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      Ron DeSantis Faces Four Main Challenges Ahead of 2024

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      Ron DeSantis has cut back, reorganized, reset and refocused his presidential campaign. We talked to Republican strategists about what they think he ought to do next.The presidential campaign of Gov. Ron DeSantis is clearly in a downward spiral, whether measured by polling, internal upheaval, shifting strategies or money woes.Early this year, Mr. DeSantis seemed to have a clear path to the Republican nomination: He was a political fighter in the mold of Donald J. Trump, but without the chaos and with a solid record of conservative achievements in Florida.But those best-laid plans have met reality — a Trump rebound and a crowded Republican field — and now the Florida governor is desperately struggling to regain his footing after his campaign this week announced its third major shake-up in a month.In interviews, Republican strategists with experience in presidential races (but unaffiliated with Mr. DeSantis or his 2024 rivals) diagnosed some of the top problems of his campaign.What to do about Trump?There is no way around it. Solving the Trump problem is the master key to this election, and no one has found it. Mr. DeSantis, like almost every other Republican in the race, adopted a strategy of never criticizing Mr. Trump, for fear of alienating his ardent base. The theory was that at some point Mr. Trump would disqualify himself, and Mr. DeSantis would be positioned to inherit his supporters.But now, after three criminal indictments have failed to dent Mr. Trump’s popularity with Republican voters, pressure is mounting on Mr. DeSantis to stop pretending Mr. Trump isn’t in the race and take him on directly.“The people who want Trump don’t need a mini-me Trump,’’ said Barbara Comstock, a former Republican member of Congress from Virginia, who is not a fan of either the former president or Mr. DeSantis.This week, Mr. DeSantis took a small step in the direction of taking on Mr. Trump by stating plainly that “of course” he lost the 2020 election, a position that conflicts with what many Republican voters believe.“Trump is the de facto Republican incumbent, and in order to beat an incumbent you have to give voters a fire-able offense,” said Terry Sullivan, who managed Senator Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign in 2016.A related problem: Mr. DeSantis has failed to captivate voters, either with a charismatic stump speech or with a new charm offensive in which he wades into crowds, poses for selfies and engages in chitchat. Sarah Longwell, who conducts focus groups of Republican voters, said that recently she had witnessed something novel: Not one G.O.P. voter brought up Mr. DeSantis’s name in the groups. “People are like, we gave you a look and we’re not that interested,’’ she said.A muddled message.“The No. 1 failing for any campaign, and it’s clearly DeSantis’s problem — what is his elevator pitch?” said Dave Carney, a New Hampshire-based strategist who has advised multiple presidential campaigns.One day, Mr. DeSantis is reminding voters about taking on the Walt Disney Company over what he views as “woke” corporate meddling. Another day, he is picking a fight with Representative Byron Donalds, the only Black Republican in Florida’s congressional delegation, over the state’s new standards for teaching Black history.These headline-making fights may break into the Trump-dominated media coverage, but Mr. Carney said they hadn’t given voters a slogan they remember.“You have to have a message that’s relatable and simple and that you can communicate,’’ he said. “‘Morning in America,’ ‘Are you better off than four years ago?,’ Make America Great Again.’”Just what that should be, of course, is up for debate.Mr. Sullivan said he thought Mr. DeSantis was on point when he talks about electability. Mr. DeSantis has often suggested that Mr. Trump, now saddled with criminal charges stemming from his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, can’t win a general election.“The messaging the other day was very smart — if the election is about January 2021, and not about Joe Biden’s record, we will lose,” Mr. Sullivan said.Gail Gitcho, a consultant who worked on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, said Mr. DeSantis needed to talk about his achievements in Florida.“He’s got something no one else has — executive experience in a big state with countless examples of his effectiveness and conservatism,” she said. “Stop with the donor-induced shake-ups and run on his record.”Too much talk about donor-induced shake-ups?All summer, media reports have been filled with accounts of Mr. DeSantis’s struggles, fed by campaign insiders, his wealthy donors and other Republicans with a close view. It has led to steady headlines about campaign restarts and reboots and a revolving door of personnel. The coverage feeds a narrative of a campaign in trouble, which becomes self-fulfilling.Mr. Sullivan said Mr. DeSantis needed to just run the plays without discussing them.“You just have to keep your head down and execute. Win the day. Win the week. Then string them together,” he said.Putting all the chips on Iowa.In an earlier reboot, Mr. DeSantis’s campaign said it would zero in on Iowa, touring the state by bus, after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on private air travel, and visit all 99 counties. Such a hyperlocal strategy of retail engagement with voters is traditionally what underfunded long shots pursue. But it also raises the stakes for Mr. DeSantis in Iowa, a state where he was trailing Mr. Trump by 24 percentage points in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll.Although the Iowa caucuses are still several months away, Mr. DeSantis is playing a risky expectations game, one that could make it difficult for him to rebound if he doesn’t post a strong showing in Iowa.“Clearly, they said they’re going to win Iowa,” Mr. Carney said. “I just think a campaign that talks too much, that brags about what they’re going to do — they set themselves up for traps.”Ms. Longwell, on the other hand, said an all-in-on-Iowa strategy made sense.“Iowa is hand-to-hand combat,” she said. “You have to get a story in Iowa that Ron DeSantis is running close to Trump — because now it’s all a downward death spiral.” More

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      DeSantis Takes His Iowa Push To a New Venue: Weddings

