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      DeSantis Says Trump Will Declare Iowa Caucuses Stolen if He Loses

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      The former president “will try to delegitimize the results,” Mr. DeSantis said while campaigning in New Hampshire on Friday.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said on Friday that he expected Donald J. Trump to claim that the Iowa caucuses had been “stolen” if the former president, who currently leads Mr. DeSantis by roughly 30 points in that state, is defeated there next month.“If Trump loses, he will say it’s stolen no matter what, absolutely,” Mr. DeSantis said, responding to a reporter in New Hampshire who had asked whether Mr. Trump would accept the results of the first contest in the Republican presidential primary on Jan. 15, or of the New Hampshire primary roughly a week later. “He will try to delegitimize the results. He did that against Ted Cruz in 2016.”Mr. DeSantis added that Mr. Trump had protested “even when ‘The Apprentice’ didn’t get an Emmy,” referring to the former president’s onetime television show.Throughout the 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump and his allies have continued to insist that he defeated President Biden in 2020. The constant chorus of falsehoods seems to have seeped into the consciousness of many Republicans. Nearly 60 percent of G.O.P. voters believe Mr. Biden’s election was illegitimate, a survey by The Associated Press found earlier this year.For several years, Mr. DeSantis appeared to play both sides of the manufactured controversy over the 2020 election. As governor, he set up a new police unit to monitor the integrity of Florida elections. Before last year’s midterms, he campaigned with Republicans who had vociferously denied the results. But he never explicitly endorsed the theory that the election had been stolen, and he repeatedly dodged questions about whether he accepted Mr. Biden’s victory.During his presidential campaign, Mr. DeSantis has courted voters from the Trump wing of the Republican Party, making it difficult for him to say that the former president was wrong.Only in August, after being repeatedly pressed during an interview with NBC News, did Mr. DeSantis acknowledge the truth, saying of Mr. Trump: “Of course he lost. Joe Biden’s the president.”In 2016, Mr. Trump claimed to have defeated Mr. Cruz, a Republican senator from Texas, in that year’s Iowa caucuses, although in reality he suffered a narrow defeat.Those repeated claims of election fraud, Mr. DeSantis argued during Friday’s appearance in New Hampshire, have led voters to take Mr. Trump less seriously.“I don’t think people are going to buy it,” he said.In response to Mr. DeSantis’s remarks, Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, accused the Florida governor of “reciting Democrat talking points.”“When Ron’s political career is finished in a few weeks, he can start moonlighting as a Democrat surrogate because he’s showing everyone his true colors,” Mr. Cheung said in a statement on Friday.The Trump campaign has already accused Mr. DeSantis’s team of trying to “rig” the caucuses because of comments made by his wife, Casey DeSantis. Last week, Ms. DeSantis encouraged out-of-state supporters to participate in the caucuses. But only Iowa residents are allowed to vote in state elections, and Ms. DeSantis later clarified that she had been asking people to volunteer for her husband.Whether Mr. Trump ends up claiming fraud in Iowa may well remain a hypothetical. Polls show that the former president’s support in Iowa would have to collapse in order for him to lose. And he leads his primary challengers in New Hampshire by an average of more than 25 points.So far in the campaign, Mr. DeSantis has spent more time battling for second place against Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, than taking on Mr. Trump. More

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      GOP Support Grows for Majewski, a Trump Ally With a Disputed Military Record

