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      Biden Faces Bleak Approval Numbers as He Starts Re-election Campaign

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      A Washington Post/ABC News poll shows challenges for President Biden and a disconnect between what Americans want and the options they have.Voters are broadly dissatisfied with President Biden’s job performance and are opposed to re-electing him, according to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll — but they don’t like their top Republican alternatives either, reflecting a deep disconnect between what Americans want and the options available to them.In hypothetical general-election matchups, Mr. Biden, who announced his re-election campaign last month, trailed the two leading candidates in the Republican primary, former President Donald J. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Yet neither of them exceeded 45 percent in The Post’s poll, with many voters saying they were undecided or naming a different candidate.In the Biden-Trump matchup, 44 percent of respondents said they would definitely or probably vote for Mr. Trump, and 38 percent for Mr. Biden. In the Biden-DeSantis matchup, 42 percent said they would definitely or probably vote for Mr. DeSantis, and 37 percent for Mr. Biden. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.As has been the case in polls for months, most Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters — 58 percent, with a margin of error of plus or minus 5.5 percentage points — said they wanted the party to nominate “someone other than” Mr. Biden in 2024, though that preference in principle does not mean there is an actual candidate they prefer in practice. The Post did not ask voters about his primary challengers, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson, but Mr. Biden led them by huge margins in other surveys.Mr. Trump had more than twice as much support as Mr. DeSantis in the Republican primary, but not a majority: He was at 43 percent and Mr. DeSantis at 20 percent, according to the poll. No other Republican had more than 2 percent support, with 27 percent undecided.In terms of voter opinion, the numbers for Mr. Biden were bleak. His approval rating was a dismal 36 percent, with 56 percent disapproving of his job performance (including 47 percent strongly disapproving). More than 60 percent said he lacked the physical health and “mental sharpness” to serve effectively as president.Mr. Trump fared better on those prompts: 64 percent of voters said he was sufficiently physically fit, and 54 percent said he was mentally sharp. Voters also said, 54 percent to 36 percent, that Mr. Trump had done a better job handling the economy than Mr. Biden has.Voters were more likely to see Mr. Biden as honest and trustworthy (41 percent) than to see Mr. Trump that way (33 percent), but neither man had majority support on that front.A majority of voters said Mr. Trump should face criminal charges in three investigations: one regarding his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, one regarding his role in the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, and another regarding his handling of classified documents. A plurality, 49 percent, supported the charges already filed against him in a fourth case related to hush-money payments to a porn star.In one more sign of the disconnect between desires and political reality, sizable minorities of the voters who said that Mr. Biden wasn’t mentally sharp enough to be president or that Mr. Trump deserved to be criminally charged said they would definitely or probably vote for one of them anyway. More

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      It’s Beginning to Feel a Lot Like 2016 Again

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      Around the time that Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign, there was a lot of chatter about how anti-Trump Republicans were poised to repeat the failures of 2016, by declining to take on Trump directly and letting him walk unscathed to the nomination.This take seemed wrong in two ways. First, unlike in 2016, anti-Trump Republicans had a singular, popular alternative in Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, whose polling was competitive with Trump’s and way ahead of any other rival. Second, unlike in 2016, most Republican primary voters have now supported Trump in two national elections, making them poor targets for sweeping broadsides against his unfitness for the presidency.Combine those two realities, and the anti-Trump path seemed clear enough: Unite behind DeSantis early, run on Trump fatigue, and hope for the slow fade rather than the dramatic knockout.But I will admit, watching DeSantis sag in the primary polls — and watching the Republican and media reaction to that sag — has triggered flashbacks to the 2016 race. Seven years later, it’s clear that many of the underlying dynamics that made Trump the nominee are still in play.Let’s count off a few of them. First, there’s the limits of ideological box-checking in a campaign against Trump. This is my colleague Nate Cohn’s main point in his assessment of DeSantis’s recent struggles, and it’s a good one: DeSantis has spent the year to date accumulating legislative victories that match up with official right-wing orthodoxy, but we already saw in