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      The Florida governor, who has struggled at times to connect with voters, is looking for every opportunity to show he is all-in with Iowa Republicans.Two great traditions converged in Des Moines on Saturday night when wedding crashing came to Iowa politics.Iowa State Representative Taylor Collins welcomed an unexpected guest to his wedding reception: Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Mr. DeSantis and his wife, Casey, strode just behind the newlyweds into the event, held at a Beaux-Arts-style building in the state’s capital, to cheers and a standing ovation, according to videos posted on social media and confirmed by an attendee. They then spent an hour mingling with roughly 150 guests.The last-minute table-grabbers had been invited by the bride, Savannah Collins, to the surprise of her husband, who had previously endorsed Mr. DeSantis’s presidential bid, according to two people familiar with the event. Several other state legislators who have endorsed Mr. DeSantis were also in attendance.For the governor, who is struggling to gain ground on former President Donald J. Trump, according to recent polls, the appearance was a clear attempt to demonstrate that he possessed the interpersonal touch that has sometimes seemed lacking in his presidential campaign.Mr. DeSantis’s allies said he saw a path to victory in Iowa’s January caucus through an aggressive plan to visit each of the state’s 99 counties, meet voters in person and win endorsements from local officials. As of Saturday, Mr. DeSantis had visited nearly 30 counties.After making fewer visits to the state than some of his lower-polling rivals for the Republican nomination, Mr. DeSantis recently started to step up his appearances in Iowa, where polling shows he is performing better than he is nationally. His campaign recently has focused on the state as he has worked to position himself as the Trump alternative after losing ground earlier this year.Before dropping in on the wedding, Mr. DeSantis had spent Friday and Saturday on a bus tour of northeast and central Iowa, where he made frequent stops to address voters in small groups, answer questions and engage in the retail politics that Iowa voters expect, such as scooping ice cream for locals at a dairy store.“You’ve got to show up in people’s communities and you’ve got to be able to make the case about why you should be the nominee of the party and the 47th president of the United States,” Mr. DeSantis told a group of several dozen voters at a Pizza Ranch restaurant in Grinnell, Iowa, on Saturday afternoon.The comments were a thinly veiled attack on Mr. Trump, who has skipped events hosted by prominent evangelical Christian leaders and who recently picked a fight with Iowa’s popular Republican governor, Kim Reynolds. “I think anybody who’s not willing to do that is basically telling you that they don’t think they have to earn your vote,” he continued. “And I think that’s a mistake.”Both Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis, as well as the rest of the presidential field, are set to attend the Iowa State Fair, a major event on the political calendar that begins this week.Polling shows that Mr. DeSantis’s efforts are playing better in Iowa than in other parts of the country. Iowa Republicans are more likely than voters nationwide to see Mr. DeSantis as “moral,” “likable” and “able to beat Joe Biden,” although he still lags Mr. Trump in the state by 24 percentage points overall, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll.While Mr. DeSantis has had success attracting endorsements from state lawmakers like Mr. Collins, Mr. Trump has much more backing from members of Congress, in part because of the former president’s attention to personal relationships, which has included reaching out to lawmakers when they or their family members fall ill and hosting them for dinners.Mr. Trump is also known to drop in at weddings held at Mar-a-Lago, the exclusive Palm Beach social club that serves as his home, as well as at his Bedminster golf resort in New Jersey.This was not Mr. DeSantis’s first attempt at surprising Iowa voters.In May, after a busy day of campaigning around the state, he made an unscheduled evening stop at a barbecue restaurant in Des Moines, not far from where Mr. Trump had canceled an earlier rally (because of bad weather, according to Mr. Trump’s campaign).After Mr. DeSantis’s unexpected entrance to the wedding, Mr. Collins celebrated on social media, saying: “You never know who will crash your wedding reception during caucus season! An honor to be on #TeamDeSantis.”In response to an email seeking comment, he wrote: “It was great for our family and friends from across the country to experience firsthand what it’s like to be in Iowa during caucus season. I can’t think of a better way to end the night than seeing everyone spend time with the governor.”Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York. More

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      ‘These people are diehard’: Iowa Trump supporters shrug off indictments

