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    Haley Heads Into Second G.O.P. Debate on the Rise, Making Her a Likely Target

    After her breakout performance at the first debate, the former South Carolina governor has gained attention from Republican voters and donors and is moving up in the polls.At a campaign event at a scenic country club in Portsmouth, N.H, on Thursday, James Peterson, a businessman, thrilled an audience when he stunned Nikki Haley with a question she said she had never heard before, and which cut straight to the point: 100 years from now, how do you think history will remember Donald Trump?“I always say, ‘I’ve done over 80 town halls in New Hampshire and Iowa — that’s all the debate prep I need,’ but you take it to a whole new level,” Ms. Haley said to a roar of laughter from roughly 100 Rotary Club members and their guests.She then took a quick beat before diving into a measured, yet sharpened, critique of Mr. Trump and his administration — the good, the bad, and with some subtlety, the ugly.“Time does funny things. My thought will be that he was the right president at the right time,” she said, later making clear, “I don’t think he is the right president now.”Such a thorny question might be just the type of preparation Ms. Haley, 51, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, is looking for as she heads into the next Republican presidential debate on Wednesday with real momentum — and as the likely focus of political attacks.After her last performance on the national debate stage, in which she made a strong general election pitch and tangled with opponents on foreign policy, climate and abortion, Ms. Haley has seen gains in the polls, a rush of volunteers and swelling interest from early-state voters.Recent surveys have her running third in Iowa and New Hampshire and second in her home state of South Carolina. One CNN survey showed Ms. Haley beating President Biden in a hypothetical general-election matchup.Some of her top fund-raisers said donors who had been waiting on the sidelines for a Trump alternative to emerge were coalescing behind her. Former Gov. Bruce Rauner of Illinois, a top giver to her rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, has transferred his allegiance to Ms. Haley.Another major backer, Eric J. Tanenblatt, an Atlanta businessman who has hosted three fund-raisers for Ms. Haley since March, said the excitement around her candidacy has increased significantly in recent weeks.“When she was here last week, we didn’t have to call people, people were calling us,” he said. He noted that the size of her events have grown, “each one bigger than the one before.” He added of his most recent gathering: “We had to turn people away — it is a good problem to have.”But even as Ms. Haley looks to replicate her debate success next week, the 2024 presidential race still appears to be Mr. Trump’s to lose. And with voters and donors starting to pay more attention, her rivals are likely to as well.Since the last debate, Ms. Haley has mostly split her time between New Hampshire and South Carolina while also making up ground in Iowa. She has continued to burnish her foreign policy credentials, criticize Republicans on spending — which played well in the first debate — and call for a change in generational leadership.On a farm last week in Grand Mound, Iowa, she drove a corn combine and spoke of the need to fix the legal immigration system to address farmers’ labor shortages against a backdrop of gleaming green tractors and American and Iowa flags. But she also pledged to defund sanctuary cities and send the military into Mexico to tackle drug cartels.In a packed auditorium at St. Anselm College in Goffstown, N.H., on Friday, Ms. Haley laid out her economic priorities, including eliminating the federal gas and diesel tax, ending green energy subsidies, overhauling social security and Medicare for younger people and withholding the pay of Congress members if they fail to pass a budget.She criticized both Republican and Democratic presidents for increasing the debt but reserved her toughest broadsides for China and Mr. Biden, whom she accused of plunging the nation into “socialism” and enlarging government, saying he was pouring money into social and corporate welfare programs that she argued were hurting the poor “in the name of helping the poor.”Ms. Haley rode a corn combine during a farm tour in Grand Mound, Iowa, last week.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesHer appearances lately have drawn in moderates, independents and even some Democrats who say they like her fresh face and appeals to common sense and reason. “I like her fast thinking and proactive ideas,” said Nancy Wauters, 67, a retired medical office support staffer and an independent voter who went to see Ms. Haley speak at a Des Moines town hall last week after being impressed by her performance in the first debate.But swaying Trump die-hards who have continued to rally behind the former president has been more difficult. “I like Nikki Haley a lot,” said Barbara Miller, 64, a retired banker, at Ms. Haley’s event in Portsmouth. “But I just feel that Donald Trump is the stronger, more electable candidate.”When another voter at the country club in Portsmouth pressed Ms. Haley on how she would overcome his advantage, Ms. Haley said she expected the field to winnow after the contests in Iowa and New Hampshire and to come to a “head-to-head” matchup in her home state of South Carolina.Mr. Trump missing the first debate and now possibly the second was a mistake, she said.“You can’t win the American people by being absent,” she said. 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    DeSantis falls to fifth in New Hampshire poll in latest campaign reverse

