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      Georgia’s Hot Mess Is Headed Your Way

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      Here’s a head scratcher for you: What happens when the leadership of a political party becomes so extreme, so out of touch with its voters, that it alienates many of its own activists and elected officials? And what happens when some of those officials set up a parallel infrastructure that lets them circumvent the party for campaign essentials such as fund-raising and voter turnout? At what point does this party become mostly a bastion of wingnuts, spiraling into chaos and irrelevance?No need to waste time guessing. Just cast your eyes upon Georgia, one of the nation’s electoral battlegrounds, where the state Republican Party has gone so far down the MAGA rabbit hole that many of its officeholders — including Gov. Brian Kemp, who romped to re-election last year despite being targeted for removal by Donald Trump — are steering clear of it as if it’s their gassy grandpa at Sunday supper.Republicans elsewhere should keep watch. Democrats too. What’s happening in Georgia is a cautionary tale for pluralism, an example of how the soul of a party can become warped and wrecked when its leadership veers toward narrow extremism. And while every state’s political dynamics are unique, a variation of the Peach State drama could be headed your way soon — if it hasn’t begun already.The backstory: Some Republican incumbents took offense last year when the Georgia G.O.P.’s Trump-smitten chairman, David Shafer, backed Trump-preferred challengers in the primaries. (Mr. Trump, you will recall, was desperate to unseat several Republicans after they declined to help him steal the 2020 election.) Those challengers went down hard, and Mr. Kemp in particular emerged as a superhero to non-Trumpist Republicans. Even so, scars remain. “That’s a burn that’s hard to get over,” says Brian Robinson, a Republican strategist who served as an adviser to former Gov. Nathan Deal.The clash also made clear that Republican candidates, or at least popular incumbents, don’t much need the party apparatus anymore. This is part of a broader trend: The clout of parties has long been on the slide because of changes in how campaigns are funded. That got turbocharged in Georgia in 2021, when its legislature, the General Assembly, passed a Kemp-backed bill allowing certain top officials (and their general-election challengers) to form leadership PACs, which can coordinate with candidates’ campaigns and accept megadonations free from pesky dollar limits.The PAC Mr. Kemp set up, the Georgians First Leadership Committee, raked in gobs of cash and built a formidable voter data and turnout machine. The governor plans to use it to aid fellow Republicans, establishing himself as a power center independent of the state party.As big-money conduits, leadership PACs can bring plenty of their own problems. But whatever their larger implications, in the current mess that is Georgia Republican politics, they also mean that elected leaders “don’t have to play nice in the sandbox with a group that is sometimes at odds with them,” says Mr. Robinson.The governor says he will skip the state party’s convention in June, as will the state’s attorney general, its insurance commissioner and its secretary of state. At a February luncheon for his Georgians First PAC, Mr. Kemp basically told big donors not to waste their money on the party, saying that the midterms showed “we can no longer rely on the traditional party infrastructure to win in the future,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.New party leadership is on the way. Mr. Shafer is not seeking another term. (Fun fact: He is under investigation for his role in the pro-Trump fake-elector scheme of 2020.) Party delegates will elect his successor at the upcoming state convention. But the problems run deeper. Republican critics say that the party culture has become steeped in the paranoid politics of MAGA and election denial. And in the current environment, “everyone must pledge their undying loyalty to Donald Trump above all else,” says Jay Morgan, who was an executive director of the state party in the 1980s and now runs a public affairs firm in Atlanta.Mr. Shafer defends his tenure, noting in particular that, since he took over in 2019, the party has gone from being mired in debt to having “over $1 million in the bank.”To be fair, the Georgia G.O.P. has a rich history of rocky relations with its governors. But the Trump era, which brought a wave of new grassroots activists and outsiders into party meetings, put the situation “on steroids,” says Martha Zoller, a Republican consultant and talk radio host.“Right now, it’s largely a place disconnected from reality,” adds Cole Muzio, a Kemp ally and the president of Frontline Policy Action, a conservative advocacy group.That seems unlikely to change any time soon, as some of the party’s more extreme elements gain influence. In recent months, leadership elections at the county and district levels have seen wins by candidates favored by the Georgia Republican Assembly, a coterie of ultraconservatives, plenty of whom are still harboring deep suspicions about the voting system.One of the more colorful winners was Kandiss Taylor, the new chairwoman of the First Congressional District. A keen peddler of conspiracy nuttiness, Ms. Taylor ran for governor last year, proclaiming herself “the ONLY candidate bold enough to stand up to the Luciferian Cabal.” After winning just slightly more than 3 percent of the primary vote, she declared that the election results could not be trusted and refused to concede — an antidemocratic move straight from the Trump playbook. As a chairwoman, she is promising “big things” for her district. So southeast Georgia has that to look forward to.Why should anyone care about the state of the Georgia G.O.P.? Well, what is happening in Georgia is unlikely to stay in Georgia — and has repercussions that go beyond the health and functionality of the Republican Party writ large. After election deniers failed to gain control of statewide offices across the nation in 2022, many of them refocused their efforts farther down the food chain. In February, The Associated Press detailed the push by some of these folks to become state party chairmen, who are typically chosen by die-hard activists. In Michigan, for instance, the state G.O.P. elevated the Trumpist conspiracy lover and failed secretary of state candidate Kristina Karamo to be its chairwoman.MAGA zealots don’t simply present ideological concerns, though their politics do tend toward the fringes. Too many embraced the stop-the-steal fiction that the electoral system has been compromised by nefarious Democrats and must be “saved” by any means necessary. Letting them oversee any aspect of the electoral process seems like a poor idea.If this development persists, Republicans more interested in the party’s future than in relitigating its past might want to look at how Kemp & Company have been trying to address their intraparty problems — and what more could and should be done to insulate not only the party’s less-extreme candidates, but also the democratic system, from these fringe forces. There are risks that come with ticking off election deniers and other Trumpian dead-enders. But the greater risk to the overall party, and the nation, would be declining to do so.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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      This Is Why Politicians Like to Change the Subject

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. You know I’m no fan of Kevin McCarthy’s. But the House speaker did succeed in getting a bill through Congress with a debt-ceiling increase, and now the Biden administration needs 60 votes in the Senate — meaning 51 Democrats and independents plus 9 Republicans — to get the limit increase to the president’s desk for a signature.So, shouldn’t Joe, you know, negotiate?Gail Collins: Bret, with your strong feelings about fiscal responsibility, you of all people should be offended by McCarthy’s ploy. The debt ceiling needs to be raised in order to avoid an unprecedented, messy, horrible moment when the country’s credit goes bad and economic collapse spreads around the globe.Everybody knows that has to be done. But McCarthy now wants to use it as a hostage — attaching his wish list of spending cuts (weaken the I.R.S.!) and prosecuting the G.O.P. war on environmentalism.Bret: I don’t think anyone wants Uncle Sam to default on his debts — except, well, the nuttier Republicans who hold the balance of power in the House. McCarthy had to pass a bill that could garner their support. That’s just political reality, and we can’t wish it away.Gail: President Biden’s right, though. We have to go ahead and do the thing we have to do. It’s the government equivalent of paying the mortgage. Then we can fight about regular spending, like a family debating whether to get a second car.Bret: Biden’s budget request was the largest in history — $6.8 trillion — which is far more than the $3.7 trillion President Barack Obama asked for just 10 years ago. Is that the right