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    Anti-Abortion Group Urges Trump to Endorse a National Ban

    Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, seeking a ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy, threatened to campaign against any candidate who does not support the proposal.Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a prominent anti-abortion political group, threatened on Thursday to campaign against Donald J. Trump unless he endorsed a national ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a bold challenge that exposed the rift between the former president and some of his onetime allies.The group’s statement was a line in the sand for all conservative 2024 hopefuls. “We will oppose any presidential candidate who refuses to embrace at a minimum a 15-week national standard to stop painful late-term abortions while allowing states to enact further protections,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of SBA Pro-Life America.Mr. Trump has been unwilling to wade into abortion battles after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year and ended federal protections, thanks largely to a majority of conservative justices he helped muscle through as president. Last year, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina introduced legislation for a federal ban on abortions after 15 weeks, an idea that split Republicans.Democrats campaigned on abortion rights in the 2022 midterms, and Republicans had another disappointing cycle. Mr. Trump blamed anti-abortion activists for Republican losses, saying they “could have fought much harder.” Others have attributed the party’s disappointing showing to Mr. Trump’s insistence on making election fraud a top issue for candidates.Ms. Dannenfelser’s statement on Thursday was a response to a Washington Post article about the abortion issue in which Mr. Trump’s campaign did not directly address whether he supported an abortion ban after six weeks of pregnancy, which was the limit that Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is preparing his own Republican presidential bid, recently signed into law in the state.Instead, Mr. Trump’s campaign issued a statement saying abortion “is an issue that should be decided at the state level.”Mr. Trump was mostly muted about the ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade when it happened. In an interview with The New York Times last year, Mr. Trump downplayed his central role in paving the way for the decision’s reversal.“I never like to take credit for anything,” said Mr. Trump, whose name is affixed to most of his businesses and properties.In a statement, Mr. Trump’s campaign said he was “the most pro-life president in American history, as pro-life leaders have stated emphatically on repeated occasions.”It added: “Even though much work remains to be done to defend the cause of life, President Trump believes it is in the states where the greatest advances can now take place to protect the unborn.”In her statement, Ms. Dannenfelser said “President Trump’s assertion that the Supreme Court returned the issue of abortion solely to the states is a completely inaccurate reading of the Dobbs decision and is a morally indefensible position for a self-proclaimed pro-life presidential candidate to hold.”A Gallup survey last year found that the share of Americans identifying as “pro-choice” had jumped to 55 percent after hovering between 45 percent and 50 percent for a decade. That sentiment was “the highest Gallup has measured since 1995,” while the 39 percent who identified as “pro-life” was “the lowest since 1996,” the polling firm said. More

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    Heritage Foundation Makes Plans to Staff Next G.O.P. Administration

    No matter the Republican, the effort has set a goal of up to 20,000 potential officials in a database akin to a right-wing LinkedIn.If a Republican enters the Oval Office in 2025, whether it’s Donald J. Trump or someone else, there is a good chance that president will turn to the same electronic database to staff the White House and federal agencies.Think of it as a right-wing LinkedIn. This so-called Project 2025 — part of a $22 million presidential transition operation at a scale never attempted before in conservative politics — is being led by the Heritage Foundation, a group that has been staffing Republican administrations since the Reagan era.Heritage usually compiles its own personnel lists, and spends far less doing so. But for this election, after conservatives and Mr. Trump himself decried what they viewed as terrible staffing decisions made during his administration, more than 50 conservative groups have temporarily set aside rivalries to team up with Heritage on the project, set to start Friday.They have already identified several thousand potential recruits and have set a goal of having up to 20,000 potential administration officials in their database by the end of 2024, according to Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage. Heritage has contracted the technology company Oracle to build a secure personnel database, Dr. Roberts said.“In 2016, the conservative movement was not prepared to flood the zone with conservative personnel,” Dr. Roberts said. “On Jan. 20, 2025, things will be very different. This database will prepare an army of vetted, trained staff to begin dismantling the administrative state from Day 1.”Heritage and its project partners have already briefed Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and their teams, Dr. Roberts said, as well as staff members for other current and potential candidates, including Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the United Nations; the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy; and former Vice President Mike Pence. They plan to give private briefings to all conservative candidates. The glaring problem with such an effort is that the various Republican hopefuls would most likely use different staffing criteria. Mr. Trump, the clear front-runner, cares far more about personal loyalty than ideological convictions.Indeed, he spent the bulk of his presidency trying to root out people whom he perceived as aligned with political critics, such as the Bush family, or Obama administration officials.In meetings at Mar-a-Lago over the past two years, Mr. Trump has repeatedly complained that his first administration was full of “snakes” and “traitors.” Those he complains about the most are not career bureaucrats but instead people like William P. Barr, a former Barry Goldwater supporter whom Mr. Trump himself selected as his attorney general.Dr. Roberts has anticipated the Trump challenge — and, though he doesn’t advertise it this way, he has built his project around it. The key people involved with the Heritage-led database served in the former president’s administration. They include James Bacon, a Trump loyalist who worked in the White House Office of Presidential Personnel under one of Mr. Trump’s most trusted aides, John McEntee. In the final year of the Trump