    The Florida governor Ron DeSantis fell to fifth in a new New Hampshire poll, trailing not just Donald Trump, the runaway leader for the Republican presidential nomination, but Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley and Chris Christie.The poll, from CNN and the University of New Hampshire (UNH), was just the latest worrying sign for DeSantis, whose hard-right campaign has struggled ever since a glitch-filled launch with Elon Musk on his social media platform in May.The former president faces 91 criminal charges, for election subversion, retention of classified information and hush-money payments, and civil threats including a defamation case in which he was adjudicated a rapist.He denies wrongdoing and claims political persecution. His popularity with Republicans has barely been dented. Though at 39% his support in the New Hampshire poll was lower than in national and other key state surveys, he still enjoyed a commanding lead.Describing “a close contest for second”, CNN put the biotech entrepreneur Ramaswamy at 13%, the former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador Nikki Haley at 12% and Christie, a former New Jersey governor running explicitly against Trump – and focusing on New Hampshire – at 11%.DeSantis was next with 10%, a 13-point drop since the last such poll in July.The Florida governor has run a relentlessly hard-right campaign, seeking to outflank even Trump, by any measure an extremist.“DeSantis’s decline comes largely among moderates,” CNN said, detailing a 20-point drop in such support, “while Haley has gained ground with that group. Ramaswamy’s standing has grown among younger voters and registered Republicans. And Christie’s gains are centered among independents and Democrats who say they will participate in the GOP primary.”Ramaswamy and Haley were widely held to have shown well in the first debate, in Wisconsin last month. The second is in California next week. Trump is again set to skip the contest.Outside the top five in the CNN-UNH poll, the South Carolina senator Tim Scott attracted 6% support and Mike Pence, a former Indiana governor and vice-president to Trump, scored 2%. No other candidate passed 1%.New Hampshire will be the second state to vote. It has been widely reported that Trump is gearing up to attack DeSantis in the first, Iowa, where DeSantis has targeted evangelical voters.According to the author Michael Wolff, Rupert Murdoch, the Fox News owner, originally believed Trump would lose to DeSantis in Iowa because “it was going to come out about the abortions Trump had paid for”. Iowa polling, however, returns consistent Trump leads.Speaking to the New York Times, David Polyansky, DeSantis’s deputy campaign manager, said: “Winning an Iowa caucus is very difficult. It takes a tremendous amount of discipline. It takes an incredible amount of hard work and organisation, traditionally. So much so that even in his heyday, Donald Trump couldn’t win it in 2016.”The Texas senator Ted Cruz won Iowa then. But Trump won the nomination – and the White House.On Wednesday, at an oil rig in Texas, DeSantis introduced his energy policy, attracting headlines by saying opponents were stoking “fear” about the climate crisis.A spokesperson, meanwhile, was forced to deny Wolff’s report that DeSantis may have kicked Tucker Carlson’s dog.“The totality of that story is absurd and false,” Andrew Romeo told the Daily Beast, of the report involving the former Fox News host. “Some will say or write anything to attack Ron DeSantis because they know he presents a threat to their worldview.” More

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    Doug Burgum and Asa Hutchinson May Not Make the Next GOP Debate

    Low poll numbers could keep the long-shot Republicans off the stage next Wednesday in the second presidential primary debate.After eking their way into the first Republican presidential debate last month, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, long-shot candidates, appear to be in jeopardy of failing to qualify for the party’s second debate next week.Both have been registering support in the low single digits in national polls and in the polls from early nominating states that the Republican National Committee uses to determine eligibility.The threshold is higher for this debate, happening on Wednesday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif. Several better-known G.O.P. rivals are expected to make the cut — but the candidate who is perhaps best known, former President Donald J. Trump, is again planning to skip the debate.Mr. Trump, who remains the overwhelming front-runner for the party’s nomination despite a maelstrom of indictments against him, will instead give a speech to