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      Upheaval Continues at DeSantis Super PAC as Another Top Official Departs

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      The firing of the new chief executive creates more uncertainty at the well-funded group that has played a key role in the Florida governor’s effort to win the Republican primary.The super PAC supporting Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in his presidential campaign, which has seen a series of changes in the last month, went through another shake-up this week when it fired its new chief executive officer who had stepped in just nine days earlier, according to two people briefed on the matter.Kristin Davison, who was appointed chief executive after serving as chief operating officer of the group, Never Back Down, was fired and replaced by Scott Wagner, a longtime friend of Mr. DeSantis who was also named chairman after the departure of another close DeSantis ally, Adam Laxalt, who resigned from that role just a week ago.Ms. Davison was not alone in being fired, according to the people briefed on the matter. A spokeswoman for the group, Erin Perrine, was dismissed, they said, with more departures possible.The changes come as the primary enters the intense final weeks before the first nominating contest, and as Mr. DeSantis was in the Iowa celebrating the final stop in his tour of the state’s 99 counties — an achievement made possible by the organizational muscle and money of his allied super PAC, which is suffering its third round of upheaval in recent weeks.It was unclear who was behind the dismissals or the cause. Ms. Davison and Ms. Perrine did not respond to requests for comment. Ms. Davison’s departure was first reported by Politico.“Scott Wagner will now serve as chairman of the board and interim C.E.O. of Never Back Down,” said Jess Szymanski, a spokeswoman for the group. “Never Back Down has the most organized, advanced caucus operation of anyone in the 2024 primary field, and we look forward to continuing that great work to help elect Gov. DeSantis the next president of the United States.”The latest shake-up caps a turbulent period at Never Back Down, which was formed earlier this year, well before Mr. DeSantis became a candidate for president, and sought to take on a number of functions that a campaign traditionally performs, such as building out a field operation in several states.Recently, the group’s senior officials engaged in internal battles as close allies of Mr. DeSantis based in Tallahassee created a new outside group, Fight Right, to which Never Back Down was expected to transfer $1 million. The fact of that transfer, which was to fund attacks on Mr. DeSantis’s closest rival in the presidential primary, Nikki Haley, was called “exceedingly objectionable” by another Never Back Down official, Ken Cuccinelli, in an email to colleagues.On the eve of Thanksgiving, the group’s chief executive officer since it began, Chris Jankowski, resigned, saying he had issues that went “well beyond” strategic differences. Five days later, Mr. Laxalt left, saying in a resignation letter that it was time to spend time with his family, having joined the group right after his own unsuccessful Senate campaign in Nevada ended last year.It was unclear if those events related to the firings, which occurred shortly afterward.Ms. Perrine and Ms. Davison both work with the group’s main strategist, Jeff Roe, at his company, Axiom Strategies. Mr. Roe filled a number of roles at Never Back Down with Axiom employees early on. Mr. Roe had a dispute with Mr. Wagner right before Fight Right was created during one of the group’s meetings at its Atlanta offices, according to two people with knowledge of the events.Meanwhile, the new super PAC, Fight Right, has been welcomed by the DeSantis campaign. Mr. DeSantis and his wife are said to have been troubled by Never Back Down’s advertising for many months. While campaigns are prohibited from directly coordinating with super PACs, Mr. DeSantis’s campaign manager, James Uthmeier, wrote in a memo last Monday that Fight Right would provide “welcomed air support” with television ads. The memo suggested Never Back Down would focus on its “field operation and ground game.”“Fight Right’s mission could not have come at a better time,” Mr. Uthmeier wrote. More

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      DeSantis Finishes His Iowa 99, Hoping for a Bump Against Trump

