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    DeSantis drops out, Trump rallies and Haley brings out Judge Judy – podcast

    Two days before voters in New Hampshire were due to head to the polls, Ron DeSantis announced he was suspending his campaign to become the presidential nominee for the Republican party.
    Donald Trump had already focused his attack lines on his remaining opponent, Nikki Haley, but can she pull a shock win out of the bag? Jonathan Freedland heads out on the campaign trail, talking to voters along the way

    How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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    Ron DeSantis put nearly all his eggs in the basket of a ‘war on woke’

    It began in a glitch-filled disaster on Twitter. It ended with a misattributed quotation on X. Just like Elon Musk’s social media platform, efforts to rebrand Ron DeSantis’s US presidential election campaign could not mask its fundamental flaws.When in May the Florida governor announced his run during a chat with Musk on Twitter Spaces, the platform’s audio streaming feature, there were technical breakdowns that drew comparisons with one of Musk’s space rockets blowing up on the launchpad.Eight months, dozens of staff departures, tens of millions of dollars and one crushing defeat in Iowa later, DeSantis announced he was dropping out in a video posted on the renamed X that quoted Winston Churchill as saying: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal – it is the courage to continue that counts.” According to the International Churchill Society, the British wartime prime minister never said that.Two days before the New Hampshire primary election, DeSantis’s humiliation was complete. “This is probably the biggest collapse of a presidential campaign in modern American history, if not all American history,” David Jolly, a former Republican congressman from Florida, told the MSNBC network on Sunday. “Ron DeSantis had everything going for him.”A year ago, DeSantis had stormed to re-election as governor of Florida by nearly 20 percentage points in what not so long ago was a swing state. He was beating Donald Trump in some opinion polls. He was drawing attention, donor money and headlines such as “DeFuture” in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post newspaper.The argument seemed compelling: DeSantis could offer the former president’s Maga (“Make America great again”) politics in purer, perfected form, unencumbered by Trump’s age, chaos or court cases. Some said he was therefore more dangerous than Trump. Comedian Trevor Noah suggested that, if Trump was the original Terminator, DeSantis was the T-1000, a smarter and slicker upgrade.DeSantis was billed as Trump without the baggage. He turned out to be Trump without the votes.The governor made a series of bad gambles. He bet big on May and Twitter Spaces as the right time and place to start. He bet big on a moral crusade against wokeness. He bet big on outsourcing central parts of his campaign to a Super Pac (whose boss spent significant time during the last days in Iowa working on a jigsaw puzzle). He bet big on Trump’s candidacy imploding under legal pressures. He bet big on the Iowa caucuses. None of them paid off.Longtime political observers in Florida had doubts from the start. They knew that DeSantis had conquered the heavily populated Sunshine state with heavy TV advertising and an unusually weak Democratic opponent. They suspected that the retail politics of Iowa – shaking hands, kissing babies, holding long conversations in diners about ethanol – would expose his lack of people skills. They were right.Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican operative and cofounder of the Lincoln Project, says: “This guy was politically overpriced stock from the very beginning. He represented Diet Trump but no Trump voter wants the low sugar, low fat, no caffeine version of Trump. They want the real thing.”But while much has been written about DeSantis’s joyless, low charisma campaign, this was a failure not only of style but of substance. The governor ran to the right of Trump on many issues and put nearly all his eggs in the basket of a “war on woke”.His timing was off. Culture war issues had been all the rage during the coronavirus pandemic – masks, vaccines, school closures – then morphed into a parents’ rights movement around book bans, critical race theory and transgender children’s access to bathrooms and sports. If it worked for Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, why not DeSantis in the US?But by the time the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary came around, the pandemic had faded and masks were rarely seen. DeSantis’s accusations that Trump palled around with Dr Anthony Fauci and forced national lockdowns, while Florida stayed open had lost their resonance.The limitations of anti-wokeness were also exposed. Groups such as Moms for Liberty, which aim to keep race and LGBTQ issues out of school curricular, underperformed in last year’s elections in states such as Virginia, where Youngkin seemed to have lost his touch.Polls show that DeSantis’s six-week abortion ban is unpopular in Florida and nationwide. His actions against the Walt Disney Co after the company spoke out against Florida legislation that limited discussion of gender and sexuality in classrooms went down badly among pro-business Republicans.Aware of such trends, Trump is trying to be vague on abortion and talk less about culture war issues these days. At a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire on Saturday, it took him an hour and 15 minutes to promise a crackdown on schools “pushing” critical race theory and transgender content as well as vaccine mandates. The crowd cheered heartily, suggesting that these topics have not lost all their potency, but Trump quickly moved on.Wilson comments: “Trump may not be smart, but he’s got a kind of feral cunning and he recognises that the culture war stuff has run out too far. That’s why he said, oh, you have to have a few exceptions [for abortion].“A guy like DeSantis was on the very bleeding edge of six-week abortion bans and the most punitive approaches to all the culture war things – book banning and everything else – and he thought that was going to get him over the finish line. But when Trump is in the race, he still could never put it together.DeSantis is still just 45 and aware that other candidates – Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden included – have lost primaries only to try again and win the presidency. He recently claimed that Trump voters in Iowa told him they will back him in four years’ time, telling reporters: “They were coming up to me saying: ‘We want you in 2028, we love you, man.”The timing of his withdrawal and endorsement of Trump, which frees the former’s president voters to back him against Haley in New Hampshire in South Carolina, will earn him a few points in Trump World.Florida congressman Matt Gaetz said on Sunday: “Welcome home Ron, welcome back to the Maga movement where you’ve always belonged.” More

