. “He has not told me that he intends to run for governor. I don’t think he has an interest in it.” More

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      Trump again requests delay in Mar-a-Lago documents trial until after 2024 election

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      Lawyers for Donald Trump are asking a federal judge for a second time to postpone until after the 2024 election his trial on charges that he illegally retained dozens of national defense documents at his Mar-a-Lago club and conspired to obstruct the government’s repeated efforts to retrieve them.The request, made in a 12-page court filing to US district judge Aileen Cannon on Wednesday night, proposed delaying the start of the trial from May until at least mid-November – leaning into the justice department’s complaint last week that Trump was trying to “re-litigate” the trial date.Trump has tried to delay the classified documents trial ever since he was charged by prosecutors in the office of special counsel Jack Smith, including asking to postpone setting a trial date indefinitely as they worked through complex procedural and evidentiary rules in the case.The efforts are the result of Trump’s bet that if he were to win the election and the trials were delayed, he could direct his attorney general to drop the cases. Even if he lost, the closer the trials were to the election, the more he could allege the prosecutions were politically motivated.The dueling complaints from both sides set up another test for Cannon, a Trump appointee who came under widespread criticism last year during the criminal investigation after she issued a series of favorable decisions to the former president before her rulings were struck down on appeal.In their renewed attempt to push back the trial date, Trump’s lawyers accused prosecutors of failing to meet their statutory obligations to turn over nine of the 32 documents Trump was charged with retaining, in violation of the Espionage Act, as part of the discovery process.The filing argued that the delay in getting access to those documents, which prosecutors said last week were so sensitive that they could not be stored in a special facility in Florida to review such materials and were removed to Washington, necessitated revising the schedule for the case.Trump’s lawyers added that they needed to push back the trial schedule because the secure facility being constructed for the judge to review the classified documents in Fort Pierce, where her courthouse is located, was running more than three months behind schedule.“The special counsel’s office has failed to make very basic arrangements in this district for the handling of the relevant classified information,” wrote Trump’s lawyers Chris Kise and Todd Blanche. “The requested adjournments are necessary to allow time for these facilities to be established.”Trump’s lawyers also hit back at prosecutors for previously suggesting that the former president was trying to weaponize the complex procedures for using classified information at trial – known as Cipa, short for the Classified Information Procedures Act – to buy time.In particular, and previewing a potential defense at trial that some of the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago could not be charged because they were not “closely held” materials, Trump’s lawyers argued prosecutors needed to say whether they had tangential information that could be exculpatory.The materials are known as “prudential search requests”, a process where national security prosecutors check with the US intelligence community about the nature of sensitive documents they are considering charging.“Because some of the documents at issue address topics that are covered in open-source materials,” Trump’s lawyers wrote, “it is extremely likely that some USIC holdings undercut the Office’s contention that documents dating back to 2017 contain information that was closely held.”The Trump legal team also cited Trump’s increasingly crowded courtroom calendar as a further reason why the classified documents trial needed to be delayed, arguing that neither they nor the former president could be in two places at once.The issue stems from Trump’s other federal trial, in which he is accused by special counsel prosecutors of conspiring the subvert the 2020 election results, being scheduled to start on 4 March. But delays in that case could lead to overlap with the start of the classified documents trial set for 20 May. More

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      Matt Gaetz Is Polarizing, in Both Congress and His Florida District

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      In an overwhelmingly Republican district, Mr. Gaetz is admired for shaking up the House, but he also has plenty of critics.He is polarizing in Washington and polarizing at home. And in both places these days, he is getting more attention than anyone might expect, given his lack of seniority and thin legislative record.As Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida orchestrated the ouster of Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday, constituents in his overwhelmingly Republican district had plenty of thoughts about their congressman’s actions and suddenly robust national profile.“If we got rid of the speaker of the House, hopefully we get someone in there who doesn’t make backdoor deals with Democrats,” said Sandra Atkinson, the chairwoman of the Republican Party of Okaloosa County, adding that Republicans were proud of him for following through on his word.Critics in his district saw a political moment that was about ego and ambition and little more.