administration, Mr. Bacon helped Mr. McEntee overhaul the government’s hiring process. They developed a questionnaire to vet government employees’ loyalty to Mr. Trump and his “America First” agenda.Typically, a new president is allowed to replace around 4,000 “political appointees” — a revolving layer that sits atop the federal work force. Below the political layer lies a long-term work force of more than two million, who have strong employment protections meant to make it harder for a new president of a different political party to fire them. These protections, enshrined in law, established a civil service that is supposed to be apolitical — with federal officials accumulating subject matter and institutional expertise over long careers in the service of both Republican and Democratic presidents.Mr. Trump wants to demolish that career civil service — or what he pejoratively calls “the deep state.” He has privately told allies that if he gets back into power he plans to fire far more than the 4,000 government officials that presidents are typically allowed to replace. Mr. Trump’s lawyers already have the legal instrument in hand.In late 2020, Mr. Trump issued an executive order that would establish a new employment category for federal workers, called “Schedule F.” Barely anyone noticed because the order was developed in strict secrecy over more than a year and issued only two weeks before the 2020 election.The news was lost amid the postelection chaos as Mr. Trump desperately tried to overturn the result.But key officials involved with the federal civil service immediately grasped the significance of Schedule F and its potential to create a new federal work force in which loyalty to Mr. Trump was the highest criteria, they said. Everett Kelley, who as national president of the American Federation of Government Employees represents more than half a million government workers, described Schedule F, at the time it was released, as “the most profound undermining of the civil service in our lifetimes.”Mr. Trump’s staff estimated that Schedule F would give the president the power to terminate and replace as many as 50,000 career government officials who served in roles that influenced federal policy.President Biden rescinded the Schedule F order on his third day in office, but over the past two years, several of Mr. Trump’s confidants, including his former budget director Russell T. Vought, have been working on a plan to re-enact the order and gut the federal civil service in a second Trump administration.Now, the two plans — Mr. Trump’s and Heritage’s — are dovetailing, even as Mr. Trump himself has shown no interest in the details. Conveniently, Dennis Kirk, a former Trump administration lawyer who was involved with the adoption of Schedule F, is now employed by Heritage. Mr. Kirk is busy at work on Project 2025, Dr. Roberts said. More

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    Behind Trump’s Personal Touch in Fighting DeSantis

    The former president has found a way to connect with Florida’s congressional delegation in a way that Gov. Ron DeSantis has not.When Anna Paulina Luna’s father was killed in a car crash in January 2022, she received notes from two prominent Florida Republicans.One was from former President Donald J. Trump, a condolence letter that he signed‌, “Donald.”The second letter came not from Gov. Ron DeSantis, but from his wife, Casey.The letters meant something to Ms. Luna, who was endorsed by both Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis in the House race she won last year. But in the end, she backed Mr. Trump for president in 2024.“Trump’s operation is personal,” Ms. Luna said in an interview on Capitol Hill, hours before flying to Mar-a-Lago for a dinner with Mr. Trump and the Florida congressional lawmakers who have endorsed him. “You take the time to actually get to know the people you’re going to be working with and that does make a difference.”The different approaches to outreach underscore Mr. DeSantis’s political weakness as he finds himself in a heated endorsement battle with Mr. Trump.The personal touch also helps explain how Mr. Trump — despite one criminal indictment and potentially more to come — has continued to increase his support among Republican lawmakers at the expense of one of the nation’s most popular governors.Furthermore, it reflects a new approach for Mr. Trump, who appears to be playing the political game in a more traditional way than he has in the past.Mr. Trump has long been considered the Republican favorite and now holds a lead of almost 25 percentage points over Mr. DeSantis in a FiveThirtyEight national poll average.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida speaking at a county Republican Party breakfast in Michigan. He is trailing Mr. Trump in congressional endorsements.Kaytie Boomer/The Bay City Times, via Associated PressMr. DeSantis, meanwhile, has struggled to find his footing as he juggles duties as governor of the nation’s No. 3 state by population with preparations for his first national campaign. Since declaring himself “kind of a hot commodity” last month in an interview with The Times of London, he has drifted further behind in the polls to Mr. Trump.During that time, he has been criticized by fellow Republicans for referring to the war in Ukraine as a “territorial dispute.” He adopted a tougher tone about Mr. Trump’s arrest in New York after initially dismissing the case because Florida had “real issues” to focus on.Mr. DeSantis has also had difficulty at times connecting with potential supporters as he has traveled the country on a book tour. At an event this month in Michigan, he irritated some Republicans who said privately that he had spent little time with the crowd at a morning event and left another in the afternoon shortly after posing for pictures.Those differences have played out as the two men have pushed for endorsements in Congress: Mr. Trump has collected 47, and Mr. DeSantis, a former congressman, just three.Mr. Trump, according to congressional aides who have fielded calls from Mr. Trump’s team, has run an aggressive and organized effort to gain support from House Republicans.One of his top political advisers, Brian Jack, worked during the midterms for Kevin McCarthy, the California Republican whom Mr. Trump helped install as speaker. Mr. Jack, along with Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, two of the former president’s senior advisers, have used their connections to coordinate the outreach effort.Ultimately, it is Mr. Trump who closes the deal himself. He has made calls to lawmakers, many of whom he knows after years of providing endorsements and hosting dinners at his Mar-a-Lago club.In contrast, some members of Congress said they had not heard from Mr. DeSantis until one of his aides reached out to ask for their endorsements. Seventeen of the Republicans who have endorsed Mr. Trump served in the House with Mr. DeSantis, who left Congress after six years to run for governor in 2018.Endorsements, like political polls, suggest political strength but are not purely predictive. Mr. Trump, for example, had relatively few endorsements when he ran in 2016, but now shows his deep strength within a certain core of the party even as roughly half of all Republican voters still tell pollsters they are interested in moving on from him.But endorsements from other elected officials help give candidates an air of legitimacy and can help spread a presidential contender’s message in their home districts.For Mr. Trump, few political institutions better reflect his arc of power inside the party.