thing to do? We’ve got a federal debt that surpasses $30 trillion. Democrats show little interest in fiscal restraint, but they have maximum appetite for tax increases they know all Republicans will oppose. So of course the G.O.P. is going to play hardball. It’s not much different from the mid-1980s, when Biden, as a senator, linked his own support for an increase in the debt ceiling with a freeze on federal spending.But here’s a question, Gail: Let’s say you got your way and Republicans magically agreed to a “clean” raising of the debt ceiling. What sort of spending cuts would you endorse?Gail: Bret, as you know, my top priority for fixing government finances is to get the rich to pay their fair share of Social Security taxes.Bret: Don’t usually think of a tax increase as a spending cut, but go on.Gail: Right now, the Social Security tax cap is so low that anybody who’s made a million dollars or more this year has already maxed out. You and I are getting taxed right now, but Elon Musk isn’t.Bret: Give the guy a break: He’s been busy blowing up rockets, launchpads, Twitter, the S.E.C., not to mention his reputation ….Gail: On the spending-cut side, while I concede we’ll inevitably spend a ton on defense, there are plenty of obvious saving targets. For instance, military bases that exist only because some powerful House or Senate member is defending them.Bret: If it were up to me, I’d do away with nearly all agriculture subsidies, starting with biofuels, which are environmentally destructive and contribute to global food scarcity by diverting corn and sugar and soybean fields for fuel production. I’d get rid of the Department of Education, which was not Jimmy Carter’s best idea and which has presided over 43 years of persistent and worsening educational failure in this country. I’d eliminate the National Flood Insurance Program; we are encouraging people to build irresponsibly in the face of climate change.Gail: Want to jump in and agree about the flood insurance. But go on …Bret: I’d stop subsidizing rich people who want to buy Teslas. Electric vehicles can compete in the market on their own merits. I’d terminate the Space Force; the Air Force was doing just fine before Donald Trump decided to add another layer of Pentagon bureaucracy. I’d claw back unspent Covid funds. The pandemic is over; we’ve spent enough. I’d … I’m really getting into this, aren’t I?Gail: I’m with you on Covid funds and the Space Force. But we do need to encourage the production and sale of electric vehicles. If we have to spend money to push back on global warming, so be it.Bret: Switching gears, Gail, our colleague Tom Friedman wrote a powerful column last week making the case that Biden needs to think hard about the wisdom of keeping Kamala Harris on the ticket. I gather you think that ship has already sailed?Gail: Tom is a great columnist and great friend — he once took me on a tour of Israel and the West Bank that was one of the most enlightening weeks of my life.Bret: Oy vey!Gail: And a year or two ago, I would definitely have agreed with him about Harris. But I’ve come around to believing that she’s grown in the job despite being saddled with a lousy agenda early on. (Kamala, would you please go solve the Mexican border situation?) Lately she’s been the administration’s fierce advocate for abortion rights.Practical bottom line — you have here a Black woman who’s been, at minimum, a perfectly adequate vice president. I just can’t see any way Biden could toss her off the ticket. Even if there’s a good chance at his age that he’ll die in office. Which is, of course, not a train of thought he wants to take us on.Your opinion?Bret: Remember all those independents who might have voted for John McCain in 2008 save for Sarah Palin? Well, Kamala Harris is gonna be another deal breaker for some of those same independents.Gail: One of the happier factoids of the world today is that a huge proportion of it has forgotten who Sarah Palin even is. What’s worse than being both terrible and forgettable?But go on about Kamala …Bret: Her approval rating is the lowest for any vice president in the last 30 years at this point in the administration — and that includes Mike Pence and Dick Cheney. It’s an open secret in Washington that she runs the most dysfunctional office of any major office holder. Nobody thought she’d “solve” the Mexican border situation, but it would have been nice if she showed a basic command of facts. Because of Biden’s age, the chances of her taking the top job are substantial, and many voters will judge the Biden-Harris ticket on how confident they feel about Harris. How would I feel about President Harris dealing with a nuclear crisis in Korea or a Chinese invasion of Taiwan or another global financial crisis? Not good.Democrats need to get over their fear of offending her. There are plenty of qualified replacements.Gail: We used to be in agreement here, but I do think she’s grown in the job. And when it comes to being terrified about somebody dealing with a nuclear crisis — how would you feel about, say, Ron DeSantis? Or of course Donald Trump?Bret: You’re sort of making my point. If you think, as Tom and I do, that she’s a major political liability for Biden, it’s that much more of an incentive to get a stronger running mate. Surely the U.N. secretary general can be cajoled into early retirement so Harris can get an office with a nice view of the East River?Gail: You just brought me back to an old fantasy about finding a job for Biden so great it would tempt him to leave office after one term. Guess secretary general wouldn’t do it. But I do keep wishing he’d announced last week that he wasn’t running again. He has plenty of major accomplishments to point to, and the nation would have a good long time to watch and appraise the many promising Democratic candidates to replace him. Including his vice president.Bret: Frank Bruni was really on the money on this subject: There really is no better job than the presidency. The perks, the pomp and the power are all irresistible, particularly to guys like Biden who have been chasing the office their whole adult lives and now finally have it. We were fools to imagine he might be tempted not to run again — even though he’s tempting fate, and second terms rarely exceed the quality of first terms.Gail: OK, Bret — that’s enough politics for today. Always count on you to finish with something more profound.Bret: One of the delights of our conversation, Gail, is being able to point our readers toward some of the very best work of our colleagues. This week, they really shouldn’t miss Mike Baker’s beautifully written, heartbreaking story about Craig Coyner, a brilliant public defender who served as mayor of Bend, Ore., in the 1980s — only to die there earlier this year as a homeless man, broken by mental illness.We all need stories that uplift us. But we also need those that remind us of the adage that “there but for the grace of God go I.” May Coyner’s memory be for a blessing.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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      Fox News Gambled, but Tucker Carlson Can Still Take Down the House

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      For the quarter-century-plus that the Fox News Channel has been coming into America’s living rooms, it has operated according to a cardinal tenet: No one at the cable network is bigger than Fox News itself. It’s a lesson Glenn Beck, Megyn Kelly and Bill O’Reilly all learned the hard way after they left Fox and saw their fame and influence (if not their fortunes) evaporate. Once the biggest names in cable news, they now spend their days wandering in the wilderness of podcasts and third-tier streaming platforms. Even Roger Ailes, Fox News’s original architect and the man who devised — and then ruthlessly enforced — the no-one-bigger-than rule, discovered that he was expendable when Rupert Murdoch pushed him out as Fox’s chairman and chief executive in 2016 amid sexual harassment allegations. Mr. Ailes soon disappeared to a mansion in Florida and, less than a year later, died in exile from the media world he’d once commanded.When Fox News abruptly fired Tucker Carlson, the network’s most popular prime-time host and the most powerful person in conservative media, many savvy press critics predicted the same fate for him: professional oblivion. Mr. Carlson had himself once replaced Ms. Kelly, and later Mr. O’Reilly, and each time he climbed to a new, better slot in the Fox News lineup he garnered bigger and bigger ratings. Now, according to the conventional wisdom, some new up-and-comer would inherit Mr. Carlson’s audience and replace him as the king (or queen) of conservative media. “The ‘talent’ at the Fox News Channel has never been the star,” Politico’s Jack Shafer wrote earlier this week. “Fox itself, which convenes the audience, is the star.”But there’s good reason to believe Mr. Carlson will be the exception that proves the rule. For one thing, unlike previous stars who have left Fox News, Mr. Carlson departed when he was still at the height of his power, making his firing all the more sudden and shocking. Three days before his sacking, he gave