More stories

  • in

    Pro-Choice? Pro-Union? Donald Trump Has a Deal for You.

    As Ron DeSantis’s challenge to Donald Trump has seemed to wither on the vine, a piece of conventional wisdom has hardened: That DeSantis has been offering Republican voters Trumpism without the drama, but now we know Republicans love the drama, indeed they can’t live without the drama, and mere substance simply leaves them cold.In one sense, that’s a reasonable conclusion to draw from the way that Trump’s multiplying indictments seemed to solidify his front-runner’s position, the way that he’s sucked up media oxygen and built his primary lead on the basis of what would be, for any normal politician, terrible publicity.But it elides the fact that DeSantis, like many of his rivals in the current battle for second place, hasn’t actually offered voters an equivalent of Trumpism, and certainly not the Trumpism that won the 2016 Republican primary fight and then upset Hillary Clinton.He has offered part of that package, certainly: the promise to wage war on liberalism by all available means, the harsh words for self-appointed experts and elites, the hostility to the establishment press. But he hasn’t really tried to channel another crucial element of Trumpism — the marriage of rhetorical extremism with ideological flexibility, the ability to drop a vicious insult one moment and promise to make a big, beautiful bipartisan deal the next.That was what Trump offered throughout 2016. While his rivals in the primaries impotently accused him of being unconservative, he cheerfully embraced various heterodoxies on health care and trade and taxes, selling himself as an economic moderate with the same gusto that he promised to build the wall and ban Muslim visitors from the United States.These heterodoxies were often more a salesman’s patter than a sincere policy agenda, which helps explain why his presidency was more conventionally conservative than his campaign.But now candidate Trump is back at the salesman’s game. In the last week, the man whose judicial appointees overturned Roe v. Wade and whose administration was reliably hostile to unions has condemned the six-week abortion ban signed by DeSantis, promised to magically bring the country together on abortion and indicated he’s going to counterprogram next week’s Republican presidential debate by showing up on the U.A.W. picket line.You can see these forays as proof that Trump thinks he’s got the nomination in the bag, that the pro-life movement especially has no choice but to support him and that he can start presenting himself as a general-election candidate early.But I suspect it’s a little more complicated than that, and that Trump’s willingness to show ideological flexibility — or, to be a bit harsher, to pander emptily to any audience he faces — has its uses in the primary campaign as well. Because what it showcases, even to primary voters who disagree with him, is an eagerness to win even at the expense of ideological consistency, an eagerness that much of American conservatism lacks.And showcasing electability is arguably even more important for Trump in 2024 than in 2016, because he was at his weakest after the 2022 midterms, which seemed to expose his election fraud obsessions as a political disaster for the G.O.P. So by moving to the center early, while DeSantis and others try to run against him from the right, he’s counteracting that narrative, trying to prove that he’s committed to victory and not just vanity. (And on the evidence of national polls, in which he now does slightly better than DeSantis against Biden, it’s working.)Does Trump actually have a labor-friendly solution to the U.A.W. strike or a coherent pro-worker agenda? The answers are no and not really. But if showing public sympathy for workers and promising a 10 percent tariff on foreign goods are respectively an empty gesture and a dubious gambit, they are still a better political message than, say, what we got from Tim Scott, the candidate of pre-Trump conservatism, who suggested that the U.A.W. workers should be fired the way Ronald Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. (This kind of nonsense position, invoking Reagan’s firing of federal employees in the completely different context of a private-sector fight where employers can’t fire strikers, is exactly what the term “zombie Reaganism” was invented to describe.)Likewise, can Trump actually mediate a national compromise on abortion by stiff-arming the pro-life movement? I wouldn’t bet on it; for better or worse, I expect his transactional relationship with anti-abortion organizations to survive in a potential second term.But his sudden pro-choice outreach is a cynical response to a real political problem for Republicans. If you aspire to restrict abortion beyond the reddest states in a politically sustainable way, you need at the very least a rhetorical modulation, a form of outreach to the wavering and conflicted. And better still would be some kind of alternative offer to Americans who are pro-choice but with reservations — with the obvious form being some new suite of family policies, some enhanced support for women who find themselves pregnant and in difficulty.But most Republicans clearly don’t want to make that kind of offer, beyond a few pro forma gestures and very modest state-level initiatives. DeSantis was quick (well, by his standards) to attack Trump for selling out the pro-life cause, and any abortion opponent should want to see Trump punished politically for that attempted sellout. But nothing in the DeSantis response was directed at the outreach problem, the political problem, the general-election problem that Trump in his unprincipled way was clearly trying to address.And so it has been throughout the primary season thus far. Trump makes big bold promises; his rivals check ideological boxes. Trump talks like a general-election candidate; his rivals bid against one another for narrower constituencies. Scott and Nikki Haley rerun the Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio campaigns; DeSantis aims to improve on Ted Cruz’s Iowa-first strategy … but the only candidate really promising the Trumpism of 2016 is, once again, Donald Trump himself.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