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    Ron DeSantis drops out of Republican presidential race

    Ron DeSantis, the hard-right governor of Florida, has ended his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination and endorsed Donald Trump.“It’s clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance,” he said in a statement posted on X. “He has my endorsement because we can’t go back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear, a repackaged form of warmed over corporatism that Nikki Haley represents.”DeSantis’s withdrawal in the days ahead of the New Hampshire primary follows a disappointing result in the Iowa caucus, where he finished second place but trailed Donald Trump by a large margin. In New Hampshire, his numbers were far behind former South Carolina governor Haley and Trump.“He’s been a good governor and I wish him well,” Haley said at a campaign event on Sunday. “Having said that, it’s now one fella and one lady left.”DeSantis’ news was the culmination of a long, agonising decline.As recently as spring 2023, the former navy lawyer and rightwing congressman was widely seen as the Republican most likely to stop Trump becoming the nominee for a third election running, in large part by attempting to offer harsh Trumpist policies without the attendant drama.In November 2022, DeSantis cruised past the Democrat Charlie Crist to win a second term in Tallahassee. In his victory speech, he crowed: “We have embraced freedom. We have maintained law and order. We have protected the rights of parents. We have respected our taxpayers and we reject ‘woke’ ideology.”Referencing Winston Churchill, a near-mythic figure on the American right, he went on: “We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools, we fight the woke in the corporations. We will never ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.”He received a rapturous reception, supporters with an eye on 2024 chanting “two more years” and the New York Post branding him “DeFuture”, as speculation abounded that Rupert Murdoch was finally set to move on from Trump.But despite formidable fundraising, a seemingly strong campaign structure, strong polling and a rising Republican star in his wife, Casey DeSantis, after a long run-in to a formal campaign declaration, little went right.DeSantis’s hard-right agenda ran into trouble as he chose to take on Disney, a dominant employer in Florida, over its opposition to his “don’t say gay” policy regarding LGBTQ+ issues in schools. Generating a string of stories, scandals and lawsuits over book bans in school libraries, the subject continued to dog the campaign.In May the launch of that campaign, a Twitter Spaces session with Elon Musk, descended into farce as the platform glitched and buckled. The event host, the donor David Sacks, claimed: “We got so many people here that we are kind of melting the servers, which is a good sign.” Few observers agreed.On the campaign trail in the months that followed, the governor came across as stilted and awkward. For a campaign focused on social media and the influencers who lurk there, the resultant string of mocking memes and threads could not have been in the plan.Nor could a summer fiasco over bizarre campaign videos, posted to social media and featuring far-right, white supremacist, Nazi and arguably homoerotic imagery. A firing followed but the campaign’s image had taken another big blow, reports of fundraising problems appearing.There was a scandal over an attempt to change history teaching in state schools, regarding the place of slavery in Florida’s past. There were attempts to troll Democrats on immigration, including sending undocumented migrants to Democratic-run states by bus or plane. That policy ended up in the courts as well.As the polling gap to Trump grew, and as the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley steadily moved through the field, DeSantis sought ways to fight back.In November he took the unexpected step of debating a Democrat other than Joe Biden. The Fox News-hosted contest with Gavin Newsom, the California governor, proved little more than a sideshow. Brandishing a map he said showed the spread of “human faeces” on the streets of San Francisco, DeSantis succeeded only in feeding more “poop map” memes.DeSantis and Haley became more willing to attack Trump as the first vote neared, if still with the gloves kept on, even Trump’s lie about a stolen election in 2020 proving hard to simply disown. In Iowa, DeSantis picked up key nominations from the governor, Kim Reynolds, and evangelical leaders and eventually finished in second. But that still didn’t catapult his campaign into safe New Hampshire territory, and he dropped out before the numbers could prove just how far behind he might be. stuck fending off speculation about whether he wore lifts in his shoes.Democrats celebrated the news on Sunday.“As Democrats, we’ve been shouting from the rooftops that his strategy of waging culture wars on the backs of hardworking Floridians just to further his own ambitions was wrong for the state & would be disastrous for the nation,” said Fentrice Driskell, the lead Democrat in the Florida state legislature on Twitter/X.Sarafina Chitika, spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee, said: “Just like Trump, DeSantis ran a campaign pledging to ban abortion nationwide, rip away access to health care, and gut Social Security and Medicare, while embracing election deniers and whitewashing January 6. Whichever candidate wins the race for the Maga base will be left running on the same dangerous and unpopular anti-freedom agenda that voters will reject in November.”For its part, the New Hampshire electorate did not seem too shaken by his last-minute announcement.Two hours before an event he had planned in New Hampshire, there were no signs of the DeSantis campaign or his fans at The Farm Bar and Grille. A member of staff said they had found out from news reports that DeSantis wouldn’t be coming and said he had not yet pre-paid for the space.“Nope, I’m about to charge him right now.”
    Adam Gabbatt contributed reporting from New Hampshire More