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      The Florida governor said his tour of all the state’s counties was evidence of his commitment to Iowa voters, even as he remained far behind Donald Trump in state polls.Ron DeSantis took the stage in Jasper County in Iowa on Saturday, heralding his appearance as the culmination of his tour of the state’s 99 counties, and hoping to inject enthusiasm into his well-funded but struggling presidential campaign.The Florida governor, who is running well behind the front-runner, former President Donald J. Trump, said he was fulfilling his campaign’s promise to complete the “Full Grassley” — so named because the state’s long-serving senator, Chuck Grassley, visits every Iowa county each year — and positioned himself as the candidate of humility, willing to travel the state and meet voters, in contrast to Mr. Trump, who has largely eschewed the retail politics of the state. “That should show you that I consider myself a servant, not a ruler,” Mr. DeSantis said, speaking to a crowd of several hundred voters inside the Thunderdome, a spacious restaurant and entertainment venue in Newton, about 30 miles east of Des Moines. “You’re not any better than the people that you are elected by.”The DeSantis campaign, which hung signs around the venue proclaiming a “Full DeSantis,” pointed out that each of the past three Republican winners of a contested Iowa caucus — Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor — had also completed the 99-county circuit (though none of them ultimately won the Republican nomination).Iowa voters have more than a month to deliver an upset win to Mr. DeSantis, and many in attendance on Saturday said it mattered to them that he had made the effort.“I think that’s kind of neat, when a candidate is willing to get out of Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, the big cities, get out and see people across the state,” said Richard Roorda, 62. “I think that is a big deal.”But the fanfare belied a difficult truth for Mr. DeSantis: Despite checking all the boxes of a successful Iowa campaign, including racking up endorsements from prominent state figures, he still trails Mr. Trump by a significant margin in state polls, and he has even lost ground in recent months to Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina.Mr. DeSantis spoke at small venues throughout the state in an effort to convince Iowans that he was more connected to them than Mr. Trump.Vincent Alban/Reuters“Mechanically, he’s doing it all the way you need to do it,” said Doug Gross, a longtime Republican strategist and former nominee for Iowa governor who has endorsed Ms. Haley. “The trouble is, he’s just not a very good candidate.”Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Trump held dueling events on Saturday, with Mr. Trump speaking at a rally less than 100 miles away in Cedar Rapids.Bob Vander Plaats, an influential Iowa evangelical leader who endorsed Mr. DeSantis last month, painted a contrast between the Florida governor and Mr. Trump.“We need somebody who fears God, they don’t believe they are God,” Mr. Vander Plaats told the crowd in Newton.The Iowa tour was largely managed by Mr. DeSantis’s super PAC, Never Back Down, which has faced setbacks in recent weeks, including the departure of both its chairman and its chief executive. But Mr. DeSantis’s Iowa barnstorm has generated sizable crowds in small-town venues. At each stop, he has made a point of telling his audience how many counties he has visited so far.Many Iowans who have shown up for his events have said that they expected presidential candidates to present themselves in person to win their votes — and praised Mr. DeSantis for doing so.On Saturday, he recounted a few of his family’s favorite stops, like playing baseball at the Field of Dreams in Dubuque County, and visiting a statue of Albert, the world’s largest bull, a tourist attraction in Audubon County.But a few of Mr. DeSantis’s Iowa county visits have seemed perfunctory. In August, the governor stopped at a train depot in Manly, in Worth County, where about a dozen people watched as his young children clambered aboard the trains and blared the horn of a truck before the governor, his family and their entourage boarded the bus for their next destination.And past caucus winners like Mr. Santorum and Mr. Huckabee were seen as anti-establishment candidates who mustered support from evangelical communities to upset more mainstream Republicans. Mr. DeSantis has the unenviable task of running against a popular former president who comes across as anything but establishment, yet maintains a strong lead in the state.Voters also said they were encouraged by Mr. DeSantis receiving the endorsement of Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican who is popular in the state. Ms. Reynolds appeared onstage Saturday, praising Mr. DeSantis for visiting each county.“Iowans want the opportunity to look you in the eye, they want the opportunity to size that candidate up a little bit,” she said.The DeSantis campaign has highlighted his effort to meet with Iowa caucusgoers in a state that values in-person encounters with presidential candidates. Vincent Alban/ReutersMr. DeSantis also made a new commitment during his remarks: He said that, if he were elected president, he would move the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Agriculture to Iowa as part of an effort to decrease the influence of government agencies in Washington. “You guys will have first dibs on the Department of Agriculture,” he said.Mr. DeSantis also tried to convince voters who backed Mr. Trump that he would push for similar policies, but without the drama. One key difference, he told the crowd, was that he could serve for two consecutive terms if elected.“Two terms is critical,” said Tom Turner, 70, adding that he came to the event with some reservations about Mr. DeSantis, but that the governor had allayed them.“I was a little concerned about whether he was personally warm — he is,” Mr. Turner said.Nicholas Nehamas More

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      McCarthy Eyes Exit From House After Speakership Loss