“Trump’s operation is personal,” Representative Anna Paulina Luna said.Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images“The pendulum couldn’t have swung much further, and this time Trump is the establishment candidate,” said Dave Wasserman, who analyzes House races as a senior editor for The Cook Political Report.As a candidate in 2016, Mr. Trump had no congressional endorsements for the first six months of his campaign and the first two House members who eventually backed him — Chris Collins of New York and Duncan Hunter of California — both resigned after unrelated criminal convictions and were later pardoned by Mr. Trump.Since then, Republican House candidates have effectively crawled over one another to seek Mr. Trump’s seal.Mr. Trump’s endorsement advantage is most pronounced among Florida’s 20 Republican House members, nine of whom have already backed him, including Representative Michael Waltz, who succeeded Mr. DeSantis in Congress. Two more Florida House members, Gus Bilirakis and Carlos Gimenez, are expected to announce their support for Mr. Trump in the coming days, according to people familiar with the planning.Representative Greg Steube of Florida, who was hospitalized for four days after falling 25 feet off a ladder at home this year, told Politico this week that Mr. DeSantis’s office had never reached out to him and also ignored multiple requests to connect. Mr. Trump was the first person to reach out to Mr. Steube while he was in the I.C.U., he said.Representative Vern Buchanan of Florida endorsed Mr. Trump on Wednesday after a personal call from the former president, who asked for the endorsement and extended an invitation to dinner on Thursday at Mar-a-Lago.Mr. DeSantis has support from one Floridian from Congress so far: Representative Laurel Lee, who served in Mr. DeSantis’s administration.Ms. Lee endorsed Mr. DeSantis on Tuesday when the governor made a special trip to Washington to meet with members of Congress. But Mr. Trump picked up multiple endorsements just before and after Mr. DeSantis’s meeting — including one from Representative Lance Gooden of Texas, who announced his endorsement of the president within minutes of leaving the meeting with the Florida governor.Still, Mr. Trump’s power has its limits — even in Congress.In the 36 most competitive House races during the 2022 midterms, Mr. Trump endorsed just five Republicans — all of whom lost.More than half of the nearly 50 endorsements he has received have come from members who won their races last year by 30 points or more, or represent such heavily Republican districts that Democrats didn’t field an opponent.When it comes to the most-watched Florida delegation, Ms. Luna said that most of them want Mr. DeSantis to continue furthering his conservative agenda from the Statehouse.The ideal situation, she said, was for Mr. DeSantis to hold off on his presidential ambitions until 2028. “If he does announce,” she added, “we’re going to be bummed.” More

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    DeSantis’s Electability Pitch Wobbles, Despite G.O.P. Losses Under Trump

    The former president’s rivals are seeking to tap into Republican frustration with recent election disappointments to urge a new face for the party in 2024, but it is proving to be a tough sell.Ron DeSantis knows the statistics by heart.He ticks them off as he contrasts his sweeping re-election as Florida governor with Republican losses nationwide last fall: a flip of traditionally “very blue” Miami-Dade County; the narrowness of his 2018 victory versus his landslide in 2022; the remarkable Republican voter registration gains in the state on his watch.“There is no substitute for victory,” Mr. DeSantis said last week during his first trip to New Hampshire in his still-undeclared presidential bid. He denounced the “culture of losing” that he said had engulfed Republicans in recent years, swiping at Donald J. Trump in all but name.“If the election of 2024 is a referendum on Joe Biden and his failed policies — and we provide a fresh vision for American renewal — Republicans will win the White House, the House and the U.S. Senate,” he told the crowd. “So we cannot get distracted, and we cannot afford to lose, because freedom is hanging in the balance.”Electability has emerged as one of the early pressure points in the 2024 Republican presidential primary.That amorphous, ill-defined, eye-of-the-beholder intangible — the sense of whether voters believe a politician can actually win — was supposed to be one of Mr. DeSantis’s strengths, tapping into the genuine Republican frustration with years of ballot box disappointments to urge a new face for the party in 2024. Republicans lost with Mr. Trump, the argument goes, but can win with Mr. DeSantis.But there are growing questions about Mr. DeSantis’s own ability to win over the independent and suburban voters who delivered the White House to President Biden, and whether the hard-line stances the governor has taken, including on abortion, will repel the very voters he promises to win back. His feuding with Disney — including an offhand remark this week suggesting he would put a state prison next to Disney World — has raised alarms, even among would-be allies.For years, electability has been the fool’s gold of Republican politics.Since the rise of the Tea Party more than a decade ago, Republican primary voters have consistently cast ballots with their hearts, sneering at so-called experts to select uncompromising hard-liners as nominees. Even as losses in winnable races have mounted, the mere perception of running as electable has repeatedly backfired, giving off for many Republicans the stench of the reviled establishment.Core to Mr. DeSantis’s particular electability pitch is that he won in Florida despite not shifting to the middle.Scott McIntyre for The New York Times“It has sounded like an excuse to get conservative voters to support somebody they don’t really want, even though the argument may very well be true,” said Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster. Citing G.O.P. losses while Mr. Trump has defined the party — in 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2022 — Mr. Ayres added of the former president and the G.O.P. 2024 front-runner, “There is no education in the fifth kick of a mule, and yet it appears that’s where we’re headed.”For Mr. Trump’s rivals, hitting him as an electoral loser is central to chiseling away at the crucial bloc of voters who liked his presidency but might be willing to move on. It also allows them to create contrast without directly crossing him; Nikki Haley, for instance, talks about the need for a “new generation” to win.Core to Mr. DeSantis’s particular electability pitch is that he won in Florida despite not tacking to the middle: that voters, in other words, can have both a fighter and a winner.But his recent signing of a six-week abortion ban puts him on the far right on an issue that Democrats have used to mobilize their base with great success since Roe v. Wade was overturned. And congressional Republicans, who have had a front-row seat to the party’s Trump-era struggles, have pointedly delivered far more endorsements to Mr. Trump, including from Mr. DeSantis’s home state delegation during his visit to Washington this week, in a sign of the governor’s slipping traction.Mr. Trump’s team has pushed an electability case against Mr. DeSantis. A Trump-allied super PAC has run ads warning that Mr. DeSantis would go after Social Security and Medicare, touchstone issues that Democrats have used to defeat Republicans nationwide.