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      Israel Violence Underscores the GOP Divide on Foreign Policy

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      The fighting in Israel has become another flashpoint in the Republican presidential primary, further revealing the foreign policy divide among candidates scrambling to distinguish themselves in a race dominated by former President Donald J. Trump.“I will always condemn antisemitism, appeasement and weakness on the radical left, but I will also call out weakness or confusion among conservatives as well,” Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina said during a speech about Israel on Tuesday at the Hudson Institute in Washington.In a departure from his usually noncombative campaign style, Mr. Scott criticized both Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who along with Mr. Trump have outlined anti-interventionist foreign policy positions. Mr. Scott highlighted Mr. Ramaswamy’s comments on Israel earlier this year (he has shifted his stance on cutting U.S. military aid to Israel), and Mr. DeSantis’s characterization of the war in Ukraine as a “territorial dispute,” which Mr. DeSantis later walked back.Former Vice President Mike Pence also attacked several candidates in remarks on Saturday in which he criticized Republicans who “embraced the language of isolationism and appeasement.” He named Mr. Trump, Mr. Ramaswamy and Mr. DeSantis as voices that have “run contrary to the tradition in our party that America is the leader of the free world.”Those three men, who have espoused anti-interventionist stances on issues like Ukraine, strongly condemned the attack on Israel. Mr. Trump has said he would “stand strongly” with Israel, claiming that the attacks “would never have happened” if he were president. Mr. DeSantis called on Israel to respond with “overwhelming force” and said the United States would stand fully behind Israel. Mr. Ramaswamy said that the U.S. should “stand ready to provide additional military supplies.” Mr. Ramaswamy hit back at Mr. Pence in a social media post Tuesday night and again criticized Nikki Haley, the former United Nations ambassador, who said over the weekend that the attacks in Israel amounted to “an attack on America because they hate us just as much.”Mr. Ramaswamy called comments from both of them “histrionics” that “are unhelpful and unserious.”Anti-interventionist positions got some support this week from the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who mocked Ms. Haley for suggesting that the attack on Israel was also an attack on America and said: “Wars beget more war. The bigger the conflict, the uglier and longer-lasting the consequences. These are not complex observations but seem lost on our leadership class.”While the Republican Party has shifted away from hawkish foreign policies over the past decade, a move that accelerated with Mr. Trump’s rise, Mr. Pence and Ms. Haley have outlined more traditional stances. But aside from Ms. Haley, who has risen in the polls and attracted increased donor attention, the other candidates expressing more hawkish views are polling in the low single digits.Maggie Astor More

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      The Two Candidates for House Speaker Are Even Worse Than Kevin McCarthy

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      The crisis of terror in Israel has made it even more urgent that the House of Representatives move past its schoolyard infighting, elect itself a speaker and demonstrate that the United States still has a functional government, one that can play a significant role in supporting democratic allies around the globe. So far, however, the Republican House majority has shown no indication it is up to the job.Only two candidates, Representatives Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio, are officially running for speaker. Neither seems to have a majority of Republicans locked up yet, and both are trying to appeal to the party’s worst instincts — making it clear they would perpetuate the chaos that was unleashed during the reign of Kevin McCarthy, who was overthrown by a group of far-right rebels on Oct. 3. In several ways, Mr. Scalise and Mr. Jordan would probably be worse.Both express opposition to the Biden administration’s request for additional military aid to Ukraine. Like Mr. McCarthy, both have cast doubt on the outcome of the 2020 presidential race, and voted against certifying the election results, a permanent stain on their reputations. But for anyone who cares about basic governmental function, the most worrisome part is that they also seem to be repudiating the two moments when Mr. McCarthy defused a fiscal crisis in recent months — over the debt ceiling and the threatened government shutdown. They want the House to use more “leverage” in its battles against President Biden.“Leverage,” in case you missed the constant reference in the battle over Mr. McCarthy, is a Washington euphemism for blackmail. By holding the country’s credit hostage, or shutting down government functions, a small band of wrecking-ball ideologues can try to get a win on some unrelated matter. The anti-McCarthyites said he failed to use his speakership to rewrite the rules of government in Washington.“Many of us had begged the speaker, pleaded with the speaker repeatedly, to utilize the debt ceiling to leverage spending cuts and reforms,” Bob Good, Republican of Virginia, told the House before the big vote. “Instead, he negotiated an unlimited increase to the debt ceiling.”Of the two ways to achieve political success in a divided government, leverage is the poisoned choice. The more effective path, the one that used to be employed regularly in Washington, is to cut deals and make compromises with your opponents, even if they are occasionally painful and at odds with your principles. That’s how Lincoln operated, that’s how Lyndon Johnson pushed through his Great Society and civil rights bills, and it’s how Obamacare was created.But ever since Newt Gingrich’s era, the idea of compromising with the Democratic Party, of putting bills on the House floor that both sides can support, has been anathema to Republicans. Speakers from that party who do so tend to lose their jobs or quit under pressure, as John Boehner and Mr. McCarthy learned. The preferred method of dealing with Democrats now is to extort them, and though that usually fails, the mere act of trying brings great cheer to extremists who view centrists from both sides as the rotten core of the “uniparty.” (An exception occurred in 2011, when Barack Obama was forced to make massive spending cuts to prevent a default caused by Republicans.)Mr. McCarthy abandoned leverage to keep the government open through mid-November, and earlier to prevent a ruinous default. But both candidates to replace him have made it clear to their restive caucus that they intend to use the leverage he discarded.