striking union autoworkers in Michigan.Who Has Qualified for the Second Republican Presidential Debate?Six candidates appear to have made the cut for the next debate. Donald J. Trump is not expected to attend.Some of Mr. Trump’s harshest critics in the G.O.P. have stepped up calls for the party’s bottom-tier candidates to leave the crowded race, consolidating support for a more viable alternative to the former president.Lance Trover, a spokesman for the Burgum campaign, contended in an email on Wednesday that Mr. Burgum was still positioned to qualify for the debate. Mr. Hutchinson’s campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Emma Vaughn, a spokeswoman for the R.N.C., said in an email on Wednesday that candidates have until 48 hours before the debate to qualify. She declined to comment further about which ones had already done so.Before the first debate on Aug. 23, the R.N.C. announced it was raising its polling and fund-raising thresholds to qualify for the second debate, which will be televised by Fox Business. Candidates must now register at least 3 percent support in a minimum of two national polls accepted by the R.N.C. The threshold for the first debate was 1 percent.Debate organizers will also recognize a combination of one national poll and polls from at least two of the following early nominating states: Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.“While debate stages are nice, we know there is no such thing as a national primary,” Mr. Trover said in a statement, adding, “Voters in Iowa and New Hampshire are the real people that narrow the field.”Mr. Burgum’s campaign has a plan to give him a boost just before the debate, Mr. Trover added, targeting certain Republicans and conservative-leaning independents through video text messages. A super PAC supporting Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is running a distant second to Mr. Trump in Republican polls, has used a similar text messaging strategy.Mr. Burgum, a former software executive, is also harnessing his wealth to introduce himself to Republicans through television — and at considerable expense. Since the first debate, a super PAC aligned with him has booked about $8 million in national broadcast, live sports and radio advertising, including a $2 million infusion last week, according to Mr. Burgum’s campaign, which is a separate entity. His TV ads appeared during Monday Night Football on ESPN.As of Wednesday, there were six Republicans who appeared to be meeting the national polling requirement, according to FiveThirtyEight, a polling aggregation site.That list was led by Mr. Trump, who is ahead of Mr. DeSantis by an average of more than 40 percentage points. The list also includes the multimillionaire entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy; Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Mr. Trump’s United Nations ambassador; former Vice President Mike Pence; and former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.And while Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina was averaging only 2.4 percent support nationally as of Wednesday, he is also expected to make the debate stage by relying on a combination of national and early nominating state polls to qualify.Mr. Scott has performed better in places like Iowa and his home state than in national polls, and his campaign has pressed the R.N.C. to place more emphasis on early nominating states.The R.N.C. also lifted its fund-raising benchmarks for the second debate. Only candidates who have received financial support from 50,000 donors will make the debate stage — 10,000 more than they needed for the first debate. They must also have at least 200 donors in 20 or more states or territories.While Mr. Burgum’s campaign said that it had reached the fund-raising threshold, it was not immediately clear whether Mr. Hutchinson had.Both candidates resorted to some unusual tactics to qualify for the first debate.Mr. Burgum offered $20 gift cards to anyone who gave at least $1 to his campaign, while Politico reported that Mr. Hutchinson had paid college students for each person they could persuade to contribute to his campaign.Candidates will still be required to sign a loyalty pledge promising to support the eventual Republican nominee, something that Mr. Trump refused to do before skipping the first debate.Shane Goldmacher More

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    Trump Campaigns in Iowa, Where GOP Rivals See Their Best Chance