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      J.R. Majewski, an ally of former President Donald J. Trump, is seeking to avenge his 13-point loss in the 2022 midterm elections in Ohio.J.R. Majewski, a Trump acolyte from Ohio whom House Republicans abandoned the first time he ran for Congress in the 2022 midterm elections after discrepancies in his military record emerged, is back as a candidate — and with some prominent G.O.P. names behind him.Mr. Majewski, an Air Force veteran, picked up endorsements on Monday from Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio and Frank LaRose, Ohio’s secretary of state, in his Republican primary as he seeks to challenge Representative Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat, for a second time in the Ninth District.The show of support contrasted sharply with the National Republican Congressional Committee’s canceling its ads for Mr. Majewski during the final six weeks of his 2022 race, which he lost by 13 percentage points to Ms. Kaptur, the longest-serving woman in congressional history.The committee pulled the plug after The Associated Press reported that the Air Force had no record of Mr. Majewski, 44, serving in Afghanistan, which he continues to claim that he did, and drew attention to a series of inconsistencies about his military record. Mr. Majewski has vehemently disputed the reporting.The endorsements came just days after the release of a secret recording of Craig Riedel, a rival G.O.P. candidate and a former state legislator, telling a Republican donor that he would not support former President Donald J. Trump and did not want his endorsement. It was obtained by Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, a pro-Trump grass-roots group.Not long after, Mr. Riedel announced that he was endorsing Mr. Trump. But the damage appeared to have been done, with at least one prominent Republican in Ohio (Representative Max Miller, a former Trump adviser) saying that he no longer supported Mr. Riedel, who lost to Mr. Majewski in the 2022 Republican primary.Mr. Riedel accused one of Mr. Majewski’s top MAGA boosters, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, of setting him up.“Matt Gaetz and a social media trickster pulled a stunt yesterday to try and convince President Trump to get involved in my congressional primary for proven loser JR Majewski,” Mr. Riedel wrote on X.Mr. Trump, who endorsed Mr. Majewski in 2022, heralded him on Saturday while both attended a New York Young Republican Club gala, blaming the “deep state” for undermining Mr. Majewski during his last run.“We stuck by him,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “They played dirty pool, but you’ll get a second shot, right?”Erica Knight, a spokeswoman for Mr. Majewski, said in a text message that he was expecting to be endorsed by Mr. Trump again. A campaign spokesman for Mr. Trump did not respond to a request for comment.Mr. Riedel has received endorsements from Republicans considered more mainstream, including Representative Kevin McCarthy, before he was deposed as speaker of the House, and Americans for Prosperity Action, a political network founded by the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch. The group has spent nearly $250,000 on Mr. Riedel’s behalf this election cycle, according to the Federal Election Commission.Mr. Riedel did not respond to a request for comment.In a statement to The New York Times on Tuesday, Mr. Gaetz denied orchestrating the secret recording.“Craig Riedel trashed Trump when he thought it would help him get a New Yorker to give him money,” he said. “We have enough people willing to say and do anything for campaign cash in Congress already. Craig Riedel exposed himself in his own words. I had nothing to do with it, though I wish I had.”Aidan Johnson, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, in a statement called the Republican primary contest an “ugly and expensive race to the bottom.” Steve Lankenau, a former mayor of Napoleon, Ohio, is also running in the Republican primary.While Mr. Majewski has frequently promoted himself as a combat veteran who served in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Air Force records obtained by The Times show that he deployed for six months in 2002 to Qatar, which is now home to the largest U.S. air base in the Middle East.According to military records, the Air Force demoted Mr. Majewski in September 2001 for driving drunk at Kadena Air Base in Japan, contradicting his earlier account that he could not re-enlist in the Air Force after his initial four years because of a “brawl.”The inconsistencies in Mr. Majewski’s public accounts of his military service brought renewed scrutiny during the last election cycle, when he was already facing questions about his presence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and sympathies for the QAnon conspiracy movement.In August 2023, more than nine months after Mr. Majewski’s defeat, the military updated his records to reflect that he had received a Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal for his service, an honor created in 2003 for Air Force members who deployed abroad after the Sept. 11 attacks.But Afghanistan is just one of several dozen countries, including Qatar, that count toward eligibility. That has not stopped Mr. Majewski and his allies, including Mr. Trump, from claiming that he was “totally exonerated.” More

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      Ramaswamy Pushes Fringe Idea About Jan. 6 at Town Hall in Iowa