“If anyone thinks throwing seniors under the bus is a winning argument, they are seriously out of touch,” said Steven Cheung, a Trump spokesman. “There is only one electable candidate in 2024, and that is President Trump.”The DeSantis team did not respond to a request for comment.Sarah Longwell, a Republican who holds regular focus groups with G.O.P. voters, said in the immediate aftermath of the 2022 midterm losses, many Republicans had come to view Mr. Trump as an electoral loser.“Baggage is the word you’d hear,” she said.Mr. DeSantis was the beneficiary, rising as voters looked for a less polarizing alternative. “Trump with a mute button,” one voter memorably described a dream Republican candidate, she recalled.Vivek Ramaswamy, a former biotechnology executive, said the belief that electability would carry the day in 2024 was “somewhere between a wish and a mirage.”Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesThat trend, however, has dissipated of late, said Ms. Longwell, who is involved with several groups that oppose Mr. Trump.“The electability pitch really only works if there is lots and lots of polling showing Trump losing by a wide margin,” she said. In a 50-50 nation, Mr. Trump remains competitive with Mr. Biden in almost every public poll, even if Mr. DeSantis often performs marginally better.Then there are the known unknowns of 2024 for Republican voters. If Mr. Trump loses the primary, would he sabotage the winner? And what would be the impact of further potential criminal indictments?Vivek Ramaswamy, a former biotechnology executive running a long-shot Republican presidential campaign, said the belief that electability would carry the day in 2024 was “somewhere between a wish and a mirage.”“It is fatally hubristic for anybody to think they can run that math equation,” Mr. Ramaswamy said in an interview aboard his campaign bus, adding that whoever was strongest would shift with debates and world events in the coming months.Mr. Trump’s pundit-defying victory in 2016 has uniquely inoculated him from charges that he cannot win. And as Mr. Trump’s rivals in 2016 learned — like when Jeb Bush called him the “chaos candidate” — it can be especially hard to press a case about electability when trailing badly in the polls, as Mr. DeSantis does now.In interviews, Trump supporters note that he only narrowly lost in 2020 despite a pandemic that crippled American life for months, circumstances that almost certainly won’t repeat. For all the turbulence Mr. Trump creates, they say he has been tested on the national stage in a way his opponents have not.The who-can-win debate plays out strikingly differently between the two parties. In 2020, Democratic primary voters obsessed over electability before nominating Mr. Biden, who made his strength against Mr. Trump a centerpiece of his candidacy.In New Hampshire, interviews with Republican voters, activists and party officials revealed both the fertile ground for and the challenges of any electability campaign against Mr. Trump. Mr. DeSantis arrived in the state for his first appearance on Friday, headlining a dinner for the state party that the chairman said had broken fund-raising records. More than 500 people attended, arriving from across New Hampshire and beyond, as Trump loyalists waved flags outside the downtown Manchester hotel.“If I had a magic wand, I would like Trump,” said Sue Higgins, 53, a dental hygienist from Belknap County, a conservative stronghold in central New Hampshire. “He’s the only person who has the chutzpah to save America. But I’m not sure he’s the most electable.” As she waited for Mr. DeSantis to speak, she said she might support Mr. Trump again anyway.Trump supporters at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference this year.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesAllison Chaffee, 36, who drove up two hours from Massachusetts to see Mr. DeSantis, described herself as an emissary “from the group that sways elections: suburban moms.” And her message was to move on.“I hear what the moms say,” she said. “They are speaking Republican and then they vote Democrat. They only just hate Trump.”But Lynda Payette, 68, of Bethlehem, N.H., waved away any talk of Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities. “I believe that God placed him there and no man is going to take him down,” she said. “He’s electable, same as 2015.”Then she turned the electability question on Mr. DeSantis, pointing to his decision to sign a six-week abortion ban, which she called extreme. “I really think we’ve got to give a little on this abortion thing,” she said, as a friend nodded in agreement.For the sizable faction of the G.O.P. that has swallowed Mr. Trump’s falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen, electability is a particularly moot argument. They don’t think he lost.If an anti-Trump electability message were to gain ground anywhere, it might be New Hampshire, where multiple competitive seats were fumbled away in 2022 by Republican candidates whom party leaders had warned were out of the mainstream, including in a marquee Senate race.The state’s governor, Chris Sununu, who has teased a possible 2024 bid of his own, warned that Don Bolduc, the Republican who ran for Senate in New Hampshire, was a “conspiracy-theory type” candidate who would lose. Mr. Bolduc won the primary and lost in November.“What I hear from some of our activists is we’re tired of losing,” said Christopher Ager, who took over the chairmanship of the New Hampshire Republican Party in a contested fight.Fergus Cullen, a former New Hampshire Republican Party chairman, is less sanguine. He is the lone elected Republican on the City Council in Dover, where he needs to win over Democratic voters in a ward carried by Mr. Biden.“I don’t see any signs of pragmatic, strategic voting among primary voters,” said Mr. Cullen, a critic of Mr. Trump. “I fully believe he has the ability to get the lemmings to follow him off the cliff again, no matter how far down it goes.” More

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    Republicans Hit DeSantis Over Disney Feud