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    Why New Hampshire could be the last chance for Republicans to beat Trump

    Brightly dressed in a red-and-white starry jacket, Melinda Tourangeau was waiting eagerly at Grill 603, a casual diner in small-town New Hampshire, for a US presidential candidate not named Donald Trump.Tourangeau, 57, who lives in Milford, was “reluctantly forced to vote for Trump” in 2016 and 2020, she said. “I had to leave my morals at the door.”But this time she is supporting Nikki Haley. “She has gone all over the state to meet people, and when she meets you, and when you meet her, you feel raised, you feel like you’re a better person after you’ve met her. And her platform is brilliant – clear, concise, cogent – and she intends to do everything she says. She’s the right candidate.”Whether this is a minority view, or indicative of tectonic plates shifting among Republicans in New Hampshire, will be put to the test in Tuesday’s first-in-the-nation primary election. It comes one week after Trump’s record victory over Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, and Haley, an ex-US ambassador to the UN, in the Iowa caucuses.For half the century, no candidate who won both Iowa and New Hampshire has failed to secure their party’s presidential nomination. Victory for Trump here would probably seal the deal and set up a rematch with Democrat Joe Biden in November.But if Iowa played to Trump’s strengths among evangelical Christians and rural conservatives, New Hampshire is a different proposition. Its voters pride themselves on an independent streak – the state motto is “Live free or die” – and are generally wealthier, more educated and less religious. Both states are about 90% white.Voters who are registered without a party affiliation make up about 40% of the electorate in New Hampshire and are eligible to cast a Republican primary ballot, which makes them more moderate than in Iowa. New voters can also register at the polls on Tuesday.For Trump, whose authoritarian language, criminal charges and brash populism play less well among college-educated voters, this represents something of an away game. Even in the Iowa suburbs last week, he won only a third of the votes.Haley has a more “Republican classic” image – less extreme on issues such as abortion, more hawkish on foreign policy – and has been barnstorming New Hampshire for months. Although her third place finish in Iowa blunted her momentum, and some opinion polls still show Trump well ahead in New Hampshire, others put Haley running neck and neck.That makes Tuesday a make-or-break moment. EJ Dionne, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, said at a panel discussion organised by the thinktank: “There is a road for her but it’s rocky, it’s rutted, it’s narrow and it runs along the edge of a cliff. She has to win New Hampshire, I believe, to have any chance of going on. I don’t think running Trump close in New Hampshire will really cut it any more, especially after running third in Iowa.”Trump apparently senses the danger and has stepped up his attacks on Haley. At a rally in Concord on Friday, he told supporters: “All you need to know about Nikki Haley is that every corrupt and sinister group we’ve been fighting for the past seven years is on her side … Nikki Haley is backed by the deep state and the military-industrial complex. She’s never seen a war she doesn’t like.”He has also resorted to his default tactic of using race and ethnicity as a political cudgel. In a post on his Truth Social account, Trump repeatedly referred to Haley, the daughter of immigrants from India, as “Nimbra”. She was born as Nimarata Nikki Randhawa but has always gone by her middle name.Asked about Trump’s false claim that her heritage disqualifies her from running from president, Haley told reporters: “I’ll let people decide what he means by his attacks. What we know is, look, he’s clearly insecure if he goes and does these temper tantrums, if he’s spending millions of dollars on TV. He’s insecure, he knows that something’s wrong.”She has also been returning fire by making a case that, while Trump was the right choice for president in 2016, he is now too old and chaos follows him wherever he goes. She is seeking to thread a needle, appealing to independents as the more acceptable face of the Republican party while not entirely alienating Trump’s “Make America great again” base.Such calculations have led her into trouble. Last month, when she was asked by a New Hampshire voter about the reason for the civil war, she did not mention slavery in her answer. Last week, in an interview on Fox News, she claimed: “We’ve never been a racist