“He is following through on using chaos as both a performative art — that phrase is overused but it’s true — and because he’s frustrated he’s not getting his own way,” said Phil Ehr, a Democrat who ran against Mr. Gaetz in 2018 and is now running for the U.S. Senate. “In some ways, he’s acting like a petulant child.”Yet for all of his time spent picking fights — and, his critics say, little time crafting legislation — Mr. Gaetz remains broadly popular in his district, a stretch of the western Florida Panhandle, where he won re-election last year by nearly 36 percentage points. His skirmishes in Washington, and a federal investigation that revealed embarrassing details about this private life, have done little to bruise him.Palafox Pier in Pensacola, Fla., on Tuesday. Mr. Gaetz remains broadly popular in his district, a stretch of the western Florida Panhandle where he won re-election last year.Elijah Baylis for The New York Times“There’s a lot of people who like Matt Gaetz,” said Joel Terry May, 67, a local artist, as he showed off a painting in downtown Pensacola to visitors from New Orleans. “He speaks for the people, and he speaks out.”Mr. May, who grew up in Alabama, remembers a time when former Gov. George C. Wallace visited his school back in the 1960s.“People didn’t like George Wallace nationally, but the people who elected him and represented him did,” he said. “That’s what Gaetz also understands. When you represent somebody, you want them to maintain the feel of the people. People want to see Washington work. They want their representatives to have a pulse on the area.”Mr. Gaetz is widely disliked by his peers in Congress but is grudgingly acknowledged to be smart and crafty, and certainly a master of drawing attention to himself. Mr. Gaetz was re-elected last year while under the cloud of an investigation in a federal sex-trafficking case that ultimately resulted in no criminal charges against him. (A congressional ethics review is pending.) Twice, women have been arrested after throwing their drinks at him.Now, his support for a far-right posture that could shut down the federal government — directly affecting many of the people he represents — is unlikely to dent him, his critics acknowledged.“He is loved by the First Congressional District,” said Mark Lombardo, who unsuccessfully challenged Mr. Gaetz in last year’s Republican primary.Mark Lombardo, who unsuccessfully challenged Mr. Gaetz in last year’s Republican primary. campaigning in Pace, Fla., last year. Gregg Pachkowski/Pensacola News Journal/ USA TODAYMr. Lombardo attributed his loss, among other things, to Mr. Gaetz’s family ties — his father, Don Gaetz, is a wealthy and well-known former president of the Florida Senate who on Monday filed to run for the Senate again after stepping down in 2016 — and his devotion to former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Gaetz is one of Mr. Trump’s closest allies in Congress and has backed him for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination over Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.“He was Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump,” Mr. Lombardo said of the congressman, “and the First District is all about Trump.”No other congressional district in the country has as many military veterans, a group that could have been badly hurt by a shutdown. Yet even his critics concede that Mr. Gaetz remains popular among them.Barry Goodson, 70, a registered Democrat and retired Army veteran who once helped organize people against a plan backed by Mr. Gaetz to privatize some of Northwest Florida’s sandy-white beaches, said he worries his health care providers at the Department of Veterans Affairs would suffer under a shutdown.“I still can’t understand why Gaetz hates negotiating rather than working out something for the people in the district,” he said.“A chaos agent is not good for public policy,” said Samantha Herring, a Democratic national committeewoman in Walton County. “It’s not good for getting highway funds, education and veterans affairs.”And Mr. McCarthy’s ouster left even some fans of Mr. Gaetz with questions about exactly what had been accomplished.“That just makes me support him even more,” said Tim Hudson, 26, a lifelong Pensacola resident, upon learning on Tuesday about the congressman’s successful ouster of Mr. McCarthy.Elijah Baylis for The New York TimesJohn Roberts, chairman of the Escambia County Republican Party, said that Republicans, even those typically sympathetic to Mr. Gaetz’s views on other policies like immigration and the national debt, generally supported keeping Mr. McCarthy as speaker.“It’s not like we’re mad at Matt Gaetz; he’s still a good congressman,” he said. “But I think this was probably the wrong move.”But as the House smoldered and shook, other backers of Mr. Gaetz said they were all in.Tim Hudson, 26, a lifelong Pensacola resident, has voted for Mr. Gaetz. Upon learning on Tuesday about the congressman’s successful ouster of Mr. McCarthy, Mr. Hudson offered only more praise.“That just makes me support him even more,” Mr. Hudson said.He added that the ouster of Mr. McCarthy “speaks to how the world really is right now. We’re tired. We’re fed up. We want to see people start getting things done.”Susan C. Beachy More

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      Home discomfort for Ron DeSantis as Florida Republicans edge away

