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      Why Kristi Noem Is Rising Quickly as a Republican Prospect for 2024

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      Ms. Noem, the governor of South Dakota, has defied coronavirus restrictions and eagerly projects a rugged Great Plainswoman image. Her moves have stirred both support and conflict in the G.O.P.PIERRE, S.D. — With Republicans hungry to cultivate their next generation of national leaders, it is not a Capitol Hill comer or a veteran battleground-state politician who is stirring interest by fusing Trumpism with a down-home conservatism spin. It is the first-term governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, a rancher who delights in sharing images of herself shooting pheasants and riding horses.Ms. Noem began drawing wider attention last year for cozying up to President Donald J. Trump — so much so that she inspired suspicion that she was angling to replace Mike Pence on the 2020 ticket — and hosting him at a July 4 Mount Rushmore event where she gave him a model of the monument with his face included. Her defiance of coronavirus restrictions and her eagerness to project a rugged Great Plainswoman image helped her come in second in a 2024 straw poll of far-right conservatives looking for candidates if Mr. Trump doesn’t run again.But her approach to politics has sometimes made for rocky relations with her base. Late last month, she got herself into a showdown with the Republican-controlled State Legislature over her veto of a bill barring transgender girls from school sports. And as some party leaders were pressing her to resolve that fight, she prompted eye-rolling at home by inserting herself in an unrelated skirmish — over Lil Nas X’s “Satan Shoes.”“We are in a fight for the soul of our nation,” she wrote on Twitter, picking a fight with the rapper over his endorsement of $1,000 sneakers featuring a pentagram and, ostensibly, a drop of blood.If Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is widely seen as the brash heir apparent to Mr. Trump, and senators like Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton are attempting to put a more ideological frame on Trumpism, Ms. Noem is trying to cement her place as the only female Trump ally echoing the former president’s trigger-the-left approach among the upper tiers of potential 2024 candidates.But her stumble on the trans bill planted some doubts among social conservatives, and her appearances on Fox News most weeks and her time spent at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago fund-raising site have prompted griping in South Dakota.At home, Ms. Noem’s apparent White House ambitions bother Republicans who want her focused on the state’s needs, even as some in the party relish the attention her rising profile is bringing to the tourism-dependent state.She’s now on her fourth chief of staff in just over two years and has an increasingly awkward relationship with John Thune, South Dakota’s senior senator, and has favored the national party circuit over building relationships in the turn-of-the-century State Capitol in Pierre.“Let’s focus on the state of South Dakota right now,” Rhonda Milstead, a Republican state representative, said in an interview between floor sessions on the so-called veto day. “And if you’re going to run for governor in 2022, let’s focus on our state. I voted for her when she ran because I believe she cared about the state of South Dakota, so let’s do it.”Ms. Noem’s approach is markedly different from the arc of other modern governors-turned-presidents, such as Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Those politicians assiduously courted their states’ kingmakers, held up their legislative achievements as campaign calling cards and waited until they had been re-elected to the governor’s office before auditioning on the national stage.The question is whether that was then.As she steps up her already-busy travel schedule — she was the keynote speaker at the Kansas G.O.P.’s convention this month and will address Arkansas Republicans in June — Ms. Noem, 49, may represent the purest test of the potency of Trump-style pugilism.“It’s a contest about who can trigger the media and Democrats the most, and Noem is trying to get in that conversation,” said David Kochel, a Republican strategist and a veteran of presidential politics. “It’s, ‘Can I come up with something that’s going to inflame Rachel Maddow and raise awareness among conservatives because Fox will cover how much the left hates me?’”In the post-Trump party, a willingness to confront the news media and do battle with the left, preferably in viral-video snippets, is more compelling to activists than amassing a record of achievement or painstakingly building coalitions. Appearing at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, Ms. Noem received her loudest applause for saying that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci “is wrong a lot.”Former President Donald J. Trump speaking at a fund-raiser for Kristi Noem during her 2018 campaign for the governor’s office.Susan Walsh/Associated PressMoreover, with Republicans having lost the presidency and both chambers of Congress after struggling among female voters, many in the party want to elevate a woman to their ticket in 2024, when Vice President Kamala Harris is likely to be the Democratic nominee for president or vice president.