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      From his corner of rural Iowa, Neil Shaffer did more than his fair share to put Donald Trump in the White House and to try to keep him there.Shaffer oversaw the biggest swing of any county in the US from Barack Obama to Trump in 2016, and increased the then president’s share of the vote four years later. But the chair of the Howard county Republican party is not enthusiastic at the prospect of yet another Trump presidential campaign, and he blames the Democrats for driving it.“Honestly, the Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot with these prosecutions,” he said. “Why is Trump doing so well? Because people feel like they are piling on him. If this is the Democrats’ effort to make him look bad, it hasn’t. It’s probably going to make him the [Republican] nominee and, honestly, he may win the general election again. And then whose fault would it be?”After pleading not guilty on Thursday to federal charges over his attempts to steal the 2020 presidential election, Trump denounced the indictment as “a persecution of a political opponent”.“If you can’t beat him, you persecute him or you prosecute him,” he said.There are plenty who buy that line in Iowa and the rest of Trump-sympathetic America.With Trump likely to spend a good part of the next year in one courtroom or another, after being indicted in New York, Florida and Washington on an array of charges and with more expected in Georgia before long, his supporters are more than willing to believe it is a plot to keep their man out of the White House.One of them is Tom Schatz, a Howard county farmer on Iowa’s border with Minnesota.“They’re bringing the charges against Trump so he can’t run against Biden. Biden is so damn crooked. We’ve never had this kind of shit in this United States, ever,” he said. “Democrats are gonna keep riding [Trump’s] ass and bringing shit up against him. They don’t quit. They just don’t like him because he’s draining the swamp, and they don’t like that.”Schatz, like many Trump supporters, sees the prosecutions as part of a pattern of establishment attacks, from Congress twice impeaching the then president to the FBI’s investigation into alleged ties between Russia and his 2016 campaign. The same message is hammered home on rightwing talk radio stations that are often the background to the working day in rural America.On the day of Trump’s arraignment, Buck Sexton, a former CIA analyst on AM 600 WMT in Iowa, was energetically telling his listeners, without irony, that the prosecutions undermined confidence in the electoral system.“We are up against something we have never dealt with before,” he said. “They don’t care how reckless this is, the Democrats. It doesn’t bother them the disruption that they are doing to faith in the judicial system, faith in our elections, something that he’s talked about all the time. How can you have a fair election when one candidate has soon to be four criminal trials against him? Specifically timed to happen during the election.”Shaffer, who works for the state as a river conservationist as well as running a family farm, has watched Trump’s support rise, fall and then bounce back.Some support drained away to the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, after several prominent candidates backed by the former president lost in the midterm elections last November. For a while, polls put DeSantis ahead of Trump in a primary matchup. Shaffer said his county party was split, although at the time he still thought Trump would win because his supporters had more energy and commitment.“Now I think it’s even more so. When I speak up for DeSantis at our Republican monthly meeting, these people wearing their Trump hats don’t want to hear it. It’s such a foregone conclusion. Trump is going to get the nomination easily, whether he’s in a jail cell or in the courtroom. These people are that diehard,” he said.Shaffer sensed the renewed vigor in Trump’s campaign when he met the former president days before the latest indictment, at the Iowa Republican party’s annual fundraising Lincoln Dinner. Trump was among 13 candidates there to argue their case before meeting party activists one on one. So was his former vice-president, Mike Pence.“I feel bad for Pence because there were 500 people in line to see Trump and there were literally five people in the room for Pence,” said Shaffer. “Trump has that connection. Most of our group was there just to meet him.”Shaffer said the line to see DeSantis was longer than for Pence but nothing like the one for Trump, which he took as further evidence that the rightwing Florida governor’s moment had passed and that the the prosecutions helped revive Trump’s candidacy.“I think DeSantis is awesome. I think he’ll make a great president someday. But as long as Trump is running, there’s no way he’s gonna get the nomination,” he said.The polls back Shaffer’s view. But among some Howard county voters, support for Trump is more ambivalent.Tom Schatz’s son, Aaron, was a reluctant Trump voter in 2016. He voted for Obama but didn’t like Hillary Clinton. He was much more enthusiastic about Trump four years later but has cooled on him since.For all that, Schatz believes the former president is the victim of a political conspiracy.The dairy and corn farmer said he was more concerned about inflation, rising interest rates and falling prices for his milk than the details of the 45-page indictment laying out Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election. He preferred to see the charges as evidence of a double standard in which the Washington establishment failed to properly investigate Hillary Clinton or Hunter Biden for alleged crimes.Asked about Trump’s part in the January 6 storming of the Capitol, Schatz brushed it off as a bad thing but not very different from what he said were Democratic politicians encouraging the protests and riots that followed the killing of George Floyd three years ago.“They burned down Minneapolis. Were they prosecuted for that?“ he asked. “Trump acted poorly when he lost, I’ll give them that. But they’re just out to get anything they can on him. Part of me thinks that all they’re going to do is unite the Trump followers. I think they’re doing more harm than good.”Shaffer, too, is not persuaded by the detail of the indictment.“I still don’t like a lot of what Trump was doing, a lot of what he was saying. People know he didn’t handle himself very well from election day through January 6. But does it rise to the level where he should go to jail because he said something in a phone call? I think we’re more adult than that,” he said.Suspicions about the barrage of indictments even extends to the chair of Howard county’s Democratic party, Laura Hubka, a US navy veteran and ultrasound technologist at the city’s hospital who has no like of Trump.“I think that they’re going after him because he’s running,” she said. “Did he break laws and is he a bad guy? Yeah. But I think if he just went into the sunset, and blathered on Truth Social, maybe they would just have left him alone. But once he ran again, people thought he’s popular enough to win again and we need to do something to stop him. They had to do something, I guess.”The impact of Trump’s coming trials, and the evidence they lay bare, remains to be seen. But it might be expected that while diehard supporters will remain loyal through it all, those who voted for him once but then swung to Biden four years later have little reason to switch back.Trump was defeated by 7m popular votes and 74 electoral college ballots in 2020, and some Democrats are calculating that he will struggle to overcome that deficit with the additional baggage of indictments, trials and possibly even prison time.Yet the polls show the US’s two most recent presidents tied, including in key swing states such as Michigan.“Every time they indict him, he goes up in the polls,” said Shaffer. “I think the Democrats are so arrogant. Some of the liberals believe that, just like they did in 2016, he’ll never be elected, he’ll never get in again. Don’t be too sure about that.”For her part, Hubka cannot believe that the polls are that close even if the election is more than a year away.“I feel like he could be running from prison and it’ll still be a tight race with Joe Biden. That’s what scares me,” she said.Which raises a question about why the Democrats are not doing better in a former stronghold like Howard county.Shaffer says Howard county is doing well in many ways, and thanks to Biden. He said the presidents’s Inflation Reduction Act has pumped money into the county, paying to renew infrastructure, including bridges and roads. Shaffer’s conservation work for the state is well funded thanks to the federal government, and that brings financial benefits to farmers. In addition, the push for green energy has resulted in a proliferation of very profitable windmills.“We’ve got a lot of windmills around here and it’s a huge benefit. Each one of those is valued at a million dollars and we’re able to tax them and it puts money in our budget so we can build bridges and roads and have money for the schools,” said Shaffer.“I’ve got one of my farmers has four windmills and all the roads and lines. He gets $185,000 a year from it. He built a new home. He’s got new tractors. The whole northwest part of the county used to be a more depressed area. The windmills pumped in a lot of money “Shaffer is surprised that, with so many Republicans denouncing renewable energy, the Democratic party isn’t making more of an effort to claim credit for the benefits in Howard county.Hubka blames the Democratic national leadership, which has been accused of overly focusing on parts of the country where a majority of the residents have a college education, unlike rural Iowa.“They need to get some balls, be more bold. I also feel like they just are writing off the rural counties,” she said.But Hubka is still there, campaigning and waiting to see what happens if Trump goes to prison. She bought a gun before the last election because of so many threats from Trump supporters.“I was really very scared that I was going to get shot or hurt. It’s calmed down a bit in that sense. But who knows what happens if he gets thrown in jail,” she said.Around the corner from her hospital, a flag hanging outside a house might be read as a warning: “Trump 2024. The rules have changed.” More