  • in

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

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

  • in

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

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

  • in

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

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

  • in

    Trump Planning Detroit Visit During Second GOP Debate

    Looking past the Republican primary, Donald Trump and his campaign are already gearing up for a possible rematch with President Biden.Former President Donald J. Trump is planning to travel to Detroit on the day of the next Republican primary debate, according to two Trump advisers with knowledge of the plans, injecting himself into the labor dispute between striking autoworkers and the nation’s leading auto manufacturers.The trip, which will include a prime-time speech before current and former union members, is the second consecutive primary debate that Mr. Trump is skipping to instead hold his own counterprogramming. He sat for an interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson that posted online during the first G.O.P. presidential debate in August.The decision to go to Michigan just days after the United Auto Workers went on strike shows the extent to which Mr. Trump wants to be seen as looking past his primary rivals — and the reality that both he and his political apparatus are already focused on the possibility of a rematch with President Biden.So instead of attending the next G.O.P. debate — on Sept. 27 in California at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum — Mr. Trump intends to speak to over 500 workers, with his campaign planning to fill the room with plumbers, pipe-fitters, electricians, as well as autoworkers, according to one of the Trump advisers familiar with the planning. Mr. Trump has not directly addressed the wage demands of striking workers and has attacked the union leadership, but he has tried to more broadly cast himself on the side of autoworkers.The campaign is also considering the possibility of having Mr. Trump make an appearance at the picket line, although the adviser said such a visit, which could involve difficult logistics given the former president’s security protections, is unlikely.The former president has long prided himself on his appeal to rank-and-file union workers — even as most union leaders have remained hostile to him, and as Mr. Biden has called himself the most pro-union president in history. In the 2016 campaign, an adviser to Mr. Trump, Paul Manafort, sought to establish a back channel with organized labor in Michigan and Wisconsin in the hopes the A.F.L.-C.I.O. would scale back its efforts to help the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. It did not appear to go anywhere, but underscored the areas that Mr. Trump considered vital in the general election.Mr. Trump won Michigan in the 2016 election, one of the states in the so-called blue wall that crumbled for Democrats that year. But Mr. Biden carried Michigan by more than 150,000 votes in 2020, and it is seen as a critical state for Democrats in 2024.The Trump campaign has produced a radio ad that will begin running on Tuesday in Detroit and Toledo, Ohio, trying to cast Mr. Trump as aligned with autoworkers. The same Trump adviser said the ad targeted union workers and men, and will air on sports and rock-themed stations.“All they’ve ever wanted is to compete fairly worldwide and get their fair share of the American dream,” the narrator says in the ad. “Donald Trump calls them great Americans and has always had their backs.”Mr. Trump has repeatedly criticized the transition to electric vehicles, and in a post on his social media site Truth Social over the weekend, he called it an “Electric Car SCAM.” The radio ad also uses the Biden administration’s support for the transition to electric vehicles to attack Mr. Biden.The ad does not specifically mention the strike, which began last week against all big three Detroit automakers, and in which the union is seeking a 40 percent wage increase over four years.Ammar Moussa, a press officer for Mr. Biden’s campaign, said in a statement, “Donald Trump is going to Michigan next week to lie to Michigan workers and pretend he didn’t spend his entire failed presidency selling them out at every turn.”Mr. Biden has sided with the striking workers, sending two top aides to Detroit and saying at the White House hours after the strike began that “workers deserve a fair share of the benefits they helped create.”The United Auto Workers pointedly decided not to endorse Mr. Biden this spring ahead of the current labor clash, with the union’s new president, Shawn Fain, expressing concern about the labor elements of the transition to electric vehicles. At the same time, in a memo, Mr. Fain said Mr. Trump would be a “disaster” if he returned to the White House.In an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” broadcast over the weekend, Mr. Trump was critical of Mr. Fain, saying workers had been “sold down the river by their leadership.”“I don’t know the gentleman, but I know his name very well, and I think he’s not doing a good job in representing his union,” Mr. Trump said. “Because he’s not going to have a union in three years from now. Those jobs are all going to be gone, because all of those electric cars are going to be made in China.”In a statement after The New York Times reported on Mr. Trump’s Detroit plans, Mr. Fain said that “every fiber of our union is being poured into fighting the billionaire class and an economy that enriches people like Donald Trump at the expense of workers.”“We can’t keep electing billionaires and millionaires that don’t have any understanding what it is like to live paycheck to paycheck and struggle to get by and expecting them to solve the problems of the working class,” he said. More