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      The Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy repeated his claim, without specific evidence, that the attack on the Capitol was an “inside job.”In the final weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and Republican presidential candidate, is pressing an unusual strategy: leaning into conspiracy theories.At a CNN town hall on Wednesday evening in Des Moines, Abby Phillip, the CNN anchor, asked Mr. Ramaswamy about previous comments in which he had said that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was an “inside job” — a claim for which there is no evidence, and which has been refuted by numerous criminal indictments and bipartisan congressional investigations.Instead of walking back his remarks, he dug in.“The reality is, we know that there were federal law enforcement agents in the field. We don’t know how many,” Mr. Ramaswamy told the audience at Grand View University, at which point Ms. Phillip interrupted him to clarify. “There’s no evidence that there were federal agents in the crowd,” she said. Mr. Ramaswamy suggested, without providing specific details, that he had seen “multiple informants suggesting that they were.”He turned to another conspiracy theory — involving the kidnapping plot against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat of Michigan. He claimed, of some defendants in that case, that “government agents put them up to do something they otherwise wouldn’t have done.” (That claim also has no evidence to support it.)“I don’t want to have to interrupt you, I really don’t, but I don’t want you to mislead the audience here —” Ms. Phillip began, before Mr. Ramaswamy redirected and claimed that it was “mainstream media” outlets that were misleading.Mr. Ramaswamy, who has continued to praise former President Donald J. Trump while competing against him for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, has slipped in polls. At the same time, on the campaign trail, during debates and at the CNN event, he has pushed conspiracy theories, including ones on the origin of Covid-19 as well as the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.Ms. Phillip’s question on Wednesday referred to Alan Hostetter, a Jan. 6 defendant who invoked Mr. Ramaswamy’s debate remarks during his sentencing hearing last week in claiming that conspiracy theories about the 2020 election being stolen “are no longer fringe.”Mr. Ramaswamy did not address Mr. Hostetter’s remarks and instead reiterated false claims, to favorable responses from the crowd.Mr. Ramaswamy’s combative demeanor in public appearances was brought up by Rylee Miller, a law student who said that Mr. Ramaswamy seemed to have “somewhat abandoned the tact and diplomacy that I would look for in a president.” He then asked a question about how Mr. Ramaswamy would balance authenticity with a “presidential demeanor.”Mr. Ramaswamy, in answering, referred to his role as a parent who would strive to “make our children proud” as president. But, he continued, voters should not “want a wilting flower in the White House.”Mr. Ramaswamy also repeated several disputed proposals he has called for on the campaign trail. He said he would end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, effective from January 2025 onward. He reiterated his call to end aid to Ukraine and to back a deal “with some territorial concessions” for the country.He also said that he would support the Supreme Court if it ruled to take mifepristone, a commonly used abortion pill facing a legal challenge, “off the market.” More

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      Trump and His Allies Descend on Iowa

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      The former president will also campaign in New Hampshire and Nevada, a burst of activity less than five weeks before voting begins.Former President Donald J. Trump kicked off a flurry of campaign activity on Wednesday with an eye toward a decisive victory in Iowa that would crush his Republican rivals’ hopes of emerging with any kind of momentum in the presidential primary.He’ll have a little help from his friends.Mr. Trump gave a speech in Coralville, a small city in eastern Iowa, on Wednesday, before planned stops in New Hampshire, the second nominating state, and Nevada, third on the primary calendar, over the weekend. Mr. Trump will return to Iowa on Tuesday for a speech in Waterloo, a city in the northeastern part of the state.But as Mr. Trump is shoring up support in the other early states, prominent surrogates will hit the ground in Iowa on his behalf in a display of the particular advantages he enjoys as the former president and the primary’s dominant front-runner. In the coming week, his campaign will hold events in Iowa with Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, a conservative firebrand and one of Mr. Trump’s closest allies in Congress, and Ben Carson, the former president’s secretary of housing and urban development.Mr. Trump enters this campaign stretch buoyed by recent polling that shows him holding his edge in the primary and in a strong position against President Biden in next year’s general election should the pair meet for a rematch. Mr. Trump’s allies in the Republican-led House of Representatives have approved a formal impeachment inquiry of Mr. Biden that could have ramifications for the president’s campaign even as their investigations thus far have failed to produce evidence of high crimes or misdemeanors.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Nikki Haley Endorsed by Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire

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      Mr. Sununu is popular in the state, though former President Donald J. Trump continues to dominate the field.Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire endorsed Nikki Haley for the Republican presidential nomination at a campaign event Tuesday evening, casting her as a fresh face for the party who could take on the elites in Washington and move the nation past the “nonsense and drama” of former President Donald J. Trump.“We are all in for Nikki Haley,” Mr. Sununu said to loud cheers at a ski area in Manchester, adding that her momentum was “real” and “tangible” and that her poll numbers and ground game have been “absolutely unbelievable.”Pacing in the middle of the audience, Ms. Haley called it “a great night in New Hampshire.” “It doesn’t get any better than this — to go and get endorsed by the ‘Live Free or Die’ governor is about as rock-solid of an endorsement as we could hope for.”The endorsement is a significant victory for Ms. Haley, who is trying to establish herself over Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida as the main alternative to Mr. Trump and has gained ground in New Hampshire polling in the past month.Mr. Sununu, a Trump critic who is serving his fourth and last two-year term as governor, was re-elected last year by more than 15 percentage points and is popular in the state. He was seen as a top recruit for the Senate last year but declined to run, and he also chose not to run for the Republican presidential nomination himself — saying at the time that he thought he could have more influence as an external voice than as a candidate.On the 2024 presidential campaign trail, Mr. Sununu stumped with Ms. Haley, Mr. DeSantis and former Gov. Chris Christie, as he weighed which of the three to back. In an interview last month, he said he would talk over his decision with friends and family over the Thanksgiving break. He said he was looking for someone who could beat Mr. Trump and who could connect with voters on “a very retail level.”Before the raucous crowd in Manchester, Mr. Sununu lauded Ms. Haley as a traditional Republican with the executive experience to secure the border, tackle mental health needs and ensure low taxes and limited government. He urged New Hampshire voters to turn the page on this era’s politics, taking shots at both President Biden and Mr. Trump. “We have a president who is more concerned about nap time,” he said. “We have a president who is worried about jail time.”In a news conference after the event, Mr. Sununu and Ms. Haley shot down suggestions that Ms. Haley might choose Mr. Sununu as her vice president should she win the nomination. “I think he is fantastic, but he has told me he doesn’t want anything to do with V.P.,” she said.Ms. Haley told reporters she had been more focused on winning over voters than scoring endorsements from elected officials, but she nevertheless called Mr. Sununu’s support a huge win for her bid. Mr. Sununu argued the race had now become a contest between only two people — “Nikki Haley and Donald Trump.”“There’s differences with us,” Ms. Haley said when Mr. Sununu was asked if he believed Ms. Haley had sufficiently confronted the former president. “Anti-Trumpers don’t think I hate him enough. Pro-Trumpers don’t think I love him enough. The end of the day, I put my truths out there and let the chips fall were they may.”Given his popularity and his proven ability to win as a Republican in a state that leans Democratic, Mr. Sununu could help sway the moderate Republicans and independents whom Ms. Haley is counting on to give her a strong showing in New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation primary on Jan. 23.Undeclared voters, who can participate in the Republican primary, now make up roughly 39 percent of voters in the state, a greater slice of the electorate than either Democrats or Republicans. And with no competitive Democratic presidential primary next year, they are expected to play an even larger role in the Republican contest.“It is really a big move,” Matthew Bartlett, a former Trump appointee and Republican strategist who is unaligned in the race, said of Mr. Sununu’s backing. “It is really the last chess piece to fall in line before Election Day, and it is not to be underestimated.”But just how much weight it will carry is an open question in a primary in which nothing — not endorsements, not debates, not 91 felony charges — has changed the basic dynamic: Mr. Trump is the overwhelming favorite, and everybody else is fighting for second place.The Sununu endorsement was first reported by WMUR earlier on Tuesday.Mr. DeSantis received two of the biggest endorsements available in Iowa — those of Gov. Kim Reynolds and the evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats — but has yet to make significant gains on Mr. Trump there. Still, campaign officials for Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Christie downplayed the impact of Mr. Sununu’s backing.“This puts us down one vote in New Hampshire and when Governor Christie is back in Londonderry tomorrow, he’ll continue to tell the unvarnished truth about Donald Trump and earn that one missing vote and thousands more,” said Karl Rickett, campaign spokesman for Mr. Christie, who has made New Hampshire his do-or-die state.Ray Buckley, the chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, criticized both Ms. Haley and Mr. Sununu in a statement. “No matter how much Nikki Haley or Chris Sununu try to spin Granite Staters, the reality is they’re both MAGA extremists who spent years cozying up to Donald Trump,” he said.At the ski area in Manchester, a prospective voter solicited a low exclamation of “oohs” from the crowd when she asked if Ms. Haley would ever consider the vice presidency given Mr. Trump’s dominance in national and state polls.“It is not that big of a deal,” Ms. Haley responded, calming the crowd and prompting some laughter, “because what you have to know is I don’t play for second.”In the audience, Dan Silverman, 53, an undeclared voter who leans Republican, said he wasn’t particularly keen on any of the contenders in the Republican primary and was concerned about some of Ms. Haley’s “bombastic language” on foreign policy. But after watching her speak, Mr. Silverman, who teaches information systems courses at the University of New Hampshire, said he enjoyed her remarks. “I am coming around,” he said.Nearby, Bruce LaRiviere, 65, a retail salesman, said he was set on voting for Ms. Haley, whom he admired for her calls for term limits and competency tests for elected officials. He hoped Mr. Sununu’s endorsement would provide her the boost she needed to beat Mr. Trump, who he said was a force of a “noise and aggression.”“She’s very conservative,” he said. “I like the way she is going to try to change Washington.” More