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      On the Campaign Trail, an Impossible Task: Ignoring Trump’s Latest Charges

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      Voters pressed them to weigh in. Reporters asked about pardons. Mike Pence was heckled. Republicans found it’s not easy to escape the fallout from Donald J. Trump’s legal peril.Days after the front-runner was indicted on charges of trying to subvert an election, Republican candidates in their presidential primary returned to the campaign trail acting as if nothing had changed.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida scooped ice cream in Iowa as he pitched his economic plans. Senator Tim Scott met community leaders at the southern border with a promise to get tough on immigration. Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, showed up in Ukraine, a dramatic attempt to focus on foreign policy. And former Vice President Mike Pence talked up the “Trump-Pence administration” record at a town hall in New Hampshire.But their dogged attempts to create a political safe space — an indictment-free zone, where they are not asked to defend or attack former President Donald J. Trump, the dominant leader in the race and the party’s most powerful figure — kept failing.Reporters asked questions about stolen-election lies and presidential pardons. Voters wanted to know what they thought of the new charges. Trump supporters greeted Mr. Pence with a sign calling him a “traitor.” Mr. Trump, too, had thoughts.“Every time they file an indictment, we go way up in the polls,” he said at a Republican Party dinner in Montgomery, Ala., on Friday night. “We need one more indictment to close out this election.”The scenes demonstrated the nearly impossible challenge before the Republican field as the candidates soldier on in a primary like no other. As Mr. Trump rallies Republicans to his side against what he says is a political persecution, how can they move beyond a past election to talk about the future?For months, their strategy has been simple: Ignore, deflect and change the subject. But it’s an approach that became significantly harder this week, as the felony counts against Mr. Trump grew to number 78 across three criminal cases with the addition of a federal indictment in a Washington, D.C., federal court accusing him of conspiring to defraud the government and to obstruct an official proceeding, as well as other crimes.Addressing voters at a brewery in northeast Iowa on Friday morning, Mr. DeSantis focused on his usual themes: his record as Florida governor, his biography as a father and a military veteran, and his plans on immigration and economic policy. But he could not entirely escape the drumbeat of news from Washington.When a member of the audience asked whether he thought Mr. Trump’s latest indictment was a “witch hunt,” Mr. DeSantis responded that the case was “politically motivated, absolutely,” and pledged to end the “weaponization” of federal government.Mr. DeSantis tried to steer the conversation away from former President Donald J. Trump while at a brewery in Decorah, Iowa.Rachel Mummey for The New York TimesLater, a reporter asked whether he would pardon Mr. Trump, should the former president be convicted in the election case. Mr. DeSantis suggested he would — before quickly trying to recast the race as about the future.“I don’t think it’s in the best interest of the country to have a former president that’s almost 80 years old go to prison,” the governor, 44, told reporters at a tire shop in Waverly, Iowa. “And just like Ford pardoned Nixon, sometimes you’ve got to put this stuff behind you, and we need to start focusing on things having to do with the country’s future.”He added: “This election needs to be about Jan. 20, 2025, not Jan. 6, 2021.”Still, there were some signs that the newest charges had pushed Mr. DeSantis, whose campaign is under pressure to appeal to more moderate voters, to inch toward criticism of Mr. Trump. After his event, he acknowledged that claims about the 2020 election’s having been stolen were “unsubstantiated” — a more direct response than he typically gives when asked about Mr. Trump’s defeat.“All those theories that were put out did not prove to be true,” Mr. DeSantis said in response to a reporter’s question.Part of the challenge for Mr. Trump’s opponents is that even Republicans who want to move past the former president defend him. Sandy Lloyd, a 61-year-old fourth-grade teacher, said she did not plan to vote for Mr. Trump, having grown tired of the frequent controversies surrounding him. Yet she said that she thought the election had been stolen and that she didn’t want to see Mr. DeSantis attack Mr. Trump.“If I’m going for a new job, I don’t go into my interview and attack everybody else — I tell them why they want me,” Ms. Lloyd said. “That’s what I want to hear. Why do I want you as president?”Others took a different view, arguing that the criminal charges against Mr. Trump would weaken him in a general election.James Smith, a supporter of Mr. DeSantis who drove from Wisconsin to see the governor, said he wanted the Florida governor to be aggressive.“I would love for him to go harder against Trump,” Mr. Smith said. “You’re not going to win the Republican nomination by not going after the leader. The only way to shake up the race is by attacking.”Supporters of Mr. Trump outside a town hall event featuring former Vice President Mike Pence in Londonderry, N.H.Joe Buglewicz for The New York TimesBut no candidate has a harder time escaping the political realities of the Trump indictments than Mr. Pence, who told prosecutors that Mr. Trump had pressured him to reject electoral votes in an attempt to disrupt the transfer of power.About a dozen Trump supporters gathered outside the American Legion post where Mr. Pence spoke Friday evening. They heckled him as he entered.“What Pence did is, he committed treason — that’s the bottom line,” said Derek Arnold, a protester from Derry, N.H. “He had the choice to do the right thing. And that man knows right from wrong, and we’re here to let him know that he did us wrong.”When Mr. Pence told a standing crowd of around 100 people that he had “stood loyally by President Trump,” his comment prompted scoffing from some in the room. But he was applauded after he finished his thought: “And I never changed my commitment to him until the day came that my oath to the Constitution required me to do otherwise.”Mr. Pence answering questions during a campaign town hall event Friday night in Londonderry, N.H.Joe Buglewicz for The New York TimesAsked if he would pardon Mr. Trump, Mr. Pence was noncommittal.“I really don’t understand why some candidates in the Republican primary are assuming that the president is going to be found guilty in these various cases,” Mr. Pence said. “Let him make his case in court, and if I have the privilege of being president of the United States, whatever pardon request comes before me, I’ll always give a thoughtful, prayerful consideration.”Around a dozen people in the crowd said they were still making up their minds on whom to support. Some were looking for a Trump alternative, but not all considered the charges against him disqualifying.“I feel bad that the country has to go through that, never mind Trump himself,” Fran York said of the prosecutions of Mr. Trump. “I’m not sure that what he did was so bad that he should be indicted.”Mr. York, who is supporting Mr. Pence, said he would vote for Mr. Trump again if he won the nomination.Mr. Scott, who has said little about the election indictment, went to Yuma, Ariz., to promote his plan to spend $10 billion on the border wall started by Mr. Trump. There, too, he repeated his accusation that the Justice Department was “hunting Republicans.”“My perspective is that the D.O.J. continues to weaponize their power against political opponents,” he said, deflecting a question from an NBC reporter about whether Mr. Trump’s legal cases were dominating the campaign.Perhaps the only candidate other than Mr. Trump who was eager to talk about the indictment was Mr. Christie, who has focused his campaign on undercutting the former president. Mr. Christie has struggled to break 3 percent in recent polling of the contest.“It’s an aggressive indictment,” he said from a train headed to Kyiv, Ukraine, on Thursday night. “But what I believe is a much more important question than the criminality, in the context of this campaign season, is the fact that he’s morally responsible for Jan. 6.”Charles Homans More

