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      DeSantis Cuts Campaign Staff by Over a Third, Aiming to Rein In Costs

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      His presidential campaign, facing questions from allies and donors about the strength of his candidacy, has now eliminated the jobs of 38 aides this month.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is sharply cutting the size of his presidential campaign staff, reducing by more than one-third a payroll that had swelled to more than 90 people in his first two months as a candidate, according to four people with knowledge of the decision.The DeSantis campaign has now made two rounds of cutbacks in the past week, and has eliminated the jobs of 38 aides this month, a figure that is nearly the size of former President Donald J. Trump’s entire 2024 campaign staff. Politico first reported on the latest reduction.Mr. DeSantis has struggled to gain traction in his early months as a candidate, losing ground to Mr. Trump in the polls as allies and donors have raised questions about the long-term strength of his candidacy.Those worries came to a head after the first public glimpse of his campaign’s finances this month. It showed that Mr. DeSantis’s payroll was roughly double the size of Mr. Trump’s and that he was burning through 40 percent of the $20 million he had raised from April through June. Mr. DeSantis’s heavy use of private planes and his decision to rent luxury venues for some fund-raising events, including a Utah donor retreat last weekend, drew added scrutiny.Mr. DeSantis entered July with just $9 million to spend on the primary race from his initial haul. A significant portion came from donors who gave the maximum amount possible, meaning they cannot contribute again.The cutbacks are seen internally as a recognition not just that spending must be reined in but also that fund-raising is expected to be harder in the coming months. Many bigger donors are now spooked by Mr. DeSantis’s sliding poll numbers and may be less inclined to risk getting on the wrong side of Mr. Trump than they were a few months ago, when Mr. DeSantis looked more competitive.One DeSantis donor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid, said that he expected the next quarter of fund-raising to be an extremely tough slog and that donor interest in Mr. DeSantis has dried up considerably.In a statement, Mr. DeSantis’s campaign manager, Generra Peck, said the changes followed “a top-to-bottom review of our organization.”“We have taken additional, aggressive steps to streamline operations and put Ron DeSantis in the strongest position to win this primary and defeat Joe Biden,” she said.There have been some shifts inside the leadership of the campaign, which is based in Tallahassee: Ethan Eilon, who had served as digital director, is now deputy campaign manager. Carl Sceusa, who had overseen the campaign’s technology, is now the chief financial officer. On Tuesday, Mr. DeSantis was on a three-stop fund-raising swing through Tennessee when his four-car motorcade had a pileup after traffic suddenly slowed. One campaign aide was lightly injured, but the governor was unharmed.On Thursday, Mr. DeSantis is set to return to Iowa for two days of events and his first bus trip in the state. But in a cost-cutting move, his campaign is not putting together the tour. His main super PAC is doing so instead, inviting Mr. DeSantis as a “special guest.”The payroll reduction came on the heels of a donor retreat in Park City, Utah, where Mr. DeSantis convened about 70 top supporters. They enjoyed s’mores on the deck and cocktails as campaign officials and super PAC advisers made presentations about the state of the race.Two people at the donor event said that despite the fact that the alarming campaign filing had dominated coverage of Mr. DeSantis heading into the weekend, there was very little talk of it by campaign officials in formal sessions. Instead, they focused on the notion that they were steadying the ship, making adjustments and trying to find ways to help Mr. DeSantis spread his message.Mr. DeSantis himself held one interactive session with donors, who tossed out suggested zingers for next month’s debate. Among the Republicans who were seen at the retreat was Phil Cox, who was a top adviser on Mr. DeSantis’s 2022 campaign and had initially been in line for a top role on his 2024 super PAC. Instead, Mr. Cox is helping the campaign itself with fund-raising and some informal support.Nick Iarossi, a lobbyist in Tallahassee and DeSantis supporter who attended the retreat, said the weekend had gone well.“Campaign manager Generra Peck and the team assured the donors of a new insurgency campaign style,” Mr. Iarossi said before the latest round of cutbacks was announced. “It’s going to be a lean, efficient and tactical campaign moving forward that’s going to focus on return on investment. They are going to cut things quickly that aren’t producing results.”In Utah, Ms. Peck’s leadership was a focus of some of the donors in private conversations among themselves, according to people familiar with the discussions. But the weekend ended with Ms. Peck, who has made herself indispensable to both Mr. DeSantis and his wife, Casey, still in charge. More

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      Kelly Ayotte Announces Run for Governor in New Hampshire

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      The former senator entered the race after Gov. Chris Sununu, a fellow Republican, said last week that he would not run again.Former Senator Kelly Ayotte, a Republican, entered the race for governor of New Hampshire on Monday, following Gov. Chris Sununu’s announcement last week that he would not run again for office in 2024.