“If we stay united, we can preserve leverage for the House to secure tangible wins in our impending policy fights,” Mr. Scalise, the current majority leader, said in announcing his candidacy for speaker last week. Mr. Scalise, as a member of the leadership team, voted for the recent deal to prevent a shutdown, but the signal he sent to the rebels was unmistakable.Representative Steve Scalise of LouisianaMark Peterson for The New York TimesAnd Mr. Jordan didn’t even need to send a signal. He was one of a minority of House Republicans who voted against the shutdown deal, against the wishes of his putative ally, Mr. McCarthy, and his credentials as a legislative bomb-thrower are already impeccable. He has helped lead Republican shutdown efforts at least three times: over defunding the Affordable Care Act, over cutting money to Planned Parenthood and (during the Trump administration) over building a border wall. He told Punchbowl News a few days ago that he would insist on refusing to spend any additional money on processing new migrants, though that would violate U.S. asylum law.Donald Trump’s “Complete & Total Endorsement!” of Mr. Jordan — and his debasement of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which he presented to Mr. Jordan in 2021 as a reward for feverishly defending him in his impeachments and during the Russia investigation — tell you pretty much all you need to know about what kind of leader Mr. Jordan would be.Mr. Scalise is less incendiary than Mr. Jordan, but is no more likely to end his chamber’s chaos and bring any degree of bipartisanship to the House than was Mr. McCarthy. He blamed “Soros-backed elements of the Democratic Party” for committing acts of violence against Republicans. Long after the 2020 election was over, he continued to suggest the outcome was stolen, relying on a theory about the primacy of state legislatures that was shot down by the Supreme Court. He had to apologize for speaking in 2002 at a white nationalist group headed by David Duke, but also described himself, according to a columnist, as like “David Duke without the baggage,” and opposed a holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.Republicans will spend the next few days trying to determine whether they have the votes to elect any speaker, and it’s possible their internal discord could go on for weeks. You might think that the world’s desperate need for a morally persuasive American leadership would pressure them to make a responsible decision, but given the abysmal choice they are facing, that outcome is hard to imagine.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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      Conservative Election Activists Use Virginia as a Dry Run for 2024

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      Inspired in part by Donald Trump’s baseless rigged-election claims, the activists are trying to recruit supporters to serve as poll watchers and election workers in the state’s legislative contests.In 2021, after Republican victories in Virginia, conservative activists were so proud of their work training poll watchers, recruiting election workers and making other attempts to subtly influence the voting system that they wrote a memo called “The Virginia Model.” The memo detailed ways that other states could follow Virginia’s lead in protecting so-called election integrity.Now these activists are turning their attention back to Virginia, which is a month away from tossup elections that will decide control of the state’s closely divided legislature and offer both national parties clear evidence of their electoral strengths and weaknesses heading into 2024.Every Tuesday night, Virginia Fair Elections, the group that drafted “The Virginia Model,” holds trainings for poll watchers aligned with its mission and encourages conservative activists to register to work at the polls. The organization also hosts trainings for new members of local election boards.The trainings are permeated by an undercurrent of mistrust in the electoral system: Poll watchers are encouraged to arrive early and insist on being as close as legally possible to election workers, voters and ballot machines; to make sure to inspect those machines; and to look for any evidence of potential fraud.“All of us have eyes on,” Clara Belle Wheeler, a former member of the Virginia State Board of Elections who now leads the trainings, said at the end of an hourlong training session for poll watchers last Tuesday, according to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times. “I’m watching.”The group, like many others across the country, is taking its cues from former President Donald J. Trump, who has continued to make baseless claims that American elections are rigged. Behind the scenes and at public events, conservative activists who share his beliefs have been working to overhaul voting laws and recruit activists and supporters to serve as poll watchers and election workers.In numerous counties and localities across Virginia, conservative activists have been appointed to local election boards, the bodies that are in charge of determining early voting hours and locations, leading some to move early polling locations or reduce voting access on the weekends. The state also withdrew from the Electronic Registration Information Center, known as ERIC, an interstate clearinghouse for voter data that helps ensure secure elections, but became a flashpoint on the right based on a widely debunked conspiracy theory.Democrats and voting rights groups say these moves could have significant consequences — that seemingly small changes and pressures on the system could add up and potentially affect the outcome of an election. They worry that overly aggressive poll watchers could intimidate voters, or that conspiracy-minded Trump supporters who insert themselves in the election process could interfere with the results.