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      DeSantis Dismisses Trump’s 2020 Election Theories as False

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      The Florida governor went further than he has before in acknowledging that the election was not stolen as a major donor pressured him to appeal to moderates.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said that claims about the 2020 election being stolen were false, directly contradicting a central argument of former President Donald J. Trump and his supporters.The comments went further than Mr. DeSantis typically goes when asked about Mr. Trump’s defeat. The governor has often tried to hedge, refusing to acknowledge that the election was fairly conducted. In his response on Friday, Mr. DeSantis did not mention Mr. Trump by name — saying merely that such theories were “unsubstantiated.” But the implication was clear.“All those theories that were put out did not prove to be true,” Mr. DeSantis said in response to a reporter’s question after a campaign event at a brewery in Northeast Iowa.The more aggressive response comes a day after Mr. Trump was arraigned on charges related to his plot to overturn the 2020 election, and as Mr. DeSantis’s campaign struggles to gain traction and burns through cash. On Friday, Mr. DeSantis was dealt another blow: Robert Bigelow, the biggest individual donor to Never Back Down, the super PAC supporting Mr. DeSantis, told Reuters he would stop giving money to the group unless Mr. DeSantis took a more moderate approach and got other major donors on board.As he has courted Mr. Trump’s voters, Mr. DeSantis has blasted the prosecution in the election case as politically motivated and has said that he did not want to see Mr. Trump charged. His new comments suggest that Mr. Trump’s legal peril may have altered his political calculation.Mr. DeSantis also suggested on Friday that he would pardon Mr. Trump, should the former president be convicted in the election case.“I don’t think it’s in the best interest of the country to have a former president that’s almost 80 years old go to prison,” he told reporters at a campaign stop in Waverly, Iowa. It was an answer that, by invoking Mr. Trump’s age, also served to highlight the contrast with Mr. DeSantis, who is 44.“And just like Ford pardoned Nixon, sometimes you’ve got to put this stuff behind you, and we need to start focusing on things having to do with the country’s future,” Mr. DeSantis said, and added: “This election needs to be about Jan. 20, 2025, not Jan. 6, 2021.”But his remarks about the 2020 election have previously been far more circumspect. He generally uses such questions on the subject to talk about electability, lament the “culture of losing” that has developed among Republicans under Mr. Trump’s leadership and boast about the security of Florida’s elections.On Friday, Mr. DeSantis did criticize aspects of the 2020 election, including changes to voting procedures made because of the coronavirus pandemic. But he specifically dismissed one particularly far-fetched theory that Venezuela, now led by President Nicolás Maduro, hacked voting machines.“It was not an election that was conducted the way I think that we want to, but that’s different than saying Maduro stole votes or something like that,” he said. “Those theories, you know, proved to be unsubstantiated.”Mr. DeSantis also said he did not have much time to watch coverage of his chief rival’s arraignment on Thursday.“I saw a little bit,” he said. “Unfortunately, one of the things as governor that you have to do is oversee executions. So we had an execution yesterday, so I was tied up with that for most of the day.” More

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      Pence Reaches Fork in Road of 2024 Campaign With New Trump Indictment