the keynote address at the Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary gala. Two weeks before that, he browbeat Texas’ Republican governor to issue a pardon to a man who had been convicted of murdering a Black Lives Matter protester in Austin.More important, at Fox, he exercised power in ways that were new and unique for a cable star. He was a sophisticated political operator as much as he was a talented television host — to an astonishingly unsettling degree, as he continued to thrive while making racist and sexist comments and earning the praise of neo-Nazis. Like Donald Trump — to say nothing of other Republican politicians and conservative media figures — he gave voice to an anger, sense of grievance and conspiratorial mind-set that resonated with many Americans, particularly those on the far right. Unlike Mr. Trump — not to mention his motley crew of cheerleaders and imitators — Mr. Carlson developed and articulated a coherent political ideology that could prove more lasting, and influential, than any cult of personality. Mr. Carlson has left Fox News. But his dark and outsize influence on the conservative movement — and on American politics — is hardly over.Tucker Carlson merchandise at the Heritage Foundation’s Leadership Summit on Friday, April 21. Mr. Carlson is leaving Fox at the height of his power. Leigh Vogel for The New York TimesWhen Mr. Carlson met with Mr. Ailes in 2009 to discuss a job at Fox News, Mr. Carlson’s career was at a nadir. He’d been let go from both CNN and MSNBC. He’d developed a game show pilot for CBS that wasn’t picked up. His stint on ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars” lasted just one episode. His finances were so stretched that he’d decided to sell his suburban New Jersey mansion out from under his wife and four children.“You’re a loser and you screwed up your whole life,” Mr. Ailes told Mr. Carlson, according to an account of the conversation Mr. Carlson later gave to his friend, the former Dick Cheney adviser Neil Patel. “But you have talent. And the only thing you have going for you is that I like hiring talented people who have screwed things up for themselves and learned a lesson, because once I do, you’re gonna work your ass off for me.”Mr. Carlson didn’t disappoint. Relegated to weekend morning show anchor duties, he threw himself into the job, participating in cooking segments with guests like Billy Ray Cyrus, competing against (and losing to) his female co-anchor in a Spartan Race and even subjecting himself to a dunk tank. He did it all with a smile, but, for a man who once hosted two prime-time cable news shows, as well as a highbrow talk show on the Public Broadcasting System, it had to have been humiliating. When his wife, Susie, sent an email in 2014 inviting some of Mr. Carlson’s Washington friends up to New York to celebrate his 45th birthday, she told guests they might “throw eggs at the FOX studio window!” (Since Hunter Biden was a friend of Mr. Carlson’s at the time and on the invite list, the email was later discovered on Mr. Biden’s laptop.)During his time as a host on “Fox and Friends,” Mr. Carlson’s contrarian streak curdled into resentment against “the elites” who took the country into Iraq, triggered the 2008 financial crisis and refused to give him a television role commensurate with his talents.Noam Galai/Getty ImagesMr. Carlson’s big break at Fox News arrived in 2016 in the form of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Although it’s hard to imagine now, Fox initially seemed intent on torpedoing Mr. Trump’s candidacy. So antagonistic were its hosts and commentators toward Mr. Trump in the early days of the 2016 race that it became a challenge for Fox to produce compelling television about the man who was dominating the G.O.P. field. No one — or at least no one Fox’s producers deemed camera-ready — seemed willing to make a sensible case for him.Enter Mr. Carlson. He’d nursed a soft spot for Mr. Trump ever since the early 2000s, when he made a throwaway joke on CNN about Mr. Trump’s hair and Mr. Trump responded with a blunt voice mail. “It’s true you have better hair than I do,” Mr. Carlson recalled Mr. Trump telling his answering machine. But, Mr. Trump said, with a vulgar boast, he had sex with more women. Mr. Carlson, who’d never met or spoken to Mr. Trump, was amused. More than a decade later, when Mr. Trump ran for president, he became intrigued. And it was that early openness to Mr. Trump’s candidacy that facilitated Mr. Carlson’s rise at Fox.Mr. Carlson had two motivations for not joining in the chorus denouncing Mr. Trump. One was ruthlessly strategic. Through the conservative website he launched with Mr. Patel in 2010, The Daily Caller, Mr. Carlson could see what got clicks: sensational articles about the twin scourges of illegal immigration and Black-on-white crime, plus slide shows of busty supermodels. The Caller’s web traffic metrics served as an early warning system for Mr. Carlson about where the conservative base was headed, and how a populist candidate who explicitly ran on nativism, white grievance and sexism might have a lane in a Republican primary.Mr. Carlson’s openness to Mr. Trump also had something to do with his own ideological journey. He started his career as a writer at The Weekly Standard, as a standard issue Reagan conservative, albeit one with a contrarian streak. The Iraq War, which he initially supported despite harboring doubts, hardened his heterodox views. Then, as his professional struggles mounted, his contrarianism curdled into resentment against “the elites” who took the country into Iraq, triggered the 2008 financial crisis and refused to give Mr. Carlson a television role commensurate with his talents. He paired his staple rep ties and Rolex with this new populist streak — and assumed the role of class traitor.That meant that in 2016, when most of his fellow conservative pundits still believed the G.O.P. needed to broaden its tent and so dismissed Mr. Trump out of hand, Mr. Carlson was able to recognize the potential appeal of the businessman turned reality-TV star turned populist politician. He was willing to say as much on air, which meant that Mr. Carlson began getting more and choicer opportunities at Fox to make the case that Mr. Trump should be taken seriously. Then, shortly after Mr. Trump’s election in November, as a reward of sorts for his prescience, Mr. Murdoch gave Mr. Carlson his own evening show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” By then, of course, Fox News was fully on board the Trump Train. Which is what made Mr. Carlson’s next move so interesting: He took a step off.At one point during Mr. Trump’s four years in the White House, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” became the highest-rated show in the history of cable news, drawing over four million viewers on some evenings. But it was not a down-the-line, pro-Trump show. Each night, Mr. Carlson articulated a populist-nationalist ideology best described as Trumpism without Mr. Trump. He borrowed from (and sometimes, on his Fox Nation streaming show, even invited on air) “new right” intellectuals like the blogger Curtis Yarvin and the Claremont Institute fellow Michael Anton, smuggling their fringe ideas — about how the United States would work better as a monarchy, for instance — into the conservative mainstream. Indeed, Mr. Carlson himself often offered views that were more inflammatory and more extreme than the president’s — complaining that immigrants make America “poorer and dirtier and more divided,” for instance, and proclaiming that white supremacy was “a hoax.” A blog post on the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer celebrated: “Tucker Carlson is basically ‘Daily Stormer: The Show.’ Other than the language used, he is covering all our talking points.”Mr. Carlson has already folded his firing into the apocalyptic worldview he’s so successfully promulgated these last few years.Max Oden/Sipa, via Associated PressAnd when Mr. Trump wasn’t willing to go as far as Mr. Carlson, Mr. Carlson wasn’t afraid to call Mr. Trump out. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in the summer of 2020, he lambasted Mr. Trump for not cracking down harder on Black Lives Matter protesters in Washington and elsewhere. “If you can’t keep a Fox News correspondent from getting attacked directly across from your house, how can you protect my family?” Mr. Carlson said on his show. “How are you going to protect the country? How hard are you trying?” He was positioning himself, in opposition to Mr. Trump, as the vanguard of the American right. As Christopher Rufo, the ubiquitous conservative culture warrior whose own rise to prominence began with an appearance on Mr. Carlson’s show, once explained: “Tucker frames the narrative for conservative politics. Tucker doesn’t react to the news; he creates the news.”Mr. Carlson’s criticism of Mr. Trump and the wary distance he kept from him — sometimes even refusing to take his calls — made him that much more intriguing to the president. “Tucker was the hot girl that didn’t want to sleep with him,” says one former Trump White House official. “I think Trump was fascinated by this idea that ‘Everybody else is calling me. Why aren’t you calling me?’” Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served as Mr. Trump’s White House communications director, recalls the president frequently fretting about getting on Mr. Carlson’s bad side. “He’d say, ‘Tucker’s crushing us, our base is going to leave us,’” Ms. Farah Griffin says. It was an acknowledgment from Mr. Trump that Mr. Carlson had become bigger than Fox.That certainly seemed to be the view inside the cable network. When Mr. Ailes ran Fox News, the pecking order was clear. If a host or reporter stepped out of line, Mr. Ailes would simply yank that person off the air, instructing producers to “show ’em the red light.” Mr. Carlson’s ascension at Fox occurred after Mr. Ailes’s departure from the network. The executive team that replaced him — the Fox News chief executive Suzanne Scott and Rupert Murdoch’s son Lachlan, who’s the chief executive of the Fox Corporation — did not enforce as much discipline. Mr. Carlson repeatedly seemed to step over lines at Fox — endorsing the racist “great replacement theory,” circulating false conspiracy theories about Covid and Jan. 6, and attacking other Fox hosts on-air — only to have Fox execs then move the line. If Mr. Ailes was always goading disgruntled hosts to quit, telling them they would be nothing without Fox, Mr. Carlson seemed to be daring his bosses to fire him.After Mr. Trump went kicking and screaming from the White House (as well as from Twitter and Facebook), Mr. Carlson, still ensconced on Fox News and with unfettered access to social media, emerged as the far right’s standard-bearer in America’s culture wars, coming to occupy the same mental real estate — among both conservatives and liberals — that Mr. Trump once did. He was no longer just a cable host but a movement leader — working to bring the G.O.P. in line with his own views. On his show, he boosted ideological comrades like J.D. Vance, who shared Mr. Carlson’s skepticism about U.S. support of Ukraine in its war with Russia, gifting Mr. Vance hours of free airtime in the run-up to the Republican primary for the 2022 Ohio Senate race. Off-air, he personally lobbied Mr. Trump to give Mr. Vance his endorsement. At one point Mr. Carlson spent nearly two hours on FaceTime with Mr. Trump, while Mr. Trump golfed in Florida, making the case that Mr. Vance believed what Mr. Trump believed and that, were Mr. Trump to run for president again, he needed someone like Mr. Vance in the Senate. According to a person familiar with the call, Mr. Trump ended it by telling Mr. Carlson, “You’ll be happy.” A few weeks later, Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Vance, propelling him to the Republican nomination and, eventually, the Senate — one of the few 2022 bright spots for Republicans.As Mr. Carlson turned his attention toward the 2024 presidential race, his relationship with Mr. Trump, once again, became complicated. On the one hand, he was dead-set opposed to Nikki Haley, for whom he’d developed an intense personal dislike during an ill-fated hunting weekend about 10 years ago. (After Ms. Haley eventually launched her presidential candidacy in February, Mr. Carlson told his viewers, “Nikki Haley believes in collective racial guilt,” before going on to say, “She believes identity politics is our future. ‘Vote for me because I’m a woman,’ she says. That’s her pitch.”) On the other hand, Mr. Carlson, like many at Fox News — including Mr. Murdoch, who, in the wake of Jan. 6, told a former executive that Fox was seeking “to make Trump a nonperson” — appeared to be leaning toward the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, as a less erratic, more electable alternative to Mr. Trump. (In 2020, Mr. Carlson moved from Washington, D.C., to the small resort town of Boca Grande, Fla.)Sensing this, Mr. Trump tried to win back Mr. Carlson, but Mr. Carlson refused a sit-down. Finally, last July, Donald Trump Jr., with whom Mr. Carlson has become close, traveled to Mr. Carlson’s summer residence in rural Maine. There, according to people familiar with the visit, Mr. Trump Jr. pressed Mr. Carlson to meet with his father. A few weeks later, Mr. Carlson showed up at Mr. Trump’s Bedminster resort in New Jersey on the same weekend it was hosting the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tour. The result was pictures of Mr. Carlson yukking it up with Mr. Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene in the tournament’s V.I.P. section.By keeping his distance from Mr. Trump, Mr. Carlson only made himself more intriguing to the former president.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAnd the two have grown closer since. Although Mr. Trump was reportedly upset when text messages from Mr. Carlson calling Mr. Trump “a demonic force” and claiming “I hate him passionately” were released in March as part of Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation suit against Fox, the two patched things up in a phone call. And in April, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” devoted a whole hour to Mr. Carlson’s one-on-one softball interview with Mr. Trump — one of Mr. Trump’s longest appearances on the cable network since he was in the White House.Less than two weeks later, Fox fired Mr. Carlson. The reasons for his sacking remain unclear. It may have had to do with offensive comments he had made about Fox executives in texts uncovered in the Dominion suit. Or it could have been because of another lawsuit, from Abby Grossberg, a former head of booking on his show, accusing him and the network of creating a hostile work environment. Or it might have had something to do with a potential lawsuit from Ray Epps, a Jan. 6 protester from Arizona who was at the center of Mr. Carlson’s false conspiracy theory about the day. Or perhaps, as some reporting from Semafor suggests, the 92-year-old Mr. Murdoch has simply become erratic in his decision-making.Whatever the reason, Mr. Carlson now finds himself with no shortage of options. He could go to work for Newsmax or One America News Network, two upstart right-wing networks that have been trying to outflank Fox. (By Wednesday, two days after Mr. Carlson’s firing, Fox News’s ratings in the 8 p.m. hour had plummeted by roughly half, to their lowest levels in more than 20 years. Meanwhile, Newsmax’s audience in that time slot rose more than 300 percent over the previous week.) He might strike out on his own and form a media company to stream his show online. (“The world is Tucker’s oyster,” says one person who spoke with Mr. Carlson this week. “Many billionaires and others with deep pockets would be eager to fund a new venture.”)Ratings at Fox News during Mr. Carlson’s former time slot have plummetedTotal weeknight viewership at 8 p.m.

      Source: AdweekBy The New York TimesAnd there’s always the chance that he could run for office. That’s a prospect that Mr. Carlson has long pooh-poohed. “I have zero ambition, not just politically but in life,” he demurred last summer when he was asked about any White House ambitions. But one of his friends recalls a family member discussing the possibility of Mr. Carlson running for president as far back as 2012.On Wednesday night just after 8 o’clock — the time when, until his firing two days earlier, he’d usually be launching into his opening monologue on Fox News — Mr. Carlson reappeared with a short, somewhat cryptic video on Twitter. He talked about “how unbelievably stupid most of the debates you see on television are” and complained that both political parties and their donors “actively collude” to shut down discussion of the truly important issues: “war, civil liberties, emerging science, demographic change, corporate power, natural resources.” America has become a “one-party state,” where the “people in charge” know that the old “orthodoxies” won’t last, he said, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. “True things prevail. Where can you still find Americans saying true things? There aren’t many places left but there are some, and that’s enough,” he continued. “As long as you can hear the words, there is hope. See you soon.” In under two hours, the video racked up 11 million views.It was vintage Mr. Carlson, and it showed how he had already incorporated his firing into the apocalyptic worldview he’s so successfully promulgated these last few years. Fox News was now part of “the elite consensus” Mr. Carlson seeks to overturn. And in this moment of unraveling, when hostility toward and distrust of institutions and elites is at an all-time high, it’s not hard to imagine a good segment of Americans following along with this logic. In their minds, Fox will now join Wall Street and big tech, globalists and the deep state, the Republican establishment and the woke as something that must be opposed. And in a world in which an increasing number of Americans are already fracturing into their own realities, Mr. Carlson will stand, for many of them, as the one person who’s independent and courageous and powerful enough to tell them the truth. Just as Mr. Murdoch and Fox failed to make Mr. Trump a nonperson, they likely won’t be able to make Mr. Carlson one, either.