country.”But even if Haley does pull off a stunning upset, she would then head into less favourable territory next month in Nevada and her home state of South Carolina. It is also difficult for any candidate to compete with the attention-grabbing spectacle of Trump, facing 91 charges across four cases, showing up in courtrooms even as he runs for president.Tara Setmayer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, predicts that he will win the New Hampshire primary. “There are some people who are hoping and praying and wishing that Nikki Haley can overtake him, which would be interesting, but again, fleeting in her success because she will go to South Carolina and lose by 30 points in her own home state. I cannot think of any example in political history where losing in your own home state by double digits has been a momentum booster.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShe added: “Some are looking at New Hampshire and thinking, well, depending on how Trump does, this could be indicative of his weakness in the general election. Perhaps. But there is a certain desire by the political media for a story and the horse race, and they’re looking for anything to write other than the inevitability of Trump, because once that happens, then people may tune out because they’re bored.”DeSantis got about 21% of the vote in Iowa, 30 points behind Trump’s narrow majority and two points ahead of Haley. He has spent little time in New Hampshire, aware that his mini-Trump persona and joyless campaign are unlikely to gain traction with either the Maga base or independents. He may soldier on to Nevada and South Carolina, playing for second in case Trump is unexpectedly felled by his age or legal troubles, and with an eye on another run in 2028.Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster, told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute thinktank in Washington last week: “His appeal overlaps so much with Donald Trump. Even though he and Donald Trump have sparred a little bit throughout this race, it hasn’t got super nasty. And all of the polling I see, Nikki Haley’s favourables are not great-great but Ron DeSantis’s are still pretty great-great among Republican voters.“Even though I don’t see a path for him – he’s going to get single digits in New Hampshire and go to South Carolina, I don’t know where this all ends – I do think I can see why he wants to stay in and be relevant as long as he can, because he does have a shot at being able to say: ‘I’m the second place guy if there is an in-case-of-emergency-break-glass situation.’”Meanwhile Democrats are also holding a primary on Tuesday but Biden is skipping it because the state defies new Democratic rules he advocates. The president will not be on the ballot alongside nearly two dozen candidates but his allies in the state have mounted a campaign to get voters to write in his name. The result will have no bearing on the Democratic nomination but could deal Biden a symbolic blow.Another tradition missing from the final week in New Hampshire is debates. Haley, angling to frame the primary as a battle between Trump and herself, had suggested that she would debate only if he was on stage. But the former president has skipped every debate so far and paid no price. Two televised debates for the final New Hampshire sprint were duly cancelled.Indeed, Trump is already campaigning as if he were already in a general election against Biden, focusing his invective on border security and rising prices. At a rally in Atkinson, New Hampshire, this week he told supporters: “Our country is dying … And I stand before you today as the only candidate who is up to the task of saving America.” He promised to “make our country rich as hell again”.There are also ominous signs of the Republican party coalescing around him, just as it did in 2016. Primary rivals Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota; Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur; and Tim Scott, a senator for South Carolina, all endorsed Trump after dropping out of the race. A constellation of senators, representatives, governors, and former White House and cabinet officials have done likewise, lending his nomination a sense of inevitability.Back in Milford, despite all the criminal charges and his past conduct towards women, Tourangeau admitted that she would still vote for Trump if he is the Republican nominee come November, not least because of her retirement savings plan.“I will have the sickest feeling in my stomach as I begrudgingly walk to the polls with my head down, and I will cast a vote for him,” she said. “But it’s only because my 401k will be bursting.” More