Ted Cruz’s 2016 campaign the limits of ideological correctness. There are Republican primary voters who cast ballots with a matrix of conservative positions in their heads, but not enough to overcome the appeal of the Trump persona, and a campaign against him won’t prosper if its main selling point is just True Conservatism 2.0.Second, there’s the mismatch between cultural conservatism and the anti-Trump donor class. Part of DeSantis’s advantage now, compared with Cruz’s situation in 2016, is that he has seemed more congenial to the party’s bigger-money donors. But many of those donors don’t really like the culture war; they’ll go along with a generic anti-wokeness, but they hate the Disney battles and they’re usually pro-choice. So socially conservative moves that DeSantis can’t refuse, like signing Florida’s six-week abortion ban, yield instant stories about how his potential donors are thinking about closing up their checkbooks, with a palpable undercurrent of: “Why can’t we have Nikki Haley or even Glenn Youngkin instead?”This leads to the third dynamic that could repeat itself: The G.O.P coordination problem, a.k.a. the South Carolina pileup. Remember how smoothly all of Joe Biden’s rivals suddenly exited the presidential race when it was time to stop Bernie Sanders? Remember how nothing remotely like that happened among Republicans in 2016? Well, if you have an anti-Trump donor base dissatisfied with DeSantis and willing to sustain long-shot rivals, and if two of those rivals, Haley and Senator Tim Scott, hail from the early primary state of South Carolina, it’s easy enough to see how they talk themselves into hanging around long enough to hand Trump exactly the sort of narrow wins that eventually gave him unstoppable momentum in 2016.But then again, a certain cast of mind has declared Trump to have unstoppable momentum already. This reflects another tendency that helped elect him the first time, the weird fatalism of professional Republicans. In 2016 many of them passed from “he can’t win” to “he can’t be stopped” with barely a way station in between. A rough month for DeSantis has already surfaced the same spirit — as in a piece by Politico’s Jonathan Martin, which quoted one strategist saying resignedly, “We’re just going to have to go into the basement, ride out the tornado and come back up when it’s over to rebuild the neighborhood.”Influencing this perspective, again as in 2016, is the assumption that Trump can’t win the general election, so if the G.O.P. just lets him lose it will finally be rid of him. Of course that assumption was completely wrong before, it could be wrong again; and even if it’s not, how do you know he won’t be back in 2028?Then, the final returning dynamic: The media still wants Trump. This is not offered as an excuse for G.O.P. primary voters choosing him; if the former president is renominated in spite of all his sins, it’s ultimately on them and them alone.But I still feel a certain vibe, in the eager coverage of DeSantis’s sag, suggesting that at some half-conscious level the mainstream press really wants the Trump return. They want to enjoy the Trump Show’s ratings, they want the G.O.P. defined by Trumpism while they define themselves as democracy’s defenders.And so Trump’s rivals will have to struggle, not only against the wattage of the man himself, but also against an impulse already apparent — to call the race for Trump before a single vote is cast.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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      DeSantis to Visit Wisconsin, a 2024 Battleground, as He Circles Trump

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      The Florida governor, who has slipped in polls as his expected entrance to the presidential race nears, is moving beyond early nominating states like Iowa and New Hampshire.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is expanding his political travel as his poll numbers slip ahead of an expected presidential campaign, visiting rural north-central Wisconsin on Saturday in a sign of his intent to compete for voters beyond early nominating states like Iowa.Declared candidates, including former President Donald J. Trump, have largely focused on making appearances in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, three of the first states on the Republican nominating calendar next year.But Mr. DeSantis’s visit to a convention center outside the small city of Wausau, an area roughly 90 minutes west of Green Bay that voted heavily for Mr. Trump in the last two elections, suggests that the governor is preparing to challenge the former president more directly in a crucial battleground state.“It’s a smart move by DeSantis,” said Brandon Scholz, a lobbyist and former executive director of the Wisconsin Republican Party. “You don’t go to Wausau, Wisconsin, to get cheese curds. You go to get the grass roots talking. You go to get on local TV. It shows that DeSantis is thinking about his strategy beyond the early states, and that he’s picking his spots well.”For Mr. DeSantis, who is expected to announce his 2024 bid in the coming weeks, the trip to the Midwest offers a chance for a reset. A trade mission abroad late last month — meant to elevate his foreign policy credentials — received only a lukewarm response. And his poll numbers against Mr. Trump have consistently dipped.On Friday, Mr. DeSantis dismissed concerns by some fellow Republicans that he was taking too long to announce a campaign.