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      Sarah Huckabee Sanders Has a Funny Idea of What the Republican Party Should Be

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      The most striking thing about the Republican response to President Biden’s State of the Union last week, delivered this year by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas, was that it wasn’t actually pitched to the American public at large.Of course, most people do not watch this particular ritual. But it is one of the few times each year (outside of a presidential election year) when the opposition party has the undivided attention of a large part of the voting public. The State of the Union response reaches enough people — an estimated 27.3 million watched Biden — to make it worthwhile for the opposition party to put its best face forward. That’s why, when it’s its turn to deliver the response, a party tends to elevate its youngest, most dynamic leaders and showcase its broadest, most accessible message.Sanders is a young and dynamic leader in the Republican Party, a point she emphasized herself, citing her age, 40, in comparison with the president’s, which is 80, but her message was neither broad nor accessible.“In the radical left’s America,” she said, “Washington taxes you and lights your hard-earned money on fire, but you get crushed with high gas prices, empty grocery shelves, and our children are taught to hate one another on account of their race but not to love one another or our great country.”Sanders attacked Biden as the “first man to surrender his presidency to a woke mob that can’t even tell you what a woman is” and decried the “woke fantasies” of a “left-wing culture war.” Every day, she said, “we are told that we must partake in their rituals, salute their flags and worship their false idols, all while big government colludes with big tech to strip away the most American thing there is: your freedom of speech.”Sanders’s folksy affect notwithstanding, this was harsh and hard and was delivered with an edge. But then, there’s nothing wrong with giving a partisan and ideological State of the Union address; that is part of the point. The problem was that most of these complaints were unintelligible to anyone but the small minority of Americans who live inside the epistemological bubble of conservative media. Sanders’s response, in other words, was less a broad and accessible message than it was fan service for devotees of the Fox News cinematic universe and its related properties.It was not the kind of speech you give if you’re trying to build a political majority. The best evidence for this is that her speech was a version of the message Republicans used in last year’s midterm elections. The result was a historic disappointment, if not a historic defeat, for an opposition party against a relatively unpopular incumbent.Yes, Republicans won the House of Representatives, but it was a slim victory despite expectations of a red wave. And the most unsuccessful candidates, in races across the country, were, in the main, the right-wing culture warriors who tried to make the midterms a referendum on their reactionary preoccupations.Here, I should say that this critique of Sanders’s response rests on the supposition that Republican politicians want to build a national political majority. And why wouldn’t they? Political parties are supposed to want to win the largest possible majority. “Unless there’s a countervailing force,” the historian Timothy Shenk notes in “Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy,” “parties bend toward majorities like sunflowers to the light.” A large majority, after all, means a mandate for your agenda. With it, you can set or reset the political landscape on your terms.But what if there is a countervailing force? What if the structure of the political system makes it possible to win the power of a popular majority without ever actually assembling a popular majority? What if, using that power, you burrow your party and its ideology into the countermajoritarian institutions of that system so that, heads or tails, you always win?In that scenario, a political party might drop the quest for a majority as a fool’s errand. There’s no need to build a broad coalition of voters if — because of the malapportionment of the national legislature, the gerrymandering of many state legislatures, the Electoral College and the strategic position of your voters in the nation’s geography — you don’t need one to win. And if your political party also has a tight hold on the highest court of constitutional interpretation, you don’t even need to win elections to clear the path for your preferred outcomes and ideology.Sanders did not deliver a broad and accessible response to the State of the Union for the same reason that congressional Republicans refuse to moderate or even acknowledge the existence of the median voter; she doesn’t have to, and they don’t have to. The American political system is so slanted toward the overrepresentation of the Republican Party’s core supporters, rural and exurban conservatives, that even when their views and priorities are far from those of the typical voter, the party is still more competitive than not.Unfortunately, there’s no one weird trick to change this state of affairs. Republicans may not need to win consistent majorities, but anyone who hopes to build a more humane country must still find and assemble a majority coalition of the willing — and pray that it is large enough not just to win power or hold power but to use power.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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      Democrats Meddle Again in a G.O.P. Primary, This Time Down-Ballot