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      Jason Zengerle (@zengerle) is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a New America national fellow. His forthcoming book about Tucker Carlson and conservative media is “Hated by All the Right People.”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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      North Carolina Gerrymander Ruling Reflects Politicization of Judiciary Nationally

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      When it had a Democratic majority last year, the North Carolina Supreme Court voided the state’s legislative and congressional maps as illegal gerrymanders. Now the court has a Republican majority, and says the opposite.Last year, Democratic justices on the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that maps of the state’s legislative and congressional districts drawn to give Republicans lopsided majorities were illegal gerrymanders. On Friday, the same court led by a newly elected Republican majority looked at the same facts, reversed itself and said it had no authority to act.The practical effect is to enable the Republican-controlled General Assembly to scrap the court-ordered State House, Senate and congressional district boundaries that were used in elections last November, and draw new maps skewed in Republicans’ favor for elections in 2024. The 5-to-2 ruling fell along party lines, reflecting the takeover of the court by Republican justices in partisan elections last November.The decision has major implications not just for the state legislature, where the G.O.P. is barely clinging to the supermajority status that makes its decisions veto-proof, but for the U.S. House, where a new North Carolina map could add at least three Republican seats in 2024 to what is now a razor-thin Republican majority. Overturning such a recent ruling by the court was a highly unusual move, particularly on a pivotal constitutional issue in which none of the facts had changed.The North Carolina case mirrors a national trend in which states that elect their judges — Ohio, Kentucky, Kansas, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and others — have seen races for their high court seats turned into multimillion-dollar political battles, and their justices’ rulings viewed through a deeply partisan lens.Such political jockeying once was limited mostly to confirmation fights over seats on the U.S. Supreme Court. But as the nation’s partisan divide has deepened, and the federal courts have offloaded questions about issues like abortion and affirmative action to the states, choosing who will decide state legal battles has increasingly become an openly political fight.The new Republican majority of justices said the North Carolina Supreme Court had no authority to strike down partisan maps that the General Assembly had drawn.“Our constitution expressly assigns the redistricting authority to the General Assembly subject to explicit limitations in the text,” Chief Justice Paul Newby wrote for the majority. “Were this court to create such a limitation, there is no judicially discoverable or manageable standard for adjudicating such claims.”Justice Newby said that Democrats who led the previous court had claimed to have developed a standard for deciding when a political map was overly partisan, but that it was “riddled with policy choices” and overstepped the State Constitution’s grant of redistricting powers to the legislature.Legal scholars said the ruling also seemed likely to derail a potentially momentous case now before the U.S. Supreme Court involving the same maps. In that case, Moore v. Harper, leaders of the Republican-run legislature have argued that the U.S. Constitution gives state lawmakers the sole authority to set rules for state elections and political maps, and that state courts have no role in overseeing them.Now that the North Carolina Supreme Court has sided with the legislature and thrown out its predecessor’s ruling, there appears to be no dispute for the federal justices to decide, the scholars said.The ruling drew a furious dissent from one of the elected Democratic justices, Anita S. Earls, who said that it was pervaded by “lawlessness.” She accused the majority of making specious legal arguments, and at times using misleading statistics, to make a false case that partisan gerrymandering was beyond its jurisdiction.“The majority ignores the uncontested truths about the intentions behind partisan gerrymandering and erects an unconvincing facade that only parrots democratic values in an attempt to defend its decision, ” she wrote. “These efforts to downplay the practice do not erase its consequences and the public will not be gaslighted.”Some legal experts said the ruling underscored a trend in state courts that elect their justices, in which decisions in politically charged cases increasingly align with the ideological views of whichever party holds the majority on the court, sometimes regardless of legal precedent.“If you think the earlier State Supreme Court was wrong, we have mechanisms to change that, like a constitutional amendment,” Joshua A. Douglas, a scholar on state constitutions at the University of Kentucky College of Law, said in an interview. “But changing judges shouldn’t cause such a sea change in the rule of law, because if that’s the case, precedent has no value any longer, and judges really are politicians.”The state court also handed down two more rulings in politically charged cases, overturning decisions that favored voting-rights advocates and their Democratic supporters.In the first, the justices reconsidered and reversed a ruling by the previous court, again along party lines, that a voter ID law passed by the Republican majority in the legislature violated the equal protection clause in the State Constitution.In the second, the justices said a lower court “misapplied the law and overlooked facts crucial to its ruling” when it struck down a state law denying voting rights to people who had completed prison sentences on felony charges but were not yet released from parole, probation or other court restrictions.The lower court had said that the state law was rooted in an earlier law written to deny voting rights to African Americans, a conclusion that the Supreme Court justices said was mistaken.The new ruling undid a decision that had restored voting rights to more than 55,000 North Carolinians who had completed prison sentences. Those rights are now revoked, lawyers said, although the status of former felons who had already registered or voted under the previous ruling appeared unclear.The ruling on Friday in the gerrymander case, now known as Harper v. Hall, came after partisan elections for two Supreme Court seats in November shifted the seven-member court’s political balance to 5-to-2 Republican, from 4-to-3 Democratic.The Democratic-controlled court ruled along party lines in February 2022 that both the state legislative maps and the congressional district maps approved by the Republican legislature violated the State Constitution’s guarantees of free speech, free elections, free assembly and equal protection.A lower court later redrew the congressional map to be used in the November elections, but a dispute over the State Senate map, which G.O.P. leaders had redrawn, bubbled back to the State Supreme Court last winter. In one of its last acts, the Democratic majority on the court threw out the G.O.P.’s State Senate map, ordering that it be redrawn again. The court then reaffirmed its earlier order in a lengthy opinion.Ordinarily, that might have ended the matter. But after the new Republican majority was elected to the court, G.O.P. legislative leaders demanded that the justices rehear not just the argument over the redrawn Senate map, but the entire case.The ruling on Friday came after a brief re-argument of the gerrymander case in mid-March.North Carolina voters are almost evenly split between the two major parties; Donald J. Trump carried the state in 2020 with 49.9 percent of the vote. But the original map of congressional districts approved by the G.O.P. legislature in 2021, and later ruled to be a partisan gerrymander, would probably have given Republicans at least 10 of the state’s 14 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.Using a congressional map drawn last year by a court-appointed special master, the November election delivered seven congressional seats to each party. With the decision on Friday, the G.O.P. legislature is likely to approve a new map along the lines of its first one, giving state Republicans — and the slender Republican majority in the U.S. House — the opportunity to capture at least three more seats. More

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      Campaign, Interrupted: Pence May Run, but He Can’t Hide From Trump’s Legal Woes

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      The former vice president faces many challenges in his potential presidential run, perhaps none bigger than his complicated relationship with his old boss.Former Vice President Mike Pence, seemingly in his element as he addressed a gathering of evangelical Christians in Iowa this month, was speaking of “the greatest honor of my life,” serving in “an administration that turned this country around” by rebuilding the military, securing the southern border, and unleashing “American energy.”“But most importantly, most of all,” he said, building to a crescendo — but at the moment he was about to claim some credit for his administration’s success in overturning the right to an abortion, a booming voice came over the loudspeaker from the sound booth: “Check, check, testing, 1-2-3.”It was a small interruption, but one that exemplified the diversions Mr. Pence continues to face as he considers a run for the Republican presidential nomination against the man who was once his greatest benefactor, but also his cruelest tormentor: Donald J. Trump.On Thursday, however, Mr. Pence faced a much more onerous and grueling intrusion into his potential campaign, and one that he had hoped to avoid, when he was forced to testify for more than five hours before a grand jury in Washington about Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Those efforts put Mr. Pence’s life at risk on Jan. 6, 2021, as a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, chanting “Hang Mike Pence.”Mr. Pence, the would-be candidate with unassailable religious convictions who spent four years a heartbeat away from the presidency, cannot seem to find the space to present those credentials to sympathetic Republican primary voters without interruption — and, in this case, on the biggest stage before a campaign has even begun.After Thursday’s testimony, a highly unusual event involving two of the most prominent U.S. public officials during a nascent presidential campaign in which both are likely to run, he is in the odd and uncomfortable position of being both a potential challenger to his former boss and possibly a key witness for his prosecution.Mr. Pence knows that core voters in the Republican base are in no mood to give such legal proceedings against Mr. Trump, including the current civil suit accusing him of rape and defamation, much credence. Paula Livingston, of Council Bluffs, Iowa, waved off the cases pending against Mr. Trump as “all the same, they’re out to stop him.”Nor is Mr. Trump showing any signs of contrition. On Thursday, while campaigning in New Hampshire, the former president embraced a supporter who had served prison time for her actions during the Capitol attack of Jan. 6, and called her “terrific,” even though she said she wants Mr. Pence executed for treason.But after the former vice president’s efforts to quash the Justice Department’s subpoena for his testimony failed, Mr. Pence had little choice but to lend his voice to the federal prosecution.Former President Donald J. Trump spoke at a campaign event in Manchester, N.H., on April 27. Sophie Park for The New York TimesThe Pence camp is now working to put that testimony within the broader rubric of his potential presidential run: Conservative truth teller. Pence loyalists would like Mr. Pence to be getting more credit for the Trump administration’s successes, especially for helping to choose the nominees that tilted the Supreme Court to the right.But Mr. Pence has to play the hand that he has been dealt, and right now that includes testifying against Mr. Trump.