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      Representative Nancy Mace Is Trying to Change the Republican Party

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      It was just after Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, had fired off a blunt text to the No. 3 House G.O.P. leader — featuring two f-bombs and four demands that needed to be met to gain her vote for the party’s debt limit plan — that she experienced a momentary flash of dread.“Now I’ll look like a flip-flopper,” Ms. Mace worried aloud.Speaker Kevin McCarthy was planning within hours to hold a vote on his proposal to lift the debt ceiling for a year in exchange for spending cuts and policy changes, and Ms. Mace had just published an op-ed declaring herself a hard no. Now the second-term congresswoman from a swing district, who had already established something of a reputation for publicly breaking with her party but ultimately falling in line behind its policies, was privately negotiating her way to yes.Ms. Mace would, in fact, vote for the bill after meeting with Mr. McCarthy and extracting several promises from him, including to hold future votes on two of her top priorities: addressing gun violence and women’s issues related to contraceptives and adoption. She anticipated criticism for the turnabout, but consoled herself with the fact that she had leveraged her vote to force her party to take on issues she cared about.“This is a way I can drive the debate,” she said as she walked back to her office. “It’s a way of using my position to push those issues.”It was a typical day for Ms. Mace, 45, who represents Charleston and the Lowcountry along South Carolina’s coast, and whose political profile — she is a fiscal conservative but leans toward the center on some social issues — puts her at odds with the hard-right Republicans who now dominate the House.Ms. Mace has said Republicans will lose control of the House if they fail to temper their most extreme stances on abortion and guns.Sean Rayford for The New York TimesMs. Mace, who last year beat a Trump-backed candidate in a primary, is constantly pivoting as she figures out how to survive and play a meaningful role as a mainstream Republican in today’s MAGA-heavy House G.O.P., where extreme members of the party have greater power than ever.She often styles herself as a maverick independent in the mold of Senator Joe Manchin III, the West Virginia Democrat whose tendency to buck his party has earned him outsize power in the closely divided chamber — and the political fame that goes with it. But she has built the voting record of a mostly reliable Republican foot soldier, even as she publicly criticizes her own party and racks up television hits and social media clicks. And Ms. Mace — savvy and irreverent — has become fluent in the art of the political troll, finding ways to signal to the MAGA base that she hasn’t forsaken it.She has repeatedly, and baselessly, accused the Biden family of being involved in “prostitution rings.”Above all, Ms. Mace, a high school dropout and former Waffle House waitress who went on to become the first woman to graduate from the Citadel, is hyper-aware of how she is perceived and of her precarious place in her party.Ms. Mace with her father, J. Emory Mace, a retired Army brigadier general. She was the first woman to graduate from the Citadel.Paula Illingworth/Associated PressDuring Mr. McCarthy’s prolonged fight for this job, Ms. Mace and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene — who have publicly feuded — huddled together on the House floor chatting about how to secure his victory. When a male lawmaker noticed them and said their joint effort was something Republicans would like to see more of, Ms. Mace dryly disagreed.“Who do you think you’re kidding?” she said. “The only thing people want to see of me and Marjorie is if we’re wrestling in Jell-O.”Behind all the tacking back and forth, Ms. Mace insisted, a bigger project is at work. She said she was trying to create a model for a “reasonable” and re-electable Republican in a purple district, and demonstrating that there was a path to winning back moderate and independent voters.“I’m trying to show how you can bring conservatives and independents along to be on the same page,” she said. “Americans want us to work together. That’s not what’s happening. There’s very little that we’ve done that’s going to get across the finish line to Biden’s desk to sign.”Ms. Mace has yet to prove that it’s possible.The debt ceiling vote was the third time in four months that Ms. Mace had publicly threatened to break with her party on an issue where her vote was critical, before ultimately falling in line. In January, Ms. Mace had threatened to oppose the House rules package for the new Republican majority, but ended up supporting it. She had said she would oppose removing Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, from the Foreign Affairs Committee, but reversed course.In both instances, she insisted that she had pried promises from Mr. McCarthy in exchange for her support, such as a vow to institute due process for committee removals in the future. She is aware of the danger of becoming the congresswoman who cried wolf.“Every handshake I’ve taken with Kevin has been legit,” she said of the speaker. “I haven’t gotten rolled. If I were to get rolled, I’d go nuclear. I’m just trying to move the ball in the right direction — that’s what matters to me.”Some of her constituents view her tactics in a less flattering light.Ms. Mace, who has two teenage children, says she does not have any hobbies and rarely takes vacations.Logan R. Cyrus for The New York Times“You live around Nancy long enough, she will talk about being bipartisan and reaching across the aisle and working together until the cows come home,” said David Rubin, a Democrat and a retiree who moved to the district six years ago and attended a “coffee with your congresswoman” event with Ms. Mace last week in Summerville. “When it comes down to the actual votes, she always sticks with the party.”A Strategy to ‘Shut Up’Ms. Mace voted to certify the 2020 election and vociferously condemned President Donald J. Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, but she did not join the small group of Republicans who supported his impeachment. These days, she avoids the subject of Mr. Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, at all costs.“I’ll support the nominee — that’s what I say,” she said while talking on the phone in her car between events in her district. “And then I shut up.”That silence is a deliberate contrast to former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, another Republican who tried to move her party — and failed miserably, ultimately losing her seat because she refused to stay quiet about her unrelenting opposition to Mr. Trump and his election lies. In fact, Ms. Mace ultimately joined Republicans in voting to oust Ms. Cheney from her leadership post.Still, as Ms. Cheney did in her final days in Congress, Ms. Mace regularly warns her party that it is at risk of losing its way. She argues that Republicans will lose control of the House if they fail to temper their most extreme stances on abortion and guns.“Signing a six-week ban that puts women who are victims of rape and girls who are victims of incest in a hard spot isn’t the way to change hearts and minds,” Ms. Mace said last month on CBS’s “Face The Nation,” responding to a new six-week abortion ban instituted by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. “It’s not compassionate.”On guns, she supports improved alert systems and stronger background checks.But Ms. Mace has also co-sponsored legislation that would ban transgender women and girls from participating in athletic programs designated for women. On fiscal issues, she is aligned with the hard-right Freedom Caucus.And while she criticized Republicans for choosing an abortion-related bill as one of their first acts in the majority, saying it would hurt the party and alienate many of her constituents, she voted for the legislation, which could subject doctors who perform abortions to criminal penalties.Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, who serves with Ms. Mace on the Oversight Committee, said he found her effective in trying to find common ground while working within the constraints of her party.