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      There haven’t been many good days for Ron DeSantis’s flailing presidential campaign lately, and news that the Florida governor has slumped to fifth place in a poll for the New Hampshire primary will hardly have lifted his spirits.Yet the biggest blow of the past week came from Florida’s once fiercely loyal Republican party, which appears to be souring on the idea of their man in the White House.The state party’s scrapping last weekend of a loyalty oath for candidates in its presidential primary next year was, on its face, an innocent move, declared by its sponsors to merely ensure voters could choose from all Republicans competing for the White House. Removing Donald Trump from Florida’s ballot because he would not pledge support for the eventual nominee would be undemocratic, they said.But there appears to be more behind the defiance than just giving the former president a leg up in a race he already leads by a substantial margin. The action, which the Republican Florida governor lobbied hard against, sends a clear signal to DeSantis that he no longer enjoys the unquestioned allegiance of the party in his own state, a potentially fatal position for a candidate seeking to convince the rest of the country he is best qualified for the presidency.“People are paying attention, and they notice when a candidate’s home state is balking,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.“One thing that DeSantis was correctly noted for was his iron grip on the Florida Republican party. They didn’t question his directives, the legislature passed bills they didn’t even have extensive hearings on because DeSantis submitted them, and he kept his people in line.“He had an iron grip, but the iron has rusted. This suggests, yet again, that DeSantis has lost not only prestige, but influence, which is what really matters in the pre-nomination battle.”Rumblings have circulated for months that some Florida Republicans have become “fatigued” with their second-term governor and his extremist agenda. Several voted in the most recent legislative session against a six-week abortion ban that passed anyway, while others have criticized his feud with Disney over transgender rights.The reversal of the loyalty oath requirement approved in May for the 19 March primary heralds a significant crystallization of that opposition.Before the vote, behind closed doors at the Florida Republican party’s statesman’s dinner at an Orlando hotel, one senior operative told NBC News it “would be viewed as a ‘fuck you’ to DeSantis” if it passed.After it did, another Republican source told the outlet: “DeSantis just got steamrollered in his own home.”It came at a critical stage for his presidential run, with DeSantis’s poll numbers continuing to collapse (he trails Trump for the Republican nomination by 50 points in a Quinnipiac survey, and has slipped to third place behind Trump and Nikki Haley in New York); and while his latest campaign reset, following the dismissal of more than a third of his staff and appointment of a new manager, struggles to gain a footing.“This is going to be a case study going forward for many years, just because you won an election in your state by a landslide, that does not mean that you are unstoppable at the national level,” Sabato said.“In fact, it may mean relatively little, even when it’s a mega-state like Florida. Was Ron DeSantis the candidate who won in a landslide in 2022, or is he the presidential candidate who’s slipping below the radar today? Well, he’s both of those things. And they aren’t contradictory.“Can he reverse it? Anybody can reverse anything given the right time and circumstances, but it sure doesn’t look that way. In all the polls I’ve seen he just keeps dropping, and pretty soon one of those other candidates, maybe it’s Nikki Haley, maybe somebody else, will end up going above him in the polls. Maybe it’s only a few points, but that’s all that’s needed to change the narrative.”Notably, the measure to reverse the loyalty oath was brought by the Republican state senator Joe Gruters, the former chair of the state party who has clashed with DeSantis over the Disney wrangle. In June, Gruters accused DeSantis of vetoing spending in his district as retribution for not supporting him.“The governor is clearly upset I endorsed Donald Trump for president, so he took it out on the people of Sarasota county,” he said in a statement at the time. “Simply because I support his political opponent, the governor chose to punish ordinary Floridians.”Gruters did not respond to a request for comment from the Guardian, but told reporters after the Orlando vote that it was about fairness.“It’s not about the pledge. It’s about creating unnecessary roadblocks late in the game that makes it perceived that it’s anti-Trump,” he said, according to Politico.DeSantis, who skipped the Orlando humiliation for fundraising events in New York, will have the chance to try to win back the support of state Republicans at the party’s Florida Freedom Summit in Kissimmee on 4 November.“The Florida GOP will remain neutral, but we will work to support the entire Republican team by helping give all the presidential candidates as many opportunities as possible to connect with Florida voters,” spokesperson Nathalie Medina told reporters.Before that, however, DeSantis must plot his strategy for the next Republican primary debate on 27 September in California, seen by many as another possible make-or-break moment for his campaign.“He’s had a lot of turnover in his management team, his campaign team, so we’ll see. A lot of us are watching whether that’s going to make a difference, particularly looking ahead to the next debate,” said Susan MacManus, distinguished professor emeritus of political science at the University of Florida.“Will he continue to focus on policy, which is what a lot of people would prefer, or is he going to have to get into the bashing of Trump and his colleagues on the stage? I don’t think the payoff for him is good in bashing, it’s in identifying problems facing the country and talking about how he will deal with them.” More

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      DeSantis Played Both Sides of the GOP Rift Over the 2020 Election