“That’s chatter,” he said at a news conference at the Florida Capitol. “The chatter is just not something that I worry about. I don’t bother.”At another point, he said of his political ambitions, “We’ll get on that relatively soon,” adding, “You either got to put up or shut up on that.”Mr. DeSantis can point to a busy two-month legislative session in Tallahassee that ended on Friday and allowed him to notch conservative victories on abortion, immigration and education, among other issues dear to his party’s base. With legislators returning home, he is expected to pick up his out-of-state travel schedule, which includes stops in Illinois and Iowa next week.After helping vault Mr. Trump to the presidency in 2016, Wisconsin swung to Joseph R. Biden Jr. four years later. Republicans there have continued to take losses, including the re-election of Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, in November and a bruising loss last month in a consequential State Supreme Court race.The Saturday event for Mr. DeSantis, an evening fund-raiser for the Republican Party of Marathon County where he will speak about his memoir, is sold out with more than 560 attendees, according to organizers. “It’s not just Marathon County,” said Kevin Hermening, the county party’s chairman. “We have people traveling in from Chicago, Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee and Green Bay,” he said. “There is a real interest in listening to somebody who represents the next generation of conservative thought.”Mr. DeSantis may use the Wisconsin dinner to highlight his family’s Midwestern roots: His mother is from Youngstown, Ohio, and his wife, Casey DeSantis, is also from Ohio. His father was raised in western Pennsylvania.Mr. DeSantis, who has spent most of his life in Florida, recently started to emphasize his ties outside the state.“I was geographically raised in Tampa Bay, but culturally my upbringing reflected the working-class communities in western Pennsylvania and northeast Ohio — from weekly church attendance to the expectation that one would earn his keep,” Mr. DeSantis says in his memoir, “The Courage to Be Free,” which he is promoting nationwide. “This made me God-fearing, hard-working and America-loving.”Saturday’s fund-raiser is not a high-dollar affair, allowing Mr. DeSantis to talk directly to his party’s base. Individual tickets cost $75. A table of eight went for $1,000. Representative Tom Tiffany, a Republican who represents the area in Congress and has not made a presidential endorsement, will introduce Mr. DeSantis.Mr. DeSantis’s visit to Wisconsin could also invite further comparisons between him and Scott Walker, the state’s former governor and onetime front-runner in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, who ended his campaign after only two months. Like Mr. DeSantis, Mr. Walker was a young, popular governor. But he stumbled early on the campaign trail and saw his star quickly dim as Mr. Trump outshone his establishment rivals.In Wisconsin — which will also host the Republican Party’s 2024 convention, in Milwaukee — Mr. DeSantis will be walking straight into the heart of Trump country.The former president held several rallies in the state’s rural north during previous campaigns, and handily beat both Hillary Clinton and Mr. Biden there. Mr. DeSantis has so far largely avoided mentioning Mr. Trump by name, although a super PAC backing the governor’s campaign is stepping up its attacks.“The die-hard people up here still love Trump,” said Linda Prehn, a Republican who helped organize the Saturday event. “But I know a lot of people who voted for him two times and do not want to vote for him a third time” in a primary.Ms. Prehn said she did not know much about Mr. DeSantis, although her friends in Florida had praised how he handled the coronavirus pandemic and a recent devastating hurricane.“People want to get a look at him,” she said.In a recent survey of Wisconsin voters, Mr. DeSantis performed better in a head-to-head matchup against Mr. Biden than Mr. Trump did, according to the Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies.Still, pro-Trump forces are mobilizing to challenge Mr. DeSantis in Wisconsin. On its Facebook page, the Republican Party in nearby Waupaca County posted an invitation calling for a rally in support of Mr. Trump outside the dinner where Mr. DeSantis will speak.“Please gather with us,” the post said, “for a patriotic rally showing that Wisconsin is Trump Country!” The post was earlier reported by NBC News.On Saturday, Mr. DeSantis is likely to make his case to party activists by extolling the results of Florida’s legislative session.“I think we got probably 99 percent” of his agenda, he told reporters on Friday. He acknowledged, however, the failure of high-profile defamation bills that would have made it easier for private citizens to sue news outlets for libel, measures that some right-wing outlets had opposed.“Look, the defamation, it’s a thorny issue,” Mr. DeSantis said. “Clearly I don’t want to incentivize frivolous lawsuits. That is totally unacceptable.”As Mr. DeSantis makes the positive case for his candidacy, the main super PAC supporting his candidacy, Never Back Down, is attacking Mr. Trump.The group released an ad this past week that features an actor putting a fresh bumper sticker on his truck.The new sticker reads “DeSantis for President.”The man places it directly over a tattered decal for Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. More