    As Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida escalates a fight against his state’s largest private employer, his potential rivals for the White House see an opening to attack.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is taking heat from fellow Republicans over his feud with Disney, as his potential rivals for the White House see an opportunity to call him out as flouting traditional conservative values.Former President Donald J. Trump this week slammed the governor’s efforts as a “political stunt” and said Mr. DeSantis was being outplayed by the company.“DeSanctus is being absolutely destroyed by Disney,” Mr. Trump wrote on Tuesday on Truth Social, his media site, using a dismissive nickname for the governor. Former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey also took a shot, suggesting Mr. DeSantis’s talk of punishing a business defied principles about small government.“I don’t think Ron DeSantis is conservative, based on actions towards Disney,” he said at an event on Tuesday hosted by the news outlet Semafor. “Where are we headed here now that, if you express disagreement in this country, the government is now going to punish you? To me, that’s what I always thought liberals did, and now all of a sudden here we are participating in this with a Republican governor.”The criticism reflects a growing effort by Mr. Trump and other prospective candidates to try to undermine the core argument of Mr. DeSantis’s case for the nomination: that he is the Republican most likely to win a general election. Advisers to Mr. Trump and other possible rivals believe moves like going after Disney will be damaging in a general election, if not necessarily in the G.O.P. primary.Some Republican strategists even argued that the move risked turning off the party’s primary voters, saying they were confused by Mr. DeSantis’s decision to dig into a fight against a company with broad appeal and considerable resources to fight back.The dispute between Mr. DeSantis and Disney — Florida’s largest private employer and corporate taxpayer — started when company officials criticized a bill that Mr. DeSantis signed into law last year. The law, which critics called a “Don’t Say Gay” bill, curtails instruction and discussion of gender and sexuality in some elementary school grades. (It was extended to cover all grades, including high school, on Wednesday.)In response to the criticism, Mr. DeSantis moved to exert greater control over the company through a district board, but officials at the company quietly found a way to strip that board of power. Mr. DeSantis has since moved to try to take control again, and floated the possibilities of imposing new taxes on Disney — which would most likely be passed along to people using Disney’s park — as well as building a state prison nearby.A spokesman for the governor said Mr. DeSantis believed Disney had “an unfair special advantage” over other businesses in the state.“Good and limited government (and, indeed, principled conservatism) reduces special privilege, encourages an even playing field for businesses, and upholds the will of the people,” said Bryan Griffin, the governor’s press secretary.In his post, Mr. Trump suggested that the threats could backfire and that the company could respond by pulling out of Florida. “Watch!” he wrote. “That would be a killer. In the meantime, this is all so unnecessary, a political STUNT!”The former president himself has never shied away from attacking companies he doesn’t like.Despite a steady stream of criticism from fellow Republicans — former Vice President Mike Pence, who is considering a campaign of his own, chided Mr. DeSantis on the issue in February — it’s not clear that Mr. DeSantis’s actions have hurt him uniformly on the right.The Wall Street Journal editorial board, on Tuesday evening, criticized the governor for the arc of the feud with Disney but took greater issue with Mr. Trump for his attack.“You’d think the former president would be critical of Disney’s woke turn, but his only abiding political conviction is personal advantage,” the board wrote. More

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    Pro-DeSantis PAC Makes Hires in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina

    The Florida governor has not entered the 2024 race yet, but a super PAC supporting him is laying the groundwork for his likely run.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and his allies are expanding his political footprint in key states that will begin the 2024 presidential nominating contest, with the main super PAC backing his bid making hires in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina and an operative with recent Iowa experience joining the payroll of the Republican Party of Florida.The Iowa strategist, Sophie Crowell, managed the successful re-election campaign of Representative Ashley Hinson, Republican of Iowa, in 2022, and is now working for the state party in Florida, according to people familiar with her hiring. The party is serving as a way station where Mr. DeSantis has been adding strategists and policy advisers who are expected to eventually work on his likely 2024 run.Mr. DeSantis has not yet declared his bid, but a pro-DeSantis super PAC, Never Back Down, has acted as something of a campaign-in-waiting, hiring staff members and responding to regular attacks from former President Donald J. Trump. Almost as significantly, it has engaged with mainstream news organizations that Mr. DeSantis instinctively shuns.The super PAC previously announced that it had raised $30 million in its first three weeks, as major donors poured money into the group in a bid to slow the momentum of Mr. Trump, the Republican polling front-runner.Never Back Down has begun answering a pro-Trump group’s ads on television and is now building out a team in the important states that kick off the race. David Polyansky, who held senior posts on the 2016 presidential campaigns of former Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, is overseeing the hiring, according to people briefed on the process. The recent hires are expected to constitute only the first wave of additions in early states.In Iowa, the pro-DeSantis group has hired Tyler Campbell, who previously served as campaign manager for the state’s agriculture secretary, Mike Naig, and now runs his own political consulting firm.In New Hampshire, the PAC has hired Ethan Zorfas, another veteran of the Cruz campaign and a close ally of the strategist Jeff Roe, who is overseeing Never Back Down’s strategy.Mr. Zorfas, who served as chief of staff to the state’s last Republican congressman, Frank Guinta, attended Mr. DeSantis’s speech on Friday in New Hampshire at a state party dinner. Mr. Zorfas worked for the congressional campaign of Karoline Leavitt in New Hampshire last year. Ms. Leavitt won the primary but lost the general election and is now working for a pro-Trump super PAC.In South Carolina, the group has hired Michael Mulé, who runs a political consulting firm in Charleston that has done extensive work in the state and beyond.Mr. DeSantis’s allies have made clear that he is unlikely to formally enter the race before the end of the Florida legislative session in early May. Mr. DeSantis has more than $85 million remaining in his state-level PAC, which is widely believed to be eligible to be transferred to the super PAC if and when he enters the 2024 contest.Mr. DeSantis has already traveled to all three early states in 2023 and was in South Carolina on Wednesday, speaking in North Charleston and talking about his “Florida blueprint” for the nation. More