    After a light campaign schedule in the key early state, the former president is making five trips in the next six weeks.Even as former President Donald J. Trump faces a crowded field of Republican primary challengers, he has kept a relatively light campaign schedule, particularly in Iowa, the first state to hold a nominating contest in the 2024 election.But with less than four months until Iowa’s caucuses, Mr. Trump and his team are beginning a more concerted effort to lock up his support there, starting with two events on Wednesday in eastern Iowa that represent the first of five planned visits to the state over the next six weeks.The increased pace of Mr. Trump’s Iowa visits, along with a six-figure advertising purchase by a super PAC supporting him, suggest a more concerted effort by his campaign and supporters to halt his rivals before any can gain momentum and pose a threat.With Mr. Trump holding a commanding lead among Republicans both in national surveys and in Iowa polls, some rivals have made barnstorming the state a cornerstone of their strategies, hoping a victory there could help them coalesce support in later primaries.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who frequently polls as Mr. Trump’s strongest rival, has made Iowa a particular focal point, planning to visit all 99 of its counties and building a robust state operation. Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur and political neophyte who has drawn increased support since last month’s Republican debate, has also been blitzing the state talking to voters.Whether this strategy will prove effective remains unclear. Mr. Trump still exerts a firm hold on the Republican base, and he did not need to win the caucus in 2016 in order to receive his party’s nomination. And even as an Emerson College poll released last week showed Mr. Trump’s support among Iowa Republican voters slipping somewhat over the past four months, he still remained 35 percentage points ahead of Mr. DeSantis.Mr. Trump’s campaign has said it has collected more than 27,000 cards in which voters pledge to back the former president in the caucuses. Its events on Wednesday — at a “commit to caucus” event in Maquoketa and at a convention center in Dubuque — will be aimed in part at helping organize supporters ahead of the voting on Jan. 15.“President Trump’s aggressive upcoming schedule in Iowa reflects his continued commitment to earning support in the state one voter at a time,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said in a statement.Mr. Trump has made seven trips to Iowa this year, well below other candidates. He has skipped some of Iowa’s large multicandidate events, including a major gathering of evangelical Christians that was held on Saturday and is typically a staple of Republican campaigning.Mr. Trump has remained popular with evangelical voters, even as he has expressed views that might normally alienate them, including his reluctance to endorse a federal abortion ban. In an interview broadcast Sunday on “Meet the Press” on NBC, he criticized Mr. DeSantis for signing a six-week abortion ban in Florida that Mr. Trump called a “terrible thing.”His last two appearances were at high-profile and much-covered events: the Iowa State Fair in August and the Iowa-Iowa State football game this month.His speeches on Wednesday, likely of a slightly smaller scale, will coincide with increased spending on advertising by MAGA Inc., the super PAC backing his campaign. The group spent more than $700,000 on ads in Iowa last week and this week, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.Similar groups backing Mr. DeSantis and Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, each spent more than a million in that same period.Nicholas Nehamas More

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    Trump’s Abortion Comments Expose a Line of Attack for Rivals in Iowa

    After Donald Trump said a six-week ban signed by Ron DeSantis in Florida was “a terrible thing,” Iowa’s governor defended a similar law in her state, and others joined in the criticism.Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa attacked former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday for his criticism of restrictive abortion legislation, highlighting a potential weakness for Mr. Trump in her state just months before the Iowa caucuses.During an interview broadcast on Sunday, Mr. Trump called a six-week abortion ban signed by his main rival in the polls, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a “terrible thing.” Governor Reynolds signed a similar law in Iowa this summer.“It’s never a ‘terrible thing’ to protect innocent life,” she wrote on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, adding that she was “proud” of the state’s six-week ban, known among conservatives as a “heartbeat” bill. She did not refer to Mr. Trump — who was set to visit Iowa on Wednesday — by name, but her meaning was clear.Later on Tuesday, one of her Republican colleagues, Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, similarly criticized Mr. Trump for his comment. Mr. DeSantis also went after the former president on X.Ms. Reynolds, a Republican popular in her home state, came under attack by Mr. Trump this summer after saying she would not endorse in Iowa’s caucuses, although she has appeared at several campaign events alongside Mr. DeSantis. Criticizing her, and Iowa’s abortion ban, poses a risk for Mr. Trump, the race’s clear front-runner, as doing so could anger the evangelical Christian voters who are highly influential in the state’s Republican caucuses, set for early next year.The conflict over abortion could also provide an opening for Mr. DeSantis ahead of the Republican debate, which Mr. Trump is skipping, next week. The Florida governor and his allies have pilloried Mr. Trump’s comments, especially his statement that he would cut a deal with Democrats on abortion, and Mr. DeSantis may continue that line of criticism at the debate, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in California.