“I’m running for governor because New Hampshire is one election away from becoming Massachusetts — from becoming something we are not,” Ms. Ayotte wrote in her campaign announcement. Maura Healey, a Democrat, flipped the Massachusetts governor’s office last year after Charlie Baker declined to run again. Both Mr. Baker and Mr. Sununu are popular moderate Republicans in their states.Ms. Ayotte, a former attorney general in New Hampshire, was ousted from her Senate seat in 2016 by Maggie Hassan, a Democrat who had previously served as a popular governor of the state.Ms. Ayotte’s candidacy for governor comes at a time when the state is receiving renewed attention from Republican presidential hopefuls, many of whom have repeatedly traveled to the state to court voters who will be among the first to go to the polls in the G.O.P. primary.Ms. Ayotte is expected to garner widespread support among Republicans in the state, in a race that the nonpartisan Cook Political Report shifted to a tossup, from solid-Republican, after Mr. Sununu said he would not run again. Chuck Morse, the former president of New Hampshire’s state senate who lost the G.O.P. Senate primary in the race to face Ms. Hassan last year, entered the race almost immediately after Mr. Sununu’s announcement.Two Democrats in the state — Cinde Warmington, a member of the New Hampshire Executive Council, and Joyce Craig, the mayor of Manchester — announced their candidacies ahead of Mr. Sununu’s declaration.Ms. Ayotte faced a tough re-election campaign in 2016 even as Republicans gained power nationally. She served only one term in the Senate.Though New Hampshire has had several recent statewide officials that are Republicans, the state has leaned blue during presidential elections, supporting Democrats in the last five.Alongside her announcement, Ms. Ayotte rolled out a lengthy list of endorsements from dozens of Republicans across the state, who rallied around her candidacy.But national Democrats were quick to criticize the former Senator and indicated that they plan to make abortion protections central in the race.“Kelly Ayotte has spent her career working to stack the deck against New Hampshire’s working families and attacking their most fundamental freedoms — even leading the charge for a national abortion ban — which is why New Hampshire voters retired her seven years ago after a single term in the Senate,” wrote Izzi Levy, the deputy communications director for the Democratic Governors Association.In her statement on Monday, Ms. Ayotte said she would seek to tackle crime by “standing up for our law enforcement officers” and would aim to “protect and strengthen New Hampshire’s economic advantage.”She also signaled that she would lean into cultural issues motivating the Republican base, writing that she would “stand with parents, not bureaucrats, when it comes to deciding what is best for our children.” More

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      Who Will Attend the First Republican Debate? What We Know About Trump and His Rivals.

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      Republican presidential candidates are supposed to face off in Milwaukee on Aug. 23. But Donald Trump, the field’s front-runner, may not show up, and others have yet to make the cut.With a month to go before the first Republican presidential debate, the stage in Milwaukee remains remarkably unsettled, with the front-runner, former President Donald J. Trump, waffling on his attendance and the rest of the participants far from certain.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is in. So are Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, and Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and author. Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor and scourge of Mr. Trump, said he would be on the stage as well.But the Republican National Committee’s complicated criteria to qualify for the Aug. 23 gathering — based on candidates’ donors and polling numbers — have also created real problems for others in the field.Former Vice President Mike Pence, who would be a serious candidate for the Republican nomination by most measures, may not be invited to debate because of the R.N.C.’s measures: Candidates must have at least 40,000 individual donors, and 1 percent in three national polls of Republican voters, or 1 percent in two national polls and two polls in the early primary states.The debate in Milwaukee — the first of three scheduled so far — has been billed by the party and the candidates as an inflection point in a race that has remained in stasis, even with its front-runner under state and federal indictment, with more charges expected soon. Mr. Trump is likely to face charges next month stemming from his efforts to overturn President Biden’s 2020 victory in Georgia, and has been notified that he could be indicted soon on federal charges for clinging to power after his electoral defeat.Yet he remains the prohibitive leader in state and national polling, with Mr. DeSantis a distant second and the rest of the field clustered in single digits.The debate will offer the dark horses perhaps their last shot at making an impression, if they can qualify, and all candidates not named Trump a chance to present themselves as the true alternative to the legally challenged former president. Over the next month, political observers will see a steady taunting of the front-runner by candidates who see a no-lose scenario. Either they goad Mr. Trump to share the stage with them, giving them equal billing with the front-runner and a chance to take a shot at him, or they paint him as too scared to show up, denting his tough-guy image.“As Governor DeSantis has already said, he looks forward to participating in the debates and believes Trump should as well — nobody is entitled to this nomination; they must earn it,” said Bryan Griffin, a spokesman for the DeSantis campaign.On CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Mr. Christie promised, “I’ll be on this stage for all of the debates, and I will hold Donald Trump personally responsible for failing us.”For his part, Mr. Trump has stayed noncommittal. Senior advisers have counseled him against showing up and validating his challengers, but his rivals believe they can prick his ego and shame him to the stage.“You’re leading people by 50 or 60 points, you say, why would you be doing a debate?” Mr. Trump said on Fox News last weekend. “It’s actually not fair. Why would you let someone who’s at zero or one or two or three be popping you with questions?”The Republican Party has chosen Milwaukee to host two key events as it chooses its 2024 presidential nominee.Morry Gash/Associated PressIn some sense, the Milwaukee debate is haunted by the circuslike atmosphere that pervaded the Republican debates of 2015 and 2016, when Mr. Trump ran roughshod over crowded stages with insulting nicknames and constant interruptions. At one point, the discussion devolved into lewd references to the significance of the size of Mr. Trump’s hands.The Republican National Committee’s thresholds were intended to keep the number of participants down and ensure that only serious candidates made the stage. The final roster will not be set until 48 hours before debate night, when the last polls come in and the candidates must pledge that they will back the eventual Republican nominee.But with a month to go, the polling and donor thresholds — imperfect as they may be — are already narrowing the field.Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the R.N.C., said Friday on Fox Business that a candidate who cannot win over “40,000 different small dollar donations” is “not going to be competitive against Joe Biden.”Candidates like Mr. Ramaswamy and Mr. Scott have used the donor rules to tout the power of their campaigns beyond the single digits they have garnered in national polling.“Tim will be on the debate stage for months to come thanks to over 145,000 donations from over 53,000 unique donors across all 50 states,” said Nathan Brand, a spokesman for the Scott campaign.Long-shot candidates like the Los Angeles commentator Larry Elder, Mayor Francis X. Suarez of Miami, former Representative Will Hurd of Texas and the businessman Perry Johnson are not likely to make the cut.In an interview on Friday, Mr. Elder said he was only about halfway to the donor threshold, and because his name is often omitted from Republican polling, reaching 1 percent could be impossible. For candidates like him, he conceded, making the stage is existential for his campaign.“It’s crucial for me to get on that debate stage; that’s Plan A, and Plan B is to make Plan A work,” he said, suggesting there is no other option.Some candidates, like Mr. Pence and Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, could also fall short of qualifying. Mr. Pence, who has easily cleared the polling threshold but has badly lagged in fund-raising, launched an email blitz on Wednesday, pleading for 40,000 people to send his campaign $1. Mr. Hutchinson is still short of 40,000 but did reach 1 percent in a qualifying national poll this month.Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota, may still qualify, in part because Mr. Burgum, a wealthy former software executive, is offering $20 gift cards to the first 50,000 people who donate at least $1 to his campaign. He is also pumping up his standing in early-state polls with a well-financed ad blitz.“Gov. Burgum will absolutely be on the debate stage next month,” said his spokesman, Lance Trover.Mr. Burgum is not alone in his creative fund-raising strategies. Mr. Ramaswamy, who like Mr. Burgum is wealthy enough to self-fund his presidential bid, is offering donors a 10 percent cut of the donations they get from those they convince to give to the Ramaswamy campaign. Mr. Suarez last week said he would enter anyone who sends his campaign $1 into a raffle for Lionel Messi’s first game with Inter Miami, the South Florida Major League Soccer club.“It corrupts the process. It makes us look foolish. It makes us look silly,” said Mr. Elder, who accused the R.N.C. of stacking the deck for elected officials and the super rich.A super PAC for Chris Christie, who has staked his campaign on criticizing Mr. Trump, has been running advertisements mocking the former president’s reluctance to debate.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesMr. Christie is making something of a mockery of another R.N.C. demand — that every candidate sign a pledge to back the eventual nominee. Mr. Christie, who was once a confidant of Mr. Trump’s and is now his sworn enemy, has said he will sign the pledge, but he has added that he will take the promise as seriously as Mr. Trump takes his promises — that is to say, not seriously at all. In the spring of 2016, Mr. Trump reneged on a similar pledge, though it became moot when he secured the nomination.Karl Rickett, a spokesman for Mr. Christie, said on Friday that the former governor had not swerved from that stand.Mr. Hurd has said flat out that he will not sign the pledge, but there is little indication he can make the debate stage anyway.For his part, Mr. Trump may make a mockery of the debate itself. In 2016, he skipped a Republican primary debate over his feud with the Fox New host Megyn Kelly and “counterprogrammed” a benefit for veterans in Des Moines. On his Truth Social media site on Sunday, Mr. Trump said “so many people have suggested” that he debate the former Fox News star Tucker Carlson on the night of the first Republican debate.Aides to rival campaigns last week said the Republican National Committee should place sanctions on Mr. Trump if he pulls a similar stunt in August.Whether Mr. Trump shows up or not, he will be the target of his rivals for the next four weeks. And if the former president does not show, he still could attend the debate at the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif., in September, or the one in Alabama in October.Mr. Christie’s super PAC, Tell It Like It Is, is already running advertisements mocking Mr. Trump’s reluctance. And others are jumping in.“We can’t complain about Biden not debating R.F.K. if Trump is not going to get on the debate stage and stand next to us,” Ms. Haley said last week, referring to the president and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has challenged Mr. Biden for the Democratic nomination.“I have never known him to be scared of anything,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I certainly don’t expect him to be scared of the debate stage, so I think he’s going to have to get on there.” More

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      Will Hurd Searches for a 2024 Republican Base