“She is one of the strongest examples of a great Republican woman,” said Glynis Gilio, a law student, who waited with a few dozen other CPAC attendees for Ms. Noem’s autograph. “We really need that strong female conservatism to pack a punch.”Russell Olson, a former South Dakota lawmaker who was elected to the Legislature alongside Ms. Noem in 2006, said Ms. Noem is “a conservative woman and can talk without regurgitating talking points, so she rises to easy consideration in my book.”Mr. Olson, whom Ms. Noem reappointed to the State Game, Fish and Parks Commission, is not the only South Dakota Republican eager to remain on the governor’s good side. A number of party officials and donors did not want to speak on the record about Ms. Noem’s political prospects, many of them pointedly observing that it is a small state.The governor declined an interview and, in keeping with her public posture, had a spokesman email to archly ask if the story would be “about next year’s re-election campaign?”Other South Dakota Republicans are downright gleeful about the speculation — though not necessarily because they’re eager to see her become president. “Love her or hate her, she’s the best resource South Dakota has going for it right now,” said Lee Schoenbeck, the leader of the State Senate. “She’s got such a platform.”Despite the state’s high Covid death toll per capita, and the outbreak stemming from the Sturgis motorcycle rally that drew nearly 500,000 biker enthusiasts last fall, many Republicans in South Dakota believe that the governor’s opposition to shutdowns contributed to South Dakota’s lowest-in-the-country unemployment rate, kept tourists coming and made the state newly appealing to transplants.Whether Ms. Noem ultimately lands on the 2024 ticket or not, she has made a name for herself nationally by recreating South Dakota as a sort of red-state oasis for visitors, new residents and businesses.She won the governorship by just three and a half percentage points, a slim margin in a state that has not elected a Democratic governor since 1974. Her approval rating stood at just 39 percent at the end of 2019, according to a private Republican poll shared by a party official familiar with the results. By last June, three months into the virus outbreak, the same pollster found that 62 percent of the state’s voters approved of her performance.Ms. Noem had a relatively modest profile during four terms serving in Congress and in her first year as governor. By the end of 2020, however, she had gained the notice of Mr. Trump, who was egging her on to challenge Mr. Thune in his primary next year.She has disclaimed any interest in such a challenge. But her coziness with Mr. Trump and her hiring of the hard-charging Corey Lewandowski, the former president’s onetime campaign manager, has put a chill in her relationship with Mr. Thune, the second-ranking Senate Republican. Mr. Thune has been clear that he wants the G.O.P. to ease away from being a cult of personality and focus on ideas.John Thune of South Dakota, the Senate minority whip, has said he wants the Republican Party to focus on ideas rather than personalities.Amr Alfiky/The New York Times“Thune wants to move on and can’t with a Trump clone in own backyard,” said Drey Samuelson, the longtime top aide to former Senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota.Ms. Noem plainly sees her opening as a Trump-of-the-prairie provocateur.In addition to her ubiquity on Fox News — one segment featured her escorting a network contributor on the state’s annual buffalo roundup — she has taken to Twitter with gusto. And not just to troll rappers.“This is how we do social distancing in South Dakota,” she wrote above a video of her shooting and downing a nearby pheasant, a clip that has drawn nearly seven million views.She also starred in a tourism commercial that aired nationally last year during the Covid surge. “We’re open for opportunity — and always will be,” Ms. Noem said as images of Mount Rushmore and galloping bison flashed on the screen.It’s difficult to overstate the importance of marketing to South Dakota.At the confluence of Midwest and West, and bifurcated by the Missouri River, the state has relied on tourism since the early part of the 20th century, when another ambitious governor, Peter Norbeck, relentlessly promoted the development of a granite monument in the Black Hills that could lure visitors to the region.Ms. Noem has shown a similar passion for making the state a destination, most memorably mixing tourism with politics by ensuring that fireworks could be displayed at Mount Rushmore to entice Mr. Trump there last year. South Dakota similarly trumpets its pheasant hunting, walleye fishing, and even more flagrant tourist pit stops, like Wall Drug and the Mitchell Corn Palace.“We don’t have a lot of industry in South Dakota, and we don’t have a lot of natural resources pumped out of the ground or mined, so when you have a state that’s basically ag and ranching, you need those out-of-state dollars,” said Ted Hustead, whose family owns Wall Drug, whose Western-themed collection of stores and restaurants is a major tourist attraction.That need is what put Ms. Noem in a vise over the transgender legislation.She initially said she would support the bill. But she reversed course after facing a backlash from South Dakota’s influential business community, which worried that the National Collegiate Athletic Association would pull moneymaking basketball tournaments out of the state.Ms. Noem was pressed about her change of mind by Tucker Carlson in a rare adversarial Fox News interview, and the flap fueled suspicions among social conservatives.“She says whatever she thinks she needs to say,” said Taffy Howard, a state lawmaker who has pressed Ms. Noem to disclose the details of state money she has been using for security on her frequent trips. “This was all about keeping her donors happy.”The House overrode Ms. Noem’s partial veto of the trans bill, but the State Senate declined to take action, dooming the legislation.Running for re-election with Mr. Trump’s support in a conservative state, Ms. Noem should be well-positioned next year. South Dakota, however, does have a history of spurning its politicians when their focus becomes more national than local.“Tom Daschles and George McGoverns are examples of what happens when you don’t pay attention at home — you got to make sure you’re balancing that well,” said Marty Jackley, a former state attorney general who lost to Ms. Noem in the primary election for governor, alluding to two of South Dakota’s most famous figures.Mr. Olson, Ms. Noem’s former colleague in the Legislature, said he nevertheless expected Ms. Noem to be a formidable candidate should she run for president. He learned his lesson, he said, after supporting her primary opponents when she ran for South Dakota’s lone House seat in 2010 and then for governor in 2018, and he was “not going to get the third strike.” More