“I think all pro-lifers should know that he’s preparing to sell you out,” Mr. DeSantis said in an interview on Monday with RadioIowa. Relatively few faith leaders and elected officials have been openly critical of Mr. Trump for his comments, reflecting how unwilling many have been to challenge the man who retains the loyalty of much of the Republican base.This year, Donald J. Trump has largely dodged questions about abortion.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesThe nomination race has entered a new phase since Labor Day, with the Iowa caucuses just four months away. While Mr. Trump has consolidated support among Republican voters after four criminal indictments this year, his rivals are now seeking to shift the race.While, in private, Republicans generally described Mr. Trump’s attack on Mr. DeSantis as an unforced error in Iowa, few faith leaders have openly criticized the former president. But comments from Ms. Reynolds and Mr. Kemp have reinforced his comments as an issue.A spokesman for Ms. Reynolds declined to comment. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.Few women know they are pregnant by six weeks. Abortion rights backers say such early bans amount to near total prohibition.Mr. Trump has long appeared uncomfortable discussing abortion in the context of Republican politics, as a former Democrat who once favored abortion rights. Yet, he and his advisers are increasingly looking past the primary to the general election. Mr. Trump privately said in 2022 before the elections that the repeal of Roe v. Wade, made possible by the conservative majority he appointed to the Supreme Court, would hurt Republican candidates in the 2022 midterms.This year, Mr. Trump has so far dodged questions about whether he would support a 15-week federal abortion ban, which is the baseline many anti-abortion activists have set for Republican candidates. But he still leads widely in primary polls. Many Republican voters seem willing to give Mr. Trump a pass on the issue because of his role in overturning Roe.Although Mr. DeSantis signed a six-week abortion ban in Florida this year, he also has not endorsed a federal ban at either six or 15 weeks.On Saturday, at a gathering of Christian conservatives in Des Moines, Mr. DeSantis was asked whether he supported a federal abortion ban. In keeping with his past statements, he did not give a direct answer.“I think the states have done the better job thus far,” he said. “Congress has really struggled to make a meaningful impact over the years.”He then talked about his efforts in Florida to help mothers and pregnant women.Other candidates, such as former Vice President Mike Pence, have come out strongly in favor of at least a 15-week ban. Former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina has taken a more nuanced approach, saying that Republicans will find it impossible to force such a bill through the Senate.In Iowa, the six-week ban is not in effect, while it awaits a ruling from the State Supreme Court. Ms. Reynolds signed a similar bill in 2018, but the measure was not made law after a court challenge.The status of abortion in Florida is also awaiting a decision from that state’s Supreme Court. More

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    Urgency Grows for DeSantis in Iowa as Trump Looks to Finish Him Off

    Despite spending far more time campaigning across the must-win state, Ron DeSantis still trails Donald Trump by double digits. And now Mr. Trump is stepping up his visits.On paper, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is doing everything that a Republican presidential candidate should do to win Iowa.He is doggedly crisscrossing the state, visiting 58 of its 99 counties so far and vowing to make it to the rest. He is meeting voters at small-town churches, meeting halls, county fairgrounds and ice-cream parlors, heavily courting evangelicals and racking up endorsements from influential faith leaders and local politicians. His super PAC is building a formidable get-out-the-vote operation and says it has reserved $13 million in television ads in Iowa through Thanksgiving.For Mr. DeSantis, who is trailing former President Donald J. Trump in Iowa by double digits, the state has become a must-win. Mr. Trump, who has campaigned sparingly here, appears to know it. The Trump campaign recently announced that he would visit Iowa five times in the next six weeks, including stops on Wednesday, in a clear attempt to scupper Mr. DeSantis’s bid for the presidency with a resounding victory in the Jan. 15 caucuses, the first votes of the race for the nomination.Mr. Trump’s enduring popularity with the Republican base — so strong that the former president has recently felt comfortable veering away from the party’s orthodoxy on abortion — is only one of Mr. DeSantis’s major hurdles in Iowa. The other is his lack of light-up-the-room charisma and folksy authenticity, qualities that seem required, at a minimum, to beat an established star like Mr. Trump.