“She doesn’t do things that would marginalize her and make her completely ineffective in her party,” Mr. Khanna said. “There’s only so much she can do to push the party. If the Republican conference had everyone of Nancy Mace’s temperament and ideology, we’d be in a much better place in our country.”Yet Ms. Mace’s approach comes with political risks.In 2020, she won election to Congress by narrowly defeating a Democrat. Last year, she won by 14 points, after her district was redrawn to make the electorate more conservative. But the seat could shift again in 2024; federal judges ordered South Carolina to redraw its congressional maps after ruling that the lines split Black neighborhoods and diluted their votes in the last election.Ms. Mace represents Charleston and the Lowcountry along South Carolina’s coast.Sean Rayford for The New York TimesConservative voters in her district are increasingly skeptical of Ms. Mace.“Sometimes I think she speaks out, particularly on the abortion thing, she needs to let that go,” said Paula Arrington, a retiree who attended an event with Ms. Mace in her district last week and who is of no relation to Ms. Mace’s former Trump-backed challenger, Katie Arrington. “We’re real conservatives and we support the Republican Party.”‘Nasty,’ ‘Disloyal’ and VictoriousOver a skinny margarita and tacos at a waterside restaurant in Mount Pleasant near her district office, Ms. Mace credited Mr. Trump with fueling her political rise, but unlike other Republicans, it was his wrath — not his backing — that made the difference.She worked for Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign, but after she broke sharply with him after the Jan. 6 attack, the former president called her “nasty” and “disloyal.” He supported her opponent in last year’s Republican primary, in which he savaged Ms. Mace for fighting with her own party and said she was “despised by almost everyone.”“He defined me as an independent voice in a way that I couldn’t have,” she said. “I would not have won by 14 points had Donald Trump not come after me, and had I not been outspoken when Roe v. Wade was overturned.”Ms. Mace, who sold commercial real estate before being elected to the statehouse and then to Congress, is obsessed with her work and has huge ambitions.Ms. Mace often styles herself as a maverick independent.Sean Rayford for The New York TimesShe only halfheartedly denies that she’s thinking about a run for Senate at some point — “La la la la la,” she said, putting her fingers in her ears, when asked about running for a statewide office — while her aides half-jokingly pass along an article that floats her as a potential presidential running mate to former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.In a party shaped by extremists who view the middle ground with disdain, the day-to-day can be pretty “lonely,” she said, noting that she has few friends on Capitol Hill. She got a dog during the pandemic, a Havanese named Liberty, and started carrying a gun at all times when threats against her increased after she voted to certify the election. She said that only “emboldens me,” as does the fact that she’s not the popular girl at the lunch table. She calls herself “a caucus of one.”Her hardened exterior is in part the result of personal trauma. She was molested at a swimming pool when she was 14 and said that for years she blamed herself, because she had been wearing a two-piece bathing suit. She was raped when she was 16, leading her to drop out of high school.“I was in a really bad situation for a long time,” she said. She was on Prozac and then self-medicated with marijuana, which she credits with reducing her anxiety and saving her life.“You carry it for a lifetime,” she said. “When I want to punch a bully in the face, it’s all still there. I’ll bring a gun to a knife fight, and that’s overkill. It’s still there.”Yet Ms. Mace is anything but aloof. As she took meetings across her district on a recent Wednesday, she shared personal details, joking with a reporter about doing the “walk of shame” home from her fiancé’s house and talking openly about her struggle with long Covid.“I overshare because I do want to connect with people on a personal level,” she said, explaining why she had told several groups throughout the day that she had gained the “freshman 15” during her first term in Congress and subsequently cut out bread. “Everyone struggles with their weight.”Ms. Mace visiting the office of Representative Kevin McCarthy, now the House speaker, in 2021.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesMs. Mace, who has two teenage children, said she does not read books or have any hobbies. She rarely takes vacations. She is divorced and engaged to be married to an entrepreneur, but has set no wedding date.The grind is worth it, she said, if she can shift her party even a touch.“The message matters,” Ms. Mace said. “I’m trying to move the national narrative.” More

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      Tim Scott Was Given a Chance to Attack Biden as Too Old. He Didn’t.

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      Mr. Scott, a Republican senator from South Carolina weighing a 2024 bid, told a questioner that the president deserves to be criticized on his policies, not his age.During a town hall on Monday at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina received a question about President Biden’s fitness for office, putting his stated desire to run a positive campaign to the test. Mr. Scott, who is expected to formally begin his presidential campaign at the end of the month, offered an answer that criticized Mr. Biden on the merits of his leadership, rather than his age or mental fitness.A Question for Tim ScottPaul Hardy, 77, a Republican voter and retired behavioral neurologist, first read Mr. Scott an excerpt from a message that President Lyndon B. Johnson sent to Congress about invoking the 25th Amendment, which lays out the presidential order of succession, should a president be deemed mentally or physically unable to serve. Mr. Hardy then lamented what he felt is a lack of action from Congress in providing standards for a president’s mental health.“There’s no way of assessing the competency of the commander in chief. Any major league owner of whatever sports team demands a detailed report on their health and capabilities. We as American people should expect this of our commander in chief, to have a full understanding of what their medical record is. As a potential candidate for the office of the presidency, what is your opinion on that?”The SubtextRepublicans have made Mr. Biden’s age and mental fitness a feature of their campaign messaging. If he is re-elected in 2024, Mr. Biden would be 82 at his second inauguration, and he is already the oldest president in U.S. history. Leagues of conservative commentators and several presidential candidates have used this fact to question whether Mr. Biden would be physically or mentally fit to serve a second term. And Mr. Biden himself has been presenting his age as an asset, not a hindrance. But his age is a major concern of voters across the political spectrum.Tim Scott’s Answer“I do not give the president a pass. I think he’s failing his job because he’s incompetent. I refuse to say it’s because he’s too old or he’s too frail. I think the bottom line is he has been co-opted by the radical left in his party. He ran as a uniter, he’s become a divider. You look at his policy positions. You look at the last State of the Union. What he said was that ‘I’m going to do what the radical left of my party wants to do.’ The problem that we have in the White House is an issue of competency. We just need an election. The 25th Amendment is one that takes into consideration folks who are unable to do their jobs. I believe he is unwilling to stand up to the party — the radical left of his party.”The SubtextMr. Scott’s response was in keeping with his overall strategy at this point in his nascent campaign of not engaging in personal attacks. He was tossed a softball question on a personal and base-animating issue that both Donald J. Trump and Nikki Haley, another Republican presidential contender, have eagerly swung at in recent speeches and interviews. Mr. Scott instead chose to go after Mr. Biden for things the president has under his control, like his policies and his ideology, rather than all that’s out of his control.Mr. Hardy, asked for his thoughts after the event, was less than satisfied with Mr. Scott’s answer: “He sidestepped it.” More

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      Biden Casts Himself as the Trump Beater. Polls Suggest That’s No Sure Thing.