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      Elizabeth Warren Grapples With Presidential Loss in New Book

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      In “Persist,” the Massachusetts senator delves into gender issues and her own shortcomings after her failed bid for the Democratic nomination.The question came at a campaign cattle call in April 2019, just a few months after Elizabeth Warren announced her presidential bid: How would she address “the urge to flee to the safety of a white male candidate?”After a question-and-answer session spent presenting her plans to address maternal mortality, criminal justice, housing, redlining and tribal sovereignty, that remark came as “a big bucket of cold water,” Ms. Warren, the Massachusetts senator, writes in a new memoir about her failed campaign.“We all knew the fear she was talking about,” she writes. “Could we — should we — support a woman?”Her book, “Persist,” addresses Ms. Warren’s effort to grapple with that question. Obtained by The New York Times before its release next week, it offers a peek into Ms. Warren’s personal view of her loss — a defeat she largely blames on a failure to explain how she would pay for her health care plan, the established following of Senator Bernie Sanders, the name recognition of Joseph R. Biden Jr. — and her own shortcomings.“There’s always another possibility, a much more painful one,” she writes. “In this moment, against this president, in this field of candidates, maybe I just wasn’t good enough to reassure the voters, to bring along the doubters, to embolden the hopeful.”Ms. Warren is determined not to wallow in her defeat, focusing most of the book on her policy prescriptions, some of which have been adopted by the new Biden administration. She offers reflections on the racial justice protests that roiled the country after the primary, devoting a significant portion of a chapter on race to her decision to identify as Native American earlier in her career — a “bad mistake,” she says. And she writes a moving tribute to her oldest brother, Don Reed Herring, attributing his death from the coronavirus last year to a failure of government.“This book is not a campaign memoir,” she writes. “It is not a rehash of big public events. It’s a book about the fight that lies ahead.”Yet, frank discussion of her gender — and the obstacles it poses — runs throughout the 304-page book. Though she never attributes sexism directly for her loss, she provides plenty of evidence that it remained a serious factor in the race. Stories of discrimination against women run throughout her book, as she recounts the struggles of her own career trajectory and offers prescriptions for changes like paid leave and affordable child care.Again and again, Ms. Warren suggests that Democratic voters were wary of nominating a second woman, fearing another defeat to Donald J. Trump. She “had to run against the shadows of Martha and Hillary,” she writes, a reference to Martha Coakley, who lost two statewide campaigns in Massachusetts, and Hillary Clinton.While Ms. Warren expected to face some sexism, she details in the book, her plan was simply to outwork those expectations with a strong team, vibrant grass roots organizing and plenty of policy plans.“I would do more,” she says. “I would fill up every space with ideas and energy and optimism. I would hope that my being a woman wouldn’t matter so much.”That idea collided with the reality of the contest fairly quickly. When calling donors early in her campaign, Ms. Warren was taken aback by the number of times potential supporters mentioned Mrs. Clinton’s defeat.Publisher: Metropolitan Books“I wondered whether anyone said to Bernie Sanders when he asked for their support, ‘Gore lost, so how can you win?’ I wondered whether anyone said to Joe Biden, ‘Kerry lost, so clearly America just isn’t ready for a man to be president,’” she recounts thinking as she lay in bed after her first day spent raising money for her presidential bid. “I tried to laugh, but the joke didn’t seem very funny.”After being passed over as vice president and Treasury secretary, Ms. Warren has kept a lower-profile in recent months, preferring to exert her influence through private conversations with the White House. Her top aides have been tapped for powerful posts throughout the administration and Democratic National Committee.She offers praise for Mr. Biden — “a good leader and fundamentally decent man” — and most of her former rivals throughout the book. A dust-up with Mr. Sanders — “fearless and determined” — over whether he told her in a private 2018 meeting that a woman could not defeat Mr. Trump is largely ignored.But one former opponent gets far more withering treatment. Ms. Warren spends several pages detailing her determination to take down Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, in a February 2020 debate, saying she believed his decision to spend nearly a billion dollars of his personal fortune to skip the early primaries “undermined our democracy” by essentially handing the nomination to the richest man.Ms. Warren describes herself as “stunned” when Mr. Bloomberg ignored her early attacks: “Like so many women in so many settings, I found myself wondering if he had even heard me,” she writes.Her debate performance was largely credited with ending Mr. Bloomberg’s bid. But Ms. Warren can’t resist mentioning an “an unexpected kick” in response to her attacks — a comment that she was too “mean and angry.”“And there it was, the same damn remark made about every woman who ever stood up for herself and threw a punch,” she writes. “Repeat after me: fighting hard is ‘not a good look.’” More