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      Through four years as Donald J. Trump’s vice president, or perhaps three years and 350 days, Mike Pence brandished a peerless talent: insisting that all was going smoothly amid plain evidence to the contrary.His 2024 campaign, he has long insisted, is going smoothly.“I have great confidence in Republican primary voters,” he said in an interview, riding to an Iowa hog roast last weekend. “I’m confident we’re going to get a fresh look.”It seemed notable that Mr. Trump, never shy about knocking anyone he views as a threat, had barely bothered to attack him in the race to that point.It was early, Mr. Pence suggested.“I think we’re coming,” he said calmly, “to a fork in the road.”The fork has arrived.As the former lieutenant to the Republican front-runner and a critical witness to that front-runner’s alleged crimes against democracy, Mr. Pence is campaigning now as many things: anti-abortion warrior, unbending conservative, believer in “heavy doses of civility.”Yet he is running most viscerally, whether he intends to or not, as a cautionary tale — a picture of what can happen when anyone, even someone as loyal as he was, defies Mr. Trump.“Anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president,” Mr. Pence said on a campaign conference call on Wednesday, during which supporters were reassured that he was on track to qualify for the first Republican debate. “Anyone who asks someone else to put them over their oath to the Constitution should never be president again.”At minimum, he has gotten his former running mate’s attention.“I feel badly for Mike Pence,” Mr. Trump posted on Wednesday on his social media site, Truth Social, repeating unfounded election claims. His former vice president, he said, was “attracting no crowds, enthusiasm or loyalty from people who, as a member of the Trump administration, should be loving him.”Mr. Pence’s most prominent turns this summer have been in court documents regarding his former boss, not in early states.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMr. Pence’s early difficulties are not shocking. Mr. Trump continues to dominate among Republicans, and much of the party’s base despises Mr. Pence for his lone act of major public defiance: resisting efforts to reverse Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss.But to see Mr. Pence up close, at stops across Iowa and New Hampshire in recent weeks, is to absorb the bracing particulars of a campaign not sparking — the creaky score of polite clapping in modest rooms — and of a candidate convinced he will be judged kindly by history, unable to hustle that history along.His most prominent turns this summer have been in court documents, not in early states. Many key details in the federal indictment against Mr. Trump, which said that Mr. Pence took “contemporaneous notes,” are culled from conversations between them. At one point, the indictment recounted, Mr. Trump let fly a three-word rebuke: “You’re too honest.”If so, this does not seem to have done Mr. Pence many favors as a candidate (though the campaign has already repurposed the “Too Honest” label for T-shirts and hats). His fund-raising has been meager. He is polling, at best, a very, very distant third or fourth.While his team says the campaign has gone according to plan, noting his late entry in the race compared with some competitors’, seven other Republicans say they have qualified for the debate later this month, a group that includes two rivals who joined the primary the same week he did in June.At a candidate forum last week in Des Moines, where multiple extended ovations greeted Mr. Trump, Mr. Pence strained to coax applause at times even while serving up the reddest of meat. (“Americans are facing one man-made crisis after another, and that man’s name is Joe Biden,” he said, to near silence.)Mr. Pence has compelled supporters to worry openly about the size of his venues as he speaks in modest rooms.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesHe has failed to dissuade voters from ascribing foreboding meaning to the mundane. (“Is that a sign?” a woman whispered in Hudson, N.H., noticing a small snake near Mr. Pence’s foot as he spoke outdoors.)He has compelled some supporters to worry openly about the size of his venues.“So tiny — you’re a vice president, for heaven’s sake,” Shirley Noakes, 84, said before he arrived to another crowd of dozens in Meredith, N.H.For those who once considered Mr. Pence the chief enabler in Mr. Trump’s White House — buoying him through relentless executive chaos that rattled democratic institutions well before January 2021 — any campaign stumbles amount to a well-earned comeuppance.Mr. Trump was the nation’s essential man, Mr. Pence long attested, and more than that, “a good man.” (He does not use that adjective anymore.)Asked in the interview if he saw himself as an example to other Republicans who remain devoted to the former president, Mr. Pence did not say no. He reiterated his pre-Jan. 6 dedication to Mr. Trump “through thick and thin, until my oath to the Constitution required me to do otherwise.”“I would leave to others,” he said, “any judgment about what that says about the president.”Among some who admire Mr. Pence, for his stand at the Capitol and otherwise, his campaign thus far has been confounding, a mission without a near-term political rationale.“He doesn’t really have a unique selling proposition,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, who has both praised Mr. Pence for what he did on Jan. 6 and been accused of helping to perpetuate Mr. Trump’s election lies. “In terms of John F. Kennedy’s ‘Profiles in Courage,’ I think that Pence is a very admirable person. In terms of that being a way to win the Republican nomination, I think it doesn’t have any traction.”Mr. Pence said he thought Mr. Gingrich was “not giving Republican primary voters enough credit.”But regardless, Mr. Pence said, this race is a calling for him and his wife, Karen Pence, no matter how it ends. “Campaigns should be about something more important than the candidate’s election,” he said.Mr. Pence and his wife, Karen Pence, during the opening prayer at the Iowa hog roast. Jordan Gale for The New York TimesAnd this one, at least, is poised to answer some questions in the interim.What do Americans think of Mike Pence now, without someone else blocking their view? What should they think?“You want to take a picture or something?” he asked with a smile recently in Barrington, N.H., arriving unannounced to a home décor shop whose Republican proprietors appreciated the visit, they said later, but did not support him. “Just in case I turn out to be somebody important.”Trump’s opposite ‘in every way’Mr. Pence has imagined himself as a prospective president for some time, entertaining White House runs during his years as a congressman and Indiana governor.