“This is sort of like a death by 1,000 cuts, and there’s no necessarily one thing that you can point to and say, ‘That’s what’s going to swing the election,’” said Aaron Mukerjee, the voter protection director for the Virginia Democratic Party. “Taken together, the goal is to disenfranchise enough voters that they can win the election.”It is often difficult to determine whether changes to election laws or other attempts to intervene in the voting process ultimately affect outcomes. Turnout alone does not determine how many voters may have been affected. In the Trump era, changes in voting patterns have scrambled the longtime presumption that higher turnout helps Democrats and lower turnout aids Republicans.And there is no evidence that Republican election activists aided victories in Virginia in 2021, nor that their policies and activities necessarily benefit either party. During that election, poll watchers at 13 voting sites were observed being disruptive, according to reports filed by elections workers.In the run-up to the 2021 election, activists trained by Virginia Fair Elections collected claims of malfeasance and filed a lawsuit challenging at least 390 ballot applications that were missing Social Security numbers. The suit was dismissed, but conservative news outlets focused on the complaint and began to argue that the coming vote in Virginia would be “stolen,” as many activists believed had happened in 2020. (Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, ended up winning, and his party made gains in the legislature.)Nonetheless, Republican-aligned groups like Virginia Fair Elections continue to try to tighten voting laws.Virginia Fair Elections is managed by the Virginia Institute for Public Policy, a conservative think tank that was formed in 1996 with moderate fund-raising in the low six figures annually. But as the think tank shifted its focus to so-called election integrity efforts after the last presidential contest, it raised over $508,000 in 2021, according to data kept by ProPublica.That money included a $125,000 grant earmarked for the “Virginia Fair Elections project” from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a major funder of groups that have proliferated myths about voter fraud. Its board includes Cleta Mitchell, a longtime conservative lawyer who played a key role in trying to overturn the 2020 election.In 2021, the “Virginia Model” executed by Virginia Fair Elections became the blueprint for the Election Integrity Network, a national coalition guided by Ms. Mitchell that quickly became one of the most influential organizations seeking to change voting laws and recruit local activists.Last year, Virginia Fair Elections hosted a two-day gathering conceptualized by Ms. Mitchell. The group boasted of having trained 4,500 poll watchers and election officials, and of covering 85 percent of polling locations in Virginia on Election Day in 2021 and during the 45 days of early voting.Cleta Mitchell has guided the Election Integrity Network, one of the most influential organizations seeking to change voting laws and recruit activists to serve as poll watchers and election workers.Matt Rourke/Associated PressIn August, Virginia Fair Elections held a similar meeting at a Sheraton hotel outside Richmond. The daylong event featured 12 discussions, including a keynote speech from Mollie Hemingway, a well-known conservative columnist. A panel discussion held just after lunch highlighted one front in which the network has made significant gains: county election boards and registrars, who serve as the chief election officials in Virginia localities.“The most important thing we do, however, is the hiring, and sometimes the firing, of the general registrar, and I think just as critical, if not more so, is the appointment, the training and potentially the dismissal of election officers,” John Ambrose, a Republican who serves as the vice chair of the electoral board of Richmond, told the audience to loud applause, according to an audio recording of the panel obtained by Documented, a liberal investigative group, and shared with The Times.Ms. Wheeler and the president of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy did not respond to text messages seeking comment. Virginia Fair Elections did not respond to multiple requests for comment.Under a peculiarity of Virginia law, the party of the most recently elected governor holds the advantage in the partisan makeup of local election boards. After Mr. Youngkin won the governor’s office in 2021, boards across the state flipped to 2-to-1 Republican control from 2-to-1 Democratic control.Groups like Virginia Fair Elections worked to place people they had trained on local election boards across the state, which meant that in many places, conservative priorities became policy.At least 10 counties in Virginia, including at least four with predominantly Black populations, have canceled Sunday voting for the coming elections. Some of the 10 counties, among them Richmond, Spotsylvania, Virginia Beach and Chesterfield, contain major population centers.Sundays are popular voting days for Black communities, where “Souls to the Polls” events led by churches have a long history of fostering community and helping protect against intimidation at the polls.“Democracy is coming under attack, whether it’s the Republican-led electoral boards throughout different localities who are cutting down on Sunday voting, or even closing early-vote locations that were in predominately Black communities,” said Joshua Cole, a pastor and a Democratic candidate for the House of Delegates in the Fredericksburg area. He pointed to the Mattaponi Baptist Association of Virginia, a local association of Black churches, several of which are no longer able to hold Souls to the Polls events.“Don’t take that right away from Christians, especially African American Christians, when it’s been a staple in the community for years,” he said.Joshua Cole, a Democratic candidate for the House of Delegates, has been critical of the push for counties to cancel Sunday voting, which are traditionally popular voting days for Black communities. Ryan M. Kelly/Associated PressSome local election officials acknowledged that the shift in partisan control was the main cause for the changes.