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      The Florida governor created an election crimes unit that placated election deniers. It led to scores of “zany-burger” tips, and, according to one Republican, “Kabuki theater.”It resembled a political rally more than a news conference. In November 2021, exactly one year after Donald J. Trump lost the presidential election to Joseph R. Biden Jr., Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida spoke to a raucous crowd in a hotel conference room just a few miles from Mr. Trump’s home base of Mar-a-Lago.Their suspicions about vast election malfeasance would be heard, Mr. DeSantis promised. He was setting up an election police unit and he invited the crowd to send in tips about illegal “ballot harvesting,” nodding to an unfounded theory about Democrats collecting ballots in bulk.The crowd whooped and waved furiously. “He gets it!” posted a commenter watching on Rumble.But in his seven-minute, tough-on-election-crimes sermon, Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, never explicitly endorsed that theory or the many others spread by the defeated president and embraced by much of their party.In this way, for nearly three years, Mr. DeSantis played both sides of Republicans’ rift over the 2020 election. As his state became a buzzing hub of the election denial movement, he repeatedly took actions that placated those who believed Mr. Trump had won.Most prominent was the creation of an election crimes unit that surfaced scores of “zany-burger” tips, according to its former leader, disrupted the lives of a few dozen Floridians, and, one year in, has not yet led to any charges of ballot harvesting or uncovered other mass fraud.Yet Mr. DeSantis kept his own views vague. Only last month — two years, six months and 18 days after Mr. Biden was sworn into office — did Mr. DeSantis, now running for president, acknowledge that Mr. Biden had defeated Mr. Trump.Mr. DeSantis has said he pushed “the strongest election integrity measures in the country.” But critics say their main impact was to appease a Republican base that embraced conspiracy theories about elections — and that came with a cost.He failed to counter lies about the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Florida judges are considering whether his administration overstepped its legal authority.Nathan Hart, a 50-year-old ex-felon from near Tampa, is among 32 people who have been arrested or faced warrants under the new initiative. Mr. Hart, who plans to appeal his conviction, said he lost his job as a warehouse worker because he had to show up in court. When he cast his ballot for Mr. Trump he had no idea he was ineligible to vote, he said.He and others suffered so that the governor “could have a really good photo op and make himself look tough,” he said.Workers at the Miami-Dade County Elections Department tabulating mail-in ballots in October 2020. The 2020 election was one of the smoothest in state history.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesThe 2020 AftermathTightening voting rules had not been high on Mr. DeSantis’s agenda when he first came into office in 2019. After the ballot-counting debacle during the 2000 presidential election, Florida had substantially revamped its elections. Experts considered the 2020 election, in which over 11 million Floridians voted, well run and smooth. Mr. Trump won by 371,686 votes.One significant change Mr. DeSantis made to Florida’s elections was his decision to join the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC. The data-sharing program, which had bipartisan support, helps states identify people who had moved, died or registered or voted in more than one state.When he announced the move to a group of local election supervisors, they broke into applause.But after the 2020 election, Mr. DeSantis came under concerted pressure from Mr. Trump’s loyalists. Florida became a staging ground for people promoting election conspiracy theories, including Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, and the Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne.Pressed again and again on whether he accepted Mr. Biden’s victory over Mr. Trump, Mr. DeSantis dodged. “It’s not for me to do,” he replied in December 2020. “Obviously, we did our thing in Florida. The college voted,” he said, referring to the Electoral College. “What’s going to happen is going to happen.”But within a few months, Mr. DeSantis was pushing for legislation he said would bulletproof Florida’s elections from fraud, with tighter rules for mail-in ballots, the use of drop boxes and third-party organizations that register voters.The governor signed the bill live on Fox News in May 2021.Peter Antonacci, the now-deceased former director of the election crimes unit, and Mr. DeSantis in 2022.Amy Beth Bennett/South Florida Sun-Sentinel, via Associated PressElection Crimes UnitBut lobbying by the election denial movement did not end. Cleta Mitchell, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers in his effort to undo the outcome of the 2020 election, helped organize Florida activists into state and local groups through her national Election Integrity Network.Members of Defend Florida, another group, went door to door canvassing for evidence of voter irregularities. They delivered their leads to local elections officials, who, to the group’s frustration, typically investigated and dismissed them.Public records show the organization’s representatives met repeatedly with aides to the governor and other high-level members of his administration. Six months after the 2021 changes became law, Mr. DeSantis proposed the election crimes unit — a top priority, aides told lawmakers. He requested a team of state law enforcement officers and prosecutors who could bypass the local officials he suggested had turned a blind eye to voting abuses.Some lawmakers worried about giving the governor’s office too much influence over law enforcement, according to people familiar with the deliberations. The Republican-led Legislature did not explicitly authorize state prosecutors to bring voter