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      Ron DeSantis Was a Slam Dunk in Florida. Until He Wasn’t.

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      Among the possible contenders for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination not named Donald Trump, one governor has captured more than his share of attention: Ron DeSantis of Florida.But to even get to the 2024 starting line, Mr. DeSantis will first have to make it through re-election in Florida — and the treacherous politics of Covid-19. Lately, his approval ratings have slumped, and his re-election has looked like a lot less of a slam dunk. By tacking hard right on some issues, especially on Covid mandates, he may have left himself potentially vulnerable to a Democratic challenger. His stumbles also suggest the possibility that the sort of harsh, inflexible Covid policies usually associated with Donald Trump may prove a hindrance for some G.O.P. candidates who embrace them in 2022 and beyond.Mr. DeSantis passed conservative red-meat legislation like voting reform and an “anti-riot” law (a federal judge recently blocked enforcement of it) and picked fights with proponents of mask and vaccine mandates, Big Tech, the media and even some Florida cruise lines.Mr. DeSantis’s moves were not a complete surprise. In our partisan political atmosphere, there’s a rationale for firing up your base to maximize turnout. Since 2018, the proportion of registered Republicans in Florida has inched up and moved closer to Democrats’ share. As Steve Schale, a Florida election expert, recently noted, “Sometime before the end of this year, there will be more Republicans registered in Florida than Democrats” — which, he said, has never happened before.And Mr. De Santis’s focus is not solely on Florida. He gets plenty of donations from outside the state, including from hotly pursued small-dollar donors who avidly consume Fox News and love his red-meat rhetoric. And he’s already engaging in some out-of-state travel of the kind future presidential contenders do to lay the groundwork.Yet he may be taking a risk. Donald Trump won Florida only by three points in 2020. Other famed swing states like Ohio and Iowa were redder — Mr. Trump won each by eight points — and many new residents flocking there come from more left-leaning places like the Northeast.In a broader context, there’s evidence, from places like the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, that Mr. Trump was perceived as moving too far right between 2016 and 2020, and it cost him dearly with swing voters. They are a smaller group than they used to be, but especially in close elections, they can still make a difference. Similarly, many suburban women — in areas like Central Florida — have moved away from the Republican Party in the Trump era.Worse, there is some evidence for Mr. DeSantis that right-wing-base hits are problematic even with some Republicans. Florida endured a devastating summer 2021 surge in Covid cases and deaths. Mr. DeSantis’s mandates against masks and vaccines have encountered resistance, and not just in left-leaning areas. Several counties that heavily favored Mr. DeSantis in 2018 have defied his order and instituted mask mandates (some temporary), including Sarasota County, which he won by almost nine points; Indian River County, which he won by 22 points; and Brevard County, which he won by 17 points.Mr. DeSantis’s approval numbers have also declined. A late August Morning Consult poll showed him down to 48 percent approval from 54 percent in late June — with the biggest shift coming from independents. Another survey of the governor’s approval from Quinnipiac now stands 12 points lower than it did in 2019. And while he opposed vaccine mandates for cruise ships — a significant industry in the Sunshine State, with a lot of Republican customers — over 60 percent of Floridians supported them.Mr. DeSantis isn’t the only Republican who has taken a right-wing line on Covid measures and experienced political fallout from it. Since June, the disapproval numbers for Texas governor Greg Abbott have gone up among both Republicans and independents.Next year, Mr. DeSantis could be running against a former Republican governor, Charlie Crist, or Nikki Fried, the agriculture commissioner, who would be the state’s first woman governor.By following a G.O.P. base strategy on pandemic issues in a state hard hit by Covid, Mr. DeSantis may have left himself vulnerable. To reverse this slide, he might look to the types of initiatives he has pursued that were popular beyond just his base — for example, on education and the environment — as well as policies popular among Republicans, like tax cuts.If he is to win decisively in 2022 — a prerequisite for a 2024 Republican primary contest that might include at least one person named Trump — he will need to perform a lot of tricky choreography in the Sunshine State.Liz Mair (@LizMair), a strategist for campaigns by Scott Walker, Roy Blunt, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina and Rick Perry, is the founder and president of Mair Strategies. She has also consulted for a major cruise line.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Trump Coup Is Still Raging