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      In a race for a State Senate seat in Wisconsin, Democrats are replicating their midterm strategy of elevating far-right Republicans in hopes of beating them in the general election.Last year, Democrats spent millions of dollars elevating far-right candidates in Republican primary contests for governor and Congress — betting, it turned out correctly, that more extreme opponents would lose general elections.Now Wisconsin Democrats are trying to do it again, this time with mail and TV ads before a Republican primary in a special election for a State Senate seat that carries ramifications far beyond the district in suburban Milwaukee.The Democrats are helping a far-right election denier who has become a pariah within her party in her race against a less extreme, but still election-denying, conservative. They hope that with a more vulnerable opponent, Democrats can win a seat held for decades by Republicans and deny the G.O.P. a veto-proof majority in the gerrymandered chamber.“Janel Brandtjen is as conservative as they come,” reads a postcard sent to Republican voters from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, which calls her “a conservative pro-Trump Republican.”The Feb. 21 primary, and the April 4 general election to follow, will serve as the latest test of how much appetite Republican voters have for the flavor of election denialism that fueled the party’s grass roots after former President Donald J. Trump’s 2020 election loss.The twist in the Wisconsin race is that both leading Republican candidates took significant public steps to try to overturn Mr. Trump’s defeat. One of them, however, Ms. Brandtjen, a state representative from Menomonee Falls, has so alienated members of her own party that she was kicked out of the State Assembly’s Republican caucus, leaving Democrats giddy about the prospect of facing her in a special election for a battleground district.“If Janel Brandtjen makes it through the primary, it’s going to allow people in Wisconsin to have a clear choice of what it is that they’re voting for in the election in April,” said Melissa Agard, the Democratic leader in the Republican-controlled Wisconsin Senate, who said the race would be more winnable for Democrats if Ms. Brandtjen, pronounced Bran-chen, triumphed in the primary.Politics Across the United StatesFrom the halls of government to the campaign trail, here’s a look at the political landscape in America.Union Support: In places like West Virginia, money from three major laws passed by Congress is pouring into the alternative energy industry and other projects. Democrats hope it will lead to increased union strength.A Chaotic Majority: The defining dynamic for House Republicans, who have a slim majority, may be the push and pull between the far right and the rest of the conference. Here is a closer look at the fractious caucus.A New Kind of Welfare: In a post-Roe world, some conservative thinkers are pushing Republicans to move on from Reagan-era family policy and send cash to families. A few lawmakers are listening.Flipping the Pennsylvania House: Democrats swept three special elections in solidly blue House districts, putting the party in the majority for the first time in a dozen years by a single seat.Some Republicans agree.The Republican State Leadership Committee, the leading national organization that backs G.O.P. state legislative candidates, is broadcasting digital ads promoting State Representative Dan Knodl before the primary. And Country First, a political action committee started by former Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois — who retired from Congress after voting to impeach Mr. Trump — has bought digital ads calling Ms. Brandtjen “an embarrassment.”Like Ms. Brandtjen, Mr. Knodl was among the 91 state legislators from several states who signed a letter urging Vice President Mike Pence to reject the certification of the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021. He shares Ms. Brandtjen’s vehement opposition to abortion rights.Ms. Brandtjen, who said in December 2020 that there was “no doubt” Mr. Trump had won that year’s election in Wisconsin, became a favorite of the former president’s in 2021 after being appointed to lead the Wisconsin Assembly’s elections committee.From that perch, she amplified a range of false claims about the 2020 election; invited conspiracy theorists to testify before the panel; sought to initiate an Arizona-style review of Wisconsin’s ballots; and appeared at rallies aiming to pressure her Republican colleagues to withdraw the state’s 2020 electoral votes — an impossible act under the U.S. Constitution. Mr. Trump praised her in his official statements and had her speak at a rally for midterm candidates he held in Wisconsin in August 2022.But Ms. Brandtjen, a longtime figure in local conservative politics dating to her time two decades ago as a gadfly at Menomonee Falls village board meetings, did not fully draw the ire of her fellow Republicans until she endorsed the Trump-backed primary opponent of Robin Vos, the speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, who has been the state’s most powerful Republican official since 2019, when Democrats took over the governor’s office.After Mr. Vos narrowly prevailed, he removed her as the elections committee chairwoman and organized his fellow Assembly Republicans to expel Ms. Brandtjen from the party’s caucus.Asked Monday about his preference in the State Senate special election, Mr. Vos replied in a text message: “Lol. Let me quote Sarah Huckabee Sanders, ‘normal vs crazy.’ I would vote normal.”A third Republican candidate in the race, Van Mobley, the president of the village of Thiensville, was among just a handful of Wisconsin elected officials who backed Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. He is far less known in the district than Ms. Brandtjen and Mr. Knodl, a bar owner from Germantown. None of the three Republican candidates responded to messages.The Democratic candidate, Jodi Habush Sinykin, a lawyer who is unopposed in her primary, is running television ads aimed at raising Ms. Brandtjen’s profile.A parade of women in Ms. Habush Sinykin’s ads call Ms. Brandtjen “too conservative” and cite her opposition to abortion rights and her citation as “pro-life legislator of the year” from a Wisconsin organization that opposes abortion rights.In all, Ms. Habush Sinykin has spent $166,000 on advertising, while neither Ms. Brandtjen nor Mr. Knodl has bought any television or digital ads, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm.Ms. Habush Sinykin declined a request to be interviewed about the campaign and her advertisements. Democratic polling of the race suggests that she could beat Ms. Brandtjen in a general election but would have a far tougher race against Mr. Knodl.“We’re continuing to highlight Janel Brandtjen and how she would be a disaster in the State Senate,” said Joe Oslund, a spokesman for the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. “We’re going to continue to put her extremism front and center for voters.”Wisconsin Republicans hold a 21-11 advantage in the State Senate after the state adopted new G.O.P.-drawn legislative maps ahead of the midterm elections. If a Republican wins the special election to the Senate, the party will hold a veto-proof majority and will have the votes to impeach Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, his appointees to state cabinet posts and state judges.Like many once solidly Republican suburban areas, the district, which covers parts of four counties in Milwaukee’s northern and northwestern suburbs, has trended toward Democrats in recent years. Mr. Trump won the district by 12 percentage points in 2016, but that advantage narrowed to five points in 2020. In 2018, Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, won the district by 20.5 points, but last year the G.O.P. nominee for governor, Tim Michels, carried it by just four points.The seat opened up when Alberta Darling, a 78-year-old moderate Republican who was first elected in 1992, announced her retirement in November. Mr. Evers praised her as “a diligent leader who’s always carried herself with poise, class, and grace.”Kitty Bennett More