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      Hoping to break through a crowded presidential field in 2024, the former Texas congressman is pitching himself as a modern and moderate Republican with a bipartisan vision.It is the stuff of viral internet legend now. After snow disrupted their flights, Will Hurd, the former Republican congressman, and Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat from a neighboring district, climbed into a rented Chevy Impala and took a cross-country road trip from their home state of Texas to Washington.As they live streamed what they called “a bipartisan town hall” to millions of Americans on Facebook and Twitter, featuring hourslong policy debates on health care, singalongs to Willie Nelson and doughnut runs, the two captured the national attention as Americans watched them cultivate a friendship, even as they disagreed.More than six years later, on a sunny day this July, Mr. Hurd was on the road again, this time as a longer than long-shot presidential candidate, a moderate whose penchant for bipartisanship puts him at odds with the party’s current mood.Riding in a rented gray S.U.V. and cutting through the wooded highways of New Hampshire, he was seeking the spotlight once again, in a race for the Republican nomination that is being driven by some of the party’s loudest and most partisan voices.Mr. Hurd is already a long-shot candidate, and his penchant for reaching across the aisle is something of an outlier in a race led by former President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.David Degner for The New York Times“Have I changed my opinion that more unites us than divides us? No,” Mr. Hurd said, recalling the lessons he took from his trip with Mr. O’Rourke. “People were craving something different — craving it.”Mr. Hurd, 45, wants to show voters that he brings something different to the race. A Black Republican who has represented a majority Latino district and wants to broaden his party’s appeal, he is not, as he puts it, about “banning books” or “harassing my friends in the L.G.B.T.Q. community.”It’s a hard sell in a primary that so far has been dominated by culture-war issues that are the focus of the front-runners as well as by the legal issues surrounding former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Hurd has the most difficult of paths ahead. He has been on the campaign trail for only a little more than a month and is lagging behind his opponents in staffing, name recognition and fund-raising. The latest quarterly filings showed he had just $245,000 in cash on hand.He may fall short of the qualifications for the first Republican primary debate on Aug. 23, which requires candidates to draw a minimum of 40,000 unique donors and at least 1 percent of voter support in three approved polls.Even if he were to meet those requirements, he still might not get on the debate stage: He has refused to fulfill the Republican National Committee’s most disputed stipulation, that candidates sign a pledge to support their party’s eventual nominee. Not having a seat at the debate table means losing the most important lever to gaining attention in the primary.At a pit stop outside Manchester, Mr. Hurd said he had no issue with championing another Republican. But he said he would not support Mr. Trump. “I’m not going to lie to get a microphone,” Mr. Hurd said, digging into a Philly cheesesteak and salty fries.Back on the road, Mr. Hurd did not downplay the challenges. In interviews, town halls and political events, he is often quick to refer to himself as a “dark horse” or “a start-up,” meticulously targeting the kind of voter that data suggests might be most open to his background and message. Those voters, he added, include a cross-section of people — Republicans, independents and moderates — who are tired of the toxicity in politics, reject Mr. Trump and want someone with a vision for the future of the Republican Party. Proving that group of people indeed exists as a coherent base of support will be the ultimate test of his candidacy.Mr. Hurd believes his voter base includes an eclectic mix of people who are looking for a new chapter in Republican politics.David Degner for The New York TimesMr. Hurd’s charisma and enthusiasm for wonky policy comes across in one-on-one conversations, but it remains to be seen how well his expertise will translate on the stump. At a 2024 presidential candidate speaker series at Dartmouth College, where he arrived that afternoon, an audience of more than 50 people seemed to gradually warm up to Mr. Hurd after a stiff start.“We are in a competition — the Chinese government is trying to surpass us as a global superpower,” Mr. Hurd said, warning that A.I. could lead to unemployment but could also help bridge inequality in education. “And I’m very specific. I say, the Chinese government. It’s not the Chinese people. It’s not the Chinese culture. It’s not Chinese Americans.”In the audience, Alice Werbel, 78, a retired nurse practitioner who drove in from Norwich, a bedroom community in Vermont, said she saw Mr. Hurd as “up and coming” and commended him for his courage in refusing to sign the debate pledge.Even those who admire Mr. Hurd’s politics are not necessarily set on giving him their support. One voter who saw Mr. Hurd speak at Dartmouth said she planned to vote for President Biden.David Degner for The New York TimesBut when Mr. Hurd’s remarks concluded, she did not seem convinced he had a road to the presidency. She said she planned to vote for President Biden in 2024.“Biden should appoint him technology czar or A.I. czar or cabinet secretary of technology,” she added.Afterward, at a dinner where Mr. Hurd spoke with a small group of students, Josh Paul, 21, a conservative and a government major, was not sure if the Texas Republican could pull off a win either, but he said he was going to help Mr. Hurd try. He had found Mr. Hurd’s rejection of Mr. Trump so refreshing that he sought out a campaign staffer to sign up as a volunteer.“I don’t understand how, if conservatism is all about fidelity to your oath and to the Constitution, how you can possibly sit silently by while this guy lies and lies and lies and incites an insurrection,” Mr. Paul said, referring to Mr. Trump and the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.For three terms, Mr. Hurd represented one of the most competitive congressional districts in the country — a wide, largely Hispanic area that stretches from El Paso at the western tip of Texas, all along the nation’s southwestern border, to San Antonio. The only Black Republican in the House when he announced his retirement in August 2019, Mr. Hurd said one of the reasons he was leaving Congress was to help diversify his party’s ranks.Mr. Hurd sometimes toes a difficult line in his party, embracing some core values, like opposing abortion, while taking more complicated stances on others.David Degner for The New York TimesMr. Hurd has been a fierce and consistent critic of Mr. Trump but has remained a steadfast Republican with conservative values. Before the students at Dartmouth, he said he would be willing to sign a 15-week ban on abortion, with exceptions for certain cases, such as rape or incest. Like his