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      G.O.P. Seeks to Empower Poll Watchers, Raising Intimidation Worries

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      Republicans in several states are pushing bills to give poll watchers more autonomy. Alarmed election officials and voting rights activists say it’s a new attempt to target voters of color.HOUSTON — The red dot of a laser pointer circled downtown Houston on a map during a virtual training of poll watchers by the Harris County Republican Party. It highlighted densely populated, largely Black, Latino and Asian neighborhoods.“This is where the fraud is occurring,” a county Republican official said falsely in a leaked video of the training, which was held in March. A precinct chair in the northeastern, largely white suburbs of Houston, he said he was trying to recruit people from his area “to have the confidence and courage” to act as poll watchers in the circled areas in upcoming elections.A question at the bottom corner of the slide indicated just how many poll watchers the party wanted to mobilize: “Can we build a 10K Election Integrity Brigade?”As Republican lawmakers in major battleground states seek to make voting harder and more confusing through a web of new election laws, they are simultaneously making a concerted legislative push to grant more autonomy and access to partisan poll watchers — citizens trained by a campaign or a party and authorized by local election officials to observe the electoral process.This effort has alarmed election officials and voting rights activists alike: There is a long history of poll watchers being used to intimidate voters and harass election workers, often in ways that target Democratic-leaning communities of color and stoke fears that have the overall effect of voter suppression. During the 2020 election, President Donald J. Trump’s campaign repeatedly promoted its “army” of poll watchers as he publicly implored supporters to venture into heavily Black and Latino cities and hunt for voter fraud.Republicans have offered little evidence to justify a need for poll watchers to have expanded access and autonomy. As they have done for other election changes — including reduced early voting, stricter absentee ballot requirements and limits on drop boxes — they have grounded their reasoning in arguments that their voters want more secure elections. That desire was born in large part out of Mr. Trump’s repeated lies about last year’s presidential contest, which included complaints about insufficient poll watcher access.Now, with disputes over the rules governing voting now at a fever pitch, the rush to empower poll watchers threatens to inject further tension into elections.Both partisan and nonpartisan poll watching have been a key component of American elections for years, and Republicans and Democrats alike have routinely sent trained observers to the polls to monitor the process and report back on any worries. In recent decades, laws have often helped keep aggressive behavior at bay, preventing poll watchers from getting too close to voters or election officials, and maintaining a relatively low threshold for expelling anyone who misbehaves.But now Republican state lawmakers in 20 states have introduced at least 40 bills that would expand the powers of poll watchers, and 12 of those bills in six states are currently progressing through legislatures, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.In Texas, the Republican-controlled Legislature is advancing legislation that would allow them to photograph and video-record voters receiving assistance, as well as make it extremely difficult for election officials to order the removal of poll watchers.The video-recording measure has particularly alarmed voting rights groups, which argue that it could result in the unwanted identification of a voter in a video posted on social media, or allow isolated incidents to be used by partisan news outlets to craft a widespread narrative.“If you have a situation, for example, where people who are poll workers do not have the ability to throw out anybody at the polls who is being disruptive or anyone at the polls who is intimidating voters, that’s essentially authorizing voter intimidation,” said Jon Greenbaum, chief counsel for the nonpartisan Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.Republicans have been increasingly open in recent years about their intent to line up legions of supporters to monitor the polls. Following the lead of Mr. Trump, they have often framed the observational role in militaristic tones, amplifying their arguments of its necessity with false claims of widespread fraud. Just three years ago, the courts lifted a consent decree that for more than three decades had barred the Republican National Committee from taking an active role in poll watching; in 2020, the committee jumped back into the practice.In Florida, Republicans in the State Legislature passed a new election bill on Thursday that includes a provision allowing one partisan poll watcher per candidate on the ballot during the inspection of votes. The measure carries the potential to significantly overcrowd election officials. The bill also does not stipulate any distance that poll watchers must keep from election workers.In Michigan, a G.O.P. bill would allow challengers to sit close enough to read poll books, tabulators and other election records, and would let them challenge a voter’s eligibility if they had “a good reason.”The Republican drive to empower poll watchers adds to the mounting evidence that much of the party continues to view the 2020 election through the same lens as Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly argued that his losses in key states must have been because of fraud.President Donald J. Trump on the morning after the election. His campaign promoted an “army” of poll watchers.Doug Mills/The New York Times“It seems like the No. 1 goal of these laws is to perpetuate the Big Lie,” said Dale Ho, the director of the Voting Rights Project at the A.C.L.U. “So when you get these unfounded charges that there was fraud or cheating in the election and people say, ‘Well, that’s not detected,’ the purveyors of these lies say, ‘That’s because we weren’t able to observe.’”After the election last year, complaints that poll watchers had not been given enough access, or that their accusations of improperly cast ballots had been ignored, fueled numerous lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign and its Republican allies, nearly all of which failed.In Texas, the leaked video of the Harris County Republican Party’s training, which was published by the voting rights group Common Cause, recalled a similar episode from the 2010 midterm elections.That year, a Tea Party-affiliated group in Houston known as the King Street Patriots sent poll watchers to downtown polling locations. The flood of the mostly white observers into Black neighborhoods caused friction, and resurfaced not-too-distant memories when racial intimidation at the polls was commonplace in the South.The King Street Patriots would eventually evolve into True the Vote, one of the major national organizations now seeking more voting restrictions. Last year, True the Vote joined several lawsuits alleging fraud in the election (all failed) and led countrywide drives to try to recruit more poll watchers.Access for poll watchers is considered sacred by Texas Republicans; in the Legislature, they cited the difficulty in finding observers for drive-through voting and 24-hour voting as one of their reasons for proposing to ban such balloting methods.“Both parties want to have poll watchers, need to have poll watchers present,” State Senator Bryan Hughes, a Republican who sponsored the chamber’s version of the bill, said in an interview last month. “That protects everyone.”While the antagonistic language from the Trump campaign about its poll watchers was already a flash point in November, Democrats and voting rights groups are worried that relaxed rules will lead to more reports of aggressive behavior.In 2020, there were at least 44 reports of inappropriate behavior by poll watchers in Harris County, according to county records obtained by The New York Times. At one polling site on the outskirts of Houston, Cindy Wilson, the nonpartisan election official in charge, reported two aggressive poll watchers who she said had bothered voters and repeatedly challenged the staff.“Two Poll watchers stood close to the black voters (less than 3 feet away) and engaged in what I describe as intimidating behavior,” Ms. Wilson wrote in an email to the Harris County clerk that was obtained by The Times through an open records request.Ms. Wilson said she was not sure which campaign or party the observers were representing.Of course, plenty of interactions with poll workers went smoothly. Merrilee C. Peterson, a poll watcher for a local Republican candidate, worked at a different site, the NRG Arena, and reported no tensions of note.“We still had some of the problems of not thinking we were allowed to get close enough to see,” she said. “But once the little kinks were worked out, quite frankly we worked very well with the poll workers.”In Florida, crowding was the chief concern of election officials.Testifying before state senators, Mark Earley, the vice president of the Florida Supervisors of Elections, said that “as an association, we are very concerned” about the number of poll watchers who would now be allowed to observe the process of duplicating a voter’s damaged or erroneously marked ballot. He said it presented “very grave security risks.”Mr. Earley was backed by at least one Republican, State Senator Jeff Brandes, who found the provision for poll watchers unnecessary and dangerous.“I don’t think we should have to install risers in the supervisor of elections offices or bars by which they can hang upside down in order to ensure that there is a transparent process,” Mr. Brandes said.A crowd that included many Michigan Republicans banged on the windows as workers counted absentee ballots in Detroit on Nov. 4. Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesBut perhaps no other state had a conflict involving poll watchers erupt onto cable news as Michigan did. On Election Day and the day after in November, Republican poll watchers grew increasingly obstructive at the TCF Center in Detroit, where absentee ballots were counted as it became clear that Mr. Trump was losing in the state.It began with a huddle of Republican observers around midday on Nov. 4, according to affidavits from Democratic poll watchers, nonpartisan observers and election officials.Soon after, the Republicans “began to fan out around the room,” wrote Dan McKernan, an election worker.Then they ramped up their objections, accusing workers of entering incorrect birth years or backdating ballots. In some cases, the poll watchers lodged blanket claims of wrongdoing.“The behavior in the room changed dramatically in the afternoon: The rage in the room from Republican challengers was nothing like I had ever experienced in my life,” wrote Anjanette Davenport Hatter, another election worker.Mr. McKernan wrote: “Republicans were challenging everything at the two tables I could see. When the ballot envelope was opened, they would say they couldn’t see it clearly. When the next envelope was opened, they made the same complaint. They were objecting to every single step down the line for no good reason.”The chaos provided some of the basis for Michigan officials to debate whether to certify the results, but a state board did so that month.Now, the Republican-controlled Legislature in Michigan is proposing to bar nonpartisan observers from acting as poll watchers, allowing only partisan challengers to do so.While widespread reports of intimidation never materialized last year, voting rights groups say the atmosphere after the election represents a dangerous shift in American elections.“It really hasn’t been like this for decades, generally speaking, even though there’s a long and storied history of it,” said Michael Waldman, a legal expert at the Brennan Center. Aggressive partisan poll watchers, he said, were “a longstanding barrier to voting in the United States, and it was also largely solved. And this risks bringing it back.” More