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      The California Republican is still angry at his ouster and has struggled to acclimate. His colleagues expect him to retire, but he has taken his time deciding.At an emotional evening news conference immediately after he was removed as speaker of the House, Representative Kevin McCarthy gave an inconclusive answer about whether he would remain in Congress.“I’ll look at that,” he said then.Over the past two months, Mr. McCarthy has given the life of a rank-and-file member a hard look and discovered it to be a painful existence after having been at the pinnacle of his party in the House for more than a decade.These days, Mr. McCarthy, famous for his preternaturally sunny California disposition, has been hard to cheer up. He no longer attends the conference meetings he used to preside over, and at times has struggled to contain his anger at the Republicans who deposed him. (He denied the accusation from one of them, Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee, that he elbowed him in the kidney in a basement hallway of the Capitol.)He has also struggled to make peace with the idea that it’s time to go, even as California’s Dec. 8 filing deadline to run for re-election draws near and his colleagues expect him to leave.“When you spend two decades building something, it’s difficult to end that chapter,” said Representative Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina, one of Mr. McCarthy’s closest friends in Congress. “His life has been building the Republican majority and attaining the third-highest office in the land. It is difficult for any mortal to deal with an abrupt end and determine his next chapter.”But the current chapter has grown increasingly untenable for him.As he has made his way around the Capitol contemplating his options for the future and cycling through various stages of grief over his merciless political downfall, Mr. McCarthy has retained small perks from his old life that serve mostly as painful reminders of all that has been taken away.He still has the kind of security detail furnished to the person second in line to the presidency, but he has been removed from the speaker’s suite of offices in the middle of the Capitol that serve as the building’s power center. He has participated in high-profile engagements, such as a recent speech to the Oxford Union and an interview at the New York Times DealBook summit, but those were booked before his ouster.Many colleagues still consider him a skillful convener of people with institutional knowledge about the workings of a Republican majority he helped build. But his inexperienced successor, Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, has not sought him out for any advice on managing the fractious Republican conference. And Mr. McCarthy has had to watch from the sidelines as Mr. Johnson has made some of the same choices that led to his own downfall — such as working with Democrats to avert a government shutdown — and, at least so far, paid little price.Mr. McCarthy has labored to acclimate.“After any stressful situation, it takes a while for the body to normalize,” Mr. McHenry said of the former speaker. “And when you talk about the extremes of political ambition, which is required to attain the speakership, it is even more dramatic to wring those chemicals out of your body to return to being a normal human.”On Instagram, where Mr. McCarthy recently shared pictures of his dogs hanging out in his Bakersfield, Calif., district office, many of the people commenting on the picture chimed in to remind him that despite his handle, “@SpeakerMcCarthy,” he was the speaker no more. (The title is technically his for life.)House Republicans are beginning to move past Mr. McCarthy’s removal as they navigate business with Mr. Johnson at the helm. But Mr. McCarthy has not finished processing his defenestration. He is someone who has never enjoyed being alone, and an emptier schedule leaves more time to spend in one’s own head.As unpleasant as it may be to hang around Congress in his diminished state, Mr. McCarthy has been forthright about the difficulty of deciding whether to leave politics, and when.“I just went through losing, so you go through different stages,” Mr. McCarthy said in a brief interview after his DealBook appearance on Wednesday in New York City. “I have to know that when I go, that there’s a place for me, and what am I going to do, and is that best?”Mr. McCarthy booked a speaking engagement at the DealBook summit while he was still speaker. Amir Hamja/The New York TimesMr. McCarthy said he was taking his time in making a decision about whether to leave Congress, in part because he did not want to make a hasty decision he might come to regret.“I have to know that if I decided that wasn’t for me and I leave, I don’t want a year from now to think ‘Aw, I regret — I shouldn’t have left,’” he said. “So if I take a little longer than most people normally, that’s just what I’m going through.”Some center-leaning Republicans are pressing him to stay.“You have a lot of members who haven’t been here that long,” said Sarah Chamberlain, the president of the Republican Main Street Partnership, an outside organization allied with the congressional caucus of the same name. “You need some senior statesmen to teach the members how the process works, and he’s one of the last ones left.”Ms. Chamberlain added, “On a personal level, I can completely understand if he decides to leave. On an institutional level, it would be a shame to lose him.”If Mr. McCarthy were to exit Congress right away, it would also shrink the already-slim Republican majority, which went from four to three seats with the expulsion on Friday of Representative George Santos of New York. (As Mr. Johnson presided over the vote to oust Mr. Santos, Mr. McCarthy did not show up to register a position.)Still, it is highly unusual for a former speaker to choose to stick around. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi has broken with tradition and embraced her emeritus status, describing herself as “emancipated” from the pressures of her old job.In September, the 83-year-old San Francisco Democrat surprised some of her colleagues by announcing she would run for another term. But Ms. Pelosi is at the end of a career that made history — she was the first woman to hold the post of speaker — and was able to leave her post, which she held for a cumulative eight years, on her own terms. The new generation of Democratic leaders in the House treats her with reverence and continues to solicit her advice on big decisions.In contrast, the awkward position of Mr. McCarthy, 58, who held the top job for little more than eight months and made history as the first speaker ever ousted, has been all too clearly on display.Ever since January, when Mr. McCarthy agreed to rule changes to appease the hard right in order to win the gavel, he and his allies had anticipated that his speakership could end exactly the way it finally did. But that has not left him feeling any less bitter about it.Though Mr. McCarthy denied intentionally shoving Mr. Burchett, he responded angrily to the accusation.“If I hit somebody, they would know it,” he told reporters, his voice rising with irritation. “If I kidney punched someone, they would be on the ground.”He has gone on television to scold Mr. Burchett and the other colleagues who brought him down, and pushed the Republican conference to exact some retribution against them even though there appears to be little appetite to do so.“I don’t believe the conference will ever heal if there’s no consequences for the action,” Mr. McCarthy told CNN in a recent interview. He also said that Mr. Burchett and Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who also voted to oust him, “care a lot about press, not about policy.”Despite his inner turmoil and painful power detox, Mr. McCarthy has made it clear that he aims to use his remaining time, influence and campaign money to help his party keep control of the House. That may also serve a rejuvenating purpose for him if he chooses to intervene in congressional races to try to defeat the Republican members who voted to oust him and bolster the candidacies of those aligned with him.“I may not be speaker,” he said during a recent appearance on “Fox & Friends.” “But I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure Republicans win.”Robert Jimison More