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      In Georgia Trump Investigation, Most Fake Electors Take Immunity Deals

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      Prosecutors are nearing charging decisions after investigating whether former President Donald J. Trump and his allies illegally meddled in Georgia’s 2020 election.More than half of the bogus Georgia electors who were convened in December 2020 to try to keep former President Donald J. Trump in power have taken immunity deals in the investigation into election interference there, according to a court filing on Friday and people with knowledge of the inquiry.In addition, Craig A. Gillen, the former deputy independent counsel in the 1980s-era Iran Contra scandal, has been hired to represent a fake elector who could still face criminal charges, David Shafer, the head of the Georgia Republican Party. Mr. Gillen specializes in cases involving racketeering, which is among the charges being weighed by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga.Ms. Willis’s office has spent more than two years investigating whether the former president and his allies illegally meddled in the 2020 election in Georgia, which Mr. Trump narrowly lost to President Biden. A special grand jury that heard evidence in the case for roughly seven months recommended more than a dozen people for indictments, and its forewoman strongly hinted in an interview with The New York Times in February that Mr. Trump was among them.Ultimately, it will be up to Ms. Willis to decide which charges to seek before a regular grand jury, which she has said she will do after a new jury is seated in mid-July. Her case is focused in part on a plan to create the slate of electors pledged to Mr. Trump in the weeks after the 2020 election despite Mr. Biden’s victory in Georgia.Lawyers for the electors have argued they were simply trying to keep Mr. Trump’s legal options open, though when they met on Dec. 14, 2020, three vote counts had all affirmed Mr. Biden’s win there.Even before any indictments are announced, the legal jockeying in the case has become intense. In March, Mr. Trump’s lawyers sought to quash the special grand jury’s final report, most of which remains sealed.In April, Ms. Willis sought to have Kimberly B. Debrow, then a lawyer for 10 of the 16 Trump electors, thrown off the proceedings. According to a motion filed at the time by Ms. Willis’s office, some of the electors recently told prosecutors that Ms. Debrow and another lawyer, Holly Pierson, had not informed them of offers of immunity in exchange for cooperation that prosecutors made last year.Fani T. Willis, center, the Fulton County district attorney, in Atlanta in 2022.Ben Gray/Associated PressMs. Debrow responded with her own filing on Friday, in which she called the accusation “completely without merit” and said she had made her clients fully aware, in writing, of what she called “generalized potential offers of immunity.”Ms. Pierson, who along with Mr. Gillen represents Mr. Shafer, has called the district attorney’s assertions “entirely false.” Both Ms. Debrow and Ms. Pierson have been paid by the state Republican Party.Ms. Debrow’s new filing also revealed that eight of her clients had been offered immunity deals and that all of them had accepted. At least one additional elector who is not represented by Ms. Debrow also has a deal in place, according to people with knowledge of the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity as the investigation is ongoing.Ms. Debrow said in her filing that two clients had not been offered immunity deals and now had new lawyers, though she did not name the clients. A recent filing from Cathy Latham, a fake elector for Mr. Trump who was the Republican Party leader in rural Coffee County, Ga., revealed that she now has her own representation.Ms. Latham played a key role in an effort by Trump allies to access voter data in her county after the 2020 election — another point of scrutiny in the investigation.While all of the fake electors had long been identified by prosecutors as targets who could face criminal charges, three have been considered particularly vulnerable by those with knowledge of the investigation: Mr. Shafer, Ms. Latham and Shawn Still, a Georgia state senator who filed and later withdrew a lawsuit related to the vote count in Coffee County.Mr. Still did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Ms. Willis’s office declined to comment. Her office alleged in a filing last month that some of the Trump electors have accused another of illegal conduct.But in her motion, Ms. Debrow called the allegation “categorically false.” She added that the court “need not take defense counsel’s word for the fact that none of the electors incriminated themselves or each other — these interviews were recorded.”It will be left to Judge Robert C.I. McBurney of Fulton County Superior Court, who has been presiding over the inquiry, to sort through the competing motions.Sean Keenan More

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      ‘Ron DeSoros’? Conspiracy Theorists Target Trump’s Rival.