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      While the president argues that he is the one best positioned to stop his predecessor from returning to the White House, surveys indicate that he starts the 2024 race facing enormous challenges.WASHINGTON — Boiled down, President Biden’s argument for running for a second term rather than ceding the ground to the next generation is that he is the Democrat most assured of beating former President Donald J. Trump next year.But a striking new poll challenged that case in a way that had much of the capital buzzing the last couple of days. Taken at face value, the poll showed Mr. Biden trailing Mr. Trump by six percentage points in a theoretical rematch, raising the question of whether the president is as well positioned as he maintains.No single poll means all that much, especially so early in an election cycle, and the president’s strategists as well as some independent analysts questioned its methodology. But even if it is an outlier, other recent surveys have indicated that the race is effectively tied, with either Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump holding narrow leads within the margin of error. Taken together, they suggest that the president opens the 2024 campaign facing enormous challenges with no guarantee of victory over Mr. Trump.The data has left many Democrats feeling anywhere from queasy to alarmed. Mr. Biden’s case for being the pair of safe hands at a volatile moment is undermined in their view if a president who passed major legislation and presides over the lowest unemployment in generations cannot outperform a twice-impeached challenger who instigated an insurrection, has been indicted on multiple felonies, is on civil trial accused of rape and faces more potential criminal charges in the months to come.“The poll demonstrates that the president still has work to do, not only in convincing the American people that he’s up for the job that he wishes to complete,” said Donna Brazile, a former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee who said she lost sleep over the “ominous signs” in the latest survey results. “More importantly, it’s a good forecast of the challenges he will face in rebuilding the remarkable coalition that elected him in 2020.”“I don’t think that they should panic because you can’t panic after one poll,” said Ms. Brazile, who managed Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000. A survey is “just one gauge” among many on the long road to the voting booth. “But it’s an important barometer of where the electorate is today, some 547 days away from the November 2024 election.”The survey by The Washington Post and ABC News found that president’s approval rating has slipped to 36 percent and that Mr. Trump would beat him by 44 percent to 38 percent if the election were held today. Just as worrisome for Democrats, respondents considered Mr. Trump, 76, more physically and mentally fit than Mr. Biden, 80, and concluded that the former president managed the economy better than the incumbent has.Critics of the poll disparaged it for including all adults in its sample of 1,006, rather than just registered voters, and maintained that its results among subgroups like young people, independents, Hispanics and Black Americans were simply not credible.“The poll really is trash, and I don’t say that lightly because I’ve had respect for their polling in the past,” said Cornell Belcher, who was President Barack Obama’s pollster. “However, their methodological decision here is problematic,” he added of the way the survey was constructed.Mr. Biden has dismissed the importance of polls, saying that he is no different from other presidents at this point in their terms.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOthers cautioned against overanalyzing data this early, noting that anything can happen in the next 18 months and recalling that projections based on polling — or misinterpretations of polling — proved to be poor predictors in recent cycles, including the 2022 midterm elections when a forecast “red wave” did not materialize.“Polls in May 2024 will be of dubious value,” said David Plouffe, who was Mr. Obama’s campaign manager. “Polls in May 2023 are worth as much as Theranos stock.”The White House expressed no concern over the latest surveys. “President Biden’s average job approval is higher now than in early November when poll-based reporting widely prophesied a supposedly inevitable red wave that never arrived,” said Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman.Kevin Munoz, a spokesman for the fledgling Biden campaign, said the president would win on issues like lowering prescription drugs and protecting Social Security. “Americans voted for Joe Biden’s America in 2020 and 2022, and regardless of what today’s Beltway insider says, they will again in 2024,” he said.While not predictive, recent surveys provide a foundational baseline at the start of a race potentially between two universally known figures, foreshadowing a campaign without a clear front-runner. Polls by Yahoo News, The Wall Street Journal and Morning Consult have found the president slightly ahead while surveys by The Economist and the Harvard University Center for American Political Studies found him tied or trailing by several points. Mr. Biden faces similarly mixed results against Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, the strongest challenger to Mr. Trump for the Republican nomination.The results point to a calcification in American politics where the leaders of both parties have a similarly sized core of support among voters not open to the other side regardless of developments in the news. The days when presidents could enjoy approval ratings above 50 percent or double-digit leads over challengers for any sustained period of time appear to be long over. And so if widespread support is no longer achievable, the challenge for Mr. Biden is to reassemble the coalition that provided him a 4.5-percentage-point victory nearly three years ago.Mr. Biden has dismissed the importance of polls, saying that he is no different from other presidents at this point in their terms. “Every major one who won re-election, their polling numbers were where mine are now,” he told Stephanie Ruhle on “The 11th Hour” on MSNBC on Friday.But in fact, only two of the past 13 presidents had approval ratings lower than Mr. Biden has at this point, according to an aggregate compilation by FiveThirtyEight.com — Mr. Trump and Jimmy Carter, both of whom lost re-election. More encouraging for Mr. Biden is the example of Ronald Reagan, who was just one-tenth of a point above where the current president is at this stage of his presidency, but came back to win a landslide re-election in 1984.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is the strongest challenger to Mr. Trump for the Republican nomination.Scott Eisen/Getty Images; Christopher Lee for The New YorkWhit Ayres, a Republican consultant, said it was telling that Mr. Biden was essentially tied or behind “a former president carrying more baggage than a loaded 747” and warned Democrats against complacency.“Democrats are in denial if they think Biden cannot lose to Trump in 2024,” he said. “Trump can most certainly win. Joe Biden is asking the country to elect a candidate who will be 82 years old, who has clearly lost a step, running with a vice president whom almost no one in either party thinks is ready for prime time.”The Post-ABC poll and other surveys contain grim news for Republicans as well. While Mr. Trump leads or keeps relatively even with the president, he may have a ceiling beyond which he cannot rise, while Mr. Biden can still win over ambivalent independents who dislike the former president, analysts said.