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      Book Review: ‘The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,’ by Tim Alberta

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      In his new book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” the journalist Tim Alberta subjects his faith’s embrace of right-wing extremism to critical scrutiny.THE KINGDOM, THE POWER, AND THE GLORY: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, by Tim AlbertaWhat would Jesus do? It’s a question that the political journalist Tim Alberta takes seriously in his brave and absorbing new book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” pressing the evangelicals he meets to answer a version of it — even if a number of them clearly do not want to.Alberta, a staff writer for The Atlantic, asks how so many devout Christians could be in thrall to a figure like Donald Trump, whom he calls a “lecherous, impenitent scoundrel.” According to one of the scoops in the book, Trump himself used decidedly less vivid language to describe the evangelicals who supported Senator Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican primaries, telling an Iowa Republican official: “You know, these so-called Christians hanging around with Ted are some real pieces of shit.” Many of Cruz’s evangelical supporters eventually backed Trump in 2016; in the 2020 election, Trump increased his share of the white evangelical vote even more, to a whopping 84 percent.This phenomenon, Alberta says, cannot simply be a matter of evangelicals mobilizing against abortion access and trying to save lives; after all, they have kept remarkably quiet when it comes to showing compassion for refugees or curbing gun violence, which is now, as Alberta notes, the leading cause of death for children in the United States.What he finds instead is that under the veneer of Christian modesty simmers an explosive rage, propelling Americans who piously declare their fealty to Jesus to act as though their highest calling is to own the libs. No wonder the popular image of evangelicalism, according to one disillusioned preacher, has devolved into “Mister Rogers with a blowtorch.”Alberta’s previous book, “American Carnage” (2019), detailed Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party. His new book reads like a sequel, tracing the Trumpian takeover of American evangelicalism, but this time Alberta begins with his very personal connection to his subject. He is “a believer in Jesus Christ,” he writes, “the son of an evangelical minister, raised in a conservative church in a conservative community,” a suburb of Detroit.In the summer of 2019, just after “American Carnage” was published, his father died suddenly of a heart attack. At Cornerstone, his father’s church, some of the congregants approached the grieving Alberta not to console him but to complain about his journalism, demanding to know if he was on “the right side.” One church elder wrote a letter to Alberta complaining about the “deep state” and accusing him of treason.The experience was so surreal that Alberta decided to find out what had happened to his religious community. During Trump’s presidency, his father had moved farther to the right, but despite their differences their love for each other was undiminished. Alberta interviewed his father’s handpicked successor, Chris Winans, who is “not a conservative Republican” and spoke candidly about how “God’s people” have always had to contend with worldly temptations that could lead them astray: “I want to be in power, I want to have influence, I want to be prosperous, I want to have security.” Many of Winans’s congregants left for a church down the road that preached the kind of “blood-and-soil Christian nationalism” they wanted to hear. “The church is supposed to challenge us,” Winans says. “But a lot of these folks don’t want to be challenged.”“The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory” charts a transformation in evangelicalism, from a midcentury moment when white American Christians were such a dominant force in the country that many could “afford to forget politics” to a time when many more feel, as one prominent pastor puts it, “under siege.” Alberta suggests that this panic has less to do with any existential threat to American Christianity than a rattled presumption of privilege. “Humility doesn’t come easy to the American evangelical,” he writes. “We are an immodest and excessively indulged people.”A crisis of leadership has compounded the problem. Alberta offers a deeply reported account of the cascading scandals that have consumed Liberty University, an “insular, paranoid family business” coupling authoritarian rules with “flagrant misconduct.” (Jerry Falwell Jr., the former president of Liberty and the son of its founder, was already indulging his “tyrannical instincts” long before “he became ensnared in a love triangle with his wife and a Miami pool boy,” Alberta writes.) Another chapter describes the struggle to bring to account pastors who victimized congregants in a church that has become “institutionally desensitized” to sexual abuse.Alberta takes heart that new congregations are springing up in unlikely places. Attending a service in an Atlanta distillery, he sees people who are there “to be discipled, not demagogued.” But his reporting keeps leading him to opportunistic impresarios who realize that the painstaking work of building a congregation can be made infinitely easier with expedient shortcuts. Political mudslinging offers a “dopamine rush.” Exaggerating threats and calling the other side evil means that whatever you do, no matter how outrageous or cruel or contrary to Scripture, can be defended as righteous.In 2021, at a rowdy protest against pandemic shutdowns hosted by FloodGate Church in Michigan, a few miles from Cornerstone, Alberta saw a lot of American flags in the sanctuary but not a single cross. “I couldn’t suppress a feeling of absolute disgust,” he writes about the spectacle that followed. To get a fuller picture, he returned repeatedly to FloodGate and talked to its pastor, but the church was committed to political warfare at all costs. “I never ceased to be aghast at what I heard,” he writes.For the most part, though, Alberta hangs back, letting the people he interviews say what they want — or refuse to say what they don’t. The most belligerent culture warriors tend to shy away from talking about helping immigrants and the poor, since bashing the left tends to stimulate conservative passions more reliably than trying to teach Jesus’ example of good deeds and turning the other cheek. The dynamic turns out to be mutually reinforcing — or mutually destructive. One preacher, a “former Southern Baptist,” says that pastors are now “afraid of their own congregants.”It’s a situation that recalls Alberta’s account in “American Carnage,” in which establishment Republicans naïvely thought they could use Trumpism to their advantage while maintaining control over their party and constituents. “Those fabled gatekeepers who once kept crackpots away from positions of authority no longer existed,” Alberta writes in “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory.” Instead of issuing guidance, too many “so-called shepherds” resort to pandering — and their congregants end up even more wayward than before.At an event organized by the Faith and Freedom Coalition, Alberta meets a man selling T-shirts emblazoned with “Let’s Go Brandon,” the conservative chant that stands in for a four-letter expletive directed at Joe Biden. The T-shirts include the hashtag #FJB as a handy reminder. The proprietor explains that his merchandise is responding to the fact that “we’ve taken God out of America.”Alberta asks the man whether the #FJB is an appropriate way to bring God back. “People keep on asking for it,” he replies with a shrug. “You’ve got to give the people what they want.”THE KINGDOM, THE POWER, AND THE GLORY: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism | More