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      Nikki Haley Threw It All Away

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      I remember the first time I saw Nikki Haley. It was in a high school gym before the 2012 South Carolina Republican presidential primary. Tim Scott, who was then a congressman, was holding a raucous town hall, and Ms. Haley was there to cheer him on. The first woman governor of South Carolina, the first Indian American ever elected to statewide office there, the youngest governor in the country. Whatever that “thing” is that talented politicians possess, Ms. Haley had it. People liked her, and more important, she seemed to like people. She talked with you, not to you, and made routine conversations feel special and important. She seemed to have unlimited potential.Then she threw it all away.No political figure better illustrates the tragic collapse of the modern Republican Party than Nikki Haley. There was a time not very long ago when she was everything the party thought it needed to win. She was a woman when the party needed more women, a daughter of immigrants when the party needed more immigrants, a young changemaker when the party needed younger voters, and a symbol of tolerance who took down the Confederate flag when the party needed more people of color and educated suburbanites.When Donald Trump ran in the 2016 Republican primary, Ms. Haley stood next to Senator Marco Rubio, the candidate she had endorsed, and eviscerated Mr. Trump as a racist the party must reject: “I will not stop until we fight a man that chooses not to disavow the K.K.K. That is not a part of our party. That is not who we want as president.” She was courageous, fighting on principle, a warrior who would never back down. Until she did.The politician who saw herself as a role model for women and immigrants transformed herself into everything she claimed to oppose: By 2021, Ms. Haley was openly embracing her inner MAGA with comments like, “Thank goodness for Donald Trump or we never would have gotten Kamala Harris to the border.” In one sentence, she managed to attack women and immigrants while praising the man she had vowed never to stop fighting. She had gone from saying “I have to tell you, Donald Trump is everything I taught my children not to do in kindergarten” to “I don’t want us to go back to the days before Trump.”As a former Republican political operative who worked in South Carolina presidential primaries, I look at Ms. Haley now, as she prepares to launch her own presidential campaign, with sadness tinged with regret for what could have been. But I’m not a bit surprised. Her rise and fall only highlights what many of us already knew: that Mr. Trump didn’t change the Republican Party, he revealed it. Ms. Haley, for all her talents, embodies the moral failure of the party in its drive to win at any cost, a drive so ruthless and insistent that it has transformed the G.O.P. into an autocratic movement. It’s not that she has changed positions to suit the political moment or even that she has abandoned beliefs she once claimed to be deeply held. It’s that the 2023 version of Ms. Haley is actively working against the core values that the 2016 Ms. Haley would have held to be the very foundation of her public life.By the time Ms. Haley resigned as ambassador to the United Nations, she had undergone a remarkable transformation.Samuel Corum for The New York TimesAs governor, her defining action was signing legislation removing the Confederate flag from the State Capitol. This came after the horrific massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, and after social media photos surfaced of the murderer holding Confederate flags. Ms. Haley compared the pain South Carolina Black people felt to the pain she had experienced when, as a young girl named Nimrata Nikki Randhawa, she had seen her immigrant father racially profiled as a potential thief at a store in Columbia. “I remember how bad that felt,” Ms. Haley told CNN in 2015. “That produce stand is still there, and every time I drive by it, I still feel that pain. I realized that that Confederate Flag was the same pain that so many people were feeling.”Then came Donald “you had some very fine people on both sides” Trump, and by 2019 Ms. Haley was defending the Confederate flag. In an interview that December, Ms. Haley told the conservative radio host Glenn Beck that the Charleston church shooter had “hijacked” the Confederate flag and that “people saw it as service, sacrifice and heritage.”In her 2019 book, “With All Due Respect,” the sort of autobiography candidates feel obligated to produce before launching a presidential campaign, Ms. Haley mentions Mr. Trump 163 times, overwhelmingly complimentary. In one lengthy passage, she insists that she was not referencing him in her 2016 Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union speech, when she called on Americans to resist “the siren call of the angriest voices.” It is always sad to see politicians lack the courage to say what should be said, but sadder still to see them speak up and later argue any courageous intent was misinterpreted.It didn’t have to be this way. No one forced Ms. Haley to accept Mr. Trump after he bragged about assaulting women in the “Access Hollywood” tape. No one forced her to defend the Confederate flag. No one forced her to assert Mr. Trump had “lost any sort of political viability” not long after the Capitol riot, then reverse herself, saying she “would not run if President Trump ran,” then prepare to challenge Mr. Trump in the primary. There is nothing new or novel about an ambitious politician engaging in transactional politics, but that’s a rare trifecta of flip-flop-flip.Mr. Trump has a pattern of breaking opponents who challenge him in a primary. Ms. Haley enters the race already broken. Had she remained the Nikki Haley who warned her party about Mr. Trump in 2016, she would have been perfectly positioned to run in 2024 as its savior. But as Ms. Haley knows all too well, Republicans aren’t looking to be saved. The latest Morning Consult poll