Republican rivals of color, he walks a thorny line between rejecting the existence of a system of racism in America while describing situations that appear to fit the definition.On the road trip through New Hampshire, he said that when his parents first arrived in San Antonio, they had to live in the only neighborhood where an interracial couple could buy a home. “There are still some communities that don’t have equal opportunity,” he said. But, “I don’t know if I’d call that systemic racism. I don’t call it that.”At a Friday town hall at Saint Anselm College in Goffstown, Thalia Floras, 60, a district retail manager and undecided Democrat, said her one concern with Mr. Hurd was his support for a ban on abortion. Yet she appreciated that he seemed open to listening to opposing views and did not resort to using phrases like “woke mob” or “radical left.”Marie Mulroy, 75, a retired public health worker and an independent raised by a Republican mother and Democratic father, said she had donated to Mr. Hurd because he was compassionate, liked to work across the aisle and had “a better understanding of the world and where we are going in the future.”In every good political argument, she said, “you have to have the thesis, antithesis and synthesis. But, “we don’t get the synthesis anymore,” she said. “And this is where the voters are — the voters are sitting in the synthesis.” More

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      The Stagnation of Ron DeSantis

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      Is it possible to rapidly “reboot” a struggling presidential campaign? Pundits have to hope so, since otherwise our advice-giving beat becomes a bit irrelevant. But thinking back over recent primary candidacies that seemed to sag and then recovered, from John Kerry in 2004 to John McCain in 2008 to Joe Biden in 2020, it’s hard to identify brilliant strategic pivots. Instead what you see is candidates with fundamental strengths who hung around until events conspired to make those strengths more relevant, their opponents’ weaknesses more manifest, and their campaigns suddenly triumphant.For Ron DeSantis, currently engaged in a campaign reset after months of stagnant polling, there’s no way to sell these case studies to his restive donors. “Don’t worry, we’re going to hang around and hope things break our way at the last minute” isn’t exactly an inspiring rallying cry, especially for a candidate who briefly seemed poised to become the 2024 front-runner, but now languishes 20 or 30 points behind Donald Trump.And it’s easy enough to list things that DeSantis could be doing differently. Some of them, like talking less about the swiftly-receding Covid era and seeking combat with the mainstream media, are obvious enough that the campaign is already trying to adapt. Other possibilities seem to still elude his team — above all, the benefits of breaking out of the movement-conservative box a bit more, making big promises on economic as well as social policy, and avoiding a replay of Ted Cruz’s ideologically self-limiting 2016 campaign.But any benefit from these shifts is likely to be incremental rather than dramatic. Meanwhile, the reset that’s so often urged on DeSantis — the idea that he needs to go hard after Trump’s unfitness for high office — is a theory supported by exactly zero polling evidence.The reality is that if there were some obvious path to rising higher in the polls at this stage of the campaign, another Republican candidate would have probably discovered it. As The Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio, no great DeSantis admirer, pointed out a week ago, amid all the talk about his faltering campaign the Florida governor’s support “exceeds the combined share of every candidate who’s trailing him, a field that includes a sitting senator, two former governors, and the most recent former vice president of the United States.”The Trump-friendly Vivek Ramaswamy, often portrayed as the breakout figure in the non-DeSantis field, stands just shy of 5 percent in the RealClearPolitics polling average. The most forthrightly anti-Trump figure, Chris Christie, stands at 2 percent. The sunny donor favorite Tim Scott is at 3 percent.Those numbers make DeSantis’s stagnant 20 percent look pretty good, and his Trump-adjacent positioning like a much stronger play than the alternatives.Yes, it’s not as strong as it looked during Trump’s post-midterm swoon. But the argument I made back then — that Trump was far more likely to lose in a fade than in a knockout — isn’t obviated by the fact that he hasn’t faded yet. Quite the reverse: It’s precisely Trump’s recovery and resilience amid multiplying indictments that suggests the futility of a Christie-style assault, while leaving DeSantis’s more hedged strategy with a narrowing but still discernible path.That path looks like this: First, in Iowa, DeSantis needs some of the very conservative voters who temporarily backed away from Trump after the midterms to back away again. Then in New Hampshire, he needs the momentum of an Iowa victory to reconcile the party’s moderates to the necessity of rallying to him, instead of sticking with Scott or Christie or Nikki Haley. Pull off that combination, and he’s well positioned for South Carolina, Florida and beyond.There’s no reason to expect things to play out this way. We’ve seen repeatedly how Trump’s supporters always seem to want to return to him, and how Trump’s skeptics always seem incapable of uniting effectively. We haven’t seen enough potency from DeSantis-the-candidate to expect him to make those patterns break.But sitting at 20 percent for a long time and then riding an early primary victory to consolidation is an imaginable scenario, at least, and one that tracks with recent examples of campaigns that first disappointed and ultimately surged. Whereas all the other scenarios for beating Trump, whether involving current contenders or some late-entering white knight, seem like wishcasting from Republicans who don’t want to settle for DeSantis.Maybe this will change in the debate season, whose set-pieces are more likely to actually reset DeSantis’s campaign than any move his team makes now, while giving his rivals their best opportunities to shake his hold on second place.But pending those confrontations, the disappointment with DeSantis doesn’t change the fact that the guy stagnating in second is more likely to finish first than all the distant others.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      What Trump’s G.O.P. Rivals Are Saying About a Third Potential Indictment