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      DeSantis Takes Fight for Second Place to Nikki Haley’s Home State

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      After ignoring each other for much of the campaign, the two candidates now engage in near-daily attacks and have sparred with increasing intensity on the debate stage.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Friday swept through South Carolina, his rival Nikki Haley’s backyard, seeking to blunt the rise of the state’s former governor in the Republican primary while capitalizing on his slugfest with the Democratic governor of California.The fight to claim the mantle of the most viable Republican alternative to former President Donald J. Trump intensified this week. Ms. Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations, won the endorsement of the political network founded by the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch and secured the backing of key donors like Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase. The upheaval in Mr. DeSantis’s campaign apparatus continued unabated on Friday with the departure of his super PAC’s chairman, Adam Laxalt.But Mr. DeSantis’s prime-time face-off on Fox News with Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday night seemed to buoy him as he barnstormed through South Carolina’s Upstate region near Greenville and its midsection outside Columbia before ending in Charleston and the Lowcountry.On Ms. Haley’s home turf, the Florida governor and his surrogates appeared unfazed by all the developments, blasting the support from Mr. Dimon as a nod from a Hillary Clinton supporter and dismissing the Koch network’s decision as evidence that Ms. Haley represents only the incremental change backed by Wall Street.“I don’t know what you could say about her tenure as governor here, but I’ve never heard of any major accomplishment that she had,” Mr. DeSantis told a town hall in Greer, S.C. “And I don’t think she’s shown a willingness to fight for you when it’s tough. It’s easy when the wind’s at your back.”Mr. DeSantis and his team have long cast the Republican nominating contest as a two-man race between him and Mr. Trump. But Ms. Haley’s rise in the polls and her successful drawing in of big-money donors have punctured that notion. After ignoring each other for much of the summer and the early fall, the two candidates now engage in near-daily attacks and have sparred with increasing intensity on the debate stage.They and their allied super PACs have clashed on a sometimes bewildering variety of fronts, from standard disputes over subjects like the strength of their conservative bona fides to more niche topics like dissecting each other’s records on recruiting Chinese businesses in their home states. Fact checkers have rated many of their attacks as false or misleading.Mr. DeSantis has been especially aggressive. On Fox News this week, he called Ms. Haley an “establishment” politician who was “fundamentally out of step with Republican voters” on core conservative issues, including immigration, where she has called for more legal pathways to recruit foreign workers. His campaign set up a website that accuses Ms. Haley of supporting “every liberal cause under the sun.”The Florida governor has also falsely claimed that Ms. Haley wanted to bring Gazan refugees to the United States. And he has mounted attacks on past statements by Ms. Haley that have sometimes mirrored his own, including her expression of sympathy after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. (Mr. DeSantis said at the time that he was “appalled” by Mr. Floyd’s death.) He has also criticized Ms. Haley for saying in 2016 that her state did not need a law banning transgender people from using the bathrooms of their choice, even though Mr. DeSantis had said during his first run for governor in 2018 that “getting into bathroom wars” was not “a good use of our time.”In addition, Mr. DeSantis’s allies have established a new super PAC to attack Ms. Haley in Iowa. Last month, the group, Fight Right, produced a misleading ad showing clips of Ms. Haley praising Hillary Clinton. The clips had been edited to excise her simultaneous criticisms of Mrs. Clinton.The Haley campaign counterpunched with an ad of its own called “Desperate Campaigns Do Desperate Things.”As Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis joust for second place, Mr. Trump’s position in the Republican primaries, even in South Carolina, remains dominant. Mr. DeSantis may have been willing to call out Ms. Haley by name in her home state, but he continued to tiptoe around the former president using the passive voice.On Friday, for instance, he insisted he could get Mexico to pay for the rest of a border wall.“I know that was promised — it didn’t happen,” he said, without naming the promiser, Mr. Trump.Mr. DeSantis also failed to identify that same promiser when he said: “We were promised we’d be tired of winning. Unfortunately, as a Republican, I’m tired of losing.”He was less reluctant when a voter asked about Ms. Haley’s suggestion last month that social media platforms verify all users and ban people from posting anonymously. Mr. DeSantis and others had criticized her comments as unconstitutional and a threat to free speech.“What Haley said was outrageous,” Mr. DeSantis responded, adding, “Honestly, it’s disqualifying.”In an interview on Fox News, Ms. Haley responded to Mr. DeSantis’s recent critiques about her record as governor.“Well, I think he went after my record as governor because he’s losing,” Ms Haley said. “I mean, who else can spend a hundred million dollars and drop half in the polls?”For some in South Carolina, Ms. Haley’s tenure — from 2011 to 2017 — is beginning to feel like a long time ago. Tim Vath, 54, who moved to Greer toward the end of Ms. Haley’s second term, found the support from the Koch network “questionable.” Suzanne Garrison, also 54 and from Greer, raised the specter of backroom politicking and suggested that Ms. Haley had not always followed through in implementing conservative policies.“I wish more people knew the real Nikki Haley,” said Ms. Garrison, a DeSantis supporter. “I just don’t trust her.”But in the tiny town of Prosperity, outside Columbia, the crowd was more mixed. Cathy Huddle, 61, of Chapin, S.C., said Ms. Haley’s accomplishments as governor “pale in comparison” to the wholesale conservative changes wrought by Mr. DeSantis in Florida.But Alice and Robert Tenny appeared unmoved by Mr. DeSantis’s pitch. Both said Ms. Haley’s experience at the United Nations gave her global knowledge and stature. And Mr. Tenny, 69, found Mr. DeSantis’s gloating over his performance against Mr. Newsom to be off-putting.“We’re kind of getting ahead of ourselves if we’re sitting down with the governor of a different party” before the first primaries, Mr. Tenny said. More