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      DeSantis Bashes Trump for Bragging About Debating Hillary Clinton

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      Gov. Ron DeSantis escalated his attacks on the former president after Mr. Trump bragged about debating Hillary Clinton in 2016.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida accused former President Donald J. Trump of “cowardice” for refusing to participate in the Republican presidential primary debates after Mr. Trump boasted about facing Hillary Clinton in 2016 following the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape.“Trump denigrates military service by claiming it is ‘braver’ that he debated Hillary Clinton than what soldiers endure on the battlefield,” Mr. DeSantis, a former Navy lawyer, wrote on the social media platform X on Sunday. “Debating isn’t ‘brave’; it’s the bare minimum any candidate should do. Hiding from debates, on the other hand, is an example of cowardice.”The Florida governor was responding to comments that Mr. Trump — who has said he is too far ahead of his rivals in the polls to debate them — had made during a speech to New York Republicans on Saturday. In his remarks, Mr. Trump recounted how a general had praised him for taking the debate stage against Mrs. Clinton in 2016 even though a damaging recording of him making vulgar statements about women had recently been made public.Mr. Trump claimed the general had told him: “Sir, I’ve been on the battlefield. Men have gone down on my left and on my right. I stood on hills where soldiers were killed. But I believe the bravest thing I’ve ever seen was the night you went onto that stage with Hillary Clinton after what happened.”Mr. DeSantis has often been hesitant to directly attack Mr. Trump, who remains popular with Republican voters, limiting his criticisms to certain topics such as his inability to serve two terms and his failure to achieve policy objectives like building a border wall and “draining the swamp” during his first administration. One of Mr. DeSantis’s other go-to attacks has been on Mr. Trump’s decision not to take part in the four Republican debates held so far. But calling the former president a coward represents something of an escalation for Mr. DeSantis as his campaign continues to underperform expectations.The former president, who has a history of manufacturing anecdotes, did not name the general. Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said that Mr. DeSantis was having “a meltdown of epic proportions by regurgitating Democrat talking points.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Annoyed at Biden, New Hampshire Democrats Aim to Help His Presidential Campaign