“The reason Sunday voting is no longer an option for the City of Richmond is because the political representation from our electoral board has changed from Democratic to Republican since 2021,” said Katherin Cardozo-Robledo, the executive assistant to the electoral board in Richmond, a city whose population of about 230,000 is roughly 45 percent Black.Others, however, said there simply wasn’t enough demand.“We have elections every November in Virginia, so we did not continue it last year, either,” said Mary Lynn A. Pinkerman, who oversees elections in Chesapeake, which is roughly 30 percent Black. “Our city has approximately 176,000 voters, and when we tried it after being told there would be busloads coming, we only had 170 voters come that day. We do not have enough of a demand for it in our city.”With just a month left before polls close in Virginia, both parties are focused on the legislative elections, but the conservative activists have larger goals in mind.“What we’re doing is so critical,” Sheryl Stanworth, an attendee at the Tuesday training, said during the gathering. “We’ve got a presidential election to be looking forward to.” More

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      Democrats Need to Pick Up the Pace of Putting Judges on the Bench

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      With the outcome of the 2024 elections for the president and control of the Senate very much up in the air, Democrats must make a concerted effort to fill federal judicial vacancies before next November.Republicans did this very effectively before the end of the Trump presidency, leaving few vacancies for President Biden to fill when he took office. Now the Democrats must emulate that approach. And they must do so now.At the moment, there are two vacancies without nominees on appeals courts and 37 on district courts. Because the evaluation process of nominees takes time, it is imperative that the Biden administration quickly name nominees to those and future vacancies. The Senate then must work expeditiously to confirm those deemed suitable for the lifetime appointments.Mr. Biden has nominated 186 people to Article III judgeships, which include the Supreme Court and the federal appeals and district courts, according to the White House. At this point in their tenures, George W. Bush had nominated 211, followed by Mr. Trump’s 206, according to the Heritage Foundation’s Judicial Appointment Tracker. There have been inexplicable and troubling delays in this process. For example, two years ago, Judge Diana Motz of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond, Va., announced that she would take senior status, a form of semiretirement, when a successor was confirmed. She took senior status last year, though no replacement had been named at that time. And still no one has been nominated for this important judgeship.Time may be running out for the Biden administration.It is critical for federal judges who would like to be replaced by a Democratic president to take senior status so that Mr. Biden can appoint their successors with sufficient time to allow them to be confirmed by the current Senate. A federal judge or justice may take senior status after meeting the age and service requirements of the “Rule of 80” — the judge must be at least 65 years old, and the judge’s age and years of service must add up to 80. A total of 121 federal judges are now eligible for senior status but have not announced their plans, according to the group Balls and Strikes, which tracks that information. Of those, 44 were appointed by Democratic presidents. By Jan. 20, 2025, the date of the next presidential inauguration, that number could rise to 69.There is little reason for judges not to take senior status. They can continue to hear cases, even carry a full load of cases. And taking senior status allows the president to fill that seat on the bench. The judge can condition taking senior status on the confirmation of a successor. A senior judge typically is not allowed to participate in en banc decisions, where all (or a significant number) of the judges on the court review a matter that is particularly significant or complex. But that is the main restriction on what a senior judge may do.We are long past the time when it could be said that judges appointed by Republican and by Democratic presidents were indistinguishable. This was made clear in an analysis of Supreme Court rulings published in July 2022 by the data-driven news site FiveThirtyEight, which found the partisan divide among the current justices “is deeper than it’s been in the modern era.”And this partisan divide is not confined to the Supreme Court. There are often huge differences between how judges in the lower courts who were appointed by Democratic and by Republican presidents decide cases. For example, a federal appeals court recently upheld Tennessee and Kentucky laws prohibiting gender-affirming care for transgender minors, with the two Republican-appointed judges siding with the states and a judge initially nominated by President Bill Clinton dissenting. Whether it is reproductive rights or gun rights or employee rights, or in countless other areas, the outcome often depends on which president appointed the judge or judges hearing the case.For that reason, I wrote an opinion article in The Los Angeles Times in March 2014 urging Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then 81, to retire so that President Barack Obama could replace her while there was a Democratic Senate and someone with progressive values would take her seat. She took offense at the suggestion, also raised by others, and remained on the bench until she died in September 2020, when President Trump replaced her with the conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Justice Ginsburg gambled, and America lost.Likewise, I think of the liberal federal court of appeals judges who did not take senior status, though they were eligible during the Obama presidency. For example, Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth Circuit declined to take senior status; when he died at age 87 in 2017 President Trump replaced him with a conservative judge. By the time another liberal