  • in

    DeSantis Played Both Sides of the GOP Rift Over the 2020 Election

    The Florida governor created an election crimes unit that placated election deniers. It led to scores of “zany-burger” tips, and, according to one Republican, “Kabuki theater.”It resembled a political rally more than a news conference. In November 2021, exactly one year after Donald J. Trump lost the presidential election to Joseph R. Biden Jr., Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida spoke to a raucous crowd in a hotel conference room just a few miles from Mr. Trump’s home base of Mar-a-Lago.Their suspicions about vast election malfeasance would be heard, Mr. DeSantis promised. He was setting up an election police unit and he invited the crowd to send in tips about illegal “ballot harvesting,” nodding to an unfounded theory about Democrats collecting ballots in bulk.The crowd whooped and waved furiously. “He gets it!” posted a commenter watching on Rumble.But in his seven-minute, tough-on-election-crimes sermon, Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, never explicitly endorsed that theory or the many others spread by the defeated president and embraced by much of their party.In this way, for nearly three years, Mr. DeSantis played both sides of Republicans’ rift over the 2020 election. As his state became a buzzing hub of the election denial movement, he repeatedly took actions that placated those who believed Mr. Trump had won.Most prominent was the creation of an election crimes unit that surfaced scores of “zany-burger” tips, according to its former leader, disrupted the lives of a few dozen Floridians, and, one year in, has not yet led to any charges of ballot harvesting or uncovered other mass fraud.Yet Mr. DeSantis kept his own views vague. Only last month — two years, six months and 18 days after Mr. Biden was sworn into office — did Mr. DeSantis, now running for president, acknowledge that Mr. Biden had defeated Mr. Trump.Mr. DeSantis has said he pushed “the strongest election integrity measures in the country.” But critics say their main impact was to appease a Republican base that embraced conspiracy theories about elections — and that came with a cost.He failed to counter lies about the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Florida judges are considering whether his administration overstepped its legal authority.Nathan Hart, a 50-year-old ex-felon from near Tampa, is among 32 people who have been arrested or faced warrants under the new initiative. Mr. Hart, who plans to appeal his conviction, said he lost his job as a warehouse worker because he had to show up in court. When he cast his ballot for Mr. Trump he had no idea he was ineligible to vote, he said.He and others suffered so that the governor “could have a really good photo op and make himself look tough,” he said.Workers at the Miami-Dade County Elections Department tabulating mail-in ballots in October 2020. The 2020 election was one of the smoothest in state history.Saul Martinez for The New York TimesThe 2020 AftermathTightening voting rules had not been high on Mr. DeSantis’s agenda when he first came into office in 2019. After the ballot-counting debacle during the 2000 presidential election, Florida had substantially revamped its elections. Experts considered the 2020 election, in which over 11 million Floridians voted, well run and smooth. Mr. Trump won by 371,686 votes.One significant change Mr. DeSantis made to Florida’s elections was his decision to join the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC. The data-sharing program, which had bipartisan support, helps states identify people who had moved, died or registered or voted in more than one state.When he announced the move to a group of local election supervisors, they broke into applause.But after the 2020 election, Mr. DeSantis came under concerted pressure from Mr. Trump’s loyalists. Florida became a staging ground for people promoting election conspiracy theories, including Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, and the Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne.Pressed again and again on whether he accepted Mr. Biden’s victory over Mr. Trump, Mr. DeSantis dodged. “It’s not for me to do,” he replied in December 2020. “Obviously, we did our thing in Florida. The college voted,” he said, referring to the Electoral College. “What’s going to happen is going to happen.”But within a few months, Mr. DeSantis was pushing for legislation he said would bulletproof Florida’s elections from fraud, with tighter rules for mail-in ballots, the use of drop boxes and third-party organizations that register voters.The governor signed the bill live on Fox News in May 2021.Peter Antonacci, the now-deceased former director of the election crimes unit, and Mr. DeSantis in 2022.Amy Beth Bennett/South Florida Sun-Sentinel, via Associated PressElection Crimes UnitBut lobbying by the election denial movement did not end. Cleta Mitchell, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers in his effort to undo the outcome of the 2020 election, helped organize Florida activists into state and local groups through her national Election Integrity Network.Members of Defend Florida, another group, went door to door canvassing for evidence of voter irregularities. They delivered their leads to local elections officials, who, to the group’s frustration, typically investigated and dismissed them.Public records show the organization’s representatives met repeatedly with aides to the governor and other high-level members of his administration. Six months after the 2021 changes became law, Mr. DeSantis proposed the election crimes unit — a top priority, aides told lawmakers. He requested a team of state law enforcement officers and prosecutors who could bypass the local officials he suggested had turned a blind eye to voting abuses.Some lawmakers worried about giving the governor’s office too much influence over law enforcement, according to people familiar with the deliberations. The Republican-led Legislature did not explicitly authorize state prosecutors to bring voter fraud charges, as Mr. DeSantis had requested.Otherwise, the governor got much of what he wanted: $2.7 million for a 15-member investigative unit and 10 state law enforcement officers dedicated to election crimes. His administration has used prosecutors under the attorney general’s office to handle the bulk of the cases, even without the Legislature’s authorization.The new investigative unit became a receptacle for activists’ tips about fraud. Activists at times alerted conservative media outlets to their leads, generating headlines about new investigations. Some accusations poured through unusual channels.Activists in Mr. DeSantis’s home county, Pinellas, handed over one binder full of tips to Mr. DeSantis’s mother. They later heard back that the package had been successfully delivered in Tallahassee, according to two people familiar with the episode.A small team reviewing the claims found the vast bulk were not credible.