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      Despite being bumped down the presidential calendar, Democrats in the state are planning a write-in campaign for the president, who won’t be on New Hampshire primary ballots.New Hampshire Democrats were furious at President Biden when he shook up the party’s nominating calendar last year, diminishing their state’s political importance by pushing its primary election behind South Carolina’s.Kicking and screaming, they defied the Democratic National Committee and refused to move back their primary. This year, they warned that the upheaval could come back to haunt Mr. Biden and cause him an embarrassing loss in the state’s primary.In turn, the national party stripped the state of its delegates. Mr. Biden declined to campaign in New Hampshire or even place his name on the ballot.Now a range of the state’s influential Democrats, including Senator Jeanne Shaheen, are coming around to the idea that they need to swallow their pride and help Mr. Biden win their primary despite his snub of their state.“It’s up to us in New Hampshire to fix a problem that his advisers and the D.N.C. made for the president,” said Kathleen Sullivan, a former New Hampshire Democratic Party chairwoman who is leading a write-in Biden super PAC.Ms. Sullivan’s super PAC is one of two groups of Democrats in the state organizing campaigns to promote Mr. Biden as a write-in candidate in the Jan. 23 primary election.For the Biden-backing Granite Staters, the write-in efforts amount to a bit of a tail-between-their-legs moment after months of howling objections about the president’s decision. Like Ms. Sullivan, they find themselves blaming the D.N.C. or Mr. Biden’s aides rather than a president whom they still support.Their goal is a substantial Biden victory over the two Democrats running protest campaigns against the president, Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota and the self-help author Marianne Williamson. Both of them, unlike Mr. Biden, will appear on Democratic ballots in the state.“People here, quite frankly, don’t care about the D.N.C. or their rules,” said Terie Norelli, a former speaker of the New Hampshire State House and a leader of Granite State Write-In, a grass-roots group supporting Mr. Biden. “The vast majority of Democrats and independents in New Hampshire do support President Biden.”The group hopes to use its modest budget — $50,000 to $70,000 — to inform New Hampshire Democrats and independents, who are allowed to cast ballots in the state’s primary elections, about how to vote for the president in a contest in which he is not participating.Beyond obvious details, like making sure voters know that his name is spelled B-i-d-e-n and that they have to check a write-in box on the ballot, the group is recruiting a team of volunteers. They will partake in the small-town New Hampshire experience of standing outside voting sites and holding signs urging voters to write in Mr. Biden’s name.The group also plans to have its members write letters and place opinion essays in New Hampshire newspapers and appear at town Democratic club meetings before the primary.Ms. Norelli said she was not worried that Mr. Biden would lose to Mr. Phillips or Ms. Williamson. The aim, she said, is to give his campaign — with which her group is not coordinating — momentum to defeat former President Donald J. Trump in the general election, assuming he is the Republican nominee.“It’s not like it’s a big, contested race,” she said.This month, the group distributed stickers at a New Hampshire Democratic Party fund-raising dinner where, in a public-relations triumph for the effort, Ms. Shaheen, the state’s senior senator, expressed her support.“Let’s kick off 2024 by writing in Biden and making our first-in-the-nation primary the very first victory for the Biden-Harris re-election team,” Ms. Shaheen said at the dinner.Representative Ro Khanna of California, who is widely seen as having presidential ambitions of his own and has publicly lamented Democrats’ decision to place New Hampshire after South Carolina on the nominating calendar, dialed into one of the group’s video conferences, which Ms. Norelli said were held every two weeks and usually attracted about 85 people.A Biden campaign spokesman declined to comment.Florida’s Democratic Party has already canceled its presidential primary. Democratic officials in other states have moved to list only Mr. Biden on their ballot, which has led to complaints from Mr. Phillips and Ms. Williamson.Ms. Sullivan said that by all but ignoring the New Hampshire primary, Mr. Biden ran the danger of allowing the challenges from Mr. Phillips and Ms. Williamson to become competitive. She pointed to 1976, 1980 and 1992, when incumbent presidents lost re-election, and to 1968, when President Lyndon B. Johnson was driven out of the race. In all of those years, the presidents faced tough primary opponents in New Hampshire.“I don’t think it would be good for him if he does poorly in New Hampshire,” Ms. Sullivan said of Mr. Biden.Ray Buckley, the chairman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party since 2007, said Mr. Biden retained support from a vast majority of the state’s Democrats, but cautioned that a significant percentage would be likely to vote against him.“About one-third of New Hampshire Democratic primary voters are cranky people who always want to be contrary,” said Mr. Buckley, who added that he had not communicated with the write-in groups. “Anyone who is not the main person starts off with a third of the vote.”Mr. Buckley himself plans to stay neutral — sort of.“Ever since I became state party chair, I have consistently written in Jimmy Carter,” Mr. Buckley said. “Maybe this time I’ll write in Rosalynn to honor her. That’s really the choice for me.”Lou D’Allesandro, a New Hampshire state senator who has known Mr. Biden for decades, said he would reluctantly write the president’s name on the ballot despite lingering anger about how the Granite State had been treated.“People felt slighted,” he said. “But what he’s done for the country overrides that decision.”Mr. D’Allesandro said he saw Mr. Biden last week at a Boston fund-raiser where the musician James Taylor played a concert. Mr. D’Allesandro said that he had embraced Mr. Biden, and that the president had invited him to the White House.But Mr. D’Allesandro didn’t bring up his grievances about New Hampshire’s primary.“It wasn’t the time or the place to do that,” he said. More