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      Paleoconservative or Moderate? Questions for Staffing the Next G.O.P. White House.

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      The Heritage Foundation asks applicants for a future Republican administration a series of questions about their ideology, showing the extent to which “America First” has shaped the modern G.O.P.An influential conservative group is using a questionnaire to test the ideology of potential recruits for the next Republican presidential administration — and the questions reveal the extent to which former President Donald J. Trump has transformed the conservative movement in his image.The questionnaire by the group, the Heritage Foundation, includes questions that suggest it is screening for applicants who want to embrace tariffs, reduce America’s military footprint overseas and remove executive branch officials who obstruct the president’s agenda. The job-application questionnaire was first reported by Axios.Candidates are asked whether they agree or disagree with the statement that “the president should be able to advance his/her agenda through the bureaucracy without hinderance from unelected federal officials.”Mr. Trump and his allies have promised to “demolish the deep state” and increase presidential power over every part of the federal government that currently operates with any degree of independence from White House political control.A Questionnaire for Applicants to the Next Conservative White HouseThe Heritage Foundation, which has been staffing Republican administrations since the Reagan era, has a list of questions for job applicants that shows how Donald Trump has transformed the party.Read DocumentHeritage, the most powerful think tank on the right, has been staffing Republican administrations since the Reagan era and is leading a $22 million presidential transition operation called Project 2025 to develop policies and personnel for the next conservative government.As a nonprofit group, Heritage cannot endorse political candidates, but its vast personnel recruitment project — a collaboration by more than 80 conservative groups — is being driven by former senior Trump administration officials who remain close to the former president. Heritage’s work will most likely end up in the hands of whomever the Republican Party nominates as its presidential candidate next year.Much of the Heritage questionnaire is unremarkable. It quizzes candidates on their political philosophy and on private school vouchers and other standard-issue Republican policies. But in subtle ways, the questionnaire shows the extent to which Mr. Trump’s “America First” ideology has infused the Republican Party. Those changes are most pronounced in the wording of the questions that relate to foreign policy and trade.(The questionnaire inquires about the applicant’s political philosophy, providing a number of possible selections such as Traditional Conservative, Libertarian, Paleoconservative and Moderate.)Heritage used to promote American leadership around the world and a hawkish foreign policy in line with the views espoused by Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.But under the leadership of its president, Kevin Roberts, Heritage has in recent years argued that American tax dollars could more usefully be spent at home than in supporting Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s invasion. And in another departure from the pre-Trump Republican orthodoxy, Heritage has expressed openness to cutting the military budget.In that vein, the Heritage questionnaire asks potential recruits whether they agree or disagree that “the U.S. should scale back its strong military presence overseas.”Once a promoter of free trade — and still internally divided on the subject — Heritage now asks recruits for the next Republican administration whether they agree that “the U.S. should impose tariffs with the goal of bringing back manufacturing jobs, even if these tariffs result in higher consumer prices.”Heritage’s shift toward an “America First” ideology has opened up rifts within the conservative movement and has caused tensions inside the organization. Several foreign policy analysts left Heritage disillusioned by the changes afoot there.In a statement to The New York Times, Heritage’s president, Mr. Roberts, said that “the radical left has lapped the political right when it comes to preparing men and women to serve in presidential administrations.”“Project 2025,” he added, “is committed to recruiting and training a deep bench of patriotic Americans who are ready to serve their country on day one of the next administration.” More