Ninth Circuit judge, Harry Pregerson, decided to take senior status in late 2015, he was 92, and though Mr. Obama quickly nominated a replacement, it was late in his term and got caught up in politics and President Trump ended up appointing another conservative to the seat.Creating vacancies will matter only if Mr. Biden quickly names replacements and the Senate confirms the nominees. If the president is not re-elected, the Republican president will fill any vacancies that exist upon taking office. And regardless of the outcome of the presidential election, if the Republicans take control of the Senate, the confirmation of judicial candidates nominated by a Democratic president will be far more difficult. That is why immediate action is imperative.A president’s most long-lasting legacy is arguably the judges he appoints. Many will serve for decades after the president leaves office. Republicans have tended to recognize this much more than Democrats. That needs to change, and quickly.Erwin Chemerinsky is the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley.Source photographs by John Slater and SergeyChayko/Getty ImagesThe 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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      The View From the Press Gallery on a ‘Surreal’ Day in the House

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      A congressional reporter talks about the vote to oust Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker, and what the ‘frenetic’ days ahead may look like.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Catie Edmondson, a reporter who covers Congress for The New York Times, was in the press gallery inside the House of Representatives on Tuesday, Oct. 3, when lawmakers voted to remove the Republican speaker of the house, Kevin McCarthy. In the 234-year history of the chamber, such an action had never been taken.“It was, until the last minute, hard to believe it was really happening,” Ms. Edmondson said in a recent interview.The House cannot fully function without a speaker. During a brief recess, two Republicans announced that they would run for the post, and on Monday Mr. McCarthy even indicated that he may seek to reclaim his seat.Ahead of a House session on Wednesday, when lawmakers are expected to formally begin the campaign for a new speaker, Ms. Edmondson discussed reporting from the chamber at the moment of Mr. McCarthy’s ouster. This conversation has been edited.When did you realize something extraordinary was happening?I’ll go back to the very beginning. I covered McCarthy’s election to the leadership post in January. There were 15 rounds of voting before he eventually won the gavel. Because that hard-right faction put him through the ringer in order to get him elected in the first place, there was a sense that this moment was inevitable, that McCarthy would face a challenge like this from the hard right.But it was still completely surreal to watch it unfold in real time. Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida had been teasing the idea that he was going to introduce a resolution to oust McCarthy the week before. But it wasn’t quite clear to us how many Republicans he had on board.The big question was always going to be, What are Democrats going to do? Republicans have such a thin margin in the House, and our understanding was that if Democrats moved to try to give him passive support by voting present, there was a better chance he would be able to weather any sort of challenge. But it became clear, talking with Democrats late Monday night and early Tuesday morning, that they had no intention of helping McCarthy.How did you and your colleagues cover the vote in the chamber?We had our team in the gallery counting every single vote. I was sitting next to my colleague Carl Hulse, our chief Washington correspondent, who has covered Capitol Hill for decades. He had never seen anything like this, either. I was having frenetic conversations with Carl and my editor, Julie Hirschfeld Davis. We had two sets of stories ready to go: One set if McCarthy survived the challenge, and one if he didn’t.Capitol Hill’s decorum is well known. Lawmakers, acting in the public view, often guard their behavior. Could you see the gravity of this moment reflected in the behavior of House members?Once that gavel came down and the presiding officer declared the speaker’s office to be empty, we saw many Republicans looking really upset. We saw a huge crowd go up to McCarthy to shake his hand, to give him a hug. It was a singular experience to watch. It’s very rare that the House votes in the fashion that it did, where lawmakers stand up, one by one, to cast their votes. I think that added to the sense of tension and drama.What happens as the House resumes its work?We expect a flurry of activity before there is a formal vote on the House floor to elect the speaker, which House rules require. There’s going to be a candidate forum where the candidates running for speaker make their pitch. It’s going to be a pretty frenetic few days. Most people are preparing for an extended race. Maybe they’ll be able to coalesce around someone more quickly than we expect. But I think there are a lot of people who are girding for another drawn-out election.What does a typical workweek look like for a congressional reporter?I’m up on the Hill at least four days of the week. We have our desk space in the press gallery, but a lot of our time is spent roaming around the hallways, trying to buttonhole lawmakers and ask how they are thinking about voting. For pivotal votes, we sit in the press gallery in the House chamber, just over the lawmakers sitting on the House floor.Is there a skill required to do this job that you could not have anticipated?I came to the congressional team to help with our coverage of the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, now a Supreme Court justice. I thought it was a pretty crazy, chaotic, fast-moving atmosphere that would slow down at some point. It never really did. The ability to adapt and keep going is one skill that’s tricky to anticipate. The other is facial recognition — being able to identify lawmakers in the House and pull them aside. More

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      Would a 3-Way Arizona Senate Race Help Kari Lake? Her Party Isn’t So Sure.