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      As news broke Tuesday morning that former President Donald J. Trump was likely to be indicted in a third criminal case, the reaction from his rivals in the 2024 Republican primary was notably muted.Mr. Trump still had defenders — including his top competitor in polls, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida — who cast him as a victim of “politicization” of the Justice Department. But the tenor was subtly different. Some candidates seemed visibly tired of having to continually respond to Mr. Trump’s legal troubles at the expense of talking about anything else, and some did not say anything at all.Nikki Haley, who served as United Nations ambassador under Mr. Trump and is now running against him, sounded exasperated when asked on Fox News about the investigation into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. She called it a “distraction” from important issues like foreign policy, border security and the national debt.“The rest of this primary election is going to be in reference to Trump: it’s going to be about lawsuits; it’s going to be about legal fees; it’s going to be about judges; and it’s just going to continue to be a further and further distraction,” Ms. Haley said. “And that’s why I am running, is because we need a new generational leader. We can’t keep dealing with this drama.”She notably did not repeat what she said when Mr. Trump was indicted last month for his retention of classified documents: that the charges were evidence of “prosecutorial overreach, double standards and vendetta politics.”Mr. DeSantis, for his part, said that any indictment would be part of “an attempt to criminalize politics and to try to criminalize differences,” while also saying that Mr. Trump should have “come out more forcefully” to stop his supporters from storming the Capitol on Jan. 6.And while Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, speaking before a campaign event in New Hampshire, denounced what he described as “the weaponization of the Department of Justice against political enemies,” he quickly turned to naming non-Trump-related examples. Pressed further on Mr. Trump, he said, “The voters will decide the next president of the United States.”In other corners, silence reigned. The campaigns of Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami and Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota did not respond to requests for comment. And a spokesman for former Vice President Mike Pence — who, by certifying the election results on Jan. 6, made an enemy of his former boss — said that Mr. Pence had nothing to say Tuesday morning.But, in a nod to the political inescapability of Mr. Trump’s legal troubles, the spokesman, Devin O’Malley, added that Mr. Pence would be making television appearances later in the day and would probably be asked about it then.The restraint was not universal.A candidate who has been one of Mr. Trump’s most forceful defenders, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, went so far last month as to urge every 2024 contender to pledge to pardon him if elected. On Tuesday, he initially took a less fiery tack, saying he “would have made very different judgments than President Trump did, but a bad judgment is not a crime.” But not long after, he issued a conspiratorial statement, suggesting without evidence that the possible indictment was part of a plot to disqualify Mr. Trump from office under the 14th Amendment.“It is un-American for the ruling party to use police power to arrest its chief political rivals,” Mr. Ramaswamy said. He added that he had filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking evidence for his belief that President Biden ordered the Justice Department and the special counsel to indict Mr. Trump. He ended the statement by promoting an upcoming campaign event.Three other low-polling candidates who, unlike Mr. Ramaswamy, have sought out the anti- Trump lane of the primary field reacted predictably.Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said on Twitter that he would not comment on the potential legal case until an indictment was released, but that Mr. Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 proved “he doesn’t care about our country & our Constitution.” And former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas reiterated his call for Mr. Trump to suspend his campaign.“I have said from the beginning that Donald Trump’s actions on Jan. 6 should disqualify him from ever being president again,” Mr. Hutchinson said in a statement. He added, “Anyone who truly loves this country and is willing to put the country over themselves would suspend their campaign for president of the United States immediately.”The third candidate, former Representative Will Hurd of Texas, was scathing: “Losing to Joe Biden was so humiliating to Donald Trump that he was willing to let people die for his lies about a stolen election,” he said in a statement. He added, “Trump’s inaction then, and now being a target in the investigation, proves he’s not fit for office.” More

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      DeSantis, in Rare CNN Interview, Defends His Struggling Campaign

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      Despite rising scrutiny, the Florida governor stuck to the same strategy — including by defending his top rival, Donald Trump, in the face of new legal troubles.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, with his poll numbers sagging and his opponents circling, defended his struggling campaign on Tuesday, saying on CNN that he had been “taking fire nonstop” but was putting together the political operation he needed to win the early nominating states next year and vault to the presidency.His afternoon appearance in a rare interview in the mainstream news media seemed intended to reset his White House campaign after weeks of second-guessing from critics who have failed to see much progress in catching his main rival, Donald J. Trump. But a major shift in tone or strategy from Mr. DeSantis, either toward the former president or in the issues he focuses on, did not appear in the offing.He remained deferential to Mr. Trump even after the front-runner signaled on Tuesday morning that he could soon be indicted for a third time, in this instance on federal charges stemming from his efforts to cling to power after losing the 2020 election. Speaking with the CNN host Jake Tapper in an interview recorded earlier in the day, Mr. DeSantis dodged questions on his support for a national abortion ban, whether he would commit U.S. troops to defend Taiwan and how to end the war in Ukraine.But he expressed confidence that he was laying the groundwork for victory in the Iowa caucuses in January, and that he, as the only military veteran in the race, would win South Carolina, a military-heavy state that comes third in the primary process.