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      With Florida Bill, Republicans Continue Unrelenting Push to Restrict Voting

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      Republican lawmakers are marching ahead to overhaul voting systems in states where they control the government, frustrating Democrats and even some G.O.P. election officials. Next up: Texas.The pleas from Florida election officials were direct and dire: Passing the state’s new voting bill would be a “grave security risk,” “unnecessary” and a “travesty.”The restrictions imposed by the new law, they warned, would make it harder to vote and hurt confidence in the balloting process.But their objections were brushed aside on Thursday night as the Legislature gave final passage to a bill that would limit voting by mail, curtail the use of drop boxes and prohibit actions to help people waiting in line to vote, among other restrictions, while imposing penalties on those who do not follow the rules. It was perhaps the clearest sign yet that Republicans are determined to march forward across state capitols to establish new restrictions on voting.The Republican effort puts added pressure on Democrats in Congress to find a way to pass federal voting laws, including a sweeping overhaul known as the For the People Act. But in Washington, just as in state capitols across the country, Republicans have remained united and steadfast against the Democratic efforts.Georgia Republicans in March enacted far-reaching new voting laws that limit ballot drop-boxes and forbid the distribution of food and water to voters waiting in line. Iowa has also imposed new limits, including reducing the period for early voting and in-person voting hours on Election Day.Next up is Texas, where Republicans in the legislature are trampling protestations from corporate titans like Dell Technologies and American Airlines and moving on a vast election bill that would be among the most severe in the nation. It would impose new restrictions on early voting, ban drive-through voting, threaten election officials with harsher penalties and greatly empower partisan poll watchers. The main bill passed a key committee in a late-night session on Thursday, and could head to a full floor vote in the House as early as next week.Bills to restrict voting have also been moving through Republican-led legislatures in Arizona and Michigan.Throughout the process, Republican legislators have been largely unmoved by opposition to new voting laws by Fortune 500 companies, major American sports leagues, Black faith leaders and elections administrators. Nor has the lack of popular support for many of the bills deterred them. Even as some of the more strident initial proposals have been watered down, there has rarely been a pause, even for a moment, in the drive to pass new legislation on voting.“I don’t think anybody was concerned about it,” Joe Gruters, a Florida state senator and the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, said of outside criticism.Tightening his state’s election laws, Mr. Gruters has said, is a top priority not just of Republican lawmakers but also of the party’s base. Though he characterized Florida’s election system as a national “gold standard” and said he wasn’t aware of any fraud in the 2020 election, Mr. Gruters said in a phone interview on Friday that his state’s voting could always be improved.“It’s just like when the Tampa Bay Bucs won the Super Bowl — they’re still making improvements and signing new players,” he said.Joe Gruters, a Florida state senator and the chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, said tightening voting laws was a top priority for lawmakers and the party’s base.Wilfredo Lee/Associated PressA representative for Gov. Ron DeSantis said on Friday that he “is supportive” of the Florida bill, and he is widely expected to sign it. But state election officials were still protesting the measure on Friday morning, barely 12 hours after it had passed.The group representing Florida election supervisors issued a statement lamenting the new limits on voting by mail, saying the changes would make it “harder” to cast a mail ballot. “After days of debate, our hope is that the initial and unnecessary call for election reform will not detract from the confidence that was well-earned in 2020,” Craig Latimer, the head of the group, said in the statement.The unrelenting push by Republicans to roll back voting access has left Democrats exasperated. In an emotional floor speech before the final vote in Florida on Thursday night, State Representative Angela Nixon of Tampa both pleaded with her colleagues to vote against the bill and chastised those supporting it.“It’s very frustrating, and it’s super hard to be in this chamber, and to be cool with people and cordial with people who are making policies that are detrimental to our communities,” said Ms. Nixon, her voice shaking at times.The fixation on voting laws reflects how central the issue has become to the Republican Party, driven by a base that still adheres to former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Pledges to ensure voting integrity have become common in political ads and stump speeches, and opposition to the federal voting rights bills in Congress is universal among Republican members.A number of Republicans running for office in 2022 have begun campaigns with messaging that pushes the false narrative that the nation’s voting systems are flawed. They include Representative Ted Budd of North Carolina, who on Wednesday announced a Senate bid with a three-minute video in which he called for fair and secure elections, adopting Republicans’ rationale for revamping the voting laws.In a political era in which partisan primaries are often the only challenge a candidate faces, the party’s base has become a chief driver of legislative action. A CNN poll released on Friday found that while 97 percent of Democrats believed President Biden “legitimately won enough votes to win the presidency,” 70 percent of Republicans surveyed said he did not.And polling from Quinnipiac University in April found that a vast majority of Republicans — 78 percent — were opposed to expanding vote by mail, and 84 percent believed that voter fraud was a greater threat than voter suppression. (Numerous audits, court cases and reports have found no significant fraud in the 2020 election.)Republicans have been largely dismissive of the business community’s objections to new voting restrictions, part of a longer-running split between the parties and local chambers of commerce that began when corporations vocally opposed laws enacted by Republican-run states in the 2010s that sought to protect businesses from having to recognize same-sex marriage.An array of corporations also denounced the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and said they would not donate to Republican members of Congress who voted to overturn the election results. That threat didn’t sway most lawmakers from their fealty to Mr. Trump, and in the weeks since the attack, some companies have pulled back from that pledge.Indeed, some Republicans have turned public opposition from major businesses and outside entities into a political weapon; rather than seek to appease businesses, lawmakers have instead taunted them, castigating corporate activism and daring businesses to act.“Major League Baseball caved to fear and lies from liberal activists,” Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia announced the day after the decision by Major League Baseball to move its All-Star Game from Atlanta. Free and fair elections, he said, “are worth the threats.” He added, “They are worth the boycotts, as well as the lawsuits. I want to be clear: I will not be backing down from this fight.’’Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia said he would continue to defend the state’s new voting restrictions after Major League Baseball moved its All-Star Game from Atlanta this year.Brynn Anderson/Associated PressLt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas was just as firm. “Texans are fed up with corporations that don’t share our values trying to dictate public policy,” he said after American Airlines released a statement denouncing one of the voting bills in the state. “The majority of Texans support maintaining the integrity of our elections, which is why I made it a priority this legislative session.”Republicans not in thrall to Mr. Trump see the standoff with businesses as an ominous sign. “We say the party has gone full Trump, but what we mean is the party has gone full populist and nationalist,” said Michael Wood, an anti-Trump Republican running in Saturday’s 23-candidate special election to Congress in the Dallas suburbs. “We’ve turned away from our roots as a pro-business party, a pro-small business party, and that, if we don’t correct course, is going to be really bad for America.”Yet Republicans are also seizing on a potential political opportunity. The aftermath of the 2020 election, and Mr. Trump’s insistence that the vote was rigged, provided the party with the first major public support from its partisans to pursue new voting legislation, after the Supreme Court hollowed out the Voting Rights Act in 2013.Indeed, many of the laws being proposed and passed by Republicans would most likely have been challenged by the Justice Department under what was known as the preclearance provision in Section 5 of the act.“We saw something like this in 2010 after Obama got elected,” said Myrna Pérez, the director of the Voting Rights and Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “But we had more of a pushback and were able to block or blunt many of those laws. Now there’s not the kind of guardrails that we had in the past, and voters are suffering because of it.”Michael Wood, left, a Republican congressional candidate in Texas, criticized his party for going “full populist and nationalist.”LM Otero/Associated PressMr. Wood, the Texas Republican running in Saturday’s special election, worries that this could drive away supporters.“It’s keeping Republicans from talking honestly to themselves about why we’re getting a smaller and smaller share of the vote in Texas,” he said. “We can either have that conversation, or keep screaming about quote unquote ‘election integrity’ and watch the state become progressively more Democratic.”That debate could well be decided soon when the Texas Legislature takes up its own voting bill.Patricia Mazzei contributed reporting. More