fraud charges, as Mr. DeSantis had requested.Otherwise, the governor got much of what he wanted: $2.7 million for a 15-member investigative unit and 10 state law enforcement officers dedicated to election crimes. His administration has used prosecutors under the attorney general’s office to handle the bulk of the cases, even without the Legislature’s authorization.The new investigative unit became a receptacle for activists’ tips about fraud. Activists at times alerted conservative media outlets to their leads, generating headlines about new investigations. Some accusations poured through unusual channels.Activists in Mr. DeSantis’s home county, Pinellas, handed over one binder full of tips to Mr. DeSantis’s mother. They later heard back that the package had been successfully delivered in Tallahassee, according to two people familiar with the episode.A small team reviewing the claims found the vast bulk were not credible.“Most that comes my way has zany-burger all over it,” Peter Antonacci, the now-deceased former director of the election crimes unit, wrote to an official in a local prosecutor’s office in 2022, according to an email obtained by The New York Times through a public records request.Andrew Ladanowski, a former analyst for the unit who describes himself as an elections data hobbyist, said he spent weeks combing through voter records from the 2020 election. He had expected to find thousands of cases of illegal votes, but pickings were slim. “I can safely say there was no large-scale fraud that could have had a change in a state or a national election. It wasn’t sufficient,” he said.Jeff Brandes, a Republican former state senator who opposed the election crimes unit, described it as largely “Kabuki theater.”Five days before Florida’s 2022 primary election, the governor, then running for re-election, announced third-degree felony charges against Mr. Hart and 19 other ex-felons.Nathan Hart, a 50-year-old ex-felon from near Tampa, is among 32 people who have been charged with election crimes under the new initiative.Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post, via Getty ImagesA 2018 ballot initiative allowed former felons to vote but exempted those who had been convicted of murder or sex offenses. Defendants and their lawyers have said they were unaware of that distinction. They said they thought they could vote because the state had allowed them to register and issued them voter registration cards.At a news conference announcing the charges, Mr. DeSantis said more cases from the 2020 election were to come. “This is the opening salvo,” he said.But by the end of 2022, the unit had announced only one other case against a 2020 voter. Mr. Ladanowski said by the time he had left in December, the team had moved on to vetting the current voter rolls.As of July, the election crimes unit had referred nearly 1,500 potential cases to local or state law enforcement agencies, according to the governor’s office. Just 32 — or 2 percent — had resulted in arrests or warrants, and those cases were unrelated to the purportedly systematic abuses that elections activists claimed had tainted the 2020 election.Thirteen of the defendants had been convicted of felonies. Defense attorneys said that some ex-felons accepted plea deals simply out of fear of being sent back to prison, and that none received a stiffer penalty than probation. Appeals court judges are now considering whether the state prosecutors had the legal authority to bring charges.The election crimes unit also fined more than three dozen organizations that ran voter registration drives a total of more than $100,000 — much of that for failing to turn in the voter registration forms quickly enough.The governor has said that even a limited number of arrests will deter voter fraud. Press officers for the secretary of state and the state law enforcement agency said the DeSantis administration expected courts to eventually decide that it acted within its authority, and that investigations of mass fraud like ballot harvesting are complex, time-consuming and still open.Warning Against ‘the Left’s Schemes’Mr. DeSantis endorsed Doug Mastriano, a vocal election denier running for governor, during a rally in Pittsburgh in 2022.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesIn August 2022, the day after he announced the election crime unit’s first arrests, Mr. DeSantis went to Pennsylvania to endorse Doug Mastriano, a vocal election denier running for governor.The trip was another chance for the governor to show election activists he gets it. Onstage with a man who had worked with Mr. Trump’s lawyers to send an “alternate” slate of electors to Washington, Mr. DeSantis spoke carefully.He did not mention the 2020 result, but he stressed that his state had cracked down on illegal voters. “We’re going to hold ’em accountable,” he told an enthusiastic crowd, ending his speech with an exhortation to “take a stand against the left’s schemes.”Mr. DeSantis continued to dance around the 2020 election for another year, while his policies sent a strong message to the Republican base.In March 2023, Cord Byrd, Mr. DeSantis’s secretary of state, announced that Florida would pull out of ERIC, the system Mr. DeSantis had ordered the state to join in 2019.Only a few weeks earlier, Mr. Byrd had called ERIC the “only and best game in town” to identify people who had voted in two different states, according to the notes of a private call he had with Florida activists allied with Ms. Mitchell. The notes were provided by the investigative group Documented. In its annual report, the election crimes unit also described ERIC as a useful tool.But Ms. Mitchell’s group and other critics had attacked the system as part of a liberal conspiracy to snatch Republican electoral victories. Mr. Byrd said publicly that Florida had lost confidence in it, and his agency cited ERIC’s failure to correct “partisan tendencies.”In Florida, activists celebrated the victory. But they also want more. In interviews they said they were frustrated that the election crimes unit hasn’t brought more charges or validated their claims of mass elections malfeasance.And when Mr. DeSantis finally said last month that “of course” Mr. Biden had won the 2020 election, he faced the sort of reaction he had long tried to avoid.“It’s a betrayal,” said Wesley Huff, a Florida elections activist who has been involved in Defend Florida and other groups.Trip Gabriel More