“While the poll is not great news for Biden, it’s not great news for the Republicans either,” said Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster. “Only about a third say they are strong supporters for Biden, DeSantis and Trump. It feels more unsettled than anything else.”She said that the real choice between Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, should it come to that, would force ambivalent Democrats and independents to come off the fence. “I noticed more softness among Democrats, but I have no doubt that no matter what skepticism Democrats tell pollsters right now, they are going to vote for Joe Biden,” she said.Stuart Stevens, who ran Mitt Romney’s campaign against Mr. Obama in 2012 and is a vocal critic of Mr. Trump, noted that the Republican establishment worries that the former president cannot win even though he leads in some polls. “We seem to be in this weird moment when Republican elite are panicked that Trump can’t beat Biden,” he said. “I think that’s because they know that Trump is deeply flawed.”David Axelrod, the former Obama senior adviser who was on the other side of that race from Mr. Stevens, agreed with his assessment. “What Biden has that no one else does is a record of having beaten Trump, which weighs heavily in conversations among Democrats about the race,” Mr. Axelrod said. “He also has a record to run on and a party out of the mainstream on some important issues to run against, with a deeply flawed front-runner.”“The worry for Democrats is that the re-elect is subject to a lot of variables Biden can’t entirely control — including his own health and aging process,” Mr. Axelrod added. “Any setback will exacerbate public concerns already apparent in the polls about his condition and ability to handle four more years.” More

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      DeSantis Continues to Test the Waters of 2024 — and Supporters Are Getting Restless

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      The Florida governor looked to excite voters in Wisconsin, finding supporters — but also doubters — in the competitive Midwest.When Peggy Nichols heard Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida was coming to this rural stretch of Wisconsin for a local Republican Party fund-raiser, she pulled out her button-making machine and crafted 10 red “Ron DeSantis 2024” pins.“He should hurry up and jump in the race,” said Ms. Nichols, who was wearing one of her creations while waiting for Mr. DeSantis to address a crowd of more than 570 people. “I made them to encourage him.”But the governor, who just wrapped up Florida’s two-month legislative session and still must deal with the state budget, is taking his time on announcing a formal bid.For now, Mr. DeSantis’s reluctance to declare his candidacy underscores the challenge he will face if he does join the race against a former president who retains the support of his party’s base. Mr. DeSantis must figure out how to set himself apart from former President Donald J. Trump without alienating his supporters — a complicated political maneuver given how closely he tied himself to Mr. Trump during his first run for governor in 2018.At the Saturday event, a sold-out dinner for the Republican Party of Marathon County, Mr. DeSantis continued to focus on his record as Florida’s governor, rather than making a direct case for why he should be president.“In Florida, we deliver big victories every single day,” Mr. DeSantis said, adding that he put conservative principles ahead of political expediency. “A leader is not captive to polls. A leader gets ahead of polls. A leader sets a vision, executes on that vision and delivers results.”Mr. DeSantis played all his greatest hits. He received a standing ovation when he criticized Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the nation’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, and said that Florida had chosen “freedom over Fauci-ism.”At the fund-raiser on Saturday, Mr. DeSantis shook hands, signed autographs and took selfies.Scott Olson/Getty ImagesMr. DeSantis is expected to announce his bid for the Republican nomination for president in the next few weeks and has been building a robust political operation in Tallahassee, Fla., hiring campaign staff and meeting with donors.On Saturday in Wisconsin, Mr. DeSantis engaged in the sort of retail politics that he sometimes avoids, shaking hands, signing autographs and taking selfies. But he left directly after his remarks.“He was very personable,” said Cindy Werner, a Republican from Milwaukee who ran for lieutenant governor in 2022 and spoke briefly with the governor as he made his way through the crowd. “I don’t understand the media narrative at all.”Representative Tom Tiffany, who represents Wisconsin’s Seventh Congressional District and is seen as an ally of Mr. Trump, introduced Mr. DeSantis, praising his landslide re-election in November.The governor, Mr. Tiffany said, “is showing how it’s done to the rest of the United States of America.”But as Mr. DeSantis stays on the sidelines of the presidential race, even some of his backers have grown anxious and publicly urged him to declare. An announcement, they say, would allow Mr. DeSantis to make a more forceful case for himself as the Republican with the best case for beating President Biden, and to defend himself more vigorously against Mr. Trump.A handful of people rallied in support of Mr. Trump outside the convention center where Mr. DeSantis spoke.Scott Olson/Getty ImagesSupporters of Mr. Trump had promised to push back against Mr. DeSantis’s appearance in Rothschild, a village roughly two hours north of Madison. But only a handful of people showed up at a rally in support of Mr. Trump outside the convention center where Mr. DeSantis spoke. Those who attended on a cold and drizzly evening said Mr. DeSantis would pay a price with the party’s grass roots for challenging the former president.“We want to send a message to DeSantis that this is Trump Country,” said Deb Allen, a Republican who drove 90 minutes from Oshkosh to Rothschild. “He should focus on Florida. He should wait another four years.”The rural northern and central Wisconsin counties surrounding the area where Mr. DeSantis spoke are often referred to as Trump Country. Mr. Trump carried Marathon County with 56 percent of the vote in 2016, when he won Wisconsin, and 58 percent in 2020, when the state flipped to Mr. Biden.But Wisconsin has not always been in Mr. Trump’s corner. In the 2016 Republican primary, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas won the state, suggesting voters and donors here could be open to an alternative to Mr. Trump.Robin Vos, the Republican speaker of the State Assembly, who has clashed with Mr. Trump, said in a phone interview that Mr. DeSantis would be “a great addition to the race.”“He’s got a good record,” said Mr. Vos, who did not attend the dinner on Saturday and who said he believed it was too early to make an endorsement. “He’s aggressive and assertive in his beliefs.”By the end of the evening, Ms. Nichols had given away all of her buttons, including the one she had been wearing, to others at the dinner who said Mr. DeSantis’s speech had won them over. More

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      It’s Beginning to Feel a Lot Like 2016 Again

