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      Republican who said she held Trump accountable for January 6 endorses him

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      The Republican South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace faced widespread accusations of hypocrisy after she endorsed Donald Trump – the presidential candidate she previously said she held “accountable” for the January 6 attack on Congress.On Monday, Mace announced her endorsement, a day before the New Hampshire primary, in which Trump enjoys comfortable polling leads over the former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, his only remaining opponent.“I don’t see eye to eye perfectly with any candidate,” Mace said. “And until now I’ve stayed out of it. But the time has come to unite behind our nominee.”Saying “it’s been a complete shit show since [Trump] left the White House”, the congresswoman said the US “needs to reverse all the damage Joe Biden has done”. Trump, she said, would be better on the economy, immigration and national security.“Donald Trump’s record in his first term should tell every American how vital it is he be returned to office,” Mace said.“Good Lord,” said Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican who sat on the House January 6 committee then quit Congress over his opposition to Trump. “Nancy Mace is just the worst.”At present, Trump faces 91 criminal charges (17 for election subversion), attempts to keep him off the ballot for inciting an insurrection and assorted civil trials. Still, he has dominated the Republican primary, winning comfortably in Iowa last week.Observers were quick to point to what Mace made of Trump at the end of that term, in the aftermath of January 6.On that day, supporters Trump told to “fight like hell” to block certification of his defeat by Biden attacked Congress, seeking lawmakers to capture and possibly kill in a riot now linked to nine deaths, more than 1,200 arrests and hundreds of convictions.“Everything that he’s worked for … all of that, his entire legacy, was wiped out yesterday,” Mace told CNN on 7 January 2021. “We’ve got to start over.”On 11 January, Mace said: “We have to hold the president accountable for what happened. The rhetoric leading up to this vote, the lies that were told to the American people – this is what happens, rhetoric has real consequences. And people died.”Trump was impeached a second time for inciting the Capitol attack.On 13 January, Mace said on the House floor she would vote against impeachment but added: “I believe we need to hold the president accountable. I hold him accountable for the events that transpired for the attack on our Capitol last Wednesday.”While 10 House Republicans voted to impeach Trump, he was acquitted at his Senate trial when enough members of his party stayed loyal.Trump turned against Mace, endorsing a primary rival in her district in South Carolina. Mace fought off the challenge – with campaign help from Haley.Also on Monday, Steve Benen, an MSNBC producer, said: “Remember when Trump called Nancy Mace ‘absolutely terrible’ and tried to end her career? And when Nikki Haley scrambled to rescue her? A lot can happen in 18 months.”Mace is not the only senior South Carolina Republican to desert the former governor: the US senator Tim Scott, who Haley appointed in 2012, endorsed Trump on Friday.Jose Pagliery, a politics reporter for the Daily Beast, pointed to another widely remarked irony in Mace’s decision to endorse Trump this week, writing: “Rape survivor Nancy Mace just endorsed Donald Trump in the middle of his second rape trial.”In April last year, on CBS’s Face the Nation, Mace discussed both her work to improve the processing of rape kits by law enforcement and her support for exceptions for victims of rape or incest in abortion bans passed in Republican states.She also said: “I am a victim of rape, I was raped by a classmate at the age of 16. I am very wary and the devil is always in the details, but we’ve got to show more care and concern and compassion for women who’ve been raped.”In August, a New York judge dismissed a counterclaim by Trump in a defamation suit brought by the writer E Jean Carroll over her claim that Trump sexually assaulted her in a department store changing room in the 1990s.Explaining why the jury decided Trump “sexually abused” Carroll but did not endorse Carroll’s claim that he raped her, Lewis A Kaplan discussed the difference, under New York law, between forcible penetration with the penis or with fingers.The jury said Trump did the latter to Carroll. Kaplan, however, wrote: “Mr Trump did in fact ‘rape’ Ms Carroll as that term is commonly used and understood in contexts outside of the New York penal law.”The case has now reached a second trial, though a hearing scheduled for Monday was postponed due to juror illness.A representative for Mace did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Speaking to Fox News, Mace said Haley had been a “great governor” but voters in her South Carolina district were “overwhelmingly with Donald Trump”.“People want the primary to be over,” Mace said, pointing to an eventuality most pundits expect sooner rather than later, given Trump’s leads over Haley in New Hampshire, South Carolina (the third state to vote) and elsewhere.Mace also said that for voters in her district, “women’s issues” including abortion were “gonna be really important in the 2024 cycle”. More