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      Florida city’s offer of Safe Place to LGBTQ+ people prompts Republican ire

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      A central Florida city is moving forward with plans to join the popular national Safe Place initiative protecting LGBTQ+ people and others, despite opposition from Republicans who consider it a “deceptive and coercive” political mandate.Councilors in Mount Dora, a historic and eclectic small city famous for its antiques stores, art galleries and festivals, voted last month to affiliate with Safe Place, which seeks to give victims of hate crimes or bias a temporary shelter if they feel threatened.The program began in Seattle in 2015 as a voluntary partnership between the police department and local businesses, which displayed rainbow stickers in the shape of a police badge to denote their participation. The effort has since been adopted in more than 350 cities nationwide, including dozens in Florida.But four Republican state politicians from Lake county, in which Mount Dora sits, took exception to the city’s declaration, accusing the city in a letter last month of “virtue signaling”, and insisting they would explore “all legislative, legal and executive options available” to oppose a move they say contravenes “Biblical principles”.“This local Safe Place program is negligent, irresponsible and divisive at best,” according to the letter signed by the Lake county legislative delegation, state representatives Taylor Yarkosky, Keith Truenow and Stan McClain, and state senator Dennis Baxley.The four claim that the city is picking “winners and losers”, and warn small businesses they risk economic harm by turning off customers, citing recent rightwing boycotts of Target and Bud Lite for affiliating with the LGBTQ+ community.Crissy Stile, the mayor of Mount Dora, told the Guardian the city would not be dissuaded by the politicians, who represent a county she said was “a little bit slower on the equality scale”.“Mount Dora is very advanced, very inclusive, very safe already for all kinds of walks of life and beliefs, and Lake county is a little bit behind us,” she said.“The political pushback doesn’t surprise me, but the actual wording of the letter did. It surprised me that they would take that step to make it so official, and to have all the legislators sign off on it.”Stile said the city was moving ahead with its plan to seek accreditation by Safe Space, which has its headquarters in Seattle, as early as October. She added that she heard little criticism from the public.“We haven’t had a lot of people that were really upset, and the ones that are, really, are just upset that the decal’s depiction of a safe place is a rainbow,” she said.“To me, it doesn’t matter if it’s a rainbow or a happy dog face, it’s just raising awareness for treating people with kindness and respect no matter who they are, what they believe in, what they feel or who they love.”Michael Gibson, Mount Dora’s interim police chief, outlined the next steps for the program at a city council last week, at which members voted down a proposal to halt the process for review.“I think that it’s an important beacon that when I look at it I’m not offended. As a conservative American it doesn’t offend me, not one bit,” Gibson told the council, according to WFTV News.Gibson said his officers would receive training in dealing with victims of hate crimes, and that the design of the decal will be finalized at a later stage.Yarkosky, the author of the letter, and self-declared constitutional conservative, did not respond to a request for comment from the Guardian. But he posted to X, formerly Twitter, a follow-up letter explaining why the original was sent.“We simply want to know why the City of Mount Dora is seeking to force Seattle style political mandates on our small businesses,” he wrote. “We should be weary [sic] of deceptive and coercive mandates administered by local government that could have an opposite effect on public safety as well and [sic] put our small businesses at risk.”Notably, the second letter was signed only by Yarkosky, and none of his colleagues. Baxley, when questioned by local journalists, appeared to backtrack a little, saying he wasn’t 100% familiar with the Mount Dora program or the intentions of city leaders.“Our interest is strictly keeping the peace in Lake county,” he said, although, as the Republicans’ original letter to the city concedes, that has not been a problem before. “We had to go back over 12 years to find reports in your area regarding any such bigotry, prejudice or outright hate crimes being reported,” they wrote.Stiles said none of the politicians had spoken to her directly, and she was not worried by threats of economic penalties.“Our city’s not going to shut down if we don’t get our typical appropriation from Tallahassee that we ask for every year,” she said.“We were lucky enough to be awarded half a million dollars for a repaving project in our downtown, and for that we’re thankful. But I don’t think the city falls apart if they do follow through with their threat of economic harm to our city.” More

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      DeSantis Spreads Covid Vaccine Skepticism With Guidance Contradicting C.D.C.