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      Around the time that Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign, there was a lot of chatter about how anti-Trump Republicans were poised to repeat the failures of 2016, by declining to take on Trump directly and letting him walk unscathed to the nomination.This take seemed wrong in two ways. First, unlike in 2016, anti-Trump Republicans had a singular, popular alternative in Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whose polling was competitive with Trump’s and way ahead of any other rival. Second, unlike in 2016, most Republican primary voters have now supported Trump in two national elections, making them poor targets for sweeping broadsides against his unfitness for the presidency.Combine those two realities, and the anti-Trump path seemed clear enough: Unite behind DeSantis early, run on Trump fatigue, and hope for the slow fade rather than the dramatic knockout.But I will admit, watching DeSantis sag in the primary polls — and watching the Republican and media reaction to that sag — has triggered flashbacks to the 2016 race. Seven years later, it’s clear that many of the underlying dynamics that made Trump the nominee are still in play.Let’s count off a few of them. First, there’s the limits of ideological box-checking in a campaign against Trump. This is my colleague Nate Cohn’s main point in his assessment of DeSantis’s recent struggles, and it’s a good one: DeSantis has spent the year to date accumulating legislative victories that match up with official right-wing orthodoxy, but we already saw in Ted Cruz’s 2016 campaign the limits of ideological correctness. There are Republican primary voters who cast ballots with a matrix of conservative positions in their heads, but not enough to overcome the appeal of the Trump persona, and a campaign against him won’t prosper if its main selling point is just True Conservatism 2.0.Second, there’s the mismatch between cultural conservatism and the anti-Trump donor class. Part of DeSantis’s advantage now, compared with Cruz’s situation in 2016, is that he has seemed more congenial to the party’s bigger-money donors. But many of those donors don’t really like the culture war; they’ll go along with a generic anti-wokeness, but they hate the Disney battles and they’re usually pro-choice. So socially conservative moves that DeSantis can’t refuse, like signing Florida’s six-week abortion ban, yield instant stories about how his potential donors are thinking about closing up their checkbooks, with a palpable undercurrent of: “Why can’t we have Nikki Haley or even Glenn Youngkin instead?”This leads to the third dynamic that could repeat itself: The G.O.P coordination problem, a.k.a. the South Carolina pileup. Remember how smoothly all of Joe Biden’s rivals suddenly exited the presidential race when it was time to stop Bernie Sanders? Remember how nothing remotely like that happened among Republicans in 2016? Well, if you have an anti-Trump donor base dissatisfied with DeSantis and willing to sustain long-shot rivals, and if two of those rivals, Haley and Senator Tim Scott, hail from the early primary state of South Carolina, it’s easy enough to see how they talk themselves into hanging around long enough to hand Trump exactly the sort of narrow wins that eventually gave him unstoppable momentum in 2016.But then again, a certain cast of mind has declared Trump to have unstoppable momentum already. This reflects another tendency that helped elect him the first time, the weird fatalism of professional Republicans. In 2016 many of them passed from “he can’t win” to “he can’t be stopped” with barely a way station in between. A rough month for DeSantis has already surfaced the same spirit — as in a piece by Politico’s Jonathan Martin, which quoted one strategist saying resignedly, “We’re just going to have to go into the basement, ride out the tornado and come back up when it’s over to rebuild the neighborhood.”Influencing this perspective, again as in 2016, is the assumption that Trump can’t win the general election, so if the G.O.P. just lets him lose it will finally be rid of him. Of course that assumption was completely wrong before, it could be wrong again; and even if it’s not, how do you know he won’t be back in 2028?Then, the final returning dynamic: The media still wants Trump. This is not offered as an excuse for G.O.P. primary voters choosing him; if the former president is renominated in spite of all his sins, it’s ultimately on them and them alone.But I still feel a certain vibe, in the eager coverage of DeSantis’s sag, suggesting that at some half-conscious level the mainstream press really wants the Trump return. They want to enjoy the Trump Show’s ratings, they want the G.O.P. defined by Trumpism while they define themselves as democracy’s defenders.And so Trump’s rivals will have to struggle, not only against the wattage of the man himself, but also against an impulse already apparent — to call the race for Trump before a single vote is cast.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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      DeSantis to Visit Wisconsin, a 2024 Battleground, as He Circles Trump

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      The Florida governor, who has slipped in polls as his expected entrance to the presidential race nears, is moving beyond early nominating states like Iowa and New Hampshire.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is expanding his political travel as his poll numbers slip ahead of an expected presidential campaign, visiting rural north-central Wisconsin on Saturday in a sign of his intent to compete for voters beyond early nominating states like Iowa.Declared candidates, including former President Donald J. Trump, have largely focused on making appearances in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, three of the first states on the Republican nominating calendar next year.But Mr. DeSantis’s visit to a convention center outside the small city of Wausau, an area roughly 90 minutes west of Green Bay that voted heavily for Mr. Trump in the last two elections, suggests that the governor is preparing to challenge the former president more directly in a crucial battleground state.“It’s a smart move by DeSantis,” said Brandon Scholz, a lobbyist and former executive director of the Wisconsin Republican Party. “You don’t go to Wausau, Wisconsin, to get cheese curds. You go to get the grass roots talking. You go to get on local TV. It shows that DeSantis is thinking about his strategy beyond the early states, and that he’s picking his spots well.”For Mr. DeSantis, who is expected to announce his 2024 bid in the coming weeks, the trip to the Midwest offers a chance for a reset. A trade mission abroad late last month — meant to elevate his foreign policy credentials — received only a lukewarm response. And his poll numbers against Mr. Trump have consistently dipped.On Friday, Mr. DeSantis dismissed concerns by some fellow Republicans that he was taking too long to announce a campaign.“That’s chatter,” he said at a news conference at the Florida Capitol. “The chatter is just not something that I worry about. I don’t bother.”At another point, he said of his political ambitions, “We’ll get on that relatively soon,” adding, “You either got to put up or shut up on that.”Mr. DeSantis can point to a busy two-month legislative session in Tallahassee that ended on Friday and allowed him to notch conservative victories on abortion, immigration and education, among other issues dear to his party’s base. With legislators returning home, he is expected to pick up his out-of-state travel schedule, which includes stops in Illinois and Iowa next week.After helping vault Mr. Trump to the presidency in 2016, Wisconsin swung to Joseph R. Biden Jr. four years later. Republicans there have continued to take losses, including the re-election of Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, in November and a bruising loss last month in a consequential State Supreme Court race.The Saturday event for Mr. DeSantis, an evening fund-raiser for the Republican Party of Marathon County where he will speak about his memoir, is sold out with more than 560 attendees, according to organizers. “It’s not just Marathon County,” said Kevin Hermening, the county party’s chairman. “We have people traveling in from Chicago, Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee and Green Bay,” he said. “There is a real interest in listening to somebody who represents the next generation of conservative thought.”Mr. DeSantis may use the Wisconsin dinner to highlight his family’s Midwestern roots: His mother is from Youngstown, Ohio, and his wife, Casey DeSantis, is also from Ohio. His father was raised in western Pennsylvania.Mr. DeSantis, who has spent most of his life in Florida, recently started to emphasize his ties outside the state.