shows Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida together drawing 79 percent of Republican primary voters. Ms. Haley is at 3 percent, one percentage point more than Liz Cheney.The female star of the current Republican Party isn’t the daughter of immigrants taking down the Confederate flag. It’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, who sells “Proud Christian Nationalist” T-shirts while becoming arguably the second-most powerful member of the House in little more than one two-year term. If Mr. Trump wins the Republican nomination (and I think he will), he may well choose the election-denying loser Kari Lake as his running mate, not the woman who twice won governor’s races the old-fashioned way: with the most votes once the ballots were counted.There is a great future behind Nikki Haley. She will never be the voice of truth she briefly was in 2016, and she will never be MAGA enough to satisfy the base of her party. But no one should feel sorry for Ms. Haley. It was her choice.Stuart Stevens (@stuartpstevens) is a former Republican political consultant who has worked on many campaigns for federal and state office, including the presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and George W. Bush.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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      Which Republicans Are Eyeing a 2024 Run?

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      Caroline Brehman/EPA, via ShutterstockHaley, 51, who served as United Nations ambassador under Trump, is expected to announce her bid on Wednesday, then visit New Hampshire and Iowa. She has called for “generational change” in the party, after three disappointing elections in a row in the Trump era. But in early surveys of the potential Republican field, she is polling in single digits. More

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      DeSantis’s Challenge: When, and How, to Counterattack Trump

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      As the former president lobs insults and calls him “Ron DeSanctimonious,” Gov. Ron DeSantis is carefully avoiding conflict. But if he runs for president as expected, a clash is inevitable.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida prizes preparation and the way it allows him to control his political narrative. But suddenly, he was on the verge of going off message.He had traveled to a Central Florida warehouse this past week to promote a $2 billion tax cut proposal when he was confronted with the inevitable: an especially ugly attack from former President Donald J. Trump that seemed to warrant a strong response.Mr. Trump had insinuated on social media that Mr. DeSantis behaved inappropriately with high school girls while he was a teacher in his early 20s. As a reporter asked for his reaction, the Florida governor — standing amid kitchen stoves and boxes of baby diapers — inhaled sharply. He straightened the papers in front of him and raised his open palms to interrupt the question.But instead of slamming the former president, Mr. DeSantis demurred.“I spend my time delivering results for the people of Florida and fighting against Joe Biden,” he said. “That’s how I spend my time. I don’t spend my time trying to smear other Republicans.”For months, Mr. DeSantis has pursued a strategy of conflict avoidance with his top rival in the shadow 2024 Republican presidential primary, delaying what is likely to be a hostile and divisive clash that forces the party’s voters to pick sides.But now he faces the pressing question of how long this approach can work. Mr. Trump, who has spent weeks trying to goad Mr. DeSantis into a fight with rude nicknames like “Ron DeSanctimonious,” is stepping up his social media-fueled assault, even as polls and interviews show that Mr. DeSantis has become the leading alternative to the former president for many voters and donors.Mr. DeSantis at the news conference on Tuesday in Ocala, Fla., where he promoted a tax cut proposal. He has shied away from attacking potential 2024 Republican presidential rivals.Doug Engle/Ocala Star-Banner, via Associated PressMr. DeSantis must also decide just how forcefully to counterattack once he engages with Mr. Trump, and whether he has left himself enough room to effectively parry the former president’s taunts and smears without offending his loyal supporters.Seventeen months before the Republican nominating convention, the future of Mr. Trump’s political movement seems likely to be decided by a battle between the 76-year-old former president, who has redefined the party in his image as centered primarily on grievances, and the 44-year-old governor, who has presented himself as a new and improved heir — younger, smarter and more strategic, policy-focused and disciplined.Many conservatives who dislike Mr. Trump’s constant dramas, the myriad criminal investigations he is facing and the stain of his efforts to cling to power after losing the 2020 election have put their hopes in a DeSantis candidacy, in a way their predecessors never did with any of Mr. Trump’s challengers in 2016.The Run-Up to the 2024 ElectionThe jockeying for the next presidential race is already underway.Education Issues: Donald J. Trump and possible Republican rivals, like Gov. Ron DeSantis, are seizing on race and gender issues in schools, but such messages had a mixed record in the midterms.No Invite for Trump: The Club for Growth, a conservative anti-tax group, has invited a half-dozen potential G.O.P. presidential candidates to its annual donor retreat — but not Mr. Trump.Falling in Line: With the vulnerabilities of Mr. Trump’s campaign becoming evident, the bickering among Democrats about President Biden’s potential bid for re-election has subsided.Harris’s Struggles: With Mr. Biden appearing all but certain to run again, concerns are growing over whether Kamala Harris, who is trying to define her vice presidency, will be a liability for the ticket.Mr. DeSantis has captured the attention of Republican voters and the party’s activist base by leaning into polarizing social issues from his perch as governor of a key battleground state, while so far refraining from attacking Mr. Trump and other potential 2024 rivals. He has instead insisted that he is focused on governing Florida, where the legislative session is scheduled to run from March to May.But Mr. DeSantis’s above-the-fray posture carries risk. One of the central tenets of the modern Republican Party under Mr. Trump has been the willingness to fight, ruthlessly and tirelessly.While the Florida governor has successfully portrayed himself to conservatives as a cultural warrior, his actual experience mixing it up with powerful opponents is thinner. He was barely tested last year during his re-election bid, his first since emerging as a national political figure.In a memorable debate moment, Mr. DeSantis stood by, stiffly staring ahead, as his Democratic opponent, Charlie Crist, demanded that the governor say whether he would serve all four years of a second term. When called upon next, Mr. DeSantis shot off a sharp canned retort, but the exchange left Mr. Crist looking like the more nimble combatant.Some deep-pocketed Republican donors have privately expressed concern about how Mr. DeSantis will perform when forced to directly engage with an opponent as combative and unbothered by traditional rules of decorum as Mr. Trump..