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      Kyrsten Sinema, the independent incumbent, has not announced whether she will run for re-election. But as both parties in Arizona prepare for that outcome, Republicans are worried.Republicans are growing anxious that their chances of capturing a Senate seat in Arizona would be diminished in a potential three-way race that included Kyrsten Sinema, the independent incumbent.While Ms. Sinema hasn’t announced whether she will run for re-election, the race already includes Representative Ruben Gallego, a Democrat, and Kari Lake, a Republican scheduled to host her first campaign rally on Tuesday.Many political strategists had figured that a re-election bid from Ms. Sinema, who dropped her Democratic affiliation last year, would split votes in her former party and increase the odds that Ms. Lake, the controversial front-runner for the Republican nomination, would be sworn in to the Senate. Arizona, along with West Virginia, Montana and Ohio, has been seen as among the best opportunities for Republicans to pick up Senate seats next year and win back a majority.But private and public polling has suggested that Ms. Sinema is viewed much more favorably by Republican voters than by Democrats. Those surveys indicated that Mr. Gallego would benefit in a three-way race.“Some of the early conventional wisdom about this race assumed there would be more Democratic defections,” said Austin Stumpf, a Democratic consultant in Arizona. “But party unity among Democrats is hard to overstate. It’s a real phenomenon right now.”Republicans expressed their concerns as Ms. Lake, a TV-anchor-turned-conservative-firebrand, made an otherwise amicable visit to Washington last week. While she met with a half-dozen Republican senators, many of whom offered campaign assistance or asked to have their photos taken with her, conversations among aides revealed worries about current polling. One Lake adviser described being surprised by the level of “freaking out” by Washington Republicans.In response, Ms. Lake’s campaign has produced a nine-page internal memo aimed at reassuring the party that she stands to benefit the most from a three-way race. She was also expected to take aim at Ms. Sinema with some of her most withering attacks during her opening campaign event on Tuesday, according to people familiar with the planning, in an attempt to address the concerns that an independent bid by the senator could siphon off a significant share of Republican votes.The previously unreported memo relies largely on recent turnout trends in Arizona to point to built-in advantages for Republicans.While Republicans account for roughly 35 percent of registered voters in the state, they typically make up about 40 percent of turnout, according to the memo. Arizona’s unusually large bloc of independent voters accounts for 34 percent of the voter rolls, but makes up a smaller share of turnout, typically between 26 percent and 29 percent, according to the memo.That means that Ms. Lake — who struggled to unite Republicans during her unsuccessful bid for governor last year as she attacked fellow Republicans, falsely insisted that former President Donald J. Trump had won the 2020 election and later refused to accept her own defeat — should have “significantly more elasticity in shedding Republican voters” than Democrats, according to the memo. (First, Ms. Lake will have to win the Republican primary race; her early rivals include Mark Lamb, a right-wing sheriff and fellow Trump ally.)Kari Lake, who lost the Arizona governor’s race last year and has continued to dispute the results, is running for Senate. Mario Tama/Getty ImagesThe memo also calculates that if Mr. Trump captures another Republican presidential nomination — and wins roughly the same number of votes in Arizona next year as he did in 2020 — then Ms. Sinema’s best path to victory would require more than 600,000 Arizonans to split their ballots between him and the incumbent senator. That total would be about 35 percent of Mr. Trump’s votes.“This is incredibly unlikely in the Trump era of American politics,” the memo says, noting that split-ticket voting is “near all-time lows.”One of the private polls that showed Mr. Gallego leading the race, in part because Ms. Lake appeared to be losing Republican votes to Ms. Sinema, was from Chuck Coughlin, a longtime Arizona operative, according to people briefed on the survey. Mr. Coughlin declined to comment on specific findings in his poll, but said that while Ms. Sinema would be a significant underdog if she sought re-election, it would also be foolish to count her out.“Kyrsten is a monstrously strong campaigner, a very effective fund-raiser and has shown a lot of personal strength to do what she’s done in politics, and I don’t want to underestimate that,” Mr. Coughlin said. “All of that is going to be necessary and a lot more for her to be successful.”The ambiguity about Ms. Sinema’s plans for re-election has confounded political professionals across three time zones separating Arizona and Washington.Some of those who anticipate she will retire point to fund-raising numbers showing that Mr. Gallego has consistently out-raised her this year. Ms. Sinema is sitting on a considerable war chest of nearly $11 million, but the Arizona Senate race last year drew more than $230 million in spending from the two major-party candidates and multiple outside groups.Some of those convinced she will seek a second term pointed to a fund-raiser she hosted this year at the Phoenix Open. The annual golf outing attracts a mix of rowdy partygoers and avid golfers, far from the typical Sinema crowd. “That’s like nails on the chalkboard for Sinema,” said Barrett Marson, a Republican operative in Arizona.Others were encouraged about her prospects after an internal fund-raising prospectus surfaced last month that signaled she and her team were actively charting a path to a second term, telling donors she could win a competitive three-way race as an independent, which is practically unheard-of in modern American politics.