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      Haley Campaign Making $4 Million Ad Buy in South Carolina

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      Nikki Haley’s campaign announced on Saturday that it is making a $4 million buy for television, radio and digital advertising in South Carolina that will begin the day after the New Hampshire primary, as she seeks a one-on-one contest with Donald J. Trump.The reservation, which was announced by Ms. Haley’s campaign manager, Betsy Ankney, at an event hosted by Bloomberg News, will span all seven media markets in the state. It was presented as an indication of her intention to stay in the race regardless of the outcome on Tuesday.“I know everyone wants us to put a number on it,” Ms. Ankney said of how she would need perform. “We have never done that. We will never do that.”Ms. Haley has campaigned aggressively New Hampshire, the state where she has polled strongest against Mr. Trump, though she still trails the former president by double digits in polling averages. Ms. Ankney repeatedly declined to describe what she would consider a strong showing in New Hampshire, other than saying Ms. Haley needed to show “incremental progress” against Mr. Trump.“There is no specific benchmarks on what we need to do or not do,” she said.Ms. Ankney, echoing Ms. Haley, presented the race as a choice between a Biden-Trump rematch “with two 80-year-old men” or a next generation nominee, though she acknowledged the road ahead is steep.“Beating Donald Trump is not easy,” Ms. Ankney said. “He is a juggernaut. But how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” More

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      Even if Nikki Haley Shocks Trump in New Hampshire, It Won’t Matter

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      Nikki Haley did well enough in the Iowa caucuses Monday night to keep her supporters’ hopes alive. But her third-place showing, on the heels of Ron DeSantis and a mile behind Donald Trump, was also just disappointing enough to raise doubts about her candidacy.Her plan coming out of Iowa is a classic underdog strategy: Use strong early results to upend expectations in the contests to come, reshaping the dynamic of the race one upset victory at a time. So, the thinking goes, her solid-enough performance in Iowa will propel her higher in New Hampshire, where she holds a strong second place in the polls.It’s possible. But even if Ms. Haley does well in New Hampshire, it won’t matter. That’s because Ms. Haley is starkly out of step with the evolution of her party over the past decade.The shape of today’s Republican electorate can be seen most clearly in national polling of Republican voters, where Mr. Trump has led by a substantial margin for months. Even in the unlikely event that all the voters who have told pollsters in recent weeks that they support Mr. DeSantis, Chris Christie and the former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson switched over to Ms. Haley, she would reach only the high 20s, placing her more than 30 points behind Mr. Trump, who sits at around 60 percent. (The voters who have said they support Vivek Ramaswamy, who dropped out of the race on Monday night, would likely switch to Mr. Trump.)Sure, Ms. Haley might peel off some of those Trump voters if she manages to puncture his air of inevitability by knocking him sideways in New Hampshire. But imagining that she could wrest the nomination from him ignores the fact that, if he were to suffer a humiliating setback in New Hampshire, Mr. Trump would be guaranteed to attack her with a viciousness he has so far reserved primarily for Mr. DeSantis. In December, as she climbed in the polls, MAGA loyalists like Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon offered a preview of these sort of slashing attacks (referring to her as a “hologram” sent by donors or as potentially worse than “Judas Pence”).More important, though, the fulfillment of the Haley campaign’s hopes would require a wholesale shift in preferences among millions of Republican voters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      In South Carolina, Biden and Harris Test Policy-Heavy Pitch to Black Voters

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      The president’s re-election campaign is looking to rekindle support among a group that was pivotal to his 2020 victory, in a state that revived his candidacy.As Democrats amplify their concerns about President Biden’s status with Black voters, South Carolina has emerged as a proving ground for his campaign: one where he can test his message to a predominantly Black electorate and use it as a largely ceremonial launchpad for his re-election.At events over the last few days, both Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris offered reverential, policy-heavy re-election pitches to largely Black audiences and celebrated the Black organizers and community leaders who helped deliver the White House to Democrats, starting with those in the Palmetto State.They also drew a contrast with former President Donald J. Trump and other Republican leaders, whose election denialism and efforts to “whitewash” history, they said, threaten the progress that Black Americans have spent generations fighting for.Black voters have expressed frustration with the Biden administration for falling short on key campaign promises, and have shown less enthusiasm for Mr. Biden’s re-election in polls and interviews. But in South Carolina, both Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris aimed to highlight the lesser-known victories their administration has notched over the last three years, and they argued that a second term would allow them to achieve even more. Black voters’ disaffection with Democrats, campaign aides and allies argue, is rooted in their lack of awareness of the White House’s accomplishments rather than in fundamental flaws with the Biden-Harris ticket.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Biden’s 2024 Playbook