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“No Republican has ever emerged from an exchange with Donald Trump looking stronger, so the natural tendency is to deflect his attacks and avoid confrontation,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist.“That’s easy to do, and maybe even wise when his barbs are confined to Truth Social,” Mr. Donovan added, referring to Mr. Trump’s social media site, where he has fired off many of his attacks. “The question is what happens when DeSantis finds himself on a debate stage opposite Trump, and G.O.P. voters want to see whether they are getting what they were promised.”Mr. Trump’s efforts to undermine Mr. DeSantis began with the “DeSanctimonious” nickname as the governor concluded his successful re-election campaign. Many conservatives — who had cheered Mr. Trump’s behavior when it was directed at Democrats — reacted angrily and were protective of Mr. DeSantis.Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Trump at a coronavirus response round-table event in Belleair, Fla., in July 2020.Al Drago for The New York TimesIt was a signal that Republicans might rally behind a single primary opponent to Mr. Trump in a way they did not in 2015 and 2016, when Mr. Trump called Ben Carson “pathological,” comparing him to a child molester, and insinuated that Senator Ted Cruz’s father had been linked to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.Since November, despite the criticism he faced at the time, Mr. Trump has periodically hit out at his potential rival, albeit to a relatively small audience. He posted his most recent innuendo about the governor on Truth Social, where he has just under five million followers. And he has insulted Mr. DeSantis in casual conversations, describing him as “Meatball Ron,” an apparent dig at his appearance, or “Shutdown Ron,” a reference to restrictions the governor put in place at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.Mr. Trump’s team has been amassing data about Mr. DeSantis’s actions in response to the pandemic, in part to try to depict him as a phony.So far, Mr. DeSantis has countered Mr. Trump’s attacks with occasional needling aimed at the former president’s anxiety about being labeled a loser. While Republicans have suffered through three disappointing election cycles with Mr. Trump as the face of the party, Mr. DeSantis won re-election resoundingly in November.“Go check out the scoreboard from last Tuesday night,” Mr. DeSantis told reporters days after the midterm elections, when he was asked about Mr. Trump’s criticism.A spokesman for Mr. DeSantis declined to comment. But a person familiar with the governor’s thinking said he was likely to stick with a measured approach. That means that Republicans hoping for a more aggressive stance by Mr. DeSantis, who is said to be keenly aware of how many of his supporters also like Mr. Trump, are almost certain to be disappointed.“DeSantis has been getting the benefit of an announced presidential candidate — and all the media attention that comes with that — without having to get involved in every dogfight, because he is operating under the auspices of a governor who is doing his job,” said Josh Holmes, a Republican strategist and top adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader.Taking on Mr. Trump is complicated. Republican rivals have been unable for seven years to thwart his personal attacks or to dissuade an abiding loyalty to the former president among about one-third of the party’s voters.There is often little room to question or debate Mr. Trump without being cast by him and his allies as a political adversary, or even a traitor to the country. Such slash-and-burn tactics are a staple not just of his political life, but also of his decades-long career in business before his White House tenure.“I don’t think people fully understand how ruthless he is,” said Jack O’Donnell, a former casino executive who published a book in 1991 about working with Mr. Trump, and who said he faced vicious threats when he did. “He has no boundaries. And when you’re on the receiving end of that, you wonder what’s next.”It’s unclear how long Mr. DeSantis can steer clear of the former president while both are anchored to Florida, their home state.On Feb. 21, the super PAC supporting Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign will hold its first fund-raiser of the 2024 election at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla.But just days later, Mr. DeSantis will visit the same 16-mile-long barrier island, where he will host a dayslong “issues forum,” a private event for Republican donors and policy experts to meet with the governor and discuss issues that are likely to be central in a presidential campaign, according to two people who insisted on anonymity to discuss plans for an event that has not yet been announced.That Mr. DeSantis sees no currency in directly taking on Mr. Trump was underscored by the target the Florida governor preferred to aim at this past week.At a different event, Mr. DeSantis held court for about an hour behind what looked like a replica of a cable news set, sitting in the center like an anchor, with a busy digital background behind him that read “TRUTH” — an echo of the name of Mr. Trump’s website. He excoriated a favored enemy, the mainstream news media, and called for rolling back the free press’s legal protections against defamation suits.“It’s a really tough situation for DeSantis,” said Tommy Vietor, a Democratic strategist who worked for Senator Barack Obama in his brutal primary race against Hillary Clinton in 2008. “If he starts punching at Trump, he’s going to anger a lot of the people he needs to vote for him.”But, Mr. Vietor noted, “if you are viewed as weak and cower in response to attacks from Trump, that will be seen as a proxy for how you will be seen as a Republican nominee and how you’ll be as president.” More

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      Will Trump and Biden Gang Up on DeSantis?