“Most that comes my way has zany-burger all over it,” Peter Antonacci, the now-deceased former director of the election crimes unit, wrote to an official in a local prosecutor’s office in 2022, according to an email obtained by The New York Times through a public records request.Andrew Ladanowski, a former analyst for the unit who describes himself as an elections data hobbyist, said he spent weeks combing through voter records from the 2020 election. He had expected to find thousands of cases of illegal votes, but pickings were slim. “I can safely say there was no large-scale fraud that could have had a change in a state or a national election. It wasn’t sufficient,” he said.Jeff Brandes, a Republican former state senator who opposed the election crimes unit, described it as largely “Kabuki theater.”Five days before Florida’s 2022 primary election, the governor, then running for re-election, announced third-degree felony charges against Mr. Hart and 19 other ex-felons.Nathan Hart, a 50-year-old ex-felon from near Tampa, is among 32 people who have been charged with election crimes under the new initiative.Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post, via Getty ImagesA 2018 ballot initiative allowed former felons to vote but exempted those who had been convicted of murder or sex offenses. Defendants and their lawyers have said they were unaware of that distinction. They said they thought they could vote because the state had allowed them to register and issued them voter registration cards.At a news conference announcing the charges, Mr. DeSantis said more cases from the 2020 election were to come. “This is the opening salvo,” he said.But by the end of 2022, the unit had announced only one other case against a 2020 voter. Mr. Ladanowski said by the time he had left in December, the team had moved on to vetting the current voter rolls.As of July, the election crimes unit had referred nearly 1,500 potential cases to local or state law enforcement agencies, according to the governor’s office. Just 32 — or 2 percent — had resulted in arrests or warrants, and those cases were unrelated to the purportedly systematic abuses that elections activists claimed had tainted the 2020 election.Thirteen of the defendants had been convicted of felonies. Defense attorneys said that some ex-felons accepted plea deals simply out of fear of being sent back to prison, and that none received a stiffer penalty than probation. Appeals court judges are now considering whether the state prosecutors had the legal authority to bring charges.The election crimes unit also fined more than three dozen organizations that ran voter registration drives a total of more than $100,000 — much of that for failing to turn in the voter registration forms quickly enough.The governor has said that even a limited number of arrests will deter voter fraud. Press officers for the secretary of state and the state law enforcement agency said the DeSantis administration expected courts to eventually decide that it acted within its authority, and that investigations of mass fraud like ballot harvesting are complex, time-consuming and still open.Warning Against ‘the Left’s Schemes’Mr. DeSantis endorsed Doug Mastriano, a vocal election denier running for governor, during a rally in Pittsburgh in 2022.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesIn August 2022, the day after he announced the election crime unit’s first arrests, Mr. DeSantis went to Pennsylvania to endorse Doug Mastriano, a vocal election denier running for governor.The trip was another chance for the governor to show election activists he gets it. Onstage with a man who had worked with Mr. Trump’s lawyers to send an “alternate” slate of electors to Washington, Mr. DeSantis spoke carefully.He did not mention the 2020 result, but he stressed that his state had cracked down on illegal voters. “We’re going to hold ’em accountable,” he told an enthusiastic crowd, ending his speech with an exhortation to “take a stand against the left’s schemes.”Mr. DeSantis continued to dance around the 2020 election for another year, while his policies sent a strong message to the Republican base.In March 2023, Cord Byrd, Mr. DeSantis’s secretary of state, announced that Florida would pull out of ERIC, the system Mr. DeSantis had ordered the state to join in 2019.Only a few weeks earlier, Mr. Byrd had called ERIC the “only and best game in town” to identify people who had voted in two different states, according to the notes of a private call he had with Florida activists allied with Ms. Mitchell. The notes were provided by the investigative group Documented. In its annual report, the election crimes unit also described ERIC as a useful tool.But Ms. Mitchell’s group and other critics had attacked the system as part of a liberal conspiracy to snatch Republican electoral victories. Mr. Byrd said publicly that Florida had lost confidence in it, and his agency cited ERIC’s failure to correct “partisan tendencies.”In Florida, activists celebrated the victory. But they also want more. In interviews they said they were frustrated that the election crimes unit hasn’t brought more charges or validated their claims of mass elections malfeasance.And when Mr. DeSantis finally said last month that “of course” Mr. Biden had won the 2020 election, he faced the sort of reaction he had long tried to avoid.“It’s a betrayal,” said Wesley Huff, a Florida elections activist who has been involved in Defend Florida and other groups.Trip Gabriel More