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    Nikki Haley bets on frosty New Hampshire to warm up to her candidacy

    There is rest for neither the wicked nor the warm undergarments among Republican presidential candidates this week, as the Republican primary rolls from a bone-bustingly cold Iowa to an almost-as-frigid New Hampshire.In Manchester, the state’s largest city, the temperature dropped to 10F (-12C) in the days before Tuesday’s primary election, cold enough for icicles to cling to cars, rooftops and, in a park near the center of town, a roundabout.But despite the snow piled high by the sides of roads, and the near constant need for a woolly hat, the remaining Republicans are set to spend the next few days making a last-minute pitch to voters.After a disappointing time in Iowa, where she placed third in the state’s caucuses, Nikki Haley is hoping the Granite state can hand her a boost, as she seeks to prevent what is threatening to become a Donald Trump march to the Republican nomination, and there are some signs that the former governor of South Carolina might just be in luck.In a state that takes an unusually aggressive pride in its independence – “Live free or die”, New Hampshire’s state motto, is the kind of thing a guy might scream before ripping off his shirt and initiating a bar fight – Republican voters at least appear to be considering someone other than their party’s de facto leader.Polls show Haley winning almost 34% of the vote in the state, 13 points behind Trump but riding a surge despite a disappointing performance in Iowa. Haley’s pitch of calm instead of the “chaos” of Trump, and her positioning of herself as a relative centrist, could prove appealing in New Hampshire.“The Iowa Republican party is dominated by conservative evangelical Christians, whose first, second and third concerns are cultural relations – they care about LGBTQ+ issues, they care about abortion, all that sort of stuff,” said Christopher Galdieri, a professor in the department of politics at Saint Anselm College.“Republicans here, there is a constituency for those sorts of issues, but a lot of Republicans here, particularly in what passes for the party’s establishment these days, their main concern is fiscal conservatism, low taxes, low regulation.”Haley, who in the American media’s telling has become the main threat to Trump, was scheduled to hold a slew of events in the coming days, including intimate gatherings in New Hampshire’s smaller towns, such as Keene and Exeter. But in Manchester, where looming red-brick buildings serve as a nod to its UK namesake, it is Trump who seems to have the largest presence, with signs heralding the former president prominent and his campaign headquarters a hub of activity.The former president traveled to New Hampshire on Friday after spending much of Thursday in court in New York, where a judge is deciding what damages he must pay to E Jean Carroll, who a jury found was sexually assaulted by Trump in 1995. The case appears to have distracted him, at least in the short term, from his efforts to win the presidency: Trump spent Thursday night posting more than 30 times on Truth Social, the rightwing social media network he formed after being banned from Twitter (now X) in 2020.Still, as the vote approaches, Trump is following a similar plan as the one he used in Iowa, swooping in to New Hampshire to hold bombastic rallies in venues his rivals could only dream of filling. The one-term former president was due to hold four rallies over the four days before the primary, including one at the 10,000-seat SNHU arena in Manchester.Trump addressed thousands of supporters at the same venue the night before the 2016 primary, memorably calling Ted Cruz, then one of his main rivals, a “pussy”. Trump had narrowly lost to Cruz in Iowa, but swept to victory in New Hampshire with a commanding 20-point victory that lit a fire under Trump’s campaign and propelled him to the Republican nomination.There are signs that things may be closer on Tuesday.In recent days Trump has complained about independent voters, who under state rules are able to vote in the Republican primary, potentially backing Haley, and has launched racist dog-whistle attacks against his opponent. He referred to Haley, whose parents emigrated to the US from India, as Nimrada, a butchering of her legal first name, Nimarata. Haley has gone by Nikki, her middle name, since she was born, a spokesperson said in 2021.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFor her part, Haley is running a new ad in the state which links Trump with Joe Biden, claiming “both are consumed by chaos, negativity and grievances of the past”, and her relative calm seems to have some appeal.“I like her policies. I like what she did in South Carolina. I think she’s got good international experience, obviously, as a former UN ambassador,” said Jeanne Geisser at an event at a fancy hotel in Salem, a 20-minute drive from Manchester. She voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, but said she would cast her ballot for Haley this time.“With Trump, all these lawsuits that are going on, I don’t know what’s gonna happen with those. And just his demeanor, his belittling of people. I don’t see that as presidential,” Geisser said.One person mostly absent from New Hampshire is Ron DeSantis, the cowboy boot-wearing Florida governor who came second to Trump in the Iowa caucuses. Though he beat Haley there, DeSantis is averaging 5% in New Hampshire polls, and though he held some events in the state on Friday, he has largely switched focus to South Carolina.While the focus is on the Republican primary, there are Democratic hopefuls active in New Hampshire too; Dean Phillips, a congressman from Minnesota, and Marianne Williamson, a self-help guru, are engaged in a largely futile battle to replace Joe Biden as the presidential nominee.Both Phillips and Williamson have both spent weeks criss-crossing the state, but New Hampshire will effectively have no say in the Democratic primary, after an internal party feud. The national Democratic party ditched decades of tradition this year in choosing South Carolina, a much more racially diverse state, to host the first presidential primary. When New Hampshire said it would host its primary first anyway, the Democratic National Committee essentially said it would ignore the results.That means most eyes will be concentrated on the Republican side of things next week, where Haley’s wealthy backers are demanding a good result.Ken Langone, the billionaire Home Depot co-founder and a key Haley donor, told the Financial Times on Thursday that he was prepared to spend “a nice sum of money” to support his candidate – but only if she does well in the Granite state.“If she doesn’t get traction in New Hampshire, you don’t throw money down a rathole,” Langone said. More