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      Florida Voting Rights: Republican Bill Adds New Limits

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      The bill, which Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to sign, is the latest Republican effort to restrict voting after the 2020 election. It will make Florida the first major swing state won by Donald Trump to pass such a law.MIAMI — Republicans in the Florida Legislature passed an election overhaul bill on Thursday that is set to usher in a host of voting restrictions in one of the most critical battleground states in the country, adding to the national push by G.O.P. state lawmakers to reduce voting access.The bill makes Florida the first major swing state won by former President Donald J. Trump to pass significant voting limits and reflects Republicans’ determination to reshape electoral systems even in states where they have been ascendant. Mr. Trump carried the state last year by more than three percentage points, other Republicans also performed strongly, and the party raised new hopes of its ability to appeal to Latino voters.But Republicans in Florida argued that its elections needed to be more secure, despite the fact that voting unfolded smoothly in 2020 and arguments by Democrats and voting rights experts that some of the new measures would disproportionately affect voters of color. Now the state is on the verge of weakening key parts of an extensive voting infrastructure that was slowly constructed after the state’s chaotic 2000 election and was rapidly enlarged last year because of the coronavirus pandemic.The new bill would limit the use of drop boxes; add more identification requirements for those requesting absentee ballots; require voters to request an absentee ballot for each election, rather than receive them automatically through an absentee voting list; limit who could collect and drop off ballots; and further empower partisan observers during the ballot-counting process. The legislation would also expand a current rule that prohibits outside groups from providing items “with the intent to influence” voters within a 150-foot radius of a polling location.Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has indicated his support for the voting overhaul and is expected to sign it. The bill passed largely along a party-line vote in both chambers, 77 to 40 in the House and 23 to 17 in the Senate, though one Republican state senator, Jeff Brandes of St. Petersburg, voted against it.The legislation follows a similar law passed recently by Georgia, and comes as Texas, Arizona and other states led by Republicans pursue limits on access to the ballot. G.O.P. lawmakers have been fueled by a party base that has largely embraced Mr. Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud and a stolen 2020 election. In Florida, Republican legislators promoted the voting bill while providing little evidence of any problems with fraud, and despite their continued claims that the state’s 2020 election was the “gold standard” for the country.“There was no problem in Florida,” said Kara Gross, the legislative director and senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. “Everything worked as it should. The only reason they’re doing this is to make it harder to vote.”Once the bill is signed into law, Florida will become the first state to create new barriers to voting after businesses across the country embarked on a public pressure campaign to oppose such measures. Major corporations, after speaking out against voting bills in states like Georgia and Texas, remained largely muted on the Republican push in Florida.Hovering over Florida’s debate about the bill was the state’s strong and exceptionally popular tradition of voting by mail — and a recent sea change in which party benefited most from it.In the 2016 and 2018 elections, roughly a third of the state’s voters cast ballots through the mail. And in both years, more Republicans than Democrats voted by mail.But in 2020, more than 2.1 million Democrats cast mail ballots, compared with roughly 1.4 million Republicans, largely because of a Democratic push to vote remotely amid the pandemic and Mr. Trump’s false attacks on the practice. (The former president and his family, however, voted by mail in Florida in the June 2020 primary.)Florida has a popular tradition of voting by mail, a method that favored Republicans until 2020, when Democrats encouraged the practice during the pandemic.Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesGiven that history in Florida, its bill will act as a unique test of the national Republican push to curtail voting access, especially absentee and mail voting. And the G.O.P. effort carries risks: Was the Democratic surge in mail balloting a sign of a new normal for the previously Republican-dominated voting method, or a blip caused by the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic?The legislation has already become something of a political balancing act, as state Republicans try to appease a Trump-friendly base hungry for new voting limits while not harming the party’s turnout. In 2022, the state is poised to yet again become a marquee political battleground as Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican, and Mr. DeSantis seek re-election.Democrats in the Legislature seized on Republicans’ justification for the bill.“So what’s the problem that we’re trying to fix?” Carlos Guillermo Smith, a Democratic representative from Orlando, asked rhetorically. “Oh, here’s the problem: Florida Democrats cast 600,000 more vote-by-mail ballots.”But Republicans defended the bill, saying that it was popular with “our constituents” and noting that voting options in Florida were still far more extensive than in other states. Florida will still have no-excuse absentee voting and will mandate at least eight days of early voting.“If the opposition says that we are creating barriers to voting, those barriers already exist in other states,” said Blaise Ingoglia, a Republican state representative from Hernando County who helped lead the push for the bill. “But we never hear a peep from the opposition about those laws.”Other Republican legislators echoed language used by Mr. Trump and his allies during their challenges to the 2020 election.“I believe that every legal vote should count,” said Travis Hutson, a Republican senator from Northeast Florida. “I believe one fraudulent vote is one too many. And I’m trying to protect the sanctity of our elections.”Data requested by lawmakers themselves suggested there was little need for the legislation. The Republican-led House Public Integrity and Elections Committee surveyed the state’s 67 election supervisors in February, asking them about past elections. Almost all of the supervisors responded and said that, over the past four years, they had reported very few instances of possible fraud — one of lawmakers’ stated reasons for pushing the legislation — and that most of their drop boxes were already monitored, through either physical or video surveillance, public records show.“It seems like the Legislature is ignoring — I would say deliberately ignoring — the facts that they have in their possession,” said Stephen F. Rosenthal of Miami, who is part of a group of Democratic lawyers that requested the records. The group also queried elected state prosecutors about voter fraud, finding a minuscule number of prosecuted cases.The supervisors’ answers to the House committee also revealed that election supervisors had received millions of dollars in grant funding from outside organizations in 2019 and 2020. That money will now be prohibited, with no obvious substitute for it in the future.Republicans, when pressed for details on any reported fraud that would prompt the need for the bill, often demurred.“I don’t know, but I’m sure it was going on,” Mr. Ingoglia responded to a question on the House floor about any reported instances of illegal ballot collection. “Just the fact that they weren’t caught doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not happening.”The bill was not without criticism from notable Republicans inside and outside the Legislature. D. Alan Hays, a conservative Republican who had previously served in the State Senate for 12 years and is now the election supervisor in Lake County, told his former colleagues at a legislative hearing last month that their bill was a “travesty.”Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is expected to sign the bill into law, will face re-election in 2022.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesThe new bill is likely to face legal challenges from Democrats; hours after Gov. Brian Kemp signed Georgia’s voting bill into law, a coalition of Democrats and civil rights groups filed a federal lawsuit challenging its legality.Democrats in the Florida Legislature focused heavily on the bill’s potential impact on communities of color.“Typically, in communities of color, households are very diverse,” said State Representative Bobby DuBose, the minority leader, taking issue with the restriction that says a person could collect only two absentee ballots from other voters to bring and drop off at a polling location. “And so, if the intent was to add two — and in many households, there are more than two — why the number two and why not expand beyond two if your intent was to open up the accessibility to voting?”Mr. Ingoglia said he believed allowing two ballots per person was sufficient, but Democrats disagreed, likening the rule to racially discriminatory laws of the past. Over and over, they framed the bill as a solution in search of a problem.One Democratic representative, Fentrice Driskell of Tampa, framed the debate as similar to the hunt for the chupacabra, the mythical, nightmarish mammal-gobbling and goat-blood-sucking beast.“Members, I’ve got no evidence for you on the chupacabra, and I got no evidence for you about ballot harvesting,” Ms. Driskell said. “But what I can tell you is this: that our system worked well in 2020, by all accounts, and everyone agreed. And that for so many reasons, we don’t need this bad bill.” More

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      Will Miami's Mayor Francis Suarez be Nikki Haley’s Vice Presidential Pick for 2024?

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      Big names in tech including Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois have moved to Miami in the past year. Mayor Francis Suarez is welcoming them with open arms in his zeal to transform Miami into the next tech hub. The sell? Sunshine, low taxes and a mayor who is always willing to take their calls (or, as Kara Swisher puts it, “pet them.”)In this conversation, Swisher presses Suarez on whether Miami — a city with rising sea levels and without an institution like Stanford in its back yard — can really become the next Silicon Valley. She also asks what he’s angling for in the long term. Suarez, a Republican, attracted national attention during the pandemic for his tensions with Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, and President Donald Trump.He’s now rumored to be a contender to be Nikki Haley’s running mate in the 2024 presidential race — speculation that he also welcomes with open arms. “I certainly was not shy about wanting to build a bond and a relationship with her,” he says. So, does Suarez want to be on a Republican ticket? His answer: “I wouldn’t say no.”Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Pete Marovich for The New York TimesThoughts? Email us at sway@nytimes.com. Transcripts of each episode are available midday.Special thanks to Shannon Busta, Liriel Higa, Michelle Harris and Isvett Verde.“Sway” is produced by Nayeema Raza, Blakeney Schick, Heba Elorbany, Matt Kwong and Daphne Chen, and edited by Nayeema Raza and Paula Szuchman; fact-checking by Kate Sinclair; music and sound design by Isaac Jones; mixing by Erick Gomez. More

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      ‘There Is a Tension There’: Publishers Draw Fire for Signing Trump Officials