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      Mary Wilson and Rachel Quester and Marion Lozano, Dan Powell, Rowan Niemisto, Diane Wong and Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicYesterday, we went inside Donald Trump’s campaign for president, to understand how he’s trying to turn a mountain of legal trouble into a political advantage. Today, we turn to the re-election campaign of President Biden.Reid Epstein, who covers politics for The Times, explains why what looks on paper like a record of accomplishment is proving to be difficult to campaign on.On today’s episodeReid J. Epstein, a politics correspondent for The New York Times.The president and his team have waved away Democrats’ worries about his bid for another term.Kent Nishimura for The New York TimesBackground readingIn South Carolina, Democrats see a test of Biden’s appeal to Black voters.Political Memo: Should Biden really run again? He prolongs an awkward conversation.There are a lot of ways to listen to The Daily. Here’s how.We aim to make transcripts available the next workday after an episode’s publication. You can find them at the top of the page.Reid J. Epstein More

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      Nikki Haley, in Retreat, Says ‘Of Course the Civil War Was About Slavery’

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      A day after giving a stumbling answer about the conflict’s origin that did not mention slavery, Ms. Haley told an interviewer: “Yes, I know it was about slavery. I am from the South.”Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and Republican presidential hopeful, on Thursday walked back her stumbling answer about the cause of the Civil War, telling a New Hampshire interviewer, “Of course the Civil War was about slavery.”Her retreat came about 12 hours after a town-hall meeting in New Hampshire, a state that is central to her presidential hopes, where she was asked what caused the Civil War. She stumbled through an answer about government overreach and “the freedoms of what people could and couldn’t do,” after jokingly telling the questioner he had posed a tough one. He then noted she never uttered the word “slavery.”“What do you want me to say about slavery?” Ms. Haley replied. “Next question.”Speaking on a New Hampshire radio show on Thursday morning, Ms. Haley, who famously removed the Confederate battle flag from the grounds of the South Carolina Capitol in Columbia, said: “Yes I know it was about slavery. I am from the South.”But she also insinuated that the question had come not from a Republican voter but from a political detractor, accusing President Biden and Democrats of “sending plants” to her town-hall events.“Why are they hitting me? See this for what it is,” she said, adding, “They want to run against Trump.”In recent polls, Ms. Haley has surged into second place in New Hampshire, edging closer to striking distance of former President Donald J. Trump. To win the Granite State contest on Jan. 23, the first primary election of 2024, she will most likely need independent voters — and possibly Democrats who registered as independents. That is how Senator John McCain of Arizona upset George W. Bush in the state’s 2000 primary.But the Civil War gaffe may have put a crimp in that strategy.“I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run,” she said Wednesday night, “the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”The answer echoed a century’s argument from segregationists that the Civil War was fundamentally about states’ rights and economics, not about ending slavery.Late Wednesday night, even Mr. Biden rebuked the answer: “It was about slavery,” he wrote on social media.She tried to walk back her comments on Thursday, asking: “What’s the lesson in all this? That freedom matters. And individual rights and liberties matter for all people. That’s the blessing of America. That was a stain on America when we had slavery. But what we want is never relive it. Never let anyone take those freedoms away again.”The episode also undermined her appeal to moderates and independents seeking to thwart Mr. Trump’s return to the White House by portraying Ms. Haley as an agent of compromise.Her record as governor of South Carolina included blocking a bill to stop transgender youths from using bathrooms that corresponded to their gender identity. Her push to lower the Confederate battle flag came after the mass shooting of Black worshipers at a Charleston church by a white supremacist. And she has recently called for a middle ground on abortion.“Haley’s refusal to talk honestly about slavery or race in America is a sad betrayal of her own story,” said Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California. More

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      Biden Makes Focused Appeal to Black Voters in South Carolina