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    ‘One of the Odd and Scary Things About American Politics’ Is What Republicans Are Doing

    Are democracies providing the rope to hang themselves?From Turkey to Hungary, from India to the United States, authoritarian leaders have gained power under the protective cloak of free elections.“There is no doubt that democratic processes and judicial decisions can be used to limit the power of the people, restructuring governments and institutions to make them less representative, more undemocratic,” Rogers Smith, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania told me, in response to my emailed inquiry.Smith continued:The classic examples are partisan gerrymandering and barriers to voting, but in recent years Republicans have gone further than ever before in using their overrepresentation in state legislatures to shift power to those legislatures, away from officeholders in Democratic-led cities, from officials elected statewide and from voters.Jack Goldstone, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, made a parallel argument by email:One of the odd and scary things about American politics, more reminiscent of the 19th century than anything in the post-World War II period, is that when the Republicans lost the presidential election in 2020 and did much worse than expected in 2022 (even worse than in a normal midterm contest), they did not abandon the leaders and policies that produced these results. Instead, they have doubled down on even more extreme and broadly unpopular leaders and policies, from Trump to abortion and guns.Goldstone believes that this developmentis a sign that normal politics have been replaced by extreme polarization and factional identity politics, in which the extremes grow stronger and drain the center. As a minority seeking to exercise control of government, it is actually necessary that the Trumpist G.O.P. suppress democratic procedures that normally produce majority control.If enough voters, Goldstone wrote,are deeply anxious or frightened of some real or imagined threat (e.g. socialism, mass immigration, crime, threats to their religion, transgender takeover), they may well vote for someone who promises to stand up to those threats, even if that person has no regard for preserving democracy, no regard for the rights and freedoms of those seen as “enemies.” If such a leader is elected, gets his or her party to control all parts of government, and wants to turn all the elements of government into a weapon to attack their enemies, no laws or other organizations can stop them.Goldstone warned “that should the Republicans manage to gain control of the House, Senate and presidency in 2024, building an electoral autocracy to impose their views without challenge will be their top priority.”There are two distinct mechanisms involved in overturning democracy, Goldstone argued:First, is controlling all elected and appointed elements of the government. If the same political party controls the House, Senate, judiciary and presidency, and disregards the principles of democracy and independence of officials, then sadly none of the institutions of democracy will prevent arbitrary and autocratic government.The second element, according to Goldstone, is unique to this country: “The United States has so many safeguards for minority rights that it is conceivable that a minority party could obtain complete control of all levers of government.”How so?The U.S. Senate is chosen on the basis of territory, not numbers, so that Wyoming and California both have two senators. Gerrymanders mean that states where Democratic and Republican voters are about even, like Wisconsin and North Carolina, have very unequal representation in Congress. Finally, the Electoral College method of aggregating state votes for president has meant that in 2000 and 2016 candidates with a minority of the people’s votes were elected.The consequences?“A determined effort to twist and benefit from these various opportunities and rules means that a party that represents a minority of the people can, in the U.S., control the House, Senate, and presidency,” Goldstone wrote, enabling “an oppressive government restricting freedom and ruling autocratically, and doing so to impose the goals and beliefs of a minority on an unwilling majority.”Robert Lieberman, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins and a co-author, with Suzanne Mettler, a political scientist at Cornell, of “Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy,” argued in an email that “Democratic procedure is not a threat to democracy per se, but it is fair to say that it has vulnerabilities.”“Democratic procedures,” he continued, “are intended to provide a means to hold leaders accountable,” which include:Horizontal accountability — institutional checks and balances that enable public officials to hold each other accountable; and vertical accountability — ways for citizens to hold public officials accountable, such as elections or popular mobilization. In a well-functioning democracy, both kinds of accountability work together to limit the concentration of power in the hands of a single party or individual.But Lieberman pointed out, “Democratic procedures can also enable would-be authoritarians to undermine both kinds of accountability under the cloak of democratic legitimacy.”Democratic regimes, he wrote, “are less likely than in the past to be overthrown in a sudden violent burst, as in an overt coup d’état. Instead, democracies are more frequently degraded by leaders who use apparently legal, democratic means to hollow out democratic accountability.”Voter suppression or gerrymandering, Lieberman noted,can limit vertical accountability by making it harder for the opposition to win elections, while maneuvers such as court packing can lower barriers for a party in power to expand its power. And these kind of tactics can reinforce one another, as when the Supreme Court upheld the practice of partisan gerrymandering (in Rucho v. Common Cause). Taken together, these kinds of moves can enable a party to gain and keep power without majority support and increasingly unconstrained by public disapproval.How do authoritarian-leaning politicians gain the power to elude the institutional restraints designed to maintain democracy? Stephan Haggard, a professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California-San Diego, emailed me to say that “an important feature of populism is the belief in majoritarian conceptions of democracy: that majorities should not be constrained