  • in

    David McCormick Will Enter Pennsylvania Senate Race

    Mr. McCormick, who lost the Republican primary to Dr. Mehmet Oz last year, is said to be preparing to enter the race to challenge Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat.David McCormick, a former hedge fund executive who lost the Republican primary for Pennsylvania’s open Senate seat last year, is set to announce on Thursday that he is running again for Senate — this time against Senator Bob Casey, a Democrat.Mr. McCormick will begin his campaign with a speech in Pittsburgh, according to two people familiar with the conversations.An Army veteran and former Treasury Department official, Mr. McCormick will enter one of the country’s most closely watched Senate races.Long a battleground state, Pennsylvania has tilted toward Democrats in recent years, and Republicans faced several losses in 2022. Mr. Casey, 63, who was first elected to the Senate in 2006, has the advantage of incumbency and a hefty fund-raising haul. The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan newsletter, describes the race for his seat as leaning Democratic.Still, Republicans see the seat as a potential pickup, with Democrats trying to defend a thin Senate majority while facing difficult races for their incumbents in West Virginia, Ohio and Montana. All three states have voted for former President Donald J. Trump and other Republicans in the last several elections.One of the biggest differences for Mr. McCormick in his second run for Senate is that, at least so far, no other Republicans have entered the race.Party leaders and major Senate fund-raisers have indicated that they will back Mr. McCormick. In another potential boost to his candidacy, Doug Mastriano, a Republican state senator who lost the governor’s race in Pennsylvania last year and was seen as a possible contender in the 2024 Senate contest, announced in May that he would not run.Democrats have similarly coalesced around Mr. Casey, which has so far helped mask turmoil inside the state party.During the 2022 midterm cycle, Mr. McCormick ran for the seat held by the retiring Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican, but he lost the primary by 950 votes to Dr. Mehmet Oz. Mr. Oz, who was endorsed by Mr. Trump, was swept aside in November by John Fetterman, a Democrat whose victory helped his party maintain its narrow control of the Senate.Since his loss in June last year, Mr. McCormick has remained politically active in the state, attending local party events and embarking on a book tour. He started a political group, Pennsylvania Rising, to support G.O.P. candidates and tackle “the challenges facing Pennsylvania Republicans” — though the apparatus has been seen as a possible tool to help his long-expected bid.Mr. McCormick has also faced scrutiny over whether he resides in Pennsylvania: Last year, he moved there from Connecticut to run for Senate. The Associated Press reported last month that while he owns a home in Pittsburgh, public records showed that he still lived in and rented a $16 million mansion in Westport, Conn. More

  • in

    September Is the Cruelest Month? It Is if You’re Joe Biden.