“Kyrsten promised Arizonans she’d be an independent voice who wouldn’t answer to party bosses and would deliver real, lasting solutions to the challenges Arizonans face,” said Hannah Hurley, an aide to Ms. Sinema. “Instead of engaging in name-calling and stupid political insults, Kyrsten has worked with anyone to make Arizonans’ lives better and then get government out of the way — and that’s exactly what she’s done and will continue to do as Arizona’s senior senator.”Ms. Sinema’s path relies on an unusual coalition of voters, according to the document, which was first reported by NBC News: winning between 10 percent and 20 percent of Democrats, 25 percent to 35 percent of Republicans and 60 percent to 70 percent of independent voters in the state.The most difficult benchmark may be the projection among independents. Even Senator John McCain — who was famously popular among independent voters — won just 50 percent of that group in his sixth and final victory in the state in 2016, according to exit polls.Independents also figure to be a top target for Mr. Gallego, an engaging politician with an inspiring personal story who is running to be the state’s first Latino senator. His campaign projects that Latinos account for about 30 percent of unaffiliated voters in Arizona, and he was ahead of both Ms. Sinema and Ms. Lake in the one public poll that has tested all three candidates this year.Some public and private polling has shown that Representative Ruben Gallego, who is seeking the Democratic nomination, would benefit in a three-way race.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times“Ruben is in a good spot and he knows it,” said Mike Noble, an Arizona pollster. He noted that early polls showed that people who had heard of Mr. Gallego generally liked him, while Arizonans tended to have negative views of both Ms. Lake and Ms. Sinema.Still, Mr. Gallego is running his first statewide campaign since first being elected to the state’s most liberal House district in 2014.He has collected a handful of endorsements from local officials and public encouragement from Yolanda Bejarano, the chairwoman of the Arizona Democratic Party, but the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Senate Majority PAC — which combined to spend nearly $40 million in the Arizona Senate race last year — have both remained silent on the prospect of a three-way race.Stan Barnes, a Republican consultant and former Arizona state legislator, said a potential three-way race offered a unique opportunity for voters because the top candidates would rely on compelling personalities as they pursued their own silos of voters.“It is about the most exciting thing I have seen in terms of politics in Arizona in the three decades I have seen,” Mr. Barnes said. 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      DeSantis Amps Up Attacks on Trump, as GOP Primary Enters a New Phase

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      The Florida governor had been reluctant to criticize the former president on the trail, but in recent weeks, that has started to change.Since the start of his presidential campaign, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has pulled his punches during speeches to voters, choosing not to attack the man leading him by 40 points in many national Republican primary polls.But in recent stump speeches in California, South Carolina, Florida and Iowa, Mr. DeSantis has started attacking former President Donald J. Trump more directly, drawing laughter and applause from his audiences.Previously, Mr. DeSantis had talked about Mr. Trump, who helped secure his political rise, only when prompted by questions from voters or during interviews with the news media. No longer.Speaking to a crowd of several hundred people on Saturday at a packed coffee shop north of Des Moines, the Florida governor pointed out that Mr. Trump had gone back on his pledge to make Mexico pay for a border wall, after Mr. Trump suggested recently that it was an impossible promise to keep. Mr. DeSantis tried to draw a strong contrast with his rival, laying out a plan to fund the wall by imposing fees on remittances back to Mexico.“So I can tell you: Not only will I keep my promises as president, I’ll keep Donald Trump’s promises as president,” the normally staid Mr. DeSantis said with a wry smile as he delivered one of his biggest applause lines of the day. It was a jab he would repeat several times during his three-day bus tour through Iowa over the holiday weekend.Criticizing a rival might not seem very notable in a presidential campaign. But Mr. Trump is no ordinary rival. He is running in the primary as a popular quasi-incumbent, and his four indictments have only further rallied Republican voters behind him and juiced his fund-raising.Leading Republicans have tried and failed to figure out how to challenge Mr. Trump since 2015. For an ambitious Republican politician, attacking Mr. Trump without success means angering his loyal supporters who make up a significant portion of the G.O.P. base, potentially forfeiting a future in the Republican Party.But the response from Mr. DeSantis’s crowds across four states in the last 10 days suggests that there could be a lane for a Republican politician to criticize Mr. Trump without alienating voters — particularly those who support his policies but say they are tired of the drama surrounding him.Still, going so far as to call Mr. Trump a threat to democracy or characterize his run as an effort to stay out of jail is not likely to play well. Will Hurd, a former congressman from Texas and a long-shot presidential candidate, was booed in Iowa this summer for invoking the indictments against him.But Mr. DeSantis’s willingness to take on Mr. Trump demonstrates that the race is moving into a new, more pressing phase for his rivals, as Mr. Trump remains miles ahead of the rest of the field in the polls and the first nominating contests are fast approaching. And it could provide a blueprint for other candidates as they look to gain ground and offer themselves as a Trump alternative.Judy McDonough, 82, said Mr. DeSantis struck the right tone against the former president.“He didn’t say anything mean or nasty about Trump,” said Ms. McDonough, who voted twice for Mr. Trump. “He stuck to the facts,” she added.Mr. DeSantis is being more forthright in his criticisms of Mr. Trump, but on the trail he still largely focuses on non-Trump talking points.