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      Ron DeSantis, a likely contender for the Republican presidential nomination, must court far-right voters who consider him a tool of the Deep State.To some, he is “Ron DeSoros,” a puppet of the Democratic megadonor George Soros. To others, he is “Ron DeSatan,” a vaccine-supporting evildoer. And to still others, he is “Ron DePLANTis,” a “plant” of the so-called Deep State.As the governor of Florida — real name Ron DeSantis — explores a bid for the Republican presidential nomination, he has made overtures to supporters of former President Donald J. Trump. But he is finding that the conspiracy theories and outlandish attacks that Mr. Trump and his allies have aimed at rivals for years are coming for him as well.The attacks often nod to one of the many unfounded conspiracy theories floating around in far-right circles: election fraud, vaccine dangers, Mr. Soros and even QAnon, the online conspiracy movement that believes, among other things, in the existence of a fictional cult that preys on children.The attacks underscore the power that conspiracy theories continue to hold over Republican politics heading into the 2024 presidential election. To win the party’s nomination, Mr. DeSantis would probably need support from a Republican base that has produced many of the attacks against him. And while Mr. DeSantis enjoys broad support among Republicans, soaring to re-election victory just six months ago, the latest primary polls show Mr. Trump gaining a sizable lead.“It’s a tug of war over who is going to grab the all-important conspiracy constituency,” said Bond Benton, an associate professor at Montclair State University who has studied QAnon.The demeaning nicknames for Mr. DeSantis have spread widely on conservative social media, growing this year as Mr. Trump’s attacks increased. There were more than 12,000 mentions of “DeSoros” on social media and news sites since January, according to Zignal Labs, a media insights company. “DeathSantis,” a term progressives used when the governor began relaxing Florida’s Covid-19 restrictions that has since been adopted by some conservatives, received 1.6 million mentions over the past two years.In recent months, Mr. DeSantis has responded by adopting some themes popular among the conspiratorial set, opposing vaccines he once endorsed and raising doubts about the 2020 election even though Mr. Trump handily won Florida in that year’s vote.Mr. DeSantis’s office did not respond to requests for comment.Mike Lindell, the MyPillow executive and an election denier, said, falsely, that Florida was spared from widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election because Mr. DeSantis had a close relationship with Dominion Voting Systems.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesThe attacks have come from some of the loudest voices in Mr. Trump’s corner.Mike Lindell, the MyPillow executive and an election denier, quickly found a role for Mr. DeSantis in his elaborate election fraud narrative. Mr. Lindell said, falsely, that Florida was spared from widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election because Mr. DeSantis had a close relationship with Dominion Voting Systems, an election software company targeted by election deniers.“Ron DeSantis is a Trojan horse,” Mr. Lindell said in a recent interview with The New York Times.Mr. Lindell pointed to an appearance Mr. DeSantis had had with a Dominion lawyer shortly after the election as a sign that the governor had conflicting loyalties.The lawyer, Elizabeth Locke, was speaking with Mr. DeSantis on a panel about the dangers of defamation by mainstream media. She has also represented Sarah Palin, the former Republican vice-presidential candidate.There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud anywhere in the 2020 election and no evidence that Mr. DeSantis had any special relationship with Dominion.In an email, Ms. Locke pointed to a podcast appearance where she called the claims “silly” and said that she had known Mr. DeSantis since before he entered politics.Kari Lake, a Republican who lost her campaign for governor of Arizona last year, once praised Mr. DeSantis on the campaign trail. But she turned on him in February, as Mr. Trump’s attacks grew.Rebecca Noble for The New York TimesKari Lake, a Republican who lost her campaign for governor of Arizona last year, once praised Mr. DeSantis on the campaign trail. But in February, as Mr. Trump’s attacks grew, she shared a story claiming Mr. DeSantis was endorsed by Mr. Soros, calling it “the kiss of death.” (Mr. Soros had only said that Mr. DeSantis was likely to become the nominee.)