    Gail Collins: Bret, September is one of my favorite months, and I’ve always kinda wished Congress would stay out on vacation longer. They tend to be a leaky cloud on the horizon.Let’s start with — oh God, the impeachment inquiry. You’re in charge of the Republicans, no matter how you feel about Donald Trump. Give me your take.Bret Stephens: Gail, if this impeachment inquiry were any more premature, it would be a teenage boy.Gail: I’m stealing that line.Bret: I say that as someone who thinks that Hunter Biden’s business dealings — with his family’s alleged shell companies and his shady foreign partners and curiously high-priced artwork — stink to heaven. I also think we in the press need to dig deeper and harder into what his father knew about what his son was up to, whether Joe knowingly lent his name to the enterprise, and who, if anyone, in the wider Biden family benefited from Hunter’s activities. And it’s no excuse to say the Trumps did worse. Innocence isn’t established by arguing that the other guy is a bigger crook.But, as our colleague David French astutely pointed out last week, “Where is the blue dress?” Every modern impeachment inquiry, from Richard Nixon and the missing 18½ minutes of tape to Bill Clinton and his, er, DNA sample, to Trump’s phone call to Volodymyr Zelensky and then the Jan. 6 riot, started from smoking-gun evidence of wrongdoing. What we have here, at most, is secondhand smoke.Gail: Thirdhand, maybe. Hunter Biden broke the law when he filled out a false gun-purchase form, denying he had a drug use problem. That’s bad. He should be punished, but it certainly doesn’t have to be by doing time in the slammer.Bret: Agree. It would probably be enough to sentence Hunter to watch 100 hours of Josh Hawley questioning Senate witnesses. But that might vanquish his hard-earned sobriety.Gail: When you try to connect Hunter’s stupid misdeeds to his father, to argue it’s a reason to throw the duly elected president of the United States out of office — it’s like me demanding new antismoking laws in Manhattan because a guy in Canton, Ohio, is puffing on a cigar downtown.But we’re pretty much in concert on this, I think. Next what-about-the-Republicans inquiry: the budget. Is Kevin McCarthy leading — or not-leading — us into a government shutdown?Bret: I love the way McCarthy keeps getting kicked around by the ultra-MAGAites: It’s the most poetic bit of justice since Mr. Bumble, the sadist, married Mrs. Corney, the bigger sadist, in “Oliver Twist.”Gail: Yipee! A Dickens reference to Kevin McCarthy. Not as if we had great expectations for his speakership.Bret: Touché. My guess is that we’ll avoid a shutdown with a continuing resolution that funds the government past the end of the month. And I’m sure we’ll find a way to fund the Defense Department, too. The longer-term question is how McCarthy can manage a Republican circus in which Donald Trump is the ringmaster, Matt Gaetz cracks the whip, and Marjorie Taylor Greene is in charge of the clowns.And speaking of cracking the whip: Your thoughts on the autoworkers’ strike?Gail: You know, I’ve been out on strike a few times — mostly it worked out and got everybody to a decent settlement. Although once, long ago, it did cause the publisher of a small paper I was working on to just pull the plug.Bret: Uh oh.Gail: I’m generally on the union side in these things. Organized labor has been a key to the growth of a solid middle- and working-class America. But the U.A.W.’s lack of support for President Biden’s effort to move us to electric cars has definitely cooled me.Bret: Won’t surprise you that it’s the part of the strike I find most interesting: It shows the growing gap between the Democrats’ environmental commitments and the interests of working-class voters.Gail: Presuming you’re hanging with management?Bret: Er, yep.I don’t blame workers for wanting hefty raises: Inflation has really eaten away at purchasing power. But the U.A.W. wants to more than double the Big Three’s labor costs, to about $150 an hour from around $65 now, which is unsustainable against nonunionized competitors like Toyota, where it’s closer to $55. The union also wants to go back to the same kind of defined-benefit pension plan that practically bankrupted the Big Three a generation ago.I’m wondering about the politics of this, too. The administration is standing with the unions, though I’m not sure a long strike helps them as opposed to, say, Trump.Gail: I’m sure there’s a big gap between the ideal contract goals they espouse in public and their real-life targets. But the bottom line is that when profits are raising management pay spectacularly, workers also deserve an unusually nice, substantial raise.If there’s a long strike, which I doubt there will be, we’ll come