“He’s very cerebral, very smart,” said John Butler, 75, an accountant from Pella, Iowa, who heard Mr. DeSantis speak on Saturday at a gathering of Christian conservatives in Des Moines. “But it feels like it can be hard to get to know him.”For now, Mr. DeSantis’s top advisers say they are planning a steady diet of the grind-it-out approach that worked for the Republican victors in the 2008, 2012 and 2016 Iowa caucuses — none of whom, notably, went on to capture the party’s nomination.“Winning an Iowa caucus is very difficult,” David Polyansky, Mr. DeSantis’s deputy campaign manager, said in an interview this month. “It takes a tremendous amount of discipline. It takes an incredible amount of hard work and organization, traditionally. So much so that even in his heyday, Donald Trump couldn’t win it in 2016.”A campaign stand for former President Donald J. Trump was set up at a tailgate event this month in Nevada, Iowa.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMuch of the DeSantis strategy mirrors the approach taken by the last three Republicans to win contested caucuses in Iowa: former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, all social conservatives who trekked to practically every corner of the state. Mr. Cruz — not exactly a ball of white-hot magnetism himself — beat Mr. Trump here in 2016, an effort in which Mr. Polyansky played a key role.“Governor DeSantis is doing the 99-county tour,” said Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who appeared with Mr. DeSantis on Saturday at a meet-and-greet at a county historical society in her hometown, Red Oak. “He’s meeting with those Iowa voters. That makes a difference.”And Mr. Trump may be giving Mr. DeSantis openings to press his case in the state.In an interview broadcast on Sunday, Mr. Trump called a six-week abortion ban that Mr. DeSantis signed in Florida a “terrible thing.” Iowa passed a similar law that is widely popular with social conservatives. Mr. DeSantis struck back on Monday in an interview with Radio Iowa, saying, “I don’t know how you can even make the claim that you’re somehow pro-life if you’re criticizing states for enacting protections for babies that have heartbeats.”The former president has also spent few days campaigning in Iowa so far, and he was booed when he appeared this month at the Iowa-Iowa State football game.“They’re jittery, they’re nervous, and they absolutely should be,” Mr. Polyansky said of the Trump campaign. “At the end of the day, it’s going to be a very tight race in Iowa. And the former president losing there seriously damages the sheen of invincibility that they are trying to project.”Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said Mr. Trump would “put the pedal to the metal” in Iowa, even though he has a commanding lead.“We don’t play prevent defense,” Mr. Cheung said in a statement. “President Trump’s aggressive upcoming schedule in Iowa reflects his continued commitment to earning support in the state one voter at a time.”One of Mr. DeSantis’s biggest challenges may be showing voters that he is not as painfully awkward as his critics suggest.Rachel Paine Caufield, a professor of political science at Drake University in Des Moines, has seen Mr. DeSantis appear at roughly 10 events so far this cycle. She said that his small-town approach made sense in Iowa but that he himself might not be the right candidate to execute it. She has been particularly struck, she said, by how he interacts with voters.“He always looks miserable until he’s directly in front of a camera about to take a selfie,” said Dr. Paine Caufield, who has written a book about the Iowa caucuses.On Twitter, a cottage industry has sprung up turning Mr. DeSantis’s most awkward moments into viral memes. There was the time he told a young girl at a county fair in Iowa that her Icee probably had a lot of sugar. The painful way his face contorted when he was reminded that Mr. Trump led him in the polls. And, of course, the bizarre, almost body-racking laughs — his head thrown violently back, eyes screwed shut, mouth agape — he uses to herald jokes from voters.New York magazine and Vanity Fair have packaged those interactions into clickbait listicles. They have become fodder for late-night comedians. The Onion, a satirical news site, has turned Mr. DeSantis into a regular punching bag (“DeSantis Has Surprisingly Smooth Verbal Exchange With Iowa State Fair Corn Dog,” one headline read).Even his super PAC, Never Back Down, reminded Mr. DeSantis that he should be “showing emotion” when discussing his wife and children, in an unexpectedly public memo about last month’s debate.Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC, Never Back Down, has been integral to his campaign in Iowa, and it has reserved $13 million in television ads there through Thanksgiving.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesBut on the campaign trail, where he is often accompanied by his wife, Casey, a former local television anchor, and their three small children, Mr. DeSantis has seemed plenty likable, voters say. Even some Trump supporters don’t find him to be a stiff. They just like Mr. Trump better and wish the Florida governor had waited to run until 2028.