“The broader narrative is that he is connected to the shadowy forces that seek to bring down Trump,” said Mr. Bond, the Montclair professor.Mr. DeSantis was forced to play catch-up, making broad appeals to conspiratorial groups within the Republican Party.Last year, he announced a crackdown on voter fraud, arresting 17 people for charges of casting illegal ballots in 2020. Many of the voters had received voter registration cards from the government.Mr. DeSantis had once endorsed Covid-19 vaccines and celebrated as Floridians were rapidly vaccinated. By late last year, though, he had impaneled a statewide grand jury to investigate vaccine makers for potentially misleading Floridians, reflecting a false belief among Trump supporters that the vaccine is dangerous.Believers of the QAnon conspiracy theory do not seem swayed by Mr. DeSantis’s appeals, said Josephine Lukito, a media professor at the University of Texas who studies the relationship between disinformation and violence. “For them, that is more indicative of what a faker they perceive DeSantis to be.” More

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      The Devolution of Ron DeSantis

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      After a promising start, he has become bogged down in issues that have divided and hurt Republicans in the past.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has fallen sharply in the polls.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesAt the beginning of the year, Ron DeSantis looked as if he might be the answer to all of the Republican Party’s problems.For the first time in decades, a conservative politician rose to national prominence on issues that unified the party’s populist base with its beleaguered establishment — and without triggering a Resistance from Florida Democrats. He seemed to offer Republicans a path beyond the divisions and defeats of the last 15 years.Mr. DeSantis does not seem like the answer anymore. His poll numbers are cratering. His strength as a general election candidate is being questioned. This is partly because he’s fallen flat on the national stage, but it’s also because he’s slowly devolved into an older kind of Republican — the kind without answers to the party’s problems.He’s been bogged down in the very issues that divided and hurt Republicans in the past, like abortion, entitlements, Russia and the conduct of Donald J. Trump. Against Mr. Trump and without Democrats as a foil, his instinct to take the most conservative stance has pushed him far to the right. He’s devolved into another Ted Cruz.Mr. DeSantis will probably never be an entertainer like Mr. Trump, an orator like Ronald Reagan, or someone to get a beer with like George W. Bush. But to compete for the nomination, he will at least need to be who he appeared to be a few months ago: a new kind of conservative, who can appeal to the establishment and the base by focusing on the new set of issues that got him here: the fight for “freedom” and against “woke.”Mr. DeSantis’s varying campaigns against everything from coronavirus restrictions to gender studies curriculums weren’t extraordinarily popular, at least not in terms of national polling, but it was a type of political gold nonetheless. It let him channel the passions of the Republican base and get on Fox News without offending bourgeoise conservative sensibilities on race, immigration and gender. In fact, many elite conservatives disliked “woke” and coronavirus restrictions just like the rank-and-file. Even some Democrats sympathized with his positions. As a result, he won re-election in Florida in a landslide. Democratic turnout was abysmal.This combination of base and elite appeal made him a natural candidate to lead an anti-Trump coalition. In the last presidential primary, in 2016, Mr. Trump held the center of the Republican electorate and left his opposition split on either side. To his right, there was Mr. Cruz and the orthodox conservatives. To his left, there was Marco Rubio, John Kasich and the relatively moderate, business-friendly establishment. None of these factional figures stood a chance of unifying those two disparate groups, but for a fleeting moment after the midterms last year, Mr. DeSantis seemed to assemble all of the various not-necessarily-Trump factions under his banner.Since then, Mr. DeSantis’s coalition has unraveled. His superficial struggles on the campaign trail might be evident to most, but what is more easily overlooked is an overarching struggle to balance the competing needs of an ideologically diverse coalition in a Republican primary.His challenge has two halves. First, his instinct to move to the right has been more fraught in a Republican primary than it was when “woke” liberals were his foil. After all, there’s plenty of room to line up to the right of “woke” without alienating anyone on the right. Trying to be to the right of Mr. Trump, on the other hand, involves