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      The president’s campaign is putting money and staff into South Carolina ahead of its primary in an effort to energize Black voters, who are critical to his re-election effort.President Biden’s campaign and affiliated groups are amping up their efforts in South Carolina, pouring in money and staff ahead of the first Democratic primary in February in an effort to generate excitement for his campaign in the state.It seems, at first glance, to be a curious political strategy. Few incumbent presidents have invested so much in an early primary state — particularly one like South Carolina, where Mr. Biden faces no serious primary challenger, and where no Democratic presidential candidate has won in a general election since Jimmy Carter in 1976.But the Biden campaign sees the effort as more than just notching a big win in the state that helped revive his struggling campaign in 2020, putting him on the path to winning the nomination. It hopes to energize Black voters, who are crucial to Mr. Biden’s re-election bid nationally, at a moment when his standing with Black Americans is particularly fraught.“One of the things that we have not done a good job of doing is showing the successes of this administration,” said Marvin Pendarvis, a state representative from North Charleston. He added that the campaign will need to curate a message “so that Black voters understand that this administration has done some of the most transformational things as it relates to Black communities, to minority communities.”Four years after Mr. Biden vowed to have the backs of the voters he said helped deliver him the White House, Black Americans in polls and focus groups are expressing frustration with Democrats for what they perceive as a failure to deliver on campaign promises. They also say that they have seen few improvements to their well-being under Mr. Biden’s presidency. Some are unsure whether they will vote at all.To counter that pessimism and boost Black turnout, Democrats are hitting the Palmetto State with a six-figure cash infusion from the Democratic National Committee, a slew of campaign events and an army of staffers and surrogates.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Nikki Haley’s South Carolina Strategy Has a Donald Trump Problem