“I saw a very confident spokesman for what he believes in,” said Madeline Meyer, 85, a retiree who heard Mr. DeSantis speak at a fund-raiser in Iowa last month but said she planned to stick with the former president. “He’s got a good voice and a nice, young family.”In a Fox News interview last weekend, Mr. DeSantis called criticisms of his demeanor a “bogus narrative.”Kristin Davison, Never Back Down’s chief operating officer, said the group’s messaging in Iowa would zero in on Mr. DeSantis’s plans for immigration and the economy, which polling shows are top issues for Republicans.“We’re focusing on amplifying what the governor has said he will do for voters,” Ms. Davison said in an interview.Mr. DeSantis has also tried to tailor his appeal more specifically to Iowa voters in recent trips, after heavily focusing his initial pitch on his record in Florida. He has noticeably adjusted his stump speech to talk less about Florida and more about what his priorities would be as president.But the governor clearly finds it hard to leave his home state behind.As he walked through an Iowa cattle ranch over the weekend, a gust of wind blew his blazer open, revealing that its lining had been stitched with images of Florida’s state flag.Maggie Haberman More

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    The Run-Up Podcast: Share Your Questions About the 2024 Election

    As primary season gets underway, “The Run-Up” podcast will begin answering listener questions in a new, recurring segment.Is the Republican primary just a race for second place? How old is too old to be president? Is it really going to be Biden vs. Trump … again?If you’re paying any attention to politics these days, you might have some questions. On “The Run-Up,” the politics podcast I host, I want to help answer them.In our first two seasons, we tried to examine a lot of big political questions and answers — such as the perceived inevitability of former President Donald J. Trump as the Republican nominee, even as he faces criminal charges, and the way the Democratic Party has consolidated support around President Biden, over the concerns of voters.Starting in mid-October, we’ll be back every week — here to serve as your election companion through Election Day on Nov. 5, 2024.I’ve traveled around the country a lot as a reporter since Mr. Trump was elected and one thing I’ve learned is that in this political era the normal rules don’t apply. And while you can’t really answer the question of “who will win?” you can do a lot before election night. Specifically, you can explore the factors that will determine the result, and make the stakes of the race clear for voters to understand. That’s what I’ll do this season on “The Run-Up” — along with my colleagues at The New York Times.So what do you want to know about this election season? We want to know. You can either fill out the form below, or send a recording of your question(s) via email: therunup@nytimes.comWe will not publish or share your contact information outside of the Times newsroom. Nor will we publish any part of your submission without talking with you first. If we’re interested in featuring your question and voice on the podcast, we may contact you to learn more and to record your question. More

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    Why Does the Republican Field All Sound the Same?

    There’s a late-summer-fade quality to the Republican primary contest, as if the candidates are passively sliding into the inevitability of a Biden-Trump rematch.Donald Trump and a variety of other people see the animating factor here as the indictments against him. “We need one more indictment to close out this election,” Mr. Trump joked last month. This is also the prism through which the other candidates get discussed: that they don’t criticize Mr. Trump much, especially over his indictments.But there’s a bigger and more claustrophobic reality to the fading quality of Ron DeSantis and all these other Republicans: It’s as if they constructed their identities as Trump alternatives and ended up all the same.Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote this summer that Mr. DeSantis can sound generic next to Vivek Ramaswamy: They talk the same way about China and TikTok, about how they will use military force against the cartels in Mexico (even though this really sounds as if we will be going to war with Mexico), about the F.B.I.Two weeks before Mr. Wallace-Wells was in Iowa watching Mr. Ramaswamy make Mr. DeSantis sound generic, I heard Mr. DeSantis and Senator Tim Scott use a similar metaphor about the border — houses, which are being broken into — in events 18 hours apart. If we don’t control the border, it might not be our country, Mr. Scott said. We will repel the intrusion with force, Mr. DeSantis said. We will finish the wall, they said.