greater risk regarding both the general electorate and his relatively moderate supporters.Perhaps surprisingly, Mr. DeSantis actually fares best among moderate voters in Republican primary polling. This probably says more about which Republicans are most skeptical about Mr. Trump than it does about Mr. DeSantis, but it nonetheless means that his conservative instincts routinely put him at odds with his own base.In some cases, the tension between Mr. DeSantis and his base is unavoidable — and his moderate supporters will sometimes lose. A politician can’t always please every constituency. Abortion, for instance, poses a legitimate problem for Mr. DeSantis — and every Republican nowadays.But Mr. DeSantis has not always seemed cognizant of the delicate balancing act ahead of him and has committed errors as a result. His relatively soft position on Russia regarding Ukraine, for instance, overlooked that the elite, hawkish, neoconservative right not only cares deeply about containing Russia but would also inevitably be part of any successful anti-Trump coalition. Mr. DeSantis doesn’t need to be a neocon to hold this support against Mr. Trump, but it does seem he needs to support defending Ukraine.The second half is that the fights for “freedom” and against “woke” have not been a glue that’s held his fractious coalition together. So far this year, he’s struggled to make the race about these issues at all. Instead, abortion, entitlements, Russia and Mr. Trump have dominated the conversation.Of all the things that have happened to Mr. DeSantis so far this year, this might be the most troubling and telling. Tactical mistakes can be fixed, but if fighting for “freedom” and against “woke” isn’t a powerful, organizing theme, then he’s not especially different from any other Republican.This might not be entirely Mr. DeSantis’s fault. The coronavirus pandemic is over — at least for political purposes. The peak of “woke” might have come and gone as well: The arc of new left culture fights seems to have bent into a reactionary phase in which debate centers as much or more on proposed Republican restrictions on books, drag shows and A.P. history curriculums as on the latest controversy about the excesses of the left. Mr. DeSantis’s renewal of a year-old fight against Disney — the exact origins of which I suspect would stump even many regular readers of this newsletter — is a telling indicator that his campaign against “woke” is struggling for oxygen.At the same time as Mr. DeSantis’s new issues have faded, the old issues have come roaring back. The Supreme Court and Vladimir Putin made sure of it. So did Mr. Trump, who attacked Mr. DeSantis for old statements on cutting entitlements. And while all of these issues make Mr. DeSantis vulnerable in various ways, there are few opportunities to attack Mr. Trump as too woke.The devolution of Mr. DeSantis, in other words, is partly due to forces beyond his control. But if “freedom” or “woke” is not enough, he will probably need a new set of issues to unite open-to-anyone-but-Trump voters. More

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      The Trump Inevitability Question

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      Listen and follow ‘The Run-Up’Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicOutside a Manhattan courtroom, on the day of former President Donald Trump’s arraignment, Astead spoke to two camps of spectators. Supporters cast Mr. Trump as the victim of prosecutorial overreach, while opposing voices hoped this was just the beginning of his legal troubles. With an ever-shifting political landscape as America heads toward the 2024 election, what do Mr. Trump’s mounting legal woes mean for his electoral viability? Is success for the former president, despite it all, an inevitability?Astead speaks with Nate Cohn, The New York Times’s chief political analyst, about what the polls do — and do not — tell us.Photo Illustration by The New York Times; Pool photo by Andrew KellyOn today’s episodeNate Cohn, chief political analyst for The New York Times. About ‘The Run-Up’First launched in August 2016, three months before the election of Donald Trump, “The Run-Up” is The New York Times’s flagship political podcast. The host, Astead W. Herndon, grapples with the big ideas already animating the 2024 presidential election. Because it’s always about more than who wins and loses. And the next election has already started.Last season, “The Run-Up” focused on grass-roots voters and shifting attitudes among the bases of both political parties. This season, we go inside the party establishment.New episodes on Thursdays.Credits“The Run-Up” is hosted by More

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      Repulsed by Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump? Tough.