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    Major poll gives Trump 16-point lead in New Hampshire days before primary

    Donald Trump continues to dominate the race for the Republican presidential nomination, enjoying a 16-point lead in New Hampshire days before it becomes the second state to vote, according to a major new poll.Suffolk University, the Boston Globe and NBC found the former president at 50% support in New Hampshire, to 34% for the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. Ron DeSantis, the hard-right governor of Florida, who edged out Haley for second in Iowa this week, was a distant third at 5%.In New Hampshire, undeclared voters can take part in state or presidential primaries. Many observers think such voters will have an outsized effect on the Republican primary this year, given the lack of real Democratic contest because Joe Biden is president.In the new poll, Trump dominated among registered Republicans and voters who called themselves conservatives. Haley led among moderates and independents.David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center in Boston, told the Globe: “Haley’s had a tough week: underperforming in Iowa, trying to answer Trump’s attacks on her positions on social security and immigration, and the recent [Vivek] Ramaswamy endorsement of Trump helping him with younger GOP voters.”Ramaswamy, a brash biotech entrepreneur with whom Haley frequently clashed in debates, dropped out after finishing fourth in Iowa.For Haley, Paleologos said, there was still time “to at least close the gap with undecided voters or even with some Trump voters, and pull Trump below 50”.Other recent polls have shown Haley closing the gap in New Hampshire. On Wednesday, the American Research Group had Haley and Trump tied at 40% each.Not all polls are created equal. The polling analysis site FiveThirtyEight.com gives the American Research Group a C+ rating. Suffolk University gets an A-.After New Hampshire, the next state to vote will be Haley’s own. The FiveThirtyEight average for South Carolina puts Trump at 55%, Haley at 25% and DeSantis at 12%. Nationally, the site puts Trump at 63%, and Haley and DeSantis both 41 points behind.With Trump displaying such dominance despite facing unprecedented legal jeopardy – 91 criminal charges, various civil suits and attempts to keep him off the ballot for inciting an insurrection – most observers think Haley must win in New Hampshire if the primary is to present anything like a meaningful contest.Seeking to present a straight choice between her and Trump, Haley said she would not take part in New Hampshire debates planned for Thursday (to be hosted by ABC) and Sunday (CNN). As Trump has skipped all debates so far, that left DeSantis the only contender willing to appear.Both debates were scrapped. CNN said: “We will continue to pursue other opportunities as the campaign season progresses through 2024, including candidate town halls this week with Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley.”Haley told CNN that Trump was “who I’m running against, that’s who I want. At the end of the day, he’s the frontrunner … There is nobody else I need to debate.”But on Wednesday Trump was more than 250 miles south of New Hampshire, in court in New York City in a defamation suit brought by the writer E Jean Carroll, whose claim that Trump raped her has already been deemed “substantially true” by the judge.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionClaiming Haley was “terrified of getting smoked” on the debate stage, the DeSantis campaign posted Iowa remarks in which Haley said of Trump: “You can’t have an election and not appear on a debate stage in front of the people who are gonna be voting for you. That’s an arrogant approach to think you don’t have to do that.”Haley and DeSantis were campaigning in New Hampshire on Tuesday but DeSantis was reportedly preparing to switch focus to South Carolina. Once a fundraising juggernaut, the DeSantis campaign has seen donations fall in line with polling results.“It’s a pretty sober conversation in terms of how much more the campaign can raise in this environment,” an unnamed source told the Washington Post. Elsewhere, the DeSantis-supporting Super Pac Never Back Down began laying off staff.DeSantis sought to sound a warning to voters, telling CNN that should Trump be the Republican nominee, the presidential election “will revolve around all these legal issues, his trials, perhaps convictions … and about things like January 6” – the deadly attack on Congress Trump incited as he attempted to overturn his 2020 defeat.Republicans, DeSantis said, would “lose if voters are making a decision based on that. We don’t want it to be a referendum on those issues.”Many agree. Digesting the result in Iowa, JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois and a Biden surrogate, told MSNBC: “Almost half of the base of the Republican party showing up for this caucus voted against Donald Trump.“Think about that. I think that is telling. It tells you the weakness of Donald Trump and also the opportunity for Democrats because in the end … if the base doesn’t turn out for Donald Trump in the general election enthusiastically and Democrats turn out [their] base, this is all about independents – and independents don’t like Donald Trump.” More