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      in Elections

      DeSantis Super PAC Suffers Another Big Staff Loss, This Time Its Chairman

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      The departure of Adam Laxalt, a longtime friend of the Florida governor, is the latest shake-up inside Never Back Down as it faces questions over the group’s strategy and spending.The main super PAC supporting Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign has been rocked by another significant departure, as Adam Laxalt, a friend and former roommate of the Florida governor, has stepped down as chairman of the group.Mr. Laxalt, who unsuccessfully ran to become a Republican senator in Nevada in 2022, lived with Mr. DeSantis when he was training as a naval officer. He joined Never Back Down in April, soon after his own campaign ended and before Mr. DeSantis officially joined the presidential race, in a move that was widely seen as Mr. DeSantis and his wife seeking to have someone they trusted monitoring the activities of the well-funded group. He also suffered the unexpected death of his mother over the summer, a friend said.“After nearly 26 straight months of being in a full-scale campaign, I need to return my time and attention to my family and law practice,” Mr. Laxalt wrote in a letter to the board on Nov. 26 that was reviewed by The New York Times. He said in the note that he was still committed to Mr. DeSantis’s becoming president.The departure represents the second major departure from Never Back Down in the last two weeks. On the eve of Thanksgiving, the group’s chief executive, Chris Jankowski, resigned. In a statement put out by the group after the resignation, Mr. Jankowski said that his differences at the group went “well beyond” strategic arguments, without explaining more.It was Mr. Laxalt who announced that Kristin Davison, previously the chief operating officer, would replace Mr. Jankowski in an email that evening. “We look forward to hitting the ground running with all of you after the holiday,” Mr. Laxalt wrote.But now Mr. Laxalt is gone, as well.With the Iowa caucuses less than seven weeks away, people associated with the DeSantis campaign encouraged the creation of a new outside group called Fight Right to take over negative attacks on his closest competition in the nomination contest, former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      George Santos Is Gone. What Happens to His Seat in Congress?