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesMr. Pence looks like a presidential candidate who knows that he looks like a presidential candidate.“Out of central casting,” Mr. Trump used to say of him, in happier times, and the Pence 2024 team seems inclined to sustain the aesthetic.He still shakes hands with his whole body — leaning, nodding, left palm on a voter’s upper back.He still remembers names and local favorites, pandering with impunity. (In New Hampshire: “I stopped by Dunkin’ Donuts the other day …” In Iowa: “I look forward to seeing you at Casey’s and Pizza Ranch…”)He is still liable to point straight ahead suddenly, as if drawing a firearm in the credits of a Hoosier James Bond, for the closing flourish of his remarks.“The best” — point! — “days for the greatest nation on earth are yet to come.”Mr. Pence, 64, has imagined himself as a prospective president for some time, entertaining White House runs during his years as a congressman and Indiana governor. In his 2022 memoir, he said he had developed “a healthy distrust of my own ambition.”Much of Mr. Pence’s career can read now as a study in suboptimal timing, with a politician who could seem almost ostentatiously out of step with the moment.In 2004, dismayed at the spending decisions of a Republican administration, Mr. Pence said he felt like “the frozen man” as a lonely voice for fiscal restraint in Congress. “Frozen before the revolution, thawed after it was over,” he said then. “A minuteman who showed up 10 years too late.”In 2016, he endorsed Senator Ted Cruz of Texas for president days before Mr. Cruz dropped out. “Cruz’s vision of our party hewed the closest to mine,” he reasoned in his book.It was Mr. Trump who gave Mr. Pence a timely lifeline anyway, inviting him on the ticket during a tough re-election race in Indiana.For all of Mr. Trump’s volatility, people who know both men said, their relationship was often buttressed by genuine affection.Robert Jeffress, the senior pastor at First Baptist Church in Dallas, recalled Mr. Trump’s glee at introducing him to Mr. Pence shortly after their election in 2016. “He said, ‘Robert, he is absolutely fantastic,’” Mr. Jeffress remembered. “‘He is opposite me in every way.’”Surely it helped relations that the dynamic between the two was never ambiguous: There was one star, one principal, one sun around which the operation would orbit.Mr. Trump gave Mr. Pence a timely lifeline when he invited him on the ticket during a tough re-election race back home.Damon Winter/The New York TimesIn his stump speech, Mr. Pence speaks about being “well-known” but “not known well,” a man often seen standing quietly behind another man.“Just a half-step off,” he told a couple dozen supporters in Ames, Iowa, “off the shoulder of the president.”In the interview, he noted: “I don’t believe that we ever agreed to a single profile interview in four years. Because I never wanted the story to be about me.” (As it happened, Mr. Trump did not want that, either.)Eventually, nightmarishly, the story became about him.Mr. Pence said he sensed in the days after the Capitol riot that Mr. Trump was “deeply remorseful about what had occurred.”The former president offers no apology for his role in the violence that surrounded Mr. Pence and his family that day.Breaking a vise grip he helped createMr. Pence at a first-responder round table meeting in Nevada, Iowa, last month, where he repeated a mantra of his on the campaign trail: “So help me God.”Jordan Gale for The New York TimesFour words accompany almost any public appearance by Mr. Pence.“So help me God,” he said in Nevada, Iowa, convening with first responders.“So help me God,” he said in Napa, Calif., at a gathering of Catholic conservatives.“So help me God,” he said in Meredith, N.H. “Which happens to be the title of my book.”Friends say Mr. Pence was always cleareyed about — and unmoved by — his steep odds in 2024. That he joined the field anyway, they suggest, says more about his faith than his ego.“My sense is there was a really long and interesting discussion with God,” said Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, who decided against a run himself, speaking highly of Mr. Pence after watching the candidate forum in Des Moines.But a vexing political irony for Mr. Pence has persisted: Mr. Trump’s unyielding support among many conservatives — a vise grip that the former vice president must break to have any electoral hope — can be traced in large measure to Mr. Pence.Mr. Jeffress said the symbolic resonance of Mr. Pence’s 2016 selection by Mr. Trump was immeasurable to evangelical voters especially, enshrining a stalwart of the right beside an ideologically flexible nominee. “And now, the overwhelming majority of evangelicals still support Trump,” he added, “because he has a track record.” (Mr. Jeffress is supporting Mr. Trump.)Mr. Pence suggested that this history is partly why he felt called to the 2024 campaign. In 2016, he said, Mr. Trump made “a tacit promise” to govern as a conservative.“He makes no such promise today,” Mr. Pence said.As other candidates, including Mr. Trump, hedge and deflect their positions on abortion restrictions, Mr. Pence has eagerly promoted his role in vetting the Trump-nominated Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade.“He has forced the other contenders to step up and say where they stand,” said Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America. “I think he has the potential to do that as well on other issues.”Mr. Pence has tried to reach conservative voters by taking a stand on abortion, an issue other candidates, including Mr. Trump, have avoided.Jordan Gale for The New York TimesA smattering of encouragement has come from the nonvoting set. In Meredith, where several guests thanked Mr. Pence for his actions on Jan. 6, a 15-year-old named Quinn Mitchell sent the Q. and A. session into a brief hush.Given the former president’s conduct, he asked, “do you think Christians should vote for Donald Trump?”Mr. Pence held for a beat, proceeding carefully.“I’m running for president of the United States because I think I should be the next president,” he said to applause.The young attendee understood, he said later, that the candidate was probably best served avoiding a clean yes or no.But when the two met afterward, Mr. Pence took care to commend the questioner.“You have a bright future,” he wrote on a poster the teen had brought. “God bless.” More