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    Ron DeSantis insists US is ‘not a racist country’, echoing claim by Nikki Haley

    The hard-right Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, said the US was “not a racist country”, echoing a controversial claim by Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who is also trying to deny Donald Trump the Republican presidential nomination.“Well, the US is not a racist country,” DeSantis told a CNN town hall in New Hampshire. “And we’ve overcome things in our history. You know, I think the founding fathers – they established a set of principles that are universal.”More than 250 years before independence from Britain, enslaved African people were brought to American soil by Spanish ships in the 1500s. Native Americans were displaced and enslaved.The first ship of enslaved Africans arrived on Virginia soil in 1619. Slavery in southern states caused the civil war (a fact Haley failed to mention when quizzed on the subject last month), a conflict fought between 1861 and 1865 and ending with slavery abolished. Jim Crow laws enforced segregation and unequal treatment in southern states until the civil rights reforms of the 1960s.Entrenched social and economic inequalities persist, affecting all racial minorities. The last presidential election, in 2020, took place after a summer of protests for racial justice inspired by the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis.Going into the New Hampshire primary next week, DeSantis and Haley trail Trump by wide margins. This week, DeSantis edged out Haley for a distant second in Iowa.On Tuesday, Haley, whose parents came to the US from India, told Fox News: “I’m a brown girl … who became the first female minority governor in history, who became a UN ambassador and who is now running for president.“If that’s not the American dream, I don’t know what is. You can sit there and give me all the reasons why you think I can’t do this. I will continue to defy everybody on why we can do this. And we will get it done.“We’re not a racist country … we’ve never been a racist country. Our goal is to make sure that today is better than yesterday. Are we perfect? No. But our goal is to always make sure we try and be more perfect every day that we can.”Amid criticism, a Haley spokesperson said: “America has always had racism, but America has never been a racist country.”Race and racism are polarising issues across US society. Republicans have recently pursued attacks on teaching about race and racism in US history as a way of attracting support. DeSantis has faced his own controversies, including over a Florida attempt to change how the history of slavery is taught.In New Hampshire, asked about Haley’s remarks, DeSantis said the principles of the Declaration of Independence – signed in 1776, saying “all men are created equal” – “may not have been universally applied at the time. But I think they understood what they were doing. They understood that those principles would be the engine for progress for generations to come.”Pressed on Haley’s contention that the US is not a racist country, DeSantis said: “Well, what I said was we’ve had challenges with how race was viewed.“And so, for example, those were universal principles in the Declaration of Independence. And you had a [supreme court] decision in the 1850s [that] said Dred Scott [an enslaved man who sued for his freedom], because he was Black, wasn’t an American citizen. That was wrong. That was discriminating on the basis of race. That’s why you ended up having the 14th amendment ratified to overturn Dred Scott.”Approved after the civil war, the 14th amendment gave citizenship to formerly enslaved people. It also barred former Confederates running for office – a provision Colorado and Maine are now seeking to apply to Trump, for inciting the January 6 attack on Congress.According to the Pew Research Center, Republican voters are overwhelmingly white.“Yes,” DeSantis continued. “We’ve had challenges with how we’ve dealt with race as a society.”On Wednesday, Kamala Harris, the first woman and first woman of colour to be vice-president, discussed Haley and DeSantis’s remarks with ABC.“The issue of race in America is not something that should be the subject of a soundbite,” Harris said. “The history of racism in America should never be the subject of … a question that is meant to elicit a one-sentence answer.“But there is no denying that we have, in our history as a nation, racism, and that racism has played a role in the history of our nation.” More