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      The expulsion of George Santos from Congress on Friday swept away one major political headache for Republicans, but it immediately set the stage for another: The party will have to defend his vulnerable seat in a special election early next year.The race in New York is expected to be one of the most high-profile and expensive off-year House contests in decades. It has the potential to further shrink Republicans’ paper-thin majority and offer a preview of the broader battle for House control next November.With towering stakes, both parties have been preparing for the possibility for months, as Mr. Santos’s fabricated biography unraveled and federal criminal charges piled up. More than two dozen candidates have already expressed interest in running, and labor unions, super PACs and other groups have begun earmarking millions of dollars for TV ads.“It’s going to be like a presidential election for Congress,” said Steve Israel, a Long Island Democrat who once led his party’s House campaign arm. “It becomes ground zero of American politics.”Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York has 10 days to formally schedule the contest after Friday’s lopsided vote to remove Mr. Santos. But both parties expect the election to take place in mid-to-late February, just over a year after he first took the oath of office.Unlike in a normal election, party leaders in Washington and New York — not primary voters — will choose the Democratic and Republican nominees. They were moving quickly to winnow the field of potential candidates, and could announce their picks in a matter of days.George Santos Lost His Job. The Lies, Charges and Questions Remaining.George Santos, who was expelled from Congress, has told so many stories they can be hard to keep straight. We cataloged them, including major questions about his personal finances and his campaign fund-raising and spending.Democrats were expected to coalesce around Thomas R. Suozzi, a tested centrist who held the seat for six years before Mr. Santos but gave it up for a failed run for governor in 2022. Mr. Suozzi, 61, is a prolific fund-raiser and perhaps the best-known candidate either party could put forward. Anna Kaplan, a former state senator, is also running and has positioned herself to Mr. Suozzi’s left.The Republican field appeared to be more fluid. Party leaders said they planned to interview roughly 15 candidates, though officials privy to the process said they were circling two top contenders, both relative newcomers: Mike Sapraicone, a retired New York Police Department detective, and Mazi Pilip, an Ethiopian-born former member of the Israel Defense Forces.Political analysts rate the district, stretching from the outskirts of New York City into the heart of Nassau County’s affluent suburbs on Long Island, as a tossup. President Biden won the district by eight points in 2020, but it has shifted rightward in three consecutive elections since, as voters fearful about crime and inflation have flocked to Republicans.Democratic strategists said they would continue to use the embarrassment of Mr. Santos to attack Republicans, blaming them for aiding the former congressman’s rise. But recapturing the seat may be more difficult than many Democrats once hoped.Local Republicans moved decisively to distance themselves from Mr. Santos last January, and the strategy has shown signs of working. When Long Island voters went to the polls for local contests last month, they delivered a Republican rout that left Democrats scrambling to figure out how to rehabilitate a tarnished political brand.“Anyone who thinks a special election on Long Island is a slam dunk for Democrats has been living under a rock for the last three years,” said Isaac Goldberg, a strategist who advised the losing Democratic campaign against Mr. Santos in 2022.“Politics is a pendulum,” he added. “Right now, it’s on one side, and it’s unclear when it’s going to swing back.”Republicans face their own challenges, though, particularly in an idiosyncratic contest likely to favor the party that can turn out more voters. Democratic voters in the district have spent months bemoaning their ties to Mr. Santos and are highly motivated to elect an alternative. It is unclear if Republican supporters will feel the same urgency their leaders do.“It’s been a frustrating year,” said Joseph Cairo, the G.O.P. party chairman in Nassau County. “I look at this as just the beginning to right a mistake, to move forward, to elect a Republican to serve the people the proper way, to elect somebody who is for real — not make believe.”The outcome promises to have far-reaching implications for the current Congress and the next.After Mr. Santos’s ouster, Republicans have a razor-thin majority. Thinning it further could hamper their short-term ambitions to pursue an impeachment inquiry into President Biden and negotiate around a major military aid package for Israel.Whoever emerges as the winner in February would also likely become the front-runner for next fall’s elections and lend their party momentum as they prepare to fight over six crucial swing seats in New York alone, including a total of three on Long Island.Democrats believe Mr. Suozzi, who is currently working as a lobbyist, is best positioned to deliver. In his stints as a congressman and Nassau County executive, he took conservative stances on public safety and affordability that are popular among suburban voters. And his combative primary campaign for governor just last year may help him shake the anti-Democratic sentiment that has sunk other candidates.Jay Jacobs, the Democratic leader for the state and Nassau County, said he still intended to screen multiple candidates, including Ms. Kaplan, a more progressive former state senator who remains in the race, even as other candidates dropped out and coalesced behind Mr. Suozzi.Ms. Kaplan could get a boost from Ms. Hochul, who faced Mr. Suozzi in an ugly 2022 primary fight, during which he questioned her husband’s ethics and referred to her as an unqualified “interim governor.”The governor has pushed Mr. Jacobs and Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House Democratic leader, to reconsider whether Mr. Suozzi was their strongest candidate, particularly given his hesitancy to fully embrace abortion rights in the past, according to four people familiar with the conversations.But it is unclear if the governor would have the power to block Mr. Suozzi. Mr. Jeffries personally worked to lure the former congressman into the race earlier this fall, and Mr. Suozzi is close friends with Mr. Jacobs, who has told associates he is the likely pick.Republicans are proceeding more cautiously. They are wary of repeating their experience with Mr. Santos, who secured the party’s backing in 2020 and 2022 despite presenting them with a fraudulent résumé and other glaring fabrications that they failed to catch.This time, Republicans appear to only be considering candidates already known to party officials, and plan to engage a research firm to more formally vet potential nominees.Campaign strategists in Washington were said to favor Mr. Sapraicone, the former police detective who made a small fortune as the head of a private security company. Mr. Sapraicone, 67, could afford to spend a portion of it in a campaign, but he would also enter a race with almost no name recognition or electoral experience.Local Republicans were pushing Ms. Pilip, a potentially mold-breaking rising star with a remarkable biography. She moved to Israel from Ethiopia as a refugee in the 1990s, later served in the Israel Defense Forces and flipped a legislative seat in Nassau County in her 40s as a mother of seven.Other wild card candidates included Elaine Phillips, the Nassau County comptroller; Kellen Curry, an Air Force veteran and former banker; and Jack Martins, a well-known state senator who has run for the seat before.Mr. Santos himself could theoretically run for the seat as an independent. But the task would be arduous and might jeopardize a more urgent priority: fighting charges that could put him in prison for up to 22 years. More