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      What happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was not a coup attempt. It was half of a coup attempt — the less important half.The more important part of the coup attempt — like legal wrangling in states and the attempts to sabotage the House commission’s investigation of Jan. 6 — is still going strong. These are not separate and discrete episodes but parts of a unitary phenomenon that, in just about any other country, would be characterized as a failed coup d’état.As the Republican Party tries to make up its mind between wishing away the events of Jan. 6 or celebrating them, one thing should be clear to conservatives estranged from the party: We can’t go home again.The attempted coup’s foot soldiers have dug themselves in at state legislatures. For example, last week in Florida State Representative Anthony Sabatini introduced a draft of legislation that would require an audit of the 2020 general election in the state’s largest (typically Democratic-heavy) counties, suggesting without basis that it may show that these areas cheated to inflate Joe Biden’s vote count.Florida’s secretary of state, a Republican, knows that an audit is nonsense and has said so. But the point of an audit would not be to change the outcome (Mr. Trump won the state). The point is not even really to conduct an audit.The obviously political object is to legitimize the 2020 coup attempt in order to soften the ground for the next one — and there will be a next one.In the broad strategy, the frenzied mobs were meant to inspire terror — and obedience among Republicans — while Rudy Giuliani and his co-conspirators tried to get the election nullified on some risible legal pretext or another. Republicans needed both pieces — neither the mob violence nor an inconclusive legal ruling would have been sufficient on its own to keep Mr. Trump in power.True to form, Mr. Trump was able to supply the mob but not the procedural victory. His coup attempt was frustrated in no small part by a thin gray line of bureaucratic fortitude — Republican officials at the state and local levels who had the grit to resist intense pressure from the president and do their jobs.Current efforts like the one in Florida are intended to terrorize them into compliance today or, short of that, to push such officials into retirement so that they can be replaced with more pliant partisans. The lonely little band of Republican officials who stopped the 2020 coup is going to be smaller and lonelier the next time around.That’s why the Great Satan for the Republican Party right now is not Mr. Biden but Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, one of a small number of Republicans willing to speak honestly about Jan. 6 and to support the investigation into it — and willing to contradict powerful people like Kevin McCarthy of California, who has falsely (and preposterously) claimed that the F.B.I. has cleared Mr. Trump of any involvement in Jan. 6.The emerging Republican orthodoxy on Jan. 6 is created by pure political engineering, with most party leaders either minimizing, halfheartedly defending or wholeheartedly celebrating the coup, depending on their audience and ambitions. Pragmatic party leaders like Mitch McConnell, and others like him who were never passionately united with Mr. Trump but need his voters, are hoping that the memory of the riot gets swept away by the ugly news from Afghanistan and the usual hurly-burly. But other Republicans have praised the rioters: Representative Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina insisted that those who have been jailed are “political prisoners” and warned that “bloodshed” might follow another “stolen” election. The middle-ground Republican consensus is that the sacking of the Capitol was at worst the unfortunate escalation of a well-intentioned protest involving legitimate electoral grievances. More

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      Republicans threaten our children’s freedom as well as their basic safety | Robert Reich

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      OpinionUS educationRepublicans threaten our children’s freedom as well as their basic safetyRobert ReichAttacks on mask mandates expose children to Covid. Attacks on the teaching of history expose them to dangerous ignorance Sun 29 Aug 2021 01.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 29 Aug 2021 01.01 EDTMy granddaughter will go to school next week. So may your child or grandchild. For many, it will be their first time back in classrooms in a year and a half.On Covid and climate we can achieve change – but we’re running out of time | Robert ReichRead moreWhat do we want for these young people? At least three things.First and most obviously, to learn the verbal, mathematical and other thinking tools they’ll need to successfully navigate the world.But that’s not all. We also want them to become responsible citizens. This means, among other things, becoming aware of the noble aspects of our history as well as the shameful aspects, so they grow into adults who can intelligently participate in our democracy.Yet some Republican lawmakers don’t want our children to have the whole picture.Over the last few months, some 26 states have curbed how teachers discuss America’s racist past. Some of these restrictions impose penalties on teachers and administrators who violate them, including the loss of licenses and fines. Many curbs take effect next week.These legislators prefer that our children learn only the sanitized, vanilla version of America, as if ignorance will make them better citizens.Why should learning the truth be a politically partisan issue?The third thing we want for our children and grandchildren heading back to school is even more basic. We want them to be safe.Yet even as the number of American children hospitalized with Covid-19 has hit a record high, some Republican lawmakers don’t want them to wear masks in school to protect themselves and others.The governors of Texas and Florida, where Covid is surging, have sought to prohibit school districts from requiring masks. Lawmakers in Kentucky, also experiencing a surge, have repudiated a statewide school mask mandate.Why should the simple precaution of wearing a mask be a politically partisan issue?Paradoxically, many of these same Republican lawmakers want people to have easy access to guns, even though school shootings have become tragically predictable.Between last March and the end of the school year in June – despite most elementary, middle and high schools being partially or entirely closed due to the pandemic – there were 14 school shootings, the highest total over that period since at least 1999.Since the massacre 22 years ago at Columbine high school near Denver, more than a quarter of a million children have been exposed to gun violence during school hours.How can lawmakers justify preventing children from masking up against Covid while allowing almost anyone to buy a gun?The answer to all of this, I think, is a warped sense of the meaning of freedom.These lawmakers – and many of the people they represent – equate “freedom” with being allowed to go without a mask and to own a gun, while also being ignorant of the shameful aspects of America.To them, personal freedom means taking no responsibility.While Delta spreads, Republicans deflect and resort to Trump demagoguery | Robert ReichRead moreYet this definition of freedom is precisely the opposite lesson our children and grandchildren need. To be truly free is to learn to be responsible for knowing the truth even if it’s sometimes painful, and responsible for the health and safety of others even if it’s sometimes inconvenient.The duty to help our children become responsible adults falls mainly on us as parents and grandparents. But our children also need schools that teach and practice the same lessons.America’s children shouldn’t be held hostage to a partisan political brawl. It’s time we focused solely on their learning and their safety.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist
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      While Delta spreads, Republicans deflect and resort to Trump demagoguery | Robert Reich