“I’ll be the first president elected since 1988 that served in a war,” Mr. DeSantis, who served in the Navy’s Judge Advocate General Corps in Iraq, said outside South Carolina’s capital building in Columbia. Simply appearing on CNN appeared to be an acknowledgment that Mr. DeSantis needs to change his approach after confining his interviews to conservative news outlets and relying on allies to take on the former president. Mr. Trump has comfortably led polls nationally and in the Palmetto State for months.And Mr. DeSantis’s newly released fund-raising figures, although strong overall at $20 million, showed that his campaign has been spending hand over fist and is dangerously dependent on large donors, who could be looking elsewhere for a Trump alternative. His campaign has also begun cutting its staff, in another worrying sign.Still, mindful of alienating core Republican voters who are sympathetic to Mr. Trump, Mr. DeSantis pulled his punches on Tuesday. After news broke that Mr. Trump had received a “target letter” from the special counsel, Jack Smith, the Florida governor said Mr. Trump “should have come out more forcefully” on Jan. 6, 2021, to stop the rioting at the Capitol.On the campaign trail, Mr. DeSantis has mostly held interviews with friendly conservative news outlets, not mainstream organizations.Meg Kinnard/Associated PressBut Mr. DeSantis added that criminal charges would fit a pattern of weaponization of political institutions against conservatives.“I think what we’ve seen in this country is an attempt to criminalize politics and to try to criminalize differences,” he said during a campaign event in West Columbia, S.C.Mr. DeSantis’s social media team, in fact, pushed back on the suggestion that the governor was insufficiently supportive of the former president.How such deference might undermine Mr. Trump’s lead was unclear. Two Republican candidates from South Carolina, Senator Tim Scott and former Gov. Nikki Haley, are also hoping to capitalize on Mr. Trump’s legal peril and Mr. DeSantis’s stumbles and present themselves as the new alternative to the former president.For Mr. DeSantis, a drastic reboot of his campaign is not obvious.On Monday night in Tega Cay, S.C., on the North Carolina border, he stuck to his well-worn talking points: the supposed “indoctrination” of children by “leftist” educators; mobilizing the military to the southern border to stop “our country being invaded”; and his disappointment in Mr. Trump for failing to fire Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who helped lead the Covid-19 response.On Tuesday morning, Mr. DeSantis discussed military policy in an airplane hangar outside Columbia. He filed the paperwork formally declaring his candidacy in the state that morning.His remarks were heavy on themes he has hit since he joined the race: railing against diversity, equity and inclusion programs and what he called “woke operating policies” like drag shows, which the Defense Department ended last month. He also proposed to reinstate the Trump administration’s ban on transgender sailors, soldiers and marines, and promised to end funding for transition care for active-duty service members.Pressed by Mr. Tapper on how the roughly one million transgender adults in the United States would live under a DeSantis administration, the governor said military readiness took precedence over what he characterized as individual life choices.Beyond the military, he said, “I would respect everybody, but what I wouldn’t do is turn society upside down” to accommodate “a very, very small percentage of the population.”Mr. DeSantis also said he would reinstate service members who had been relieved of duty for declining to take the Covid-19 vaccine, a move that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III instituted a year ago.Although the Trump administration broadly moved against transgender rights throughout the federal government, the DeSantis campaign has framed Mr. Trump as weak on his opposition to rolling back L.G.B.T.Q. rights. It may be having an impact.Elizabeth James, 69, a retiree and self-proclaimed “grandmama for DeSantis” who lives in the Columbia area, said she supported Mr. Trump in 2016 and 2020 but soured on him after he “waffled” on transgender issues. She applauded Mr. DeSantis’s plans to end military funding for service members’ transition surgeries and said she believed that too few Republican voters knew enough about Mr. Trump’s record on L.G.B.T.Q. issues.“They’re just holding over from him in 2020 without re-examining where he is now,” she said of the former president. “I think he shifted a lot from where he was.”By holding the CNN interview, the governor had most likely hoped to quiet detractors who say he cannot handle the heat of a critical press.Mr. Tapper pressed Mr. DeSantis on whether he would sign a national ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, mirroring the ban he signed in Florida. He said he saw no evidence Congress could pass a national abortion ban.On committing to send U.S. troops to beat back a theoretical Chinese invasion of Taiwan, again, he dodged: “We’re going to deter that from happening.”And on the hot-button Republican issue of continued U.S. military support for Ukraine, he was even more vague.“The goal should be a sustainable, enduring peace in Europe, but one that does not reward aggression,” he said.The DeSantis political operation may be strengthening its jabs against Mr. Trump. The DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down confirmed on Tuesday that a new advertisement from the group had used artificial intelligence to mimic the voice of Mr. Trump as if it were attacking Iowa’s popular conservative governor, Kim Reynolds. Politico reported on the ad on Monday evening.Mr. Trump’s feud with Ms. Reynolds over her refusal to endorse him is real, and began with an attack on his social network, Truth Social. And it could hurt the former president’s chances in Iowa.But the ad falsely purports to catch Mr. Trump on tape. The super PAC said, “Our team utilized technology to give voice to Donald Trump’s words and Truth Social post attacking Gov. Reynolds.”The Trump campaign evinced no fear.“The DeSantis campaign doesn’t know how to turn things around with their current candidate,” Jason Miller, a senior adviser for the Trump campaign, said in a statement. More