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesMr. DeSantis’s more direct strategy began late last month at the second Republican presidential debate. Standing center stage, Mr. DeSantis teed off on Mr. Trump for skipping the debates, taking a far more aggressive tone than he had in the debate a month earlier. Soon after, at a convention of the California Republican Party, Mr. DeSantis criticized the former president for claiming he had turned Florida red, saying he wished Mr. Trump had not “turned Georgia and Arizona blue.”Now, Mr. DeSantis’s approach to taking on Mr. Trump seems like it will be rooted in addressing a few key policy points from Mr. Trump’s presidency. Among them, based on Mr. DeSantis’s statements so far, will be Mr. Trump’s failures to build the border wall he promised and dismantle what Republicans call the “deep state”; his adding to the national debt; and his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Mr. DeSantis has also pointed out that Mr. Trump would be able to serve only one term, calling him a “lame duck,” and has gone after his stance on abortion.Despite Mr. DeSantis raising the pressure on Mr. Trump, their potential showdown is unlikely to combust into fiery theatrics anytime soon. The Florida governor avoids the kind of name-calling and cutting personal attacks that Mr. Trump has used to cow scores of his G.O.P opponents. And besides one or two jabs, Mr. DeSantis’s stump speech remains focused on non-Trump issues, such as inflation, immigration and President Biden’s ability to handle the rigors of the White House.But there is a sense of heightened urgency for Mr. DeSantis, who has gone all-in on winning the Iowa caucuses, moving a third of his staff to the state last week. With only $5 million on hand for the primary going into the last three months of the year, Mr. DeSantis must make his move on Mr. Trump now or never.Mr. Trump, of course, has been savaging Mr. DeSantis for months.On Saturday, as the two men campaigned roughly 100 miles apart in Iowa, Mr. Trump claimed Mr. DeSantis, whom he often refers to by the demeaning nickname “DeSanctimonious,” would soon drop out of the race.“He’s like a wounded bird going down,” Mr. Trump told a cheering crowd in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.In typical fashion, Mr. Trump’s spokesman Steven Cheung mocked Mr. DeSantis’s criticisms, saying that his “tough guy routine is laughable.”“Ron DeSantis has a Little League brain trying to compete in a Major League world,” Mr. Cheung said in a statement. “This is nothing more than a desperate attempt of a flailing candidate who is in the last throes of his campaign.”As the other candidates battle against Mr. Trump’s overwhelming lead, even the most pro-Trump among them, the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, has started drawing contrasts with the front-runner, although in Mr. Ramaswamy’s case, quite gently.“I have something that he doesn’t: I’m from a different generation,” Mr. Ramaswamy, 38, said in response to a question about Mr. Trump, 77, at a SiriusXM town hall in New Hampshire that aired Monday.Mr. DeSantis debuted his line about the border wall during appearances in South Carolina and Florida this past week, before trotting it out again in Iowa.Although it generally drew loud applause, the attack did not land with everyone.Leo Nowak, 69, said he believed Republicans should remain respectful of Mr. Trump even as he acknowledged he was ready to vote for someone else.“I didn’t like it,” said Mr. Nowak, a retired parole officer who heard Mr. DeSantis speak on Saturday at a hotel in Keosauqua, Iowa. “I don’t like seeing him take shots at Trump, and I don’t like seeing Trump take shots at him.”But Mr. Nowak said he was ultimately impressed by Mr. DeSantis’s combative conservative message.“He’s a younger version of Trump,” he said.And Dennis Moore, 73, a Trump supporter who attended a DeSantis event on Monday at an Iowa ice cream parlor, said he wasn’t worried by the attacks.Mr. Trump, he noted, “punches back.”Michael Gold More

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      Will Hurd Drops Out of G.O.P. Presidential Race and Endorses Haley

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      The former congressman, who had staked out an anti-Trump position, failed to gain traction in a crowded field.Will Hurd, a Republican former congressman from Texas who was once seen as a rising star in the G.O.P., announced on Monday that he would suspend his campaign for president. He endorsed Nikki Haley, the former U.N. ambassador and governor of South Carolina.Mr. Hurd entered the 2024 Republican primary race in June with a video that directly criticized former President Donald J. Trump, positioning himself among a handful of explicitly anti-Trump candidates. But he struggled to gain traction with voters and failed to qualify for both the first and second Republican National Committee debates.“While I appreciate all the time and energy our supporters have given, it is important to recognize the realities of the political landscape and the need to consolidate our party around one person to defeat both Donald Trump and President Biden,” Mr. Hurd wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “I urge donors, voters, and other candidates to unite around an alternative candidate to Trump.”“If the Republican Party nominates Donald Trump or the various personalities jockeying to imitate his divisive, crass behavior, we will lose,” Mr. Hurd wrote.The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Hurd had banked on his long-shot bid’s resonating with a swath of voters who do not want to see Mr. Trump win the nomination but oppose President Biden’s re-election.He pitched himself as a modern, moderate Republican who could appeal to swing voters and work across the aisle — a message at odds with the hyperpartisan mood in his party. He pushed back against the culture-war messaging embraced by others in the race — he criticized “banning books” and attacks on the L.G.B.T.Q. community — while casting Mr. Trump as a “loser” who he said was “running to stay out of prison.”But a vast majority of polls showed his support at far below 1 percent in a race heavily dominated by the former president.In endorsing Ms. Haley, Mr. Hurd said that he had sought a candidate who could “unite us” and “navigate the complex challenges we face, particularly when it comes to our national security.”“Ambassador Haley has shown a willingness to articulate a different vision for the country than Donald Trump and has an unmatched grasp on the complexities of our foreign policy,” he said.Ms. Haley thanked Mr. Hurd for the endorsement. “America is at a crossroads and it’s time to come together and make Joe Biden a one-term president,” she wrote on X.In 2017, Mr. Hurd gained attention for a cross-country road trip with Beto O’Rourke, a Democrat who at the time served in a neighboring House district. After flights were canceled in San Antonio because of a storm, they decided to travel 1,600 miles by car back to Washington in a show of bipartisan good will.Mr. Hurd represented a competitive, heavily Latino district in Texas, and when he left office in 2021, he was the only Black Republican in the House.Even if Mr. Hurd had met the criteria for appearing on the debate stage, it’s unclear whether he would have been permitted to participate. Mr. Hurd said he would not sign a pledge to support the party’s eventual nominee — part of the R.N.C.’s debate requirements — because he did not plan to support Mr. Trump under any circumstances. More