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      Casey DeSantis Invited Outsiders to Caucus in Iowa. The State Party Said No.

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      The Iowa Republican Party reminded supporters that only residents can vote in the first-in-the-nation caucuses, which will be held on Jan. 15.Casey DeSantis, the wife of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, drew criticism on Saturday from the rival campaign of former President Donald J. Trump for seeking to recruit out-of-state supporters to participate in the nation’s first Republican nominating contest.The backlash came a day after Ms. DeSantis, during a Fox News appearance with her husband, urged supporters from elsewhere to “descend upon the state of Iowa to be a part of the caucus.”“You do not have to be a resident of Iowa to be able to participate in the caucus,” said Ms. DeSantis, who has been a key player in her husband’s campaign and was specifically addressing mothers and grandmothers who support him.But the call to action is at odds with caucus rules, according to the Republican Party of Iowa, which hours later said that nonresidents were barred from caucusing.“Remember: you must be a legal resident of Iowa and the precinct you live in and bring photo ID with you to participate in the #iacaucus!” the party wrote on the social media platform X.Mr. Trump’s campaign on Saturday accused the DeSantis campaign of spreading misinformation about the caucuses, which will be held on Jan. 15. It suggested that the move was part of a broader scheme to change the outcome in the state, where polls show that Mr. Trump, the Republican front-runner, has a significant lead.“The Trump campaign strongly condemns their dirty and illegal tactics and implores all Trump supporters to be aware of the DeSantises’ openly stated plot to rig the caucus through fraud,” the campaign said in a statement.In an email on Saturday, Andrew Romeo, a spokesman for the DeSantis campaign, drew attention to comments made later on Friday by Ms. DeSantis on X, attempting to clarify her earlier remarks.“While voting in the Iowa caucus is limited to registered voters in Iowa, there is a way for others to participate,” Ms. DeSantis wrote.Mr. DeSantis also addressed the controversy while speaking to reporters on Friday in Iowa.“While voting in the Iowa caucus is limited to registered voters in Iowa, there is a way for others to participate,” he said. “They even let people go and speak on behalf of candidates, and they have all these precincts, so you may have people who really can speak strongly about our leadership that are going to come.”The Trump campaign continued to seize upon Ms. DeSantis’s remarks on Saturday, calling on Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa, who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis and snubbed Mr. Trump, to clarify the caucus eligibility rules. It also demanded that Ms. Reynolds disavow the tactics promoted by Ms. DeSantis as “flagrantly wrong that could further disenfranchise caucusgoers.”A spokesman for Ms. Reynolds did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.Kellen Browning More