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      The C.D.C. on Tuesday recommended at least one dose of the updated Covid-19 vaccines for most Americans six months and older.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida’s administration issued Covid-19 vaccine recommendations this week that directly contradicted federal officials’ guidance as his presidential campaign tries to use the resurgence of the virus to appeal to Republican voters.With cases ticking up, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended on Tuesday that everyone six months and older who had not received a Covid-19 shot in the last two months receive a booster vaccine. The new shots, approved by the Food and Drug Administration this week, appear to be effective against a vast majority of Covid-19 variants now in circulation, according to data presented at a C.D.C. meeting on Tuesday.Mr. DeSantis’s administration advised that Florida residents under the age of 65 skip the updated boosters.“I will not stand by and let the F.D.A. and C.D.C. use healthy Floridians as guinea pigs for new booster shots,” Mr. DeSantis, who has a history of downplaying the efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines, said in a statement after he hosted an online panel Wednesday to discuss the new federal guidelines.Appearing alongside Mr. DeSantis was Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, Florida’s surgeon general, and other medical doctors who expressed skepticism about the shots.“What I have directed our department to do is to provide guidance that really recommends and advises against the use of these mRNA Covid-19 vaccines for anyone under 65,” Dr. Ladapo said during the panel on Wednesday.Covid-19 cases have steadily increased since July, and public health officials have warned of a comeback for the virus in the fall and winter months — though some experts say that this year is less alarming than previous years. Conspiracy theorists, right-wing influencers and politicians have seized on the moment to stoke fears that the government would again initiate widespread shutdowns or masking requirements to help prevent the spread of the disease. But federal and state officials have not suggested that those types of measures are under consideration.In the release accompanying Mr. DeSantis’s statement, the governor’s office said that Covid-19 vaccines had “shown little to no benefit to prevent Covid-19 infection” — a claim that is directly contradicted by a host of evidence from doctors, public health officials and infectious disease experts.The C.D.C. specifies that while older adults and “persons with weakened immune systems” are at greater risk for hospitalization and death from the disease, “healthy children and adults can still experience severe disease.” The “benefits of Covid-19 vaccination continue to outweigh any potential risks,” the agency said.Mr. DeSantis — whose presidential campaign has floundered amid money troubles and mass layoffs — has frequently appealed to Covid-19-related concerns among the Republican base, both from the governor’s office and on the campaign trail.Mr. DeSantis has talked up his handling of the virus in the state to contrast himself with former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican front-runner in the 2024 presidential race whom he trails badly in polls, and whose administration headed the development of the coronavirus vaccines that are now very unpopular among Republican voters. Mr. DeSantis often highlights that he was one of the first governors to fully reopen his state after a pandemic lockdown.At a public health event in Jacksonville last week that, in the absence of formal policy announcements, resembled a campaign rally, Mr. DeSantis said: “I can tell you here in Florida, we did not and we will not allow the dystopian visions of paranoid hypochondriacs to control our health policies, let alone our state.”Nicholas Nehamas More

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      Covid Hero or ‘Lockdown Ron’? DeSantis and Trump Renew Pandemic Politics

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      The Florida governor has recently highlighted his state’s response to the coronavirus in hopes of striking some distance from Donald Trump.Hank Miller, a 64-year-old Iowa farmer, started paying attention to Gov. Ron DeSantis during the coronavirus pandemic, when the Florida governor was a constant presence on Fox News highlighting the reopening of his state.While Mr. Miller voted for former President Donald J. Trump in 2016 and 2020, he now plans to support Mr. DeSantis, in part, he said, because he was “disappointed” with Mr. Trump for following the advice of the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, whom Mr. DeSantis has said should be prosecuted.