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      Is Trump Leaving an Opening in Iowa?

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      The former president’s poll numbers are still strong. But the caucuses could be his rivals’ best chance to make him look vulnerable.Donald J. Trump’s standing in our Iowa poll is weaker than in our national results.Christopher Smith for The New York TimesDonald J. Trump has dominated the Republican Party for eight years, and our recent poll results show that he is dominating the Republican primary race again. So it’s not wrong to wonder whether Mr. Trump is simply undefeatable — even after his third criminal indictment.But there was one moment — one fleeting moment — when it really did look like Republicans might move on. It was in the aftermath of the 2022 midterm election, when Mr. Trump’s party and his preferred candidates fared far worse than expected. It undermined the perception of his strength and dominance. He was a loser.With that in mind, consider our first New York Times/Siena College survey of the Iowa caucus, released Friday. It is by no means a bad survey for Mr. Trump: He leads Ron DeSantis by a comfortable margin, 43 percent to 20 percent. Tim Scott sits even further back, at 9 percent.But Mr. Trump’s position is unequivocally weaker in our Iowa poll than in our nationwide survey. His support is well beneath 50 percent in Iowa, and his opponents seem stronger. Mr. DeSantis has the highest favorability ratings in the poll, and clear majorities of likely caucusgoers consider him more “likable” and “moral” than the former president. Mr. Trump’s electability advantage over Mr. DeSantis is also far smaller — just 9 points — than it is nationwide.A 23-point deficit is still a daunting gap for Mr. DeSantis. But unlike the national poll, our Iowa poll has revealed a few cracks in Mr. Trump’s armor. If Mr. DeSantis (or another challenger) could ever pry those cracks open and win the Iowa caucuses — the first nominating contest of the race — one wonders what kind of effect that might have on Republican voters.After all, the only time Republicans were prepared to move on from Mr. Trump was the one time he and his supporters had to accept that he lost, after the 2022 midterm election.A few other tidbits from our polling this week (moderately wonky)Will Hurd, the former Texas congressman, narrowly missed the qualifying threshold for the first G.O.P. debate on Aug. 23 in our national poll earlier this week. He had the support of 0.57 percent of Republican primary voters, near the 1 percent needed to help him qualify for the event (Mr. Hurd has not yet qualified for the debate; The Times is tracking who has qualified, here). Usually, 0.57 percent would be rounded to 1 percent, but while the poll was being conducted we decided that wasn’t appropriate for this survey. Republicans had set a 1 percent threshold to winnow the debate field; rounding to the nearest whole number didn’t seem like it was in the spirit of the cutoff for candidates in this case.Vivek Ramaswamy also had cause to be disappointed in our polls. He received 2 percent of the vote in our national survey, compared with about 6 percent in the FiveThirtyEight polling average and over 10 percent in some online polls. I’ll offer two basic theories for why he did worse in our poll.One is that it’s about survey administration: In an online survey, you see a long list of candidates, read them over, and then you choose one. In our phone survey, you either immediately volunteered your preference after hearing the question, or you heard a list of more than a dozen candidates and chose an answer at the end. If you’re an undecided voter, the online setting might help you find and choose someone you’re not especially familiar with. You may be overwhelmed on the phone, and even if you liked Mr. Ramaswamy when he was mentioned 20 seconds earlier, you could forget by the time the interviewer is done asking the question.A second possibility is that it’s about the kind of voters who participate in the big online panels that power so many polls today. Maybe they’re, shall we say, a little too online — and perhaps unusually likely to be aware of Mr. Ramaswamy’s campaign. My guess is that this is probably a factor: Online polls recruited by mail and by YouGov, the gold standard of this kind of polling, don’t show Mr. Ramaswamy doing so well, even though they were also conducted online.This Times/Siena national poll used an elaborate model of the likely Republican primary electorate, but it’s hard to say it made any difference in the result. Mr. Trump would have held a commanding lead with at least 50 percent of the vote no matter how we defined G.O.P. primary voters.The Democratic primary, however, is a case where more sophisticated modeling of the primary electorate might make a huge difference. While President Biden leads Robert F. Kennedy Jr. by a wide margin, 64 percent to 13 percent, among Democratic leaners, he enjoys a far wider lead — 74 percent to 8 percent — among those Democratic leaners who have ever actually voted in a primary, including 92 percent to 4 percent among those who voted in a Democratic primary in 2022.My guess: if we had done an elaborate Democratic primary poll — and we did not, in the absence of a competitive race — Mr. Biden’s lead would have grown.As I mentioned a few days ago, we’ve started to mull whether and how we can use respondents who begin to take our polls but don’t complete the interview. In our longer national surveys, about 15 percent of our respondents fall into this category, and they’re the kind of less educated and less reliable voters whom we want included in our polls.Interestingly enough, including these voters might have made a slight difference in our national poll this week. Rather than being tied, Mr. Trump would have led Mr. Biden by one point, 43 percent to 42 percent, if the survey had included respondents who decided to stop taking the survey before it was completed.It’s not clear whether this is just a random blip or indicative of a systematic tendency for these drop-off voters to back Republican candidates. Until now, we haven’t had the data necessary to fully evaluate this issue. In particular, we haven’t had the self-reported educational attainment of these respondents. But it’s something we’ve begun to track and may ultimately incorporate into our design. More

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      Today’s Top News: Inside Trump’s Washington Arraignment, and More

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      The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists who are covering them, all in about 10 minutes. Hosted by Annie Correal, the new morning show features three top stories from reporters across the newsroom and around the world, so you always have a sense of what’s happening, even if you only have a few minutes to spare.Former President Donald J. Trump was arraigned on Thursday on four counts tied to his efforts to stay in power after the 2020 election.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOn Today’s Episode:Trump Pleads Not Guilty to Plotting to Overturn the 2020 Election, with Charlie SavageTrump Leads G.O.P. in Iowa, but His Hold Is Less DominantThe U.S. Women’s Soccer Team Tries to Focus on What Comes After Portugal Tie, with Juliet MacurEli Cohen More