by horizontal checks, various rights, or even by the rule of law: Majorities should be able to do what they want.”This majoritarian conception of democracy, Haggard continued,is a leitmotif of virtually all democratic backsliding episodes. That the will of “the people” is being thwarted by an elite (read “deep state”) that must be purged. Of course, the definition of “the people” does not refer to everyone, but the favored supporters of the autocrat: whites in the U.S., Muslims in Turkey, Russian traditionalists and so on.One common characteristic of democratic backsliding, according to Haggard, is its incrementalism, which, in turn, mutes the ability of the public to perceive what is happening in front of its eyes:A constant refrain from observers who have weathered these systems is how difficult it is to be clear as to what is transpiring. This comes in part because autocrats lie and distort the truth — that is fundamental — but also because behaviors once thought out of bounds are normalized. Think Trump’s open racism or calls for violence against opponents at his rallies; all of that got normalized.Christina Ewig, a professor of public affairs at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs, views contemporary challenges to democracy from another vantage point.In an email responding to my inquiry, Ewig wrote that she disagrees with the premise that democracy is providing the rope to hang itself. Instead, she argued, “Democracy and democratic procedure are not threats to democracy itself. Instead, anti-democratic actors that abuse the state are a threat to democracy.”The United States, Ewig continued, “shows evidence of becoming what the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way call a ‘competitive authoritarian regime’ — a regime that is civilian, with formal democratic institutions, but in which incumbents ‘abuse’ the state to stay in power.”Prominent examplesinclude former President Trump’s attempts to influence Georgia officials to change election outcomes in November 2020, and then to impede the peaceful transfer of power on Jan. 6. Senator Mitch McConnell’s refusal to let President Obama nominate a Supreme Court justice is another. At the state level, Wisconsin Republicans, through district gerrymandering, have a chokehold on a purple state.All of these examples, Ewig argued,appear to be abuses of democracy rather than uses of democracy. Democracy requires an acceptance that one’s party will not always be a winner. But the Republican Party in the United States has, on more than one occasion, refused to lose.For now, Ewig wrote, the United States is not a competitive authoritarian regime. The results of the 2020 national elections and the institutional opposition to the insurrection in 2021 “helped to avoid that. But some U.S. states do look suspiciously competitive authoritarian.”Why is democracy under such stress now? There are many answers to that question, including, crucially, the divisiveness inherent in the elevated levels of contemporary polarization that makes democratic consensus so difficult to achieve.In an April 2021 paper, four scholars, Samuel Wang of Princeton, Jonathan Cervas of Carnegie Mellon, Bernard Grofman of the University of California-Irvine and Keena Lipsitz of Queens College, address the basic question of what led to the erosion among a substantial number of voters of support for democratic principles in a nation with a two-century-plus commitment to this tradition:In the United States, rules and institutions from 1790, when voters comprised white male landowners and slave owners in a nation of four million, were not designed to address today’s governance needs. Moreover, existing rules and institutions may amplify background conditions that drive polarization. The decline of civic life in America and the pluralism it once nurtured has hastened a collapse of dimensionality in the system.Americans once enjoyed a rich associational life, Wang and his colleagues write, the demise of which contributes to the erosion of democracy: “Nonpolitical associations, such as labor unions, churches, and bowling leagues, were often crosscutting, bringing people from different backgrounds into contact with one another, building trust and teaching tolerance.” In recent years, however, “the groups that once structured a multidimensional issue space in the United States have collapsed.”The erosion of democracy is also the central topic of a Feb. 13 podcast with Martin Wolf, a Financial Times columnist and the author of “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism.” Wolf makes the case that “economic changes and the performance of the economy interacting produced quite a large number of people who feared that they were becoming losers. They feared that they risked falling into the condition of people who really were at the bottom.”At the same time, Wolf continued, “the immense growth of the financial sector and the dominance of the financial sector in management generated some simply staggering fortunes at the top.” Instead of helping to drive democratization, the market system “recreated an oligarchy. I think there’s no doubt about that.”Those who suffered, Wolf noted, “felt the parties of the center-left had largely abandoned them and were no longer really interested in their fate.”Two senior fellows at Brookings, William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, explore threats to American democracy in a January 2022 analysis, “Is Democracy Failing and Putting Our Economy at Risk?” Citing data from six surveys, including those by Pew, P.R.R.I., Voter Study Group and CNN, the authors write:Support in the United States for political violence is significant. In February 2021, 39 percent of Republicans, 31 percent of independents and 17 percent of Democrats agreed that “if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions.” In November, 30 percent of Republicans, 17 percent of independents and 11 percent of Democrats agreed that they might have to resort to violence in order to save our country.In the wake of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, Galston and Kamarck observe:Even though constitutional processes prevailed, and Mr. Trump is no longer president, he and his followers continue to weaken American democracy by convincing many Americans to distrust the results of the election. About three-quarters of rank-and-file Republicans believe that there was massive fraud in 2020 and Joe Biden was not legitimately elected president.In fact, Galston and Kamarck continue, “the 2020 election revealed structural weaknesses in the institutions designed to safeguard the integrity of the electoral process,” noting that “if Mr. Pence had yielded to then-President Trump’s pressure to act, the election would have been thrown into chaos and the Constitution placed in jeopardy.”Since then, Galston and Kamarck note, the attack on democracyhas taken a new and dangerous turn. Rather than focusing on the federal government, Trump’s supporters have focused on the obscure world of election machinery. Republican majorities in state legislatures are passing laws making it harder to vote and weakening the ability of election officials to do their jobs.American democracy, the two authors conclude,is thus under assault from the ground up. The most recent systematic attack on state and local election machinery is much more dangerous than the chaotic statements of a disorganized former president. A movement that relied on Mr. Trump’s organizational skills would pose no threat to constitutional institutions. A movement inspired by him with a clear objective and a detailed plan to achieve it would be another matter altogether.