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      Kellyanne Conway, Mike Pence and William Barr have book deals. That is raising new challenges for publishers trying to balance ideological lines with a desire to continue representing the political spectrum.Things were already strained at Simon & Schuster.After backing out of a deal with Senator Josh Hawley, a prominent supporter of former President Donald J. Trump, the company announced this month that it would publish two books by former Vice President Mike Pence. Dana Canedy, who joined Simon & Schuster as publisher last year, called Mr. Pence’s memoir “the definitive book on one of the most consequential presidencies in American history.” That’s when much of the staff erupted in protest.On Monday, editors and other employees at Simon & Schuster delivered a petition to management demanding an end to the deal, with signatures from more than 200 employees and 3,500 outside supporters, including Simon & Schuster authors such as Jesmyn Ward and Scott Westerfeld.Most were probably not aware that the company has also signed the former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, according to people familiar with the matter — a move that is sure to throw gas on the fire.In another era, book deals with former White House officials were viewed as prestigious and uncontroversial, and major publishers have long maintained that putting out books from across the political spectrum is not only good for business but an essential part of their mission. In today’s hyperpartisan environment, however, Simon & Schuster has become a test case for how publishers are trying to draw a line over who is acceptable to publish, and how firmly executives will hold in the face of criticism from their own authors and employees.Many publishers and editors have said privately that they would be reluctant to acquire a book by Mr. Trump because of the outcry that would ensue and the potential legal exposure they would face if Mr. Trump used a memoir to promote the false view that he won the 2020 election.But the reticence extends beyond Mr. Trump himself, and several publishers acknowledge that there are certain ideological lines that they won’t cross. Some said they wouldn’t acquire books by politicians or pundits who questioned the results of the presidential election. Another bright line is working with people who promoted the false narratives or conspiracy theories that Mr. Trump espoused.Certain literary agents representing Trump officials have adjusted their sales tactics. A few are avoiding large auctions in hopes of staving off a backlash until after a contract is signed, according to some publishing executives.“What I’m watching very closely is the succession of lines crossed,” said Thomas Spence, the president of Regnery, a conservative publisher. “People start to wonder: Whom else might they shut down?”Donald Rumsfeld, a defense secretary under George W. Bush, is among the former Republican officials whose books attracted little scrutiny in a different political era.Scott Olson/Getty ImagesThose who work in the industry, which is concentrated in New York, tend to be left leaning in their politics, but publishing houses have long adhered to the principle of political neutrality when it comes to who they publish. After the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, major publishers signed deals with administration officials like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and Mr. Bush himself, with little blowback. (An imprint of Penguin Random House published a book of portraits and stories about immigrants by Mr. Bush last week called “Out of Many, One.”)After the 2020 election, those ideals have been tested in unprecedented ways.“There is a tension there — on the one hand, I’ve always believed, and I still believe fervently, that we need to publish major voices that are at the center of the national conversation, whether we agree with them or not,” said Adrian Zackheim, the president and publisher of two Penguin Random House imprints, including Sentinel, which is geared toward conservative books. “On the other hand, we have to be leery of public figures who have come to be associated with blatant falsehoods.”At the same time, conservative publishers and some literary agents say there is enormous demand for books from voices on the right, particularly now that Republicans are out of power, and publishers are demonstrating that they are eager to work with politicians they regard as acceptable mainstream conservatives. Politico reported that William P. Barr, Trump’s former attorney general, sold a book about his role at the Justice Department. Sentinel acquired a book by Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whose appointment by Mr. Trump last year caused an uproar on the left. Ms. Conway’s book will be published by Threshold, a Simon & Schuster imprint focused on conservative titles, though a person familiar with it said it would be more of a memoir than a standard political book.Simon & Schuster declined to comment.The company published several political blockbusters last year, including Mary L. Trump’s “Too Much and Never Enough” and John R. Bolton’s “The Room Where It Happened.” This year has been more complicated.In January, Simon & Schuster dropped plans to release Mr. Hawley’s book following criticism of his efforts to overturn the election and accusations that he helped incite the Capitol riot on Jan. 6. This month, it said it would not distribute a title, published by Post Hill Press, a small publisher in Tennessee, by one of the police officers in the raid that killed Breonna Taylor.The petition drafted by Simon & Schuster staff, which circulated on social media last week, demanded the company cancel Mr. Pence’s books, not sign any more former Trump officials and end its distribution deal with Post Hill Press. Jonathan Karp, Simon & Schuster’s chief executive, wrote a letter to the company saying it wouldn’t take those actions.“We come to work each day to publish, not cancel,” Mr. Karp wrote, “which is the most extreme decision a publisher can make, and one that runs counter to the very core of our mission to publish a diversity of voices and perspectives.”Staff members who organized the petition were not satisfied by his response. They sent a letter to Mr. Karp and Ms. Canedy on Monday along with the petition.“Let’s be clear: the First Amendment protects free speech from legal encroachment. It in no way calls for publishing companies to publish all viewpoints, much less those as dangerous as Mike Pence’s,” the letter said. “When S&S chose to sign Mike Pence, we broke the public’s trust in our editorial process, and blatantly contradicted previous public claims in support of Black and other lives made vulnerable by structural oppression.”Some publishing employees said the decision to sign Mr. Pence and other Trump officials was especially jarring as major publishers have taken pains to stress their commitment to diversity over the past year.“It feels like you’re talking out of both sides of your mouth,” said Stephanie Guerdan, an assistant editor at HarperCollins, who was speaking in her role as a shop steward at its union. “You want to make a safe space for your Black employees and your queer employees and put out your anti-Asian-discrimination statements. You can’t say the company supports these causes and then give money to people who have actively hurt those causes.”The reluctance among mainstream publishers to work with some conservatives has created an opportunity for smaller independent houses.“It’s one thing to be published by a group of people who are holding their nose,” Adam Bellow, who runs the conservative imprint Bombardier, “but it’s another thing to be published by a group of people who hate you.”Guerin Blask for The New York Times“The reaction of people on the right to the cancellation of political books is to double down, so we have lots of books to publish,” said Adam Bellow, who founded the Broadside imprint at HarperCollins and is now an executive editor at Bombardier, an imprint of Post Hill, which has published books by Representative Matt Gaetz and other prominent Republicans.Mr. Bellow added that some conservatives have grown wary of selling their books to mainstream publishing houses.“It’s a purge that’s becoming more of an exodus,” he said. “Many conservative authors are telling their agents they don’t want to be pitched to publishers who have canceled conservative books. It’s one thing to be published by a group of people who are holding their noses, but it’s another thing to be published by a group of people who hate you.”The highly charged atmosphere could lead to a realignment in the political publishing landscape, with the formation of a new literary niche that caters to voices on the far right.The D.C. public relations firm Athos started a literary agency and is representing some prominent conservatives. Co-founded by Alexei Woltornist, who worked in communications in the Department of Homeland Security under Mr. Trump, and Jonathan Bronitsky, who served as Mr. Barr’s chief speechwriter, Athos recently sold Bombardier a book by Scott Atlas, Mr. Trump’s former coronavirus adviser, about the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic.Conservative publishers are also experimenting with direct-to-consumer sales with a new online bookstore, conservativereaders.com, that was created by Mr. Bellow and a small group of colleagues and investors. With a new online outlet, they are aiming to develop an alternative platform to traditional retailers and Amazon in the event that stores refuse to sell a controversial title.Some predict the appetite for political books will only continue to grow.“After the election, there was this big question mark over the future of the political book,” the literary agent Rafe Sagalyn said, “and I think we’re learning now that they’re very much in demand.” More

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      Why Iowa Has Become Such a Heartbreaker for Democrats