back to it — this really is one of our most fundamental differences. But in the meantime: Mitt Romney. He’s retiring. What are your thoughts?Bret: You and I both have guilty consciences for being so hard on the guy back when he was running for president.Now, I think of him as the last good Republican. He was right about the threat posed by Russia back in 2012, when so many Democrats mocked him for it. He was the only Republican senator who voted to convict Trump in his first impeachment trial and one of only seven Republicans who voted for conviction in the second impeachment.Gail: Mitt Romney was a good governor in Massachusetts, where he proved a cost-conscious Republican could still build a much-needed state health care program. He’s been a fine senator who proved it’s possible for a Republican to have backbone in the age of Trump.Those were the arenas he was meant to star in. Sadly, as a presidential candidate, he was terrible. Suddenly retro: “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” And very, very boring. It predates your arrival at The Times, but you may remember that I made a thing out of mentioning, every time I wrote about Romney, that he once drove to Canada with the family dog on the roof of the car.Bret: May remember, Gail?Gail: It was just a game I’d worked up to rebel against the deep, deep dullness of his candidacy. Still getting pictures of dogs on car roofs from readers after all these years.But that shouldn’t be his political legacy. Mitt, I apologize.Bret: Me too, Mitt. And in choosing to retire from politics when he’s still fit in order to make way for the next generation, Romney’s showing that he’s right about life — in the sense that it’s good to bow out with grace.Gail: Bet I know what’s coming next.Bret: Wish I could say the same thing about Joe Biden. Which reminds me to ask your thoughts about David Ignatius’s column in The Washington Post that everyone in the chattering classes is talking about, particularly this line: “If he and Harris campaign together in 2024, I think Biden risks undoing his greatest achievement — which was stopping Trump.”Gail: You and I both bemoaned Biden’s decision to run again. We wanted him to announce his planned retirement early so all the other Democratic options — many attractive possibilities from Congress and state government — could get out there and introduce themselves to the country.Didn’t happen. And Biden, alas, isn’t going to listen to critics unless he suffers some unexpected medical issue.Bret: That “unexpected medical issue” is the palpable sense of feebleness in Biden’s public performances. Not a good look for a guy who wants to spend five more years in the world’s most important job.Gail: But I’m not sure Biden’s age gives the race to Trump. And as I’ve pointed out a billion times, Trump will be 78 if he runs against Biden, and in way worse physical shape. Although he has now started to brag about his long-life genes.Bret: His awful dad lived to 93. I’ll assume his mom was a saint, and she died at 88.Gail: As to Kamala Harris, she’s certainly been improving during her vice presidency. I’d be happy to see her run as a candidate for president — up against a bunch of other smart, super-achieving Democrats.Bret: I suspect a lot of people would feel a lot better about voting for Biden next year if they had rock-solid confidence in his veep. Like Harris or not, her unfavorable ratings among voters is close to 56 percent, which makes her a huge drag on an already vulnerable ticket. I know a lot of Democrats feel Biden needs a minority woman as a running mate, so why not swap her out for someone like Michelle Lujan Grisham, the Hispanic governor of New Mexico, or Mellody Hobson, the superstar businesswoman, or Val Demings, the former congresswoman from Florida? I also think Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, would also be a great veep choice, even if she isn’t a minority woman, because she’s just incredibly talented. Remember that F.D.R. tossed out Henry Wallace for Harry Truman in 1944. That’s the historical analogy Biden ought to be thinking of now.Gail: Does sound very attractive. But Bret, you know that sort of thing isn’t done anymore. You don’t dump your loyal, hard-working vice president. Who also happens to be of Jamaican and Indian descent. Swapping for another minority woman just seems … tacky.If Biden bowed out, it’d be perfectly reasonable for all those other good candidates to jump in. But as things stand they are, sigh, as they are.Bret: I’ll grant you the tacky part. But I can think of something a lot worse: Donald Trump back in the White House. When those are the stakes, being tacky seems a small price to pay for national self-preservation.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