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      OpinionUS politicsWhile Delta spreads, Republicans deflect and resort to Trump demagogueryRobert ReichTrump Republicans are falling back on their proven method of deflecting attention by blaming immigrants crossing the southern border Sun 8 Aug 2021 08.36 EDTLast modified on Sun 8 Aug 2021 10.03 EDTAs America reaches the milestone of 70% of adults with at least one dose of a vaccine, the highly contagious Delta variant is surging.Public health officials are trying to keep the focus on the urgent need for more vaccinations.But with unvaccinated Americans – notably and conspicuously residents of states and counties that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2020 – succumbing to the Delta strain in large numbers, Trump Republicans are falling back on their proven method of deflecting attention by blaming immigrants crossing the southern border.Last week, Trump issued a characteristic charge: “ICYMI: “Thousands of Covid-positive migrants passing through Texas border city,” linking a New York Post article claiming that “nearly 7,000 immigrants who tested positive for Covid-19 have passed through a Texas city that has become the epicenter of the illegal immigration surge.”Trump has employed this racist-nationalist theme before. For years he fixed his ire on Mexicans and Central Americans from “shitholes”, as he has so delicately put it. He began his 2016 campaign by charging that “criminals, drug dealers and rapists” were surging across America’s southern border, and then spent much of the subsequent four years trying to erect a fence to keep them out.Trump acolytes are adopting the same demagoguery.As hospitalizations in Florida surged past 12,000 this week, exceeding a record already shattered last weekend, Florida governor Ron DeSantis accused Joe Biden of facilitating the virus by not reducing immigration through the southern border.“Why don’t you do your job?” DeSantis snapped after Biden suggested DeSantis stop opposing masks. “Why don’t you get this border secure? And until you do that, I don’t want to hear a blip about Covid from you, thank you.”The Trumpist media is quickly falling in line behind this nativist rubbish. In the last week, Fox News’s Sean Hannity has asserted the “biggest super-spreader” is immigrants streaming over the southern border rather than the lack of vaccinations.The National Review claims “Biden’s border crisis merges with his Covid crisis” and asserts that “the federal government is successfully terrifying people about Covid while it is shrugging at the thousands of infectious illegal aliens who are coming into the country and spreading the virus.”A columnist for the Wall Street Journal insists that “if Biden Is Serious About Covid, He’ll Protect the Border.” The Washington Examiner asserts “Biden hypocrisy endangers American lives on southern border.” Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire warns of “Covid-Positive Illegal Immigrants Flooding Across The Border.”Can we please stop for a moment and look at the actual data? The Delta variant is spreading fastest in interior states like Missouri and Arkansas, far away from the Mexican border.It was first detected in India in December, and then moved directly to the United States in March and April according to the CDC.GISAID, a nonprofit organization that tracks the genetic sequencing of viruses, has shown that each of the four variants now circulating in the United States arrived here before spreading to Mexico and Central America. International travel rather than immigration over the southern border brought the viruses to America.Haven’t we had enough demagoguery and deflection? Haven’t Trump and his ilk done enough damage already?The blame game must stop. Let’s be clear: The best way to contain deaths and hospitalizations from Covid is to get more Americans vaccinated. Period.TopicsUS politicsOpinionRepublicansCoronavirusDonald TrumpFloridacommentReuse this content More