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      BURLINGTON, Iowa — Tom Courtney and Terry Davis are former factory workers in Des Moines County along the Mississippi River in eastern Iowa, two men of similar age who skipped college but thrived in a community where blue-collar jobs used to be an engine of upward mobility.In 2008, Mr. Courtney’s daughter Shawna married Mr. Davis’s son Shannon. They celebrated at a rehearsal dinner at the Drake, a steak restaurant on the riverfront in Burlington. The two men are grandparents to Shawna’s daughters from her first marriage, and they occasionally met on the sidelines of Little League games.But as economic decline and social malaise overtook Des Moines County, and Donald J. Trump was embraced by many as an answer, the two men moved in opposite directions. Today they rarely speak. Mr. Davis has become the chairman of the county Republican Party. Mr. Courtney lost his seat as a powerful Democratic state senator in 2016, then tried to win it back last year. He faced an opponent recruited by Mr. Davis.“This was a pretty blue county, but we had a lot of Democrats come over to our side,” Mr. Davis said.Mr. Courtney, who expected a close race, was stunned by the depth of his loss on election night. “As I looked around the state, there were lots of people like me,” he said.“Iowans have changed.”For decades, this state was a reliable wind vane of American politics. In six presidential elections from 1992 to 2012, its voters never deviated by more than one percentage point from the national results.Then in 2016, Mr. Trump pulled Iowa more sharply to the right than any state in the country. The trend continued in 2020, when he ran up wider margins against President Biden than he had against Hillary Clinton in most Iowa counties.Some Democrats believe there are pathways to winning back the working-class voters the party has lost here and in places like it. They point to Mr. Biden’s $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan, the subject of tense negotiations in Washington, which would bring a surge of spending on roads, bridges, child care and clean energy. In Iowa, there are more structurally deficient bridges than any state in the country. Yet, few local Democrats have such high hopes for a political realignment. “There is no short-term elixir,” said Jeff Link, a Democratic strategist in the state.Tom Courtney lost his seat as a powerful Democratic state senator in Iowa in 2016, then tried to win it back last year. Soon after the polls closed, he knew he had no chance. “Iowans have changed,” he said.Jacob Moscovitch for The New York TimesThe 2020 carnage for Iowa Democrats was wide and deep. The party lost a Senate race, gave up two congressional seats and lost half a dozen seats in the state legislature. Unified Republican rule in state government has led Gov. Kim Reynolds to sign permissive gun laws and new restrictions on voting this year, and lawmakers are moving to add a constitutional ban on abortion.Many Democrats now believe that Iowa is all but lost to the party, and that it is time to let go, a view driving a fierce debate over whether to drop the state’s presidential caucuses from their leadoff role in 2024 and beyond. Iowa is small and unrepresentative, more than 90 percent white, and the 2020 election showed that Democrats’ future is in the Sun Belt, with its racially diverse electorate and college-educated suburbanites.Other party strategists are quick to note that Mr. Biden barely won his two Sun Belt pickup states last year, Georgia and Arizona, and that the party can’t afford to bleed more of its traditional voters while making only tenuous inroads with a new constituency.What’s the matter with Iowa, and by extension much of the northern Midwest, for Democrats? Many officials say the party’s cataclysmic losses stem from the erosion in quality of life in rural places like Des Moines County and small cities like Burlington, which are a microcosm for a hollowing out that has led to sweeping political realignments in parts of Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania.Schools have closed, rural hospitals are cutting all but bare-bones care, and young people with college degrees have fled for opportunities in Des Moines or Chicago. Employers have backfilled jobs with immigrants, often after weakening unions and cutting pay.“There’s just a discontent, an unhappiness here seeing communities shrink,” said Patty Judge, a Democrat and former lieutenant governor of Iowa. “That makes people very vulnerable to a quick fix. Donald Trump offered that: ‘Let’s make America great again, you’ve lost your voice, let’s have a voice again.’ People have bought into that.”Angela Pforts at her shop in Burlington, Barber and Style. Jacob Moscovitch for The New York TimesMr. Courtney, who is one of eight children of a farm couple he called “strong Roosevelt Democrats,” said that most of his nieces and nephews were “Trumpers,” which confounds him. “They’re not millionaires, most of the family works for wages,” he said. “I don’t understand them.”Mr. Davis’s 95-year-old father is a Democrat. He told his son he always votes for who he thinks will do the best job. “I said, ‘Dad, have you ever voted for a Republican?’” Mr. Davis recalled. “He said, ‘Hell no!’”According to Iowa Workforce Development, a state agency, 1,700 jobs were shed statewide in 2019 outside Iowa’s major cities. It was the third loss in four years, the agency said, “and highlights a trend that is not uncommon in most of the country.”On top of economic factors, other forces forged the Trump coalition in Iowa, as they did elsewhere in places dominated by the white working class: a resentment of immigrants and people of color, and a narrowing of information sources that has pushed conservatives to radio and social media channels where lies and conspiracy theories flourish.A postal carrier in downtown Burlington. There are embers of a downtown revival, but most businesses now line Route 61 west of downtown, where big box stores and chain restaurants draw shoppers from rural towns.Jacob Moscovitch for The New York Times‘Those were my voters’On a recent sunny morning, Mr. Courtney, 73, steered his white S.U.V. around Burlington, a riverfront city with a population of 25,600, which is down by 3.5 percent since 2010. A slender figure with a mustache, silver hair and a soft-pitched voice, Mr. Courtney joined the Air Force out of high school and returned home to work at a Case backhoe plant in Burlington. He rose to become the leader of the union bargaining team before he retired and was elected to the State Senate in 2002.“When I worked there and was bargaining chair, we had 2,300 rank-and-file members,” he said as he drove near the Case plant beside the pewter-colored Mississippi. Today the shop floor is down to 350 workers.“Those were my voters,” he said, passing a nearly empty employee parking lot and a shuttered bar that was once crowded at shift changes. “The last five or six years I worked there, it was nothing to make $70,000 a year. Cars and boats — everybody had all that kind of stuff.” Today, starting wages are about $17 an hour. Burlington rose as a railroad and manufacturing center, and the stone mansions of its 19th-century barons still stand on a bluff above the river. The population peaked around 1970. Although there are embers of a downtown renewal, including a yoga studio and a brew pub, Jefferson Street, the main thoroughfare, was largely deserted on a recent weekday. Most businesses now line Route 61 west of downtown, where big box stores and chain restaurants draw shoppers from rural towns that are themselves losing their economic cores.The visitor’s entrance at the Case factory in Burlington, Iowa. Case’s backhoe plant used to have more than 3,000 employees. Now it has about 350.Jacob Moscovitch for The New York TimesMr. Courtney harks back to a golden era for local Democrats. Des Moines County — not to be confused with the state’s capital city — voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in 10 straight elections before 2016, when Mr. Trump flipped it. Before the 2008 Iowa caucuses, Mr. Courtney, who was the majority whip in the State Senate, escorted Mr. Biden, then embarking on his second bid for the presidency, to an interview with editors of The Hawk Eye. In the middle of it, Mr. Courtney’s cellphone buzzed: It was Bill Clinton, pestering him to endorse the former president’s wife. (Mr. Courtney remained neutral.)Mr. Courtney grew up in the rural town of Wapello, 25 miles north of Burlington. He recalled how in 2018 he knocked on doors there for Democrats. “I’d go into neighborhoods that when I was a kid were nice middle-income neighborhoods with nice homes,” he said. “Now today there’s old cars in the yards, there’s trash everywhere. People come to the doors who are obviously poor