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      The presidential race sure does seem like it’ll wind up coming down to Biden vs. Trump — and a whole lot of people would rather have an alternative.Here’s an important early message: Even if you aren’t thrilled by the Republican and Democratic options come Election Day, don’t vote for anybody else.We’re talking here about the attraction of third parties. So tempting. So disaster-inducing.The lure is obvious. Donald Trump’s terrible and Joe Biden’s boring. Much more satisfying to go to the polls and announce you’re too far above the status quo to vote for either.The way so many people did in 2016, when Trump won the presidency thanks to the Electoral College votes of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Which Hillary Clinton would probably have carried if the folks who were appalled by Trump had voted for her instead of the Libertarian or Green Party candidates.OK, ticked-off swing staters, how did that work for you in the long run?This brings us to No Labels, a new group that’s warning it might launch a third-party candidacy if it isn’t happy with the two major party nominees.“We care about this country more than the demands of any political party,” No Labels announces on its website. Its founding chairman, Joe Lieberman, told interviewers that his group believes the American people “are so dissatisfied with the choice of Presidents Trump or Biden that they want a third alternative.”Yeah. But let’s stop here to recall that Lieberman is a former U.S. senator, Democrat of Connecticut. Who ran for vice president with Al Gore on the Democratic ticket in 2000, hurt Gore’s chances with a terrible performance in a debate with Dick Cheney, then made a totally disastrous attempt to run for president himself four years later.Hard to think of him as a guy with big answers. And about that business of voters wanting a third choice: A lot of them do, until it turns out that option throws the race to the worse of the top two.Remember all the chaos in the 2000 Florida vote count? The entire presidential election hinged on the result. In the end, Ralph Nader, the Green Party nominee, got more than 97,000 votes there. In a state that George W. Bush eventually won by 537.Now Nader had a phenomenal career as a champion of consumer protection and the environment. But this was a terrible finale. His candidacy gave Floridians who felt that Gore was not very exciting a chance to declare their disaffection. It gave them a chance to feel superior. It gave the country a new President Bush. And a war in Iraq.I talked with Nader about his role much later, and he basically said the outcome was Gore’s fault for being a bad candidate. This conversation took place when the country was bearing down on the 2016 election, and Nader vowed not to vote for either Trump or Clinton. “They’re not alike,” he acknowledged, but added, “they’re both terrible.”Think that was the last time I ever consulted Ralph Nader.The third-party thingy also comes up in legislative races. Remember the 2018 Senate contest in Arizona? No? OK, that’s fair. The Democratic candidate was Kyrsten Sinema, who seemed to be in danger of losing because the Green Party was on the ballot, capable of siphoning off a chunk of her supporters. Even though Sinema had a good environmental record! Well, a few days before the election the Green candidate — have I mentioned her name was Angela Green? — urged her supporters to vote for Sinema. Who did squeak out a win.As senator, Sinema became an, um, unreliable Democratic vote. Who you might call either principled or egocentrically uncooperative. In any case, it didn’t look like she’d have much chance of being renominated. So now she’s very likely to run as … an independent.Another senator who frequently drives Democratic leaders crazy is Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who hasn’t announced his own plans. But he’s started to flirt with a presidential run. On a No Labels ticket? “I don’t rule myself in and I don’t rule myself out,” he helpfully told an interviewer.Sigh.Politicians are perfectly well aware of what effect a third option can have on elections. Back in 2020, a group of Montanans who’d signed petitions to put the Green Party on the ballot discovered that the Republicans had spent $100,000 to support the signature-gathering effort — undoubtedly in hopes that the Green candidate would take votes away from former Democratic governor Steve Bullock when he ran for the Senate. The irate voters went to court and a judge finally ruled that they could remove their names.Didn’t help Bullock win, but it does leave another message about the way too many options can be used to screw up an election. Really, people, when it comes time to go to the polls, the smartest thing you can do is accept the depressing compromises that can come with a two-party democracy. Then straighten your back and fight for change anyhow.Don’t forget to vote! But feel free to go home after and have three or four drinks.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