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      If President Biden sometimes sounded a lot like Donald Trump during his State of the Union address, boasting about a record of economic nationalism, the imitation may soon run the other way. Biden’s attacks on congressional Republicans for being allegedly eager to cut Medicare and Social Security were a clear preview of how he hopes to run against the G.O.P. in 2024. But they were also a possible preview of how Trump may try to reclaim his own party’s nomination — by reprising his 2016 campaign’s rejection of Tea Party austerity and attacking potential rivals (which means, primarily, Ron DeSantis) as libertarian dogmatists who don’t care about the middle class.That strategy was previewed a bit recently by Joseph Zeballos-Roig and Shelby Talcott in Semafor. Their subject was the so-called Fair Tax, a longstanding fascination for certain right-wing activists that proposes to replace the U.S. tax code with a sales tax. This would yield certain advantages in economic efficiency; it would also result in a dramatic tax increase on the middle class.In the heyday of the Tea Party, when implausible policy proposals were all the rage, the Fair Tax was endorsed by many of today’s 2024 hopefuls: by Nikki Haley, Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo and, yes, by DeSantis himself. Which gives Trump a license to accuse all these potential rivals of supporting a middle-class tax hike — and the Semafor writers quote a Trumpworld source basically promising an attack along those lines, to force Trump’s rivals to “answer for what they supported and what they’ve advocated in the past.”That same quote could easily apply to the proposed entitlement changes that many Republicans (again, including DeSantis) embraced in the same era, under the influence of Paul Ryan’s budget blueprints. Those proposals were serious rather than crankish, if ill-timed for a moment when there was more fiscal space than deficit hawks believed. But they were also seriously unpopular, and Trump’s discarding of them was crucial to his success in 2016. And having discarded them then, he’s well positioned to go after DeSantis and others now — in imitation of not only his prior campaign but also, as National Review’s Philip Klein points out, the strategy pursued by Mitt Romney in the 2012 primaries, when he sank Rick Perry’s candidacy in part by blasting Perry for calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.”This means that the non-Trump G.O.P. can expect to spend the looming presidential race facing similar attacks from the Biden White House and the Trump campaign. Making the similarity too obvious could backfire on Trump. But the peril for the G.O.P. is that even if Trump can’t beat DeSantis by harping on his past positions, he will still be reinforcing for swing voters the liberal narrative that (non-Trump) Republicans care only about the rich.In one sense that narrative shouldn’t be too hard for DeSantis to counteract, since his record as governor of Florida is more moderate than libertarian — with increases in teacher pay, support for environmental protection and so on — and it’s not clear that voters care that much about long-ago votes if they aren’t tied to specific policy proposals now.But the question is what exactly DeSantis’s more of-the-moment policy proposals would be, in a fiscal landscape constrained by inflation for the first time in decades. There’s certainly a scenario in which he abjures austerity and embraces pro-family and industrial-policy spending, maybe even finds a few modest tax increases that own the professional-class liberals, and thereby evades the Trump-Biden pincer.But it won’t be easy to pull off. Especially because part of Trump’s strength has always been that he doesn’t need the Republican Party’s donor class in the way that normal politicians do, while DeSantis will need to rally that class if he’s going to dethrone the former president. And the price of their support will be, most likely, something that isn’t particularly popular: not an idea from the fringes like Fair Tax or a big entitlement overhaul proposal, necessarily, but at the very least a budget-eating tax cut that probably won’t be populist in any way.Again, 2012 is an interesting precedent. Part of what killed Romney in that general election was that even though he championed Social Security against Perry and declined to embrace any crankish tax proposals, he still ended up saddled with a tax overhaul plan that donors and activists liked but that was easy for the Democrats to attack.It’s not hard to imagine a DeSantis candidacy that rallies the establishment and defeats Trump only to end up in a similar general‌-‌election position. Which suggests one way in which Trump’s populist attacks on other Republicans could actually be helpful to the party’s chances. They’ll leave no doubt, for DeSantis or any other figure, about the political weaknesses of traditional right-wing policymaking. And they might force an early adaptation that otherwise could come, like Romney’s attempted pivots in 2012, as too little and too late.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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      in Elections

      A Close Look at the Chaotic House Republican Majority

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      C-SPAN video of the House speaker election in January. The tumult that broke out last month during the election of Kevin McCarthy for speaker illustrated the potential for profound dysfunction in the new House Republican majority. And the spectacle created by Republican lawmakers at the State of the Union address showed the unruly behavior of […] More

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      in Elections

      In Post-Roe World, These Conservatives Embrace New Benefits for Parents