“I don’t know if he has to dislodge” Mr. Trump, Marc Short, a former chief of staff to the vice president, said. “He has to remind voters who he is.”Over his 12 years in Congress, as governor of Indiana and in the Trump White House, Mr. Pence was “the consistent conservative,” Mr. Short said, working for a man who was anything but consistent: “That’s an important contrast for him to draw,” Mr. Short said.A Republican close to the former vice president, who requested anonymity in order to discuss internal deliberations, explained on Friday that Mr. Pence has long stuck with conservative constitutional principles, even when that has meant standing up to his party.As a House member, he chastised the administration of President George W. Bush for its failure to adhere to fiscal discipline as federal budget surpluses turned to large deficits. He has embraced changes to Social Security and Medicare that would trim benefits in the name of balancing the budget, changes that Mr. Trump has loudly rejected.He continues to publicly make the case for U.S. military aid to Ukraine, even as some Republican lawmakers and many Republican voters turn against it. He has said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s fight with the Walt Disney Company over social policy has strayed, and become a violation of the Republican Party’s bedrock belief in free enterprise.And he leaned on constitutional arguments, first to avoid the subpoena of federal prosecutors investigating efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and now to comply with it. Earlier this year Mr. Pence argued that the Constitution’s “speech or debate” clause, intended to protect the separation of powers between the three branches of government, shielded him from having to speak of Mr. Trump’s campaign to pressure him not to certify the election results in his ceremonial role as vice president.When that failed, he complied with the subpoena rather than search for another rationale for delay, such as the “executive privilege” claims that have been repeatedly rejected.Mr. Pence, in his recent book “So Help Me God,” described in detail Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure him into blocking congressional certification of President Biden’s victory. Mr. Trump became preoccupied with the idea that Mr. Pence could do something, though Mr. Pence’s chief lawyer had concluded that there was no legal authority for him to act on Mr. Trump’s behalf.But people close to Mr. Pence said that just as he argued that he had to fulfill his constitutional duty on Jan. 6, 2021, he invoked that same Constitution the following day to reject overtures from Democratic leaders to use the Constitution’s 25th amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office.Aides to Mr. Pence showed little worry this week as the former vice president continues his deliberations about a run. Mr. Pence’s attitude, they said, is simple: Let the chips fall where they may.“He feels remarkably blessed to have been able to serve the American people in the roles he has had,” Mr. Short said, “and he hopes to continue that service.” More

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      Florida Lawmakers Clear a Potential Presidential Roadblock for DeSantis

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      The Florida Legislature passed an elections bill on Friday clarifying that Gov. Ron DeSantis would not have to resign early if he ran for president.Gov. Ron DeSantis has gotten just about everything he wanted out of Florida’s legislative session, which draws to a close next week.A six-week ban on abortion. The ability for Floridians to carry concealed weapons without a permit or training. An expansion of school vouchers. All laws that Mr. DeSantis could lean on heavily in a potential Republican primary for president.Now the governor’s legislative allies in Tallahassee have delivered another boon, one that is procedural but just as important: an elections bill that eliminates a potential roadblock to Mr. DeSantis declaring his candidacy for president, which he is expected to do next month. The law will ensure that Mr. DeSantis does not have to resign the governorship early if he runs for president.On Friday, the State House of Representatives approved the law with a 76-34 vote along strict party lines, with nine lawmakers abstaining. Having already been approved by the State Senate, it now heads to Mr. DeSantis’s desk.The previous provision in state law, known as the “resign-to-run” statute, could have posed a problem for Mr. DeSantis’s presidential ambitions.Although legal opinions varied, it might have compelled Mr. DeSantis, if he became a presidential candidate, to resign as governor in 2025 with two years still left in his term. The new bill cleared up any ambiguity by stating that the law does not apply to elected officials running specifically for president and vice president, meaning Mr. DeSantis can make a bid for the White House without the prospect of giving up the governor’s office should he lose the 2024 Republican primary or general election.Allies have been urging Mr. DeSantis to formally jump into the 2024 race, seeing it as the only way to deal with former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican front-runner.Sophie Park for The New York Times“I can’t think of a better training ground than the state of Florida for a future potential commander in chief,” State Representative Tyler I. Sirois, a Merritt Island Republican, said on the House floor.Republicans said they wanted to leave no ambiguity in the law and argued that presidential and vice-presidential candidates are different than others seeking elective office because they are chosen by political parties in national conventions — instead of having to simply qualify for the ballot. Democrats countered that Mr. DeSantis was getting special treatment from his legislative buddies.“Why are we signing off on allowing Ron DeSantis the ability to not do his job?” said State Representative Angie Nixon, a Jacksonville Democrat, who argued during the floor debate that Mr. DeSantis was neglecting his duties as governor.In the months before the legislative session kicked off in March, it seemed that the bill’s passage would mark a time for quiet celebration in the DeSantis camp — a tactical milestone for a campaign that seemed to have front-runner status in its grasp. But since then, the governor has frequently seemed to stumble or been stymied at crucial moments, often to the delight of former President Donald J. Trump, a declared candidate who now leads him in the polls.As Mr. DeSantis seeks to recover his footing, he will hope to present the new laws he has steered through Republican-controlled Tallahassee as evidence of what he might accomplish in the White House, while pointing to his landslide re-election last year as proof that his conservative policies have a broad base of support.“In November, December and January, Republicans all around the country were looking to DeSantis as the future of the party,” said Alex Conant, a Republican political strategist who worked as communications director for Senator Marco Rubio of Florida during his 2016 presidential campaign. “He was really hot coming off the midterms. But now it’s not so clear that Republican voters are ready to move beyond Trump.”Those close to Mr. DeSantis say he plans to make his presidential bid official in mid-May or late May, and he has already assembled the makings of a senior campaign staff.Matias J. Ocner/Miami Herald, via Associated PressPart of Mr. DeSantis’s struggle has been the challenge of running for higher office only unofficially. Such a shadow campaign limits how strongly his message can carry beyond Florida and seems to curtail his ability to criticize his presumptive main rival, Mr. Trump. Allies have been urging Mr. DeSantis to formally jump into the race, seeing it as the only way to deal with the former president.“Trump was born without gloves,” Mr. Conant said. “He is always on offense. If you’re going to run against him, expect him to wake up every day punching you.”As the pressure builds, the end of the DeSantis campaign-in-waiting finally seems near. Those close to him say he plans to make his presidential bid official in mid-May or late May. And he has assembled the makings of a senior campaign staff in Tallahassee, including veteran advisers from his time as governor and when he served in Congress. A super PAC backing his candidacy says it has raised $33 million and has hired operatives in key early voting states.The group, Never Back Down, also brought in Adam Laxalt, the former Nevada attorney general, as its chairman. Mr. Laxalt is a Trump ally who amplified the former president’s conspiracy theories about the integrity of the 2020 election. But he has longstanding ties to Mr. DeSantis, too, dating back to their days as roommates during naval officer training.“If Governor DeSantis heeds the growing calls for him to run for president, we can hit the ground running for him to win,” said Erin Perrine, the communications director for Never Back Down.As the political operation backing him grows, Mr. DeSantis has spent more and more time out of state, which has included appearances promoting his new memoir and a foreign trade mission this week. In his absence, cracks have started to appear in his political coalition back home for the first time.On Wednesday, State Senator Joe Gruters, a Republican who is a close ally of Mr. Trump, made an open show of defiance against Mr. DeSantis by voting no on a bill related to Disney. The bill — part of a yearlong feud between the company and Mr. DeSantis that has energized segments of the Republican base while alienating some members of the donor class — would nullify development agreements involving Disney.Crowds gathering to hear Mr. DeSantis during a book-signing event in Garden City, N.Y., in April.