“I was geographically raised in Tampa Bay, but culturally my upbringing reflected the working-class communities in western Pennsylvania and northeast Ohio — from weekly church attendance to the expectation that one would earn his keep,” Mr. DeSantis says in his memoir, “The Courage to Be Free,” which he is promoting nationwide. “This made me God-fearing, hard-working and America-loving.”Saturday’s fund-raiser is not a high-dollar affair, allowing Mr. DeSantis to talk directly to his party’s base. Individual tickets cost $75. A table of eight went for $1,000. Representative Tom Tiffany, a Republican who represents the area in Congress and has not made a presidential endorsement, will introduce Mr. DeSantis.Mr. DeSantis’s visit to Wisconsin could also invite further comparisons between him and Scott Walker, the state’s former governor and onetime front-runner in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, who ended his campaign after only two months. Like Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Walker was a young, popular governor. But he stumbled early on the campaign trail and saw his star quickly dim as Mr. Trump outshone his establishment rivals.In Wisconsin — which will also host the Republican Party’s 2024 convention, in Milwaukee — Mr. DeSantis will be walking straight into the heart of Trump country.The former president held several rallies in the state’s rural north during previous campaigns, and handily beat both Hillary Clinton and Mr. Biden there. Mr. DeSantis has so far largely avoided mentioning Mr. Trump by name, although a super PAC backing the governor’s campaign is stepping up its attacks.“The die-hard people up here still love Trump,” said Linda Prehn, a Republican who helped organize the Saturday event. “But I know a lot of people who voted for him two times and do not want to vote for him a third time” in a primary.Ms. Prehn said she did not know much about Mr. DeSantis, although her friends in Florida had praised how he handled the coronavirus pandemic and a recent devastating hurricane.“People want to get a look at him,” she said.In a recent survey of Wisconsin voters, Mr. DeSantis performed better in a head-to-head matchup against Mr. Biden than Mr. Trump did, according to the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies.Still, pro-Trump forces are mobilizing to challenge Mr. DeSantis in Wisconsin. On its Facebook page, the Republican Party in nearby Waupaca County posted an invitation calling for a rally in support of Mr. Trump outside the dinner where Mr. DeSantis will speak.“Please gather with us,” the post said, “for a patriotic rally showing that Wisconsin is Trump Country!” The post was earlier reported by NBC News.On Saturday, Mr. DeSantis is likely to make his case to party activists by extolling the results of Florida’s legislative session.“I think we got probably 99 percent” of his agenda, he told reporters on Friday. He acknowledged, however, the failure of high-profile defamation bills that would have made it easier for private citizens to sue news outlets for libel, measures that some right-wing outlets had opposed.“Look, the defamation, it’s a thorny issue,” Mr. DeSantis said. “Clearly I don’t want to incentivize frivolous lawsuits. That is totally unacceptable.”As Mr. DeSantis makes the positive case for his candidacy, the main super PAC supporting his candidacy, Never Back Down, is attacking Mr. Trump.The group released an ad this past week that features an actor putting a fresh bumper sticker on his truck.The new sticker reads “DeSantis for President.”The man places it directly over a tattered decal for Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. More

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      How to Police Gerrymanders? Some Judges Say the Courts Can’t.

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      A North Carolina court, following the lead of the U.S. Supreme Court, ruled that courts don’t have the ability to determine if a political map is legal, giving legislators a free pass.WASHINGTON — Courts decide vexing legal matters and interpret opaque constitutional language all the time, from defining pornography and judging whether a search or seizure is unreasonable to determining how speedy a speedy trial must be.And then there is the issue that some judges increasingly say is beyond their abilities to adjudicate. It was on display again last week, in North Carolina.The North Carolina Supreme Court said that it could find no way to determine when even egregious gerrymanders — in this case, lopsided partisan maps of the state’s General Assembly and its 14 congressional districts — cross the line between skewed but legal and unconstitutionally rigged. In addition, the justices said, any court-ordered standard “would embroil the judiciary in every local election in every county, city and district across the state.”The effect was to give the Republican-led legislature carte blanche to draw new maps for 2024 elections that lock in G.O.P. political dominance, even though the state’s electorate is split almost evenly between the two major parties.Under its current court-ordered map, North Carolina now elects seven Democrats and seven Republicans to the U.S. House. Maps drawn by the Republican legislature could mean 10 Republicans to four Democrats, or possibly 11 to three. Without judicial review, the only remedy is to vote the dominant party out using maps drawn to keep them in power.The 5-to-2 decision, which fell along party lines in a court led by Republicans, pointedly threw out a ruling by a Democrat-led court only a few months earlier that said such lines could — and should — be drawn. In that respect, the North Carolina ruling reinforced what seems to be a hardening partisan divide between jurists who believe unfair political maps should be policed and ones who do not.The U.S. Supreme Court also split along partisan lines in 2019 when it ruled 5 to 4, after decades of dithering, that it could not devise a legal standard to regulate partisan gerrymandering, though it suggested that state courts could.It is hard to separate party allegiance from jurists’ positions, said Paul M. Smith, the senior vice president of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan advocacy group that litigates voting rights issues.“One explanation would be that the courts decide cases about elections based on who will be helped,” he said. “On some days, I’m cynical enough to believe that.” Whether that consciously figures in court decisions, though, is less easy to say, he added.Nate Persily, a Stanford Law School professor and expert on election law and democracy, said that any standard for judging partisan gerrymanders has to be above reproach.“The response is always going to be that you’re picking winners and losers,” he said. “Unless we come up with some sort of clear mathematical test, I respect the argument that judges’ political preferences might creep into the process.” Passing judgment on a legislature’s constitutional authority to set political boundaries can be a fraught exercise. In 1962, one U.S. Supreme Court justice, Charles Evans Whittaker, who had heard the historic redistricting case Baker v. Carr, suffered a nervous breakdown during the court’s deliberations and skipped the final vote.But some say that just because it is hard to create fair district lines does not mean it cannot be done.“I think that’s intellectually dishonest and intellectually lazy,” Rebecca Szetela, a political independent and a member of the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission, said in an interview. “We had a commission made up of 13 randomly selected voters of varying educational backgrounds, and somehow we were able to come up with fair standards.”The Michigan commissioners drew their first set of maps after the 2020 election, following orders not to give any party a “disproportionate advantage.” They relied on several statistical metrics to meet that standard. But overall, they decided that an acceptable range for the statewide ratio of votes to seats won would fall within five percentage points of their calculation of the state’s political preferences: 52 percent Democratic, 48 percent Republican.In practice, Ms Szetela said, the maps hewed closely to the calculated partisan divide. Still, some experts say that it is impossible to construct a standard that will be reliably fair. Daniel H. Lowenstein, an election-law expert at UCLA School of Law, said that would-be regulators of partisan gerrymanders by and large know little of how politics really works. He said that he picked up such an education during the 1970s while working in the California Secretary of State office, and later while running the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission.“There’s nothing in the Constitution that says elections have to be fair,” he said, “and that’s a good thing, because different people all have different concepts of what it means to be fair.”Peter H. Schuck, professor emeritus of law at Yale wrote a detailed analysis on the topic, “The Thickest Thicket,” in 1987. “I just don’t see any objective criteria that would be authoritative in assessing whether a gerrymander ought to be upheld or not,” he said. A few other state courts have set standards for partisan gerrymandering and applied them. Pennsylvania was the first state to strike down partisan gerrymanders in 2018, and the Alaska Supreme Court upheld a lower-court decision last month stating that gerrymandered State Senate seats violated the State Constitution’s equal protection clause.Many voting rights advocates say the same computer-driven advances that enable today’s extreme gerrymanders also make it possible to easily spot them.In particular, software programs can now generate thousands and even millions of maps of hypothetical political districts, each with small variations in their borders. Using statistical measures, those maps can be compared to a map being contested to gauge their partisan slant.In actual court cases, the technique has shown that some gerrymandered maps produce more lopsided partisan outcomes than 99 percent and more of the hypothetical ones.Measures of partisanship have improved, as social scientists employed data analytics to tease out the partisan impact of map changes. One yardstick, called the efficiency gap, gauges how much the votes of one party are wasted when its voters are disproportionately packed into one district or carved up among several. Another, partisan bias, measures the effectiveness of a gerrymandered map by calculating how many seats the same map would give each party in a hypothetical election where voters were split 50-50. There are many others, and each has its shortcomings. For example, voters sort themselves geographically, with a lopsided share of Democrats packed in cities and Republicans in rural areas, for reasons that have nothing to do with partisan skulduggery. And some metrics are useful only in particular situations, such as in states where party support is closely divided.In a 2017 hearing in a Wisconsin partisan gerrymander case, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. called such metrics “sociological gobbledygook.” But if so, much of American jurisprudence carries the same label, said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard University law professor who has been a leading advocate of standards to judge partisan gerrymanders.“In any voting rights case, people have to calculate racial polarization, which is a far more complex calculation than the efficiency gap,” he said. “You have to calculate the compactness of districts. You have to estimate voting patterns for minority voters and white voters.”“Tests involving some matter of degree are just ubiquitous in constitutional law,” he added, and nothing makes a partisan gerrymander case any different.Mr. Stephanopoulos and others also say that drawing a line between permissible and illegal political maps is not all that difficult. Courts make similar judgments in lawsuits claiming racial bias in redistricting, he noted. After the one-person, one-vote ruling in 1964, judges quickly set a limit — 10 percent — on how much political districts could deviate from the new requirement to have substantially equal populations.Some gerrymandering yardsticks have already been suggested. For example, a political map might be assumed constitutional unless measures of partisanship uniformly argued against it. At that point, the body that drew the map would have to demonstrate another compelling reason for the way boundaries were drawn.Critics like Professor Lowenstein argue that any dividing line between unfair and fair maps will have an unwanted consequence: Every subsequent map may be drawn to extract as much partisan gain as possible, yet fall just short of the legal standard for rejection.“The ultimate question,” Professor Schuck said, “is how crude a fit should a court be willing to accept?”Then again, he pointed out, the U.S. Supreme Court and the North Carolina Supreme Court have answered that question: Future political maps, they have ruled, can be as crude as their makers want them to be.“Declining to apply a rule is still going to validate or invalidate what politicians have done,” he said. “There’s no total innocence, no virginity, as it were.” More

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      Vivek Ramaswamy, the Wealthy Republican Who Thinks Trump Didn’t Go Far Enough

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      Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican wunderkind running for his party’s presidential nomination, would like potential supporters to know he believes in the rule of law and the Constitution’s separation of powers — though his applications of such principles can seem selective.After intense study of the Constitution, Mr. Ramaswamy says he believes that the awesome powers of the presidency would allow him to abolish the Education Department “on Day 1,” part of an assault on the “administrative state” that his 2024 rival, Donald J. Trump, fell short on during Days 1 through 1,461 of his presidency. Never mind that the Constitution confers the power of the purse on Congress, and a subsequent law makes it illegal for the president not to spend that money.Mr. Ramaswamy also wants to eradicate teachers’ unions, though he concedes that they are governed by contracts with state and local governments.And he says he would unleash the military to stamp out the scourge of fentanyl coming across the Southern border, unworried by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits the use of the military for civil law enforcement.In short, Mr. Ramaswamy, a lavishly wealthy 37-year-old entrepreneur and author pitching himself as a new face of intellectual conservatism, is promising to go farther down the road of ruling by fiat than Mr. Trump would or could.Mr. Ramaswamy has already lent his well-appointed campaign more than $10 million, and he has said he will spend over $100 million if necessary. John Tully for The New York Times“I respect what Donald Trump did, I do, with the America First agenda, but I think he went as far as he was going to go,” Mr. Ramaswamy told a crowd of about 100 on Tuesday night at Murphy’s Tap Room in Bedford, N.H. “I’m in this race to take the America First agenda far further than Donald Trump ever did.”Mr. Ramaswamy, a Cincinnati-born son of Indian immigrants, would seem to be the longest of long shots: He has never held elective office and has vanishingly low name recognition. But he is playing to sizable crowds and exudes a confidence that can be infectious. He has already lent his well-appointed campaign more than $10 million and has said he will spend over $100 million if necessary. Recent polling, both nationally and in New Hampshire, shows him on the rise in the Republican field, though at no more than 5 percent.His overt shots at Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whom he labels a visionless “implementer” without the courage to venture into the hostile territories of college campuses or NBC News, are intended to clear what he sees as an eventual showdown with Mr. Trump. His brashest criticism of the former president is over Mr. Trump’s suggestion that he might skip primary debates, depriving Mr. Ramaswamy of the stage he says he needs to catch his rival.Mr. Ramaswamy sees a simple path to the White House: score respectably in the Iowa caucuses, win New Hampshire, vault to the nomination — and then triumph in a landslide that would exceed Ronald Reagan’s victory over Jimmy Carter in 1980.