“The chances that this threat will materialize over the next few years,” Galston and Kamarck add, “are high and rising.”If democracy fails in America, they contend,It will not be because a majority of Americans is demanding a nondemocratic form of government. It will be because an organized, purposeful minority seizes strategic positions within the system and subverts the substance of democracy while retaining its shell — while the majority isn’t well organized, or doesn’t care enough, to resist. The possibility that this will occur is far from remote.The anxiety about democratic erosion — even collapse — is widespread among those who think about politics for a living:In his January 2022 article, “Democracy’s Arc: From Resurgent to Imperiled,” Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute, joins those who tackle what has become an overriding topic of concern in American universities:For a decade, the democratic recession was sufficiently subtle, incremental and mixed so that it was reasonable to debate whether it was happening at all. But as the years have passed, the authoritarian trend has become harder to miss. For each of the last fifteen years, many more countries have declined in freedom than have gained. By my count, the percentage of states with populations over one million that are democracies peaked in 2006 at 57 percent and has steadily declined since, dropping below a majority (48 percent) in 2019 for the first time since 1993.In this country, Diamond continued, “Rising proportions of Americans in both camps express attitudes and perceptions that are blinking red for democratic peril. Common political ground has largely vanished.”He adds: “Even in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, most Americans have still not come to grips with how far the country has strayed from the minimum elements of normative and behavioral consensus that sustain democracy.”At the close of his essay, Diamond goes on to say:It is human nature to seek personal autonomy, dignity and self-determination, and with economic development those values have become ascendant. But there is nothing inevitable about the triumph of democracy.The next test will be in November 2024.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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    Chris Christie, Eyeing ’24 Run, Takes Shots at DeSantis

    The former New Jersey governor mocked the Florida governor’s tussles with Disney and also criticized Donald Trump during a talk hosted by Semafor.Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, slammed Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida as a fake conservative during an event in Washington on Tuesday, one of a string of meetings and stops as he considers a second Republican presidential campaign.The comments, made at an event hosted by the media outlet Semafor, were among a wide range of topics that Mr. Christie touched on, including abortion rights and his feelings about former President Donald J. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.Mr. Christie took a shot at Mr. DeSantis over his efforts to target Disney, a top business in Florida, over a fight that began when Mr. DeSantis signed legislation that banned classroom teaching and discussion about gender identity and sexual orientation in certain grade schools.Mr. Christie suggested that Mr. DeSantis’s efforts to restrict Disney were against traditional conservative principles about small government.“I don’t think Ron DeSantis is conservative, based on actions towards Disney,” he said. “Where are we headed here now that, if you express disagreement in this country, the government is now going to punish you? To me, that’s what I always thought liberals did, and now all of a sudden here we are participating in this with a Republican governor.”At another point, he mocked Disney’s escape from Mr. DeSantis’s efforts to appoint a board to oversee it, using references to Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.“That’s not the guy I want sitting across from President Xi and negotiating our next agreement with China, or sitting across from Putin and trying to resolve what’s happening in Ukraine, if you can’t see around a corner that Bob Iger created for you,” Mr. Christie said. (Mr. Iger, a longtime Disney leader, returned as Disney’s chief executive late last year.)Mr. Christie has been meeting with his staff and some donors and soliciting input from people, as he aims to decide in the coming weeks whether to run for president. If he does run, he would start at a disadvantage in a party redefined by Mr. Trump. But as Mr. DeSantis has stumbled at times before formally entering the race, some anti-Trump voices in the Republican Party have grown more interested in a Christie candidacy. Mr. Trump has taunted Mr. DeSantis relentlessly, while Mr. DeSantis has largely declined to push back on Mr. Trump. A television ad from the super PAC supporting Mr. DeSantis took issue with Mr. Trump for attacking Mr. DeSantis, a fellow Republican; Mr. Trump has never been bothered by such raised eyebrows.But Mr. Christie has been willing to take on both Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis, who was meeting with lawmakers in Washington on Tuesday.A senior member of Mr. DeSantis’s political team, who was not authorized to speak publicly, replied by insulting Mr. Christie and said he was resorting to attacking a “winner.”Mr. Christie and Mr. Trump have gone from friends to opponents to allies after Mr. Trump became the nominee in 2016, beating Mr. Christie and all other rivals in the New Hampshire primary. He was the chairman of Mr. Trump’s transition team before top Trump aides and Mr. Trump’s son-in-law fired him from the role after Election Day; still, Mr. Christie remained aligned with Mr. Trump. The president considered him for chief of staff at one point in late 2018, but Mr. Christie took himself out of the running.Mr. Christie told the crowd that Mr. Trump hit a point of no return with his lies that the election was stolen from him.“There’s a difference between spinning politically to try to put yourself in a better position before the vote happens and after the vote happens to say it was ‘rigged,’” Mr. Christie said.He also faulted Mr. Trump for declaring in a recent speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference that “I am your retribution” to people who believe they’ve been wronged.“I think a president should be our inspiration, not our retribution,” Mr. Christie said. More