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesIn a statement, Mr. Gruters, a former chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, said that the state should “support our job creators” and avoid influencing the behavior of corporations with “the heavy hand of government.”While he was the lone Republican to vote no, and the bill passed easily, the moment came as a sign that tensions between Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Trump are spelling the end of the days when the state party stood unanimously behind the governor.Mr. DeSantis’s attacks on Disney have also recently led some national Republicans to publicly air words of caution. Mr. Rubio said he did not have a problem taking on Disney but expressed concern that businesses might be fearful of coming to Florida if politicians continued to put pressure on companies over politics. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy also weighed in.“I think it would be much better if he sat down and solved the problem,” Mr. McCarthy told CNBC on Thursday.Local leaders have taken shots at Mr. DeSantis, too.Last week, Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami, a Republican who may also run for president, criticized how Mr. DeSantis treats others during an appearance on Fox News. “Well, he seems to struggle with relationships, generally,” said Mr. Suarez, who has occasionally clashed with the governor over the years but had not attacked him so personally. “I mean, I look people in the eye when I shake their hands.”Even Dwyane Wade, the popular former star for the N.B.A.’s Miami Heat, seemed to weigh in, saying in a television interview that he left Florida in part because of the state’s stance on transgender issues. (Mr. Wade’s teenage daughter is transgender.)“My family would not be accepted or feel comfortable there,” he said, without directly referencing the governor.As part of Mr. DeSantis’s agenda, state leaders have pushed laws banning children from drag shows and criminalizing gender-affirming health care for minors, as well as expanding a law that restricts the discussion of sexual orientation and gender identities in public schools.Drag queens and their supporters marched in a protest to the State Capitol in Tallahassee, Fla., on Tuesday.Alicia Devine/Tallahassee Democrat, via Associated PressThe change to the resign-to-run law is not the first time a pliant legislature has helped out a governor. Legislators under former Governors Charlie Crist and Rick Scott adjusted the law when it seemed in their interest. Mr. DeSantis’s office did not respond when asked if he supported the change.Not every new law the governor sought this session is sure to pass.A proposal on immigration looks like it will be somewhat watered down. And the sponsor of a bill that would make it easier to sue the news media has said that the legislation is unlikely to move forward this year.Still, those who have seen Tallahassee in action say it was an unusually productive time.“I think it’s clear the governor has had a remarkable session, one of the best I can remember,” said Brian Ballard, an influential lobbyist who has served as a fund-raiser for both Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis.With Republicans holding supermajorities in both legislative chambers, Florida Democrats could do little but watch.Dan Gelber, the Democratic mayor of Miami Beach and a former state senator, said many of the governor’s priorities were “not important” to most Floridians.“It’s a heaping portion of red meat for his base,” Mr. Gelber said.Maggie Haberman More

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      Top Republicans Balk at WinRed’s Plan to Charge More for Online Donations

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      Republican Party leaders are opposed to a proposed price increase by the online donation-processing company, WinRed, stirring debate about the company’s future.A battle over a threatened price increase has exposed growing tensions between top Republican Party officials and the company with a virtual monopoly on processing Republican campaign contributions online.Party leaders have risen up in opposition to the plan to raise prices, which would siphon millions of dollars from G.O.P. campaigns less than 20 months after the company, WinRed, had said its finances were robust enough to forego an extra fee on every transaction.In a series of private meetings in recent weeks, Gerrit Lansing, the president of WinRed, has told the leaders of the Republican National Committee, the House and Senate campaign arms and former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign that WinRed’s prices needed to go up.The Republican officials all objected.Mr. Lansing’s company, a private for-profit firm responsible for processing almost all online Republican political donations, charges 3.94 percent of almost every donation made online. But he said it wasn’t enough, citing an unforeseen slowdown in online G.O.P. giving last year and also plans to broaden WinRed’s suite of services. He moved to impose a 30-cent transaction fee on each of the tens of millions of coming contributions in the 2024 race, according to several people directly involved in or briefed on the conversations.The plan to raise prices appears to have stalled over fierce G.O.P. objections, according to people involved in the talks. But the episode has accelerated conversations at the party’s highest levels about the decision four years ago to clear the way for WinRed to dominate the online donation-processing field, and about whether the for-profit company’s model needs to be reassessed. Democrats process most online donations through ActBlue, which, unlike WinRed, is an independent nonprofit. ActBlue charges a flat rate of 3.95 percent per donation and does not charge an additional per-transaction fee.“WinRed is constantly evaluating what it takes to compete against and leapfrog ActBlue, combat the Democrats’ campaign to attack us by all means available, and still make the necessary investments to provide our customers with the features they need to win,” WinRed said in a statement. “At this time, WinRed has no announcements to make regarding pricing.”Representatives for the party committees declined to comment.Gerrit Lansing, the president of WinRed, has told officials about a plan to charge an extra fee on every transaction.Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call, Getty ImagesMr. Lansing’s pursuit of outside investors to expand WinRed’s digital footprint and offerings — including talks with advisers to Paul Singer, a major Republican financier — has spurred further discussions about the company’s ownership structure.The obscure industry of processing donations online is deeply consequential for Republicans because the party has faced a persistent digital fund-raising deficit against Democrats. WinRed has been held up as the linchpin of the party’s plans to help close that gap.Huge sums are involved. There were nearly 31.2 million donations made on WinRed during the 2022 federal elections, worth nearly $1.2 billion. The upcoming presidential cycle could easily double that.The creation of WinRed in 2019 was supposed to be one of Mr. Trump’s enduring legacies within the Republican infrastructure, a bold bid to unify the party around a single platform to help shrink the G.O.P. fund-raising gap with ActBlue. Mr. Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and Mr. Trump’s campaign manager at the time, Brad Parscale, were all personally involved.The site has largely been a success, achieving near-universal adoption among G.O.P. campaigns. WinRed originally had charged 3.8 percent of contributions with an additional 30-cent transaction fee. That amounted to an especially steep share of smaller contributions — 68 cents, or nearly 7 percent, of a $10 donation, for instance.A Trump rally in Waco, Texas, in March. As president, Donald J. Trump was among those personally involved in the creation of WinRed in 2019.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesIn late 2021, Mr. Lansing trumpeted the removal of the 30-cent transaction fee, saying the company had been able to “achieve and maintain scale.” But the decision by credit card companies to raise their own fees not long afterward made WinRed’s move unsustainable, according to a person close to the company, as most of its processing fees are quickly spent on credit card costs.In recent weeks, Mr. Lansing told party officials that WinRed had suffered financially in 2022 as a result of diminished Republican giving and that he needed to reimpose a per-transaction fee ahead of 2024 to continue broader investments in technology. Because WinRed is a private firm, its executive compensation and the state of its finances remain mostly hidden from public view. Records show that federal candidates and committees paid WinRed at least $64 million in the 2022 election cycle; those funds were not all from processing fees but also included significant vendor fees, according to a person close to WinRed.Its Democratic counterpart, ActBlue, has faced a financial pinch too, announcing in early April plans to lay off 17 percent of its work force. ActBlue discloses more of its finances than its counterpart does, including the amount of donors who volunteered to add “tips” on top of their donations. Those tips go directly to ActBlue and have built a $68.7 million balance in ActBlue’s federal account as of the end of 2022. Mr. Lansing has begun discussing adding the option to make tips to the Republican site as well, according to people involved in the conversations.WinRed faces other unique pressures, including an investigation by multiple state attorneys general into the firm’s use of prechecked boxes that automatically signed up donors to make recurring donations unless they opted out. A New York Times investigation in 2021 revealed how the extensive use of those boxes — known internally as “money bombs” for withdrawing more than one donation at a time — spurred an enormous wave of demands for refunds and complaints of fraud to credit card companies at the end of the 2020 campaign.WinRed sued to block subpoenas but lost a key legal battle in February when the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the investigation could proceed in Minnesota. In New York, a December filing from the state attorney general, Letitia James, that demanded compliance with a subpoena gave a glimpse into the internal documents her office has already obtained. The filing cited an internal WinRed memo as saying that, at one point in June 2020, donors who were opted into multiple donations through pre-checked boxes had caused a surge of phone calls and “a 10,000 message deep queue over one weekend.” Recurring donations were dropping over time, the memo theorized, because “as donors get used to or go through the process they become more savvy.”One Republican candidate who saw a surge of refund requests from people who were unwittingly opted into recurring donations was Kelly Loeffler, a senator who lost her runoff in Georgia in January 2021 and who found the experience of working with WinRed jarring.“It absolutely was a red flag,” Ms. Loeffler said in an interview, referring to the deluge of refund requests. Ms. Loeffler, a former co-owner of the Women’s National Basketball Association team in Atlanta, has since bought donation-processing technology from a Republican firm that stopped its business after the creation of WinRed. She has rebranded the technology and now uses it in running RallyRight, another company that processes online donations.“We have seen a need for a competitor in this market,” Ms. Loeffler said.So far, she is undercutting WinRed on price — charging 3.5 percent of donations — and ensuring that “no campaign can automatically check a recurring payments box.” She declined to name specific Republican groups that she has spoken with but said the price could go even lower — down to 3 percent — with “the scale of some of the organizations we are talking to.”Ms. Loeffler said that she was in the business not for personal profit but to direct more money to campaigns. “It’s absolutely not about me making millions of dollars,” she said. “I’ve done that.” More