“That’s why you see these things like weaponization of agencies, because nobody’s held them accountable,” Mr. DeSantis said. “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired watching the weaponization of the D.O.J. against their political opponents, against pro-life activists,” Mr. Scott said. On Day 1, Mr. DeSantis said, we’ll have a new F.B.I. director. The first three things we have to do, Mr. Scott said, are fire Joe Biden, Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray. “You’re going to have housecleaning at the Department of Justice,” Mr. DeSantis said. “We should actually eliminate every single political appointee in all the Department of Justice,” said Mr. Scott, who wants to “purge” the politicization of the department for the benefit of all Americans. They walked off the stage to the same song (Darius Rucker’s cover of “Wagon Wheel”).It can be hard to remember what made Mr. Trump distinct eight years ago, because it has become the texture of our lives. The 1980s tabloid dimension of his language — weeping mothers, blood and carnage, rot and disease in institutions, brutal action — crushed the antiseptic piety and euphemisms of the post-Bush Republican Party. The lurid, fallen vision of American life that implicitly casts critics as naïve chumps or in on the corruption is the one we still occupy.Now they all sound kind of like that. Politicians’ impulse to shorthand and flatten major policies and controversies is eternal, but it’s not just that they use similar words. The way these politicians talk takes the old, once-novel Trump themes, aggressive energy and promises and packages them into indoctrination and the administrative state.At the event in July where Mr. DeSantis sounded so like Mr. Scott did the evening before, he was midway through a period that the campaign had signaled would be a reset. At first, speaking to a midday crowd in Iowa, Mr. DeSantis ventured onto different ground, talking about economic concerns, the cost of things, debt. But he ended up talking about woke ideology, the administrative state, Disney and all the rest. If you spend a few days in New Hampshire, seeing Mr. Ramaswamy here and Mr. DeSantis there, or the full field at something like Iowa’s Lincoln Dinner, you can imagine nearly the entire Republican presidential field, hands joined, heads turning at once and saying with one voice, “End the weaponization of the Justice Department.”This dynamic might be on display in its purest form on the subject of voting and elections, in the way what Mr. Trump cares about flows through the base and becomes the starting premise of what the other candidates talk about. Mr. DeSantis runs a state with well-regarded early voting and ballot-counting practices — one where Mr. Trump won twice, along with a bunch of down-ballot Republicans. He transformed widespread voter fraud, an (illusory) concern of Mr. Trump’s, into a unit that would address (rare) instances of voter fraud and arrested a handful of people, some of whom have said they had no reason to believe they couldn’t vote, to prove the point that he takes Mr. Trump’s fake concerns seriously.Practically every candidacy right now is about Mr. Trump: The protest candidates exist to oppose Mr. Trump; the alternatives basically seem constructed in the negative (Trump but nice, Trump but we’ve got to win the suburbs again, Trump but competent) and grown inside the Trump concerns lab. Here and there, the candidates talk about health care, education costs, the economic changes with artificial intelligence or anything that might be kitchen table — things that exist beyond Mr. Trump’s reach — but it’s amazing how little some of this stuff is emphasized beyond inflation and energy costs.During the August debate, the Fox News moderators put something Nikki Haley said — that trans kids playing girls’ sports is “the women’s issue of our time” — to a few candidates. When they asked Ms. Haley, she barely registered her own line and led with, in what seems to be her real voice: “There’s a lot of crazy, woke things happening in schools, but we’ve got to get these kids reading. If a child can’t read by third grade, they’re four times less likely to graduate high school.” She can oscillate a bit, in and out of past and present iterations of the G.O.P., but as David Weigel wrote this spring, she accepts the premise of the Trump era: “I am very aware of a deep state,” she told a voter who asked about her plans to dismantle it this spring. “It’s not just in D.C.; it’s in every one of our states.”And none of them are winning! It might be the indictments that have firmed up Mr. Trump’s support, but the inescapable sameness of the candidates, especially when they should sound and seem different, is real.The idea some conservatives had for Mr. DeSantis — including Mr. DeSantis — was that he would be a singular figure, uniting the people attracted to the statist aggression of Mr. Trump and the people looking to move beyond Mr. Trump. Fundamentally, this depended on the idea that Mr. DeSantis is distinct from Mr. Trump, which seems like a misunderstanding. His appeal for certain kinds of conservatives, particularly donors, depended then on a subtle trust that he would not go too far and could shift into some other plane of political operation.But they were never distinct figures; Mr. DeSantis’s rise in the party as a competent aggressor exists because of the Trump era and the things that Mr. Trump is and isn’t. He makes happen what Mr. Trump talks about. And, like all the others who have defined themselves by being an alternative to an individual who is still always present, he has ended up talking about the same things and sounding the same as most of the others. Mr. Trump created the air that everyone now breathes.Katherine Miller is a staff writer and editor in Opinion.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