“I liked how DeSantis responded to the pandemic,” Mr. Miller said at a coffee shop in Grundy Center, Iowa, where Mr. DeSantis campaigned on Saturday. “He didn’t just shut things down.”Mr. DeSantis, far behind Mr. Trump in the polls in Iowa and nationally, is clearly hoping that such feelings are widespread among Republican primary voters. The governor’s record on Covid-19 provides perhaps his strongest contrast with the former president, whose administration spearheaded the development of the coronavirus vaccines that are now deeply unpopular with the Republican base.The virus could be an important wedge issue for Mr. DeSantis, who at times has struggled to provide voters with a clear case for why he would be a better president than Mr. Trump, the Republican front-runner. But there are questions about whether a pandemic that many Americans see as long over will resonate with the electorate in 2024.Now, a recent resurgence of Covid-19 cases is giving Mr. DeSantis a chance to press the argument. In response to the uptick, a small number of schools, universities and hospitals have told students, patients and employees to wear masks again. Mr. DeSantis and other Republicans have seized on that as evidence that the Covid-19 debate, which they frame as a civil rights battle, is far from over.Mr. DeSantis emphasized that point during his swing through Iowa on Saturday. “When you have people going back to restrictions and mandates, this shows that this issue has not died,” he told reporters outside the coffee shop in Grundy Center. “This shows that if we don’t bring accountability with my administration, they are going to keep trying to do this.”Since returning to the campaign trail after Hurricane Idalia, which hit Florida last month, Mr. DeSantis has seemingly made the virus his No. 1 issue. He has appeared repeatedly this past week on Fox News and other conservative media outlets lauding his pandemic policies, and has done interviews with local news media outlets in Iowa and New Hampshire. He even held a news conference in Jacksonville — in his role as governor — to promote the way he handled the virus.“I can tell you here in Florida, we did not and we will not allow the dystopian visions of paranoid hypochondriacs to control our health policies, let alone our state,” Mr. DeSantis said on Thursday at the event in Jacksonville, which, in the absence of formal policy announcements, had the feel of a campaign rally.Mr. DeSantis is taking advantage of an apparent shift in the national mood on the virus, even among Democrats. Only 12 percent of Americans say they typically wear a mask in public, according to a poll conducted in August by Yahoo News and YouGov.President Biden joked with reporters at the White House about the fact that he was not wearing a mask days after the first lady, Jill Biden, was diagnosed with Covid-19.Al Drago for The New York TimesAfter the first lady, Jill Biden, was recently diagnosed with Covid-19, President Biden joked with reporters at the White House about the fact that he was not wearing a mask. Although he had tested negative, Mr. Biden said he was told he needed to continue masking for 10 days.“Don’t tell them I didn’t have it on when I walked in,” Mr. Biden said, holding up his mask.As Mr. DeSantis has elevated the issue of Covid-19 once more, the Trump campaign has responded by accusing Mr. DeSantis of hypocrisy, pointing out that he did issue shut down orders and at one point praised Dr. Fauci.“Lockdown Ron should take a look in the mirror and ask himself why he’s trying to gaslight voters,” Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman, said in a statement.But while many Republican governors shut down their states at the pandemic’s start, Mr. DeSantis was early to fully reopen.Mr. Trump, who was always skeptical of masking and other public health measures, has also begun talking about Covid-19 restrictions on the trail.“The radical Democrats are trying hard to restart Covid hysteria,” Mr. Trump said on Friday at a rally in Rapid City, S.D. He has also downplayed the role Dr. Fauci played in his administration.Still, as Republican candidates try to resuscitate the pandemic as a political issue, they may face virus weariness.During Mr. DeSantis’s Saturday bus tour through Iowa, several voters said in interviews that the pandemic was not a top concern for them going into 2024, even if they admired the governor’s record.“We don’t need to hear about it,” said Dave Sweeney, a retired farmer who said he was trying to decide between supporting Mr. DeSantis, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. “It’s not really an issue anymore.”It’s possible that audiences in places like New Hampshire, which imposed more stringent public health measures than Iowa, may be more receptive.In the run-up to his presidential campaign, Mr. DeSantis signed a series of public health laws in Florida that he often points to on the trail, including ones banning mask and vaccine mandates. He also instigated a state grand jury investigation into possible “misconduct” by scientists and vaccine manufacturers. (No charges have been brought.)While Mr. DeSantis says his Covid-19 policies protected Floridians from government overreach and kept the economy going, the state suffered a disproportionate number of coronavirus deaths during the Delta wave of the virus in 2021, after Mr. DeSantis stopped preaching the virtues of vaccines, a New York Times investigation found.During Mr. DeSantis’s recent bus tour through Iowa, several voters said in interviews that the pandemic was not a top concern for them going into 2024.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesStill, such criticisms are unlikely to matter in a Republican primary where many voters discount the severity of a virus that has killed more than a million Americans since 2020.“I think it’s a common cold,” said Roger Hibdon, 32, an engineer from Grundy Center. “I’m not worried about it.”Michael Gold More