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      ‘His Candidacy Feels Deader Than Disco’: Our Columnists Weigh In on Asa Hutchinson

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      As Republican candidates enter the 2024 presidential race, Times columnists and Opinion writers will assess their strengths and weaknesses with a scorecard. We rate the candidates on a scale of 1 to 10: 1 means the candidate will probably drop out before any caucus or primary voting; 10 means the candidate has a very strong chance of receiving the party’s nomination next summer. This entry assesses Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, who announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination on Wednesday.How seriously should we take Asa Hutchinson’s candidacy?John Brummett His candidacy should be taken seriously for his diverse, relevant experience and for what he has to say about today’s political predicament. But it probably won’t be taken that way, considering that his strength is as a workhorse in a game designed for show horses. He’d make a fine and circumspect attorney general.Matthew Continetti On Earth Two, where Donald Trump never entered American politics, a two-term conservative governor from the South like Asa Hutchinson would be considered a serious candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination. But where we live, and in Trump’s G.O.P., Hutchinson is a long shot.Michelle Cottle As seriously as you would take any little-known, low-key, old-school Republican contender with decades of government experience who has said that Donald Trump has disqualified himself from being president again. So, not seriously at all.David French Just as seriously as we should take the chances of Republican primary voters turning decisively against Trump and Trumpism. At this point it’s far more of a hope than an expectation.Rosie Gray Not very seriously. Hutchinson is vying to occupy the return-to-normalcy, adult-in-the-room lane, which is a lane that Republican voters have shown little interest in over the past eight years. His candidacy is likely to struggle to break through amid the onslaught of Trump-related news.Michelle Goldberg If he could hop in a time machine to 2012, he’d be a favorite. In today’s Republican Party I don’t think he has a chance.Liz Mair Asa Hutchinson is a serious person who arguably did a better job on fiscal governance than Ron DeSantis and certainly a much better job than Donald Trump. He’s a very underrated politician, but I’m not sure “competent steward of public finances and generally affable-seeming fellow” is sufficiently salable in today’s Republican rage machine.Daniel McCarthy Asa Hutchinson probably hopes to be taken as seriously as John Kasich was in 2016. But he’ll be lucky if he has even as much impact as his fellow Arkansan Mike Huckabee had that year, which was virtually none.What matters most about him as a presidential candidate?Brummett Any airing his message gets is the most important thing. He’s making the case that boorish, irresponsible and destructive behavior is not conservatism. That’s what his party needs to hear.Continetti Hutchinson’s willingness to take stands against Trump and the ascendant New Right within the Republican Party is laudable, if only because so few conservatives have done the same thing. His fearlessness may stand out on the debate stage.Cottle He is, as advertised, a “consistent conservative” — pro-God, pro-gun, pro-business, anti-abortion rights, anti-big government — aggressively looking to remind Republicans that there is an alternative to the middle-finger nastiness of Trumpism. Which is also why his candidacy feels deader than disco. Who is his target audience?French He’s the first true “turn the page” candidate in the race. He’s a traditional Republican who’s provided the most consistent and clear critique of Trump of anyone who has entered the race. He’s called on Trump to withdraw from the race, and he’s defended prominent Republican Trump critics Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.Gray He represents the still-extant yearning among old-school Republicans for an anti-Trump alternative. Other potential candidates who could have filled this space, like former Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, have so far decided not to run, so Hutchinson’s bid will be a test case for how much interest such a candidacy can attract.Goldberg He is admirably anti-Trump, arguing that Jan. 6 should be disqualifying, and he had a more measured response to Trump’s indictment than other members of his party, who rushed to Trump’s defense.Mair Arkansas has produced quite a lot of talented politicians over the years. His candidacy will be a test of how big a chunk of the G.O.P. electorate cares about a candidate combining the actual ability to govern and honesty without consistently coming off as a nasty, evil person or media “personality.” My guess is that’s a pretty small chunk.McCarthy He’s as much an anti-DeSantis candidate as he is anti-Trump. As governor, Hutchinson antagonized social conservatives by vetoing legislation that banned “gender-transition procedures” for minors, and although he did sign an abortion ban, he had said more recently that the ban should be “revisited” to permit more exceptions.What do you find most inspiring — or unsettling — about his vision for America?Brummett What inspires most is that he brings precisely what this politically dysfunctional country needs: someone who can surprise both the right and left. He brings conservative bona fides, but in Arkansas, he also vetoed a bill that would have banned hormone therapy for trans youth, asserting that parents and doctors should make those decisions and that interrupting a treatment plan already in progress is cruel. He called the Affordable Care Act bad policy but went to the mat to save Medicaid expansion in his state. That kind of independent thought is inspiring.Continetti Hutchinson is a freedom conservative devoted to the limited-government principles of Ronald Reagan. I’m happy to see him standing for his beliefs.Cottle At this point, Hutchinson isn’t really offering a vision for America so much as a post-Trumpian vision for the Republican Party. This is a worthy — even glorious — aim.French A Hutchinson presidential election itself would have a singular inspiring element — his election would represent a truly bipartisan repudiation of Trump and a clear revival of the moral center of the G.O.P.Gray It’s hard to tell at this stage what that vision is, since Hutchinson’s run seems primarily motivated by opposition to Trump. Voters are likely to find his Reaganesque politics familiar, maybe even comforting, but probably not inspiring or fresh.Goldberg He seems to imagine that there’s a version of American conservatism that isn’t bitterly conspiratorial and inspired by Viktor Orban’s Hungary. I think he’s wrong, but it’s a nice fantasy.Mair I personally think about the fact that Arkansas, under him and others, hasn’t exactly been a beacon of light where occupational licensing reform is concerned — but that’s something approximately 0.1 percent of Republican primary voters care about.McCarthy What’s pitiful, if not unsettling, about Hutchinson’s vision is that it’s what passes for center-right without having the merits of either the center or the right. The center should be broadly appealing and practical rather than ideological. The right should be firmly opposed to the left. These commitments can be brought together, albeit not without tension, in an effective center-right. Republicans like Hutchinson, however, can succeed only as long as they don’t have to answer the tough policy questions. Once they do have to answer — about abortion, for example — they prove to be ideological yet also inconsistent, unpopular themselves yet hostile to the right for jeopardizing the party’s popularity.Imagine you’re a G.O.P. operative or campaign manager. What’s your elevator pitch for a Hutchinson candidacy?Brummett You think he’s a RINO? Just remember — he played a central role in Clinton’s impeachment proceedings, and the N.R.A. hired him after Sandy Hook to lead a task force that recommended armed guards at schools.Continetti Republican voters may want a brawler to take the fight to the left, but they may also want to actually win a presidential election even more.Cottle Former governors know how to get stuff done, and this one is a staunch conservative — but not of the ragey, paranoid, conspiracy-mongering variety.French Reasonable conservatism can win.Gray I would pitch him as a serious, experienced public servant with solid conservative credentials who would be an antidote to the nonstop political circus.Goldberg He looks like a TV president, was popular in bright-red Arkansas and projects a sunny affability rare among Republicans, even as he holds doctrinaire, base-pleasing views on issues like guns and abortion.Mair Don’t want to return to the days when you thought about what outrageous stuff the president was doing once a week or even daily? Vote for Asa.McCarthy Asa Hutchinson is the right choice if you think conservative Republicans have already lost the culture wars but ought to surrender slowly.John Brummett (@johnbrummett) is a columnist for The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock.Matthew Continetti (@continetti) is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism.”Michelle Cottle is a member of the Times’s editorial board.David French and Michelle Goldberg are Times columnists.Rosie Gray is a political reporter.Liz Mair (@LizMair) has served as a campaign strategist for Scott Walker, Roy Blunt, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina and Rick Perry. She is the founder and president of Mair Strategies.Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.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