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    DeSantis booked his ticket out of Iowa – but is he still on the road to nowhere?

    Minutes after his second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses was confirmed, Ron DeSantis came onstage in a hotel ballroom to declare that everything was going according to plan in his campaign to win the Republican presidential nomination.“They threw everything but the kitchen sink at us,” the Florida governor told a crowd of supporters who had made liberal use of a nearby cash bar on Monday evening, in the hours they waited for him to speak in West Des Moines.“They were predicting that we wouldn’t be able to get our ticket punched here, out of Iowa. But, I can tell you because of your support, in spite of all of that they threw at us, everyone against us, we’ve got our ticket punched out of Iowa,” DeSantis said.Ticket to where? The Florida governor did not say, and there are few indications he is primed to win, or even repeat his second-place finish, when New Hampshire Republicans hold their primary next week.While DeSantis’s first runner-up status in Iowa is good enough for his campaign to continue, he finished 30 percentage points behind the victor, Donald Trump, and just two points ahead of Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor whose campaign is hoping for a win in New Hampshire.DeSantis’s strategy called for victory in Iowa, and the governor campaigned in all 99 counties, won the endorsement of the state’s Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, and influential evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats and was supported by more than $33m in advertising.None of that was enough to keep Trump from an overwhelming victory, and with the former president leading the polls of the other states that will vote in the coming weeks, it’s not clear where DeSantis can regain momentum.“I don’t see much good for him in the short term,” said Michael Binder, a political science professor at the University of North Florida. “It’s not going to happen in New Hampshire. So, the narrative then, for the next three weeks, is going to be, what’s he doing? Does he have money to continue?”DeSantis launched his campaign last May with endorsements, money and a pitch to replicate his conservative remaking of Florida’s laws on the national level. But he ran into the same problem every other Republican presidential contender has: Trump’s continued stranglehold on the GOP base. The former president had led most polls throughout last year, and saw his edge grow sharper with each criminal indictment against him.Trump also repeatedly outmaneuvered DeSantis, most notably by picking up endorsements from lawmakers in Florida and holding an edge in polls that the governor was never able to overcome.Meanwhile, DeSantis’s campaign lost staff throughout last year, while Never Back Down, the Super Pac supporting him, struggled to maintain donors and parted ways with a key strategist. In the final days before Iowa’s caucuses, DeSantis began referring to himself as an “underdog”, and on Monday, that status was confirmed when Trump won every county in the state, except for one that Haley picked up. DeSantis carried none.“I think DeSantis’s struggles are, at this point, kind of embedded into him. He’s not the most charismatic of candidates, he struggles to connect with people, he has some weird ticks that people find off-putting. And that’s hard to overcome when you’re going up against essentially an incumbent,” Binder said.On Tuesday morning, DeSantis went on the attack against Haley after she announced she would only attend debates against Trump or Joe Biden. “I won’t snub New Hampshire voters like both Nikki Haley and Donald Trump, and plan to honor my commitments,” DeSantis wrote on X.Matt Gaetz, a rightwing Florida congressman and Trump ally, responded: “It’s over man.” More