“Even as a freshman, he had a similar voice, confident, articulate, very sure of himself,” said Anson Frericks, a high school friend of Mr. Ramaswamy’s and a business partner at the asset management firm they founded to give investors financial options untethered to socially conscious corporations. “Confidence builds with success. It’s a virtuous cycle.”And though his promises may be legally problematic, they sound correct to many Republicans — or at least authoritative. Mr. Ramaswamy at Linda’s Breakfast Place in Seabrook, N.H., on Thursday. Recent polling, both nationally and in New Hampshire, shows him on the rise in the Republican field, though at no more than 5 percent.John Tully for The New York Times“He seems like he knows what he’s talking about,” said Bob Willis, a self-described “Ultra-MAGA Trump person” who was waiting for Mr. Ramaswamy to arrive on Wednesday in Keene, N.H.Confidence is Mr. Ramaswamy’s gift. His father, an engineer and a patent lawyer at General Electric, is, the candidate says, far more liberal than his son. His mother is a physician. He attributes his strict vegetarianism to his Indian roots. A piano teacher began Mr. Ramaswamy’s political journey with long asides on the evils of government and the wrongs of Hillary Clinton. At Harvard, he majored in biology and developed a brash libertarianism complete with a political rapper alter ego, “Da Vek.”Between graduation and Yale Law School, he worked in finance, investing in pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Before getting his law degree, he was already worth around $15 million, he said in an interview, during which he worried about wealth inequality.“I think it fuels a social hierarchy in our country that rejects the premise that we’re all coequal citizens,” he said.Mr. Ramaswamy, a Cincinnati-born son of Indian immigrants, has never held elective office and has low name recognition.John Tully for The New York TimesIndeed, Mr. Ramaswamy’s promises have an overarching theme that the nation — especially his generation and younger — has lost its spiritual center, creating what the mathematician Blaise Pascal called “a God-shaped vacuum in the heart.” That hole is being filled, Mr. Ramaswamy says, by “secular cults” — racial “wokeism,” sexual and gender fluidity, and the “climate cult” — which can be “diluted to oblivion” only with the rediscovery of the American ideals of patriotism, meritocracy and sacrifice. Mr. Ramaswamy can say things that stretch credulity or undermine his seriousness. He boasts on the campaign trail of his recent star turn jousting with Don Lemon just before Mr. Lemon was fired by CNN. But his statement in that exchange that Black Americans did not secure their civil rights until they secured their right to bear arms made little historical sense, since the civil rights movement was predicated on nonviolence. Indeed, the arming of the Black Panthers led to a deadly government crackdown.Mr. Ramaswamy accepts the established science that the burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet, but his answer is to “drill, frack, burn coal” and use more fossil fuels. That will supposedly unleash economic growth that will pay for mitigation efforts to shield everyone from climate change.He also says he is the first presidential candidate to promise to end race-based affirmative action, ignoring that this was the centerpiece of Ben Carson’s presidential run in 2016. Mr. Ramaswamy would end affirmative action by executive order, he says.He would not spend another dollar on aid to Ukraine but would use military force to “annihilate” Mexican drug cartels.Gregg Dumont, wearing a T-shirt picturing Mr. Trump in jail as a political prisoner, said Mr. Ramaswamy had his vote over the man on his shirt. John Tully for The New York TimesOn Wednesday night in Windham, N.H., Mr. Ramaswamy suggested he would name Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Democratic vaccine skeptic challenging President Biden, as his running mate. On Tuesday in Bedford, he was asked by a woman with a Black son-in-law and a mixed-race grandson to clarify the meaning of “anti-woke.”Mr. Ramaswamy — the author of “Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam” — answered, “I’ve never used that word to actually describe myself,” as aides handed out stickers reading: “Stop Wokeism. Vote Vivek.”All of this can be somewhat mystifying to prominent people who worked with him. Mr. Ramaswamy’s real fortune comes from the pharmaceutical investment and drug development firm Roivant Sciences, founded after the entrepreneur had a “brilliant” idea, said Donald M. Berwick, a former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under President Barack Obama.Pharmaceutical giants often abandon research efforts after concluding that even if they are successful, the medicinal product might not be profitable. Roivant would then pick up such ventures and bring them to market. Roivant’s advisory board eventually included Tom Daschle, the former Democratic senator and Senate majority leader; Dr. Berwick; and Kathleen Sebelius, a health and human services secretary in the Obama administration.Part of the appeal, Mr. Daschle said, was Mr. Ramaswamy’s commitment to bringing prescription drugs to market at affordable prices.“I just assumed that because he was so interested in doing as much as he was to lower costs, social responsibility and corporate responsibility was part of his thinking,” Mr. Daschle said.Then, after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Mr. Ramaswamy began publicly castigating corporations for speaking out on social issues like Black Lives Matter, voting rights and “E.S.G.” — environmental, social and governance investing. Opinion columns in The Wall Street Journal were followed by appearances on Tucker Carlson’s now-canceled Fox News show.“I was rather shocked,” said Dr. Berwick, who resigned from Roivant on Jan. 12, 2021. Within days, Mr. Daschle and Ms. Sebelius quit. Mr. Ramaswamy soon followed, to write three books, help start the asset management company with Mr. Frericks and run for president.Mr. Ramaswamy says he would not spend another dollar on aid to Ukraine but would use military force to “annihilate” Mexican drug cartels.John Tully for The New York TimesAt this very early stage of the campaign, Mr. Ramaswamy is open about the limits of his appeal. Evangelical Christians who dominate the Republican caucuses in Iowa will need to be brought along to his Hindu faith. His “war with Mexico” may go over well in South Carolina, but faces resistance among more libertarian voters in New Hampshire, he said.And New Hampshire cynics don’t quite know how seriously to take him. Victoria Gulla, 50, of Spofford, N.H., questioned whether he was part of a back-room deal with Mr. Trump to help take out Mr. DeSantis in exchange for a position in the next Trump administration, in the way she thinks Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, helped take down Senator Marco Rubio in New Hampshire in 2016.In a statement on Friday afternoon, Mr. Trump fueled that kind of speculation, saying he was “pleased to see that Vivek Ramaswamy is doing so well” in a recent poll and “seems to be on his way to catching Ron DeSanctimonious.”A hundred million dollars in self-funding could keep Mr. Ramaswamy in the race for a long time, and some voters were clearly persuaded by Mr. Ramaswamy’s nearly messianic appeal for a spiritual and social renewal.Gregg Dumont, 45, of Manchester, broke into tears in Windham as he praised the candidate for daring to save his children from moral decay and what he called the “racism” of identity politics.Mr. Dumont, wearing a T-shirt picturing Mr. Trump in jail as a political prisoner, said Mr. Ramaswamy had his vote over the man on his shirt: “All the policies with an upgrade, and none of the personality,” he said. “I’m sick of the narcissism.” More