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      Ms. Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, has won tough races in her home state. But as she vies for the 2024 Republican nomination, her state and party look different.In 2016, as Donald J. Trump was romping to victory in her home state, Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina backed Senator Marco Rubio as the fresh face of a “new conservative movement that’s going to change the country.”Now, Ms. Haley insists, she is that new generational leader, but even in her own state, she is finding Mr. Trump still standing in her way. If she is to make a real play for the Republican presidential nomination, South Carolina is where Ms. Haley needs to prove that the party’s voters want to turn the page on the Trump era — and where she has predicted that she will face him one-on-one after strong showings in Iowa and New Hampshire.“Then you’ll have me and Trump going into my home state of South Carolina — that’s how we win,” she told a crowd gathered inside a rustic banquet hall during a recent campaign stop in rural Wolfeboro, N.H.But Ms. Haley’s road to victory on her home turf will be steep. Ever since the state set Mr. Trump on a glide path to the G.O.P. nomination seven years ago, he has solidified a loyal base. The candidate who upended the state’s politics from outside the political system now has a tight hold on most of the Republican establishment, appearing recently with both Gov. Henry McMaster and Senator Lindsey Graham and boasting more than 80 endorsements from current and former officials across the state.“It is still clearly Trump’s party,” said Scott H. Huffmon, the director of the statewide Winthrop Poll, one of the few regular surveys of voter attitudes in the state. “That makes many Republican voters Trump supporters first. She has to remind them the party is bigger than one man.”Ms. Haley attempted to make that case on Wednesday on the national debate stage, where rivals intent on blunting her rise made her a target and put her on defense. She promised her approach would be different from Mr. Trump’s. “No drama, no vendettas, no whining,” she said. While Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has staked his bid on Iowa and former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has gone all in on New Hampshire, Ms. Haley’s campaign officials say they have sought to spend equitable time and resources in all three early-voting states.Her campaign has its headquarters in Charleston, and is bolstered by what the campaign said was hundreds of volunteers. (The campaign declined to give specifics on staffing and volunteer efforts across all three states.)But Ms. Haley’s efforts have so far been less pronounced in South Carolina. She has spent 58 days campaigning almost evenly between Iowa and New Hampshire, but only 12 in her own backyard. Her campaign has not yet released a full list of endorsements within the state, though several key state legislators and donors are expected to back Ms. Haley in the coming days, according to her campaign. A $10 million advertising effort, more than $4 million of which has been reserved on television so far, is expected only in Iowa and New Hampshire.Ms. Haley’s campaign officials and allies argue she still has time to make up ground, even as Mr. Trump remains dominant nationwide and in all the early states, where surveys indicate he leads his nearest opponent by double digits. Former Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Tim Scott, a fellow South Carolinian, have dropped out of the race, which has helped Ms. Haley with money and momentum and tightened the fight with Mr. DeSantis for second place.At an energetic town-hall event last week in Bluffton, S.C., Katon Dawson, an adviser for the Haley campaign in South Carolina and a former chairman of the state Republican Party, pointed to the audience of more than 2,500 people — her largest crowd yet in her home state — and said the mailing lists generated from such events would help elevate her ground game.“When South Carolina jumps into focus, it’s going to jump in the gutter, and we’ll be ready for it,” Mr. Dawson said, suggesting he expected the attacks on Ms. Haley to become uglier closer to the January contests in Iowa and New Hampshire.Plenty of the attendees at the Bluffton event were former Trump supporters. Michelle Handfield, 80, a volunteer at a correctional institute, and her husband, John, 81, a retired photographer, said they had been some of Mr. Trump’s most enthusiastic admirers. Ms. Handfield, a former Democrat, said he was the first Republican she had ever voted for in 2016.Now, however, they were planning to vote for Ms. Haley for reasons similar to what the former South Carolina governor has articulated: “Chaos follows him.”“I think he was a great president, but they were after him from the beginning — the Democrats — and then he didn’t help by what he says and does,” Ms. Handfield said. “I really wish he had won a second term, but I think now he would do more harm for the country than good.”Former President Donald J. Trump has solidified a loyal base in South Carolina, appearing recently with Gov. Henry McMaster at a University of South Carolina football game.Chris Carlson/Associated PressStill, many of the state’s Republican primary voters remain ardent supporters of Mr. Trump, even as he has so far kept a light campaign schedule.“It is fascinating that we see all of these campaigns in the various stages of grief as President Trump continues to dominate the primary field,” said Alex Latcham, Mr. Trump’s early states director. “Right now, Haley is in the bargaining stage.”Ms. Haley’s political base in the state remains the same as it was when she was governor: the affluent — and more moderate — Republicans along the coast and in Charleston.But her grip on the Midlands, honed by her years in government, has loosened with time, and whatever support she had in the much more conservative Upstate around Greenville has dissipated sharply. To prevail, she must win back some of those conservatives and soften enthusiasm for Mr. Trump, all while fending off attacks from other opponents.On the debate stage Wednesday, Mr. DeSantis took aim at her conservative record as governor, saying he had signed a bill criminalizing transgender people for using bathrooms in public buildings that do not correspond to their sex at birth and argued she had not supported a similar measure. Ms. Haley countered that such legislation wasn’t necessary at the time, adding that she had not wanted to bring government into the issue. The South Carolina bill did not advance past its introduction in the State House.Last week, Mr. DeSantis also ripped into Ms. Haley as he campaigned in South Carolina. On Friday, he appeared with Tara Servatius, a popular radio broadcaster on the Greenville station WORD, who has been using her show for weeks to blast Ms. Haley as an untrustworthy moderate.“For the last 10 years, I have tried to get Nikki Haley to come answer unscripted questions,” Ms. Servatius said, to which Mr. DeSantis quipped, “Good luck with that.”Some Republican primary voters seem to be looking for a figure who embodies more drastic conservative change. Tim Branham, 73, of Columbia, could not recall much that Ms. Haley accomplished as governor. “In my opinion, the best thing you can say about Nikki was she’s a Republican,” he said.Still, Ms. Haley continues to pull in key endorsements along with a fresh wave of big-money donors looking for a Trump alternative, strengthening her finances as well as her field operations.Within a week of endorsing her campaign, Americans for Prosperity Action, the political network founded by the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch, had already poured $3.5 million into hiring door knockers, placing digital ads and producing door hangers and media in Iowa and South Carolina, according to federal spending filings. Within a day of its announcement, Americans for Prosperity Action had more than 140 volunteers and staffers already out in nearly half of South Carolina’s 46 counties spreading her message.Kyle Kondik, an elections analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said Ms. Haley’s appeal, which appears greater among college-educated Republicans who do not think of themselves as particularly religious, better positioned her for success among Republican primary voters in New Hampshire.But he added that a more telling test of how her message might fare among Republican primary voters in South Carolina would be Iowa and its largely white and Christian evangelical Republican base — a group that is closely aligned with Mr. Trump.“If Haley loses South Carolina, that very well may be curtains,” Mr. Kondik said.Shane Goldmacher More