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      Trump Taunts DeSantis Onstage at Turning Point Action Conference

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      Former President Donald J. Trump taunted Gov. Ron DeSantis, his chief Republican rival, for his absence from the conservative Turning Point Action Conference.On the home turf of his chief Republican rival and in his adopted state, former President Donald J. Trump told a sprawling conservative gathering in Florida on Saturday night that it was futile for Gov. Ron DeSantis to keep battling him for the party’s presidential nomination.In a prime-time speech at the Turning Point Action Conference in West Palm Beach, Fla., Mr. Trump claimed that his polling lead over Mr. DeSantis and every other G.O.P. candidate was insurmountable, and suggested that the Florida governor should stand down for the good of the party.Mr. Trump, who leads Mr. DeSantis by roughly 30 percentage points in national polls, dismissed Mr. DeSantis’s early momentum before he officially entered the race in May as a mirage.“He was never that close, by the way,” Mr. Trump told about 6,000 grass-roots activists at the Palm Beach County Convention Center. Turning Point Action is a political arm of Turning Point USA, a pro-Trump grass-roots group focusing on millennial conservatives that was founded by Charlie Kirk.Mr. Trump seized on his rival’s absence from the two-day event, which drew about a third of the Republican presidential field as speakers.“I don’t know why he’s not here,” he said. “He should be here representing himself.”In a statement on Saturday, Bryan Griffin, the campaign press secretary for Mr. DeSantis, shrugged off Mr. Trump’s criticism.“Governor DeSantis spent the day with Iowans and spoke to a packed house at the Tennessee G.O.P. Statesman Dinner later that night,” he said. “This was a day after he delivered the strongest interview at the Family Leadership Summit, which Donald Trump notably skipped. Ron DeSantis is campaigning to win.”Mr. Trump was greeted onstage with pyrotechnics and a nearly three-minute video montage of the former president. While organizers prepared the stage for his entrance, Mr. Trump’s supporters, many in their ubiquitous red caps, watched musical performances of Elvis and Pavarotti on giant screens.Mr. DeSantis declined an invitation to speak at the end of the conference on Sunday, according to organizers, who noted that he had worked closely with Turning Point Action during the midterm elections last year and took part in several rallies that supported Trump-endorsed candidates.Mr. Trump spoke for nearly 100 minutes at the conference, meeting a warm reception from the conservative crowd of about 6,000.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesBut on the same day that Mr. DeSantis announced his campaign in May, the conservative group announced that Mr. Trump would headline its conference in Florida, perhaps miffing the host governor.The lineup of speakers on Saturday may have given Mr. DeSantis further pause. It included three Republican House members from Florida who have endorsed Mr. Trump’s candidacy: Representatives Byron Donalds, Anna Paulina Luna and Matt Gaetz.In succession, each professed their loyalty to the former president, as booming subwoofers and smoke machines added to the theatrical effect.Mr. Gaetz, the provocateur who nominated Mr. Trump for House speaker earlier this year during the G.O.P.’s protracted leadership fight, got a roar from the crowd when he said that Mr. Trump’s allies were unflinching.“Of course, we ride or die with President Donald John Trump,” he said.And when Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News commentator, dared to suggest at the event that the Republican nominating contest was probably a two-candidate race between Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis, several thousand activists booed.Ms. Kelly, who famously tangled with Mr. Trump in a G.O.P. debate in 2015, relented.“The vast majority of the Republican Party wants Trump,” she said, adding that Mr. Trump’s indictments had only burnished his stock with conservative voters. “We all know who the best middle-finger candidate is.”In a nearly 100-minute speech, Mr. Trump noted that Mr. DeSantis had once been his ally and had sought his endorsement in his first race for governor in 2018.“I got him elected,” he said. “He was dead. He begged me to endorse him.”Mr. Trump said that he had been taken aback when Mr. DeSantis later declined to say whether he might challenge him for the Republican nomination, using an expletive to refer to the Florida governor.Tucker Carlson, who was fired from Fox News in April, whipped the audience into a frenzy with an appearance immediately before the former president.“I don’t think most unemployed people get a reception like that,” Mr. Carlson said.Mr. Carlson doubled down on his baseless claims that voting machines had been rigged during the 2020 election and expressed sympathy for the Capitol rioters, saying that a country that squashes discussions about the electoral process was not a democracy.Vivek Ramaswamy, the multimillionaire entrepreneur running for the Republican nomination, also spoke on Saturday. Three other long-shot candidates — Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas; Francis X. Suarez, the mayor of Miami; and Perry Johnson, a wealthy businessman from Michigan — are scheduled to speak on Sunday.So are Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s onetime chief strategist who was found guilty of contempt of Congress; and Roger J. Stone Jr., the pro-Trump operative who was convicted of obstruction but had his sentence commuted by Mr. Trump. In the convention center’s lobby, Mr. Stone took selfies with Mr. Trump’s supporters.“All the cool people are here,” Mr. Carlson said. More