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      Some conservative thinkers are pushing Republicans to move on from Reagan-era family policy and send cash to families. A few lawmakers are listening.Sending cash to parents, with few strings attached. Expanding Medicaid. Providing child care subsidies to families earning six figures.The ideas may sound like part of a progressive platform. But they are from an influential group of conservative intellectuals with a direct line to elected politicians. They hope to represent the future of a post-Trump Republican Party — if only, they say, their fellow travelers would abandon Reaganomics once and for all.These conservatives generally oppose abortion rights. They’re eager to promote marriage, worried about the nation’s declining fertility rate and often resist the trans rights movement.But they also acknowledge that with abortion now illegal or tightly restricted in half the states, more babies will be born to parents struggling to pay for the basics — rent, health care, groceries and child care — when prices are high and child care slots scarce.“A full-spectrum family policy has to be about encouraging and supporting people in getting married and starting families,” said Oren Cass, executive director of the American Compass think tank. “It has to be pro-life, but also supportive of those families as they are trying to raise kids in an economic environment where that has become a lot harder to do.”The idea of spending heavily on family benefits remains an outlier within the Republican Party, which only recently rejected Democrats’ attempts to extend pandemic-era child tax credits.But a number of conservative members of Congress have embraced new benefits for parents, including Mr. Cass’s former boss, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, as well as the senators Marco Rubio of Florida, Josh Hawley of Missouri and J.D. Vance of Ohio.And in President Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, he called on Republicans to join him in providing families with child care, paid leave, child tax credits and affordable housing.Some conservative thinkers believe that many young children are better off at home and are skeptical of policies that would place more in center-based care.Jason Henry for The New York TimesNow, Mr. Cass and conservative allies are hoping to shape ideas for the 2024 Republican presidential primary and beyond, targeting ambitious governors who have emphasized making their states family-friendly, such as Ron DeSantis of Florida, Kristi Noem of South Dakota and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia.A key priority for this new network of conservative thinkers is for the federal government to send parents cash monthly for each child, a sea change from decades of Republican thinking on family policy. They hope the cash could encourage people to have more children, and allow more parents to stay home full- or part-time when their children are young.The Run-Up to the 2024 ElectionThe jockeying for the next presidential race is already underway.Education Issues: Donald J. Trump and possible Republican rivals, like Gov. Ron DeSantis, are seizing on race and gender issues in schools, but such messages had a mixed record in the midterms.No Invite for Trump: The Club for Growth, a conservative anti-tax group, has invited a half-dozen potential G.O.P. presidential candidates to its annual donor retreat — but not Mr. Trump.Falling in Line: With the vulnerabilities of Mr. Trump’s campaign becoming evident, the bickering among Democrats about President Biden’s potential bid for re-election has subsided.Harris’s Struggles: With Mr. Biden appearing all but certain to run again, concerns are growing over whether Kamala Harris, who is trying to define her vice presidency, will be a liability for the ticket.“The work of the family is real work,” said Erika Bachiochi, a legal scholar who calls herself a pro-life feminist and has written influential essays and books.She and others debate to what extent benefits should be tied to work requirements, but even the more stringent proposals do not require full-time work. These conservatives believe that many young children are better off at home and are skeptical of policies that would place more in child care centers. And they point to polls that show many parents would prefer to cut their work hours and take care of their babies and toddlers themselves.In a Republican Party hoping to become the party of parents, these conservative intellectuals do not share the outraged tone of right-wing activists like Christopher Rufo, the “parental rights” crusader battling what he sees as leftist ideology in school curriculums.While they may agree with much of that cultural critique, supporting families financially, they say, is a pragmatic way to prop up conservative values alongside new restrictions on abortion..Oren Cass said that his ideas on policy had been shaped by his own family life.Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesIn arguing this, Ms. Bachiochi, Mr. Cass and others in this network are making a big ask: for Republicans to reject what they call the outdated, rigid agenda of the Reagan era, which not only cut working parents from welfare programs, but also vilified mothers receiving public benefits, often in starkly racist terms. If Republicans are to grow support among working-class, multiethnic voters, they say, the party must match pro-family rhetoric with pro-family investments.The group has founded think tanks, published statements of principle and organized discussions with policymakers to push its cause. Mr. Cass, 39, said his ideas on policy had been shaped by his own family life. His wife has her own career, and they both work from home in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts.Mr. Cass served as the domestic policy director for Mr. Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign; in 2020, he founded American Compass, a think tank that has tried to build conservative momentum for more generous government support to working families. Its priorities include child cash benefits, wage subsidies and even reviving the labor movement.That some conservatives have landed on what amounts to a new entitlement program seems to speak to the economic plight of many families. The pressures of wage stagnation, low marriage rates and the opioid epidemic have helped erode Republican anti-government orthodoxy, said Seth Dowland, a historian of the family values movement and professor of religion at Pacific Lutheran University. “There are some Republicans looking at this and saying, ‘We need to invest in rebuilding families and rebuilding communities, because it’s dire in some places — and it’s our voters,’” he said.Ms. Bachiochi, the mother of seven children, 4 to 21, is a fellow at two think tanks, the Abigail Adams Institute and the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her husband is a tech executive and, she said, much more of a baby person than she is. In an interview, she recalled struggling to get reading and writing done while her babies were napping.Left to right, Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, Representative Ann Wagner of Missouri and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida introducing their paid family leave legislation in 2019. Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesShe celebrates mothers finding paid work that adds meaning to their lives, but believes government should help parents of both sexes spend more time on child-rearing.The job of parents, in her view, is to create “adults with virtue who can go out and be good friends, spouses, good employees, good citizens.”The primary problem, she said, is that “the family is so overtaxed economically that they don’t have time with one another to do that work” of raising children, which is, by nature, time intensive.Her own ideas have shifted radically over time. In the mid-1990s, as a student at Middlebury College in Vermont, she volunteered for Bernie Sanders, then a congressman. But she also interned for a Washington bipartisan group hoping to shape President Bill Clinton’s welfare reforms, which curtailed cash payments to single mothers, while tying remaining benefits to strict work requirements. Through that experience, she said, she came to appreciate that some members of both parties shared a sincere commitment to alleviating poverty.Since then, Ms. Bachiochi has embraced her Catholic roots, in part through Alcoholics Anonymous. She now considers herself “center right,” she said, but more often argues with Republicans than with Democrats.“The libertarian right is a little bit blind” to the economic conditions families live under, Ms. Bachiochi said, noting that many parents struggle with the low pay and irregular hours of service jobs, working long days while leaving their children with less-than-ideal care.Patrick T. Brown, 33, a former congressional staffer and current fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, previously cared for his children full-time. Now, he works part-time from home in Columbia, S.C., and takes charge of his four children after school while his wife works as a college professor. He supports child cash benefits, expanding Medicaid to more mothers and increasing the supply of affordable housing.“There are definitely some conservatives who still point to the 1950s as a normative vision for family life,” Mr. Brown said, referencing the “Leave It to Beaver” white, suburban family with a stay-at-home wife.“That debate is stale,” he added. “We shouldn’t expect we can turn back the clock — and we shouldn’t really want to.”Mr. Brown, Mr. Cass and Ms. Bachiochi are well known on Capitol Hill.Their influence can been seen in Mr. Romney’s bill to expand the child tax credit, which would provide families earning up to $400,000 with $350 in cash per month for each child under 6, and $250 per month for children 6 to 17.Mr. Romney and Mr. Rubio, Republican of Florida, have a separate proposal to allow workers to draw from future Social Security payments to fund parental leave.And last year, Senator Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina, introduced a bill that would subsidize child care for families earning up to 150 percent of their state’s median income, which in some states approaches $200,000 for a family of four.These proposals have attracted criticism from both conservatives and liberals.Scott Winship, director of the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, applauded any attempt to move away from conservative social policy based in “cultural grievance.” But he argued that many of the proposals were overly generous to middle-class and upper middle-class parents.“I’d focus much more strongly on low-income families,” he said. “We have this huge deficit, and we need to start husbanding our resources in a more serious way.”A cost-conscious approach has also been embraced by many Republican governors, who over the past year have tried to address child care shortages primarily through deregulation — increasing class sizes in child care programs, for example.Both parties are still deeply divided over whether benefits should be tied to work requirements — a core belief of centrists like Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a Democrat, and conservatives like Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a Republican.When Senator Romney first introduced his Family Security Act in 2021, it offered cash to parents no matter their work history. After an outcry from Republicans and Mr. Cass, he revised the proposal in 2022 to require $10,000 in family income to receive the full benefit.Senator Hawley of Missouri, a close ally of former President Donald J. Trump, has also proposed monthly cash payments to parents of children younger than 13 who meet a modest work requirement.Progressives have criticized these plans for favoring married couples and leaving out caregivers without earnings, such as college students, parents with disabilities or retired grandparents.The family policy ideas in the Democrats’ Build Back Better bill were more sweeping. But none became law.Now, some Republicans and Democrats say that a bipartisan deal on family policy would likely require Republicans to rally around proposals like Senator Romney’s — a difficult goal.Senator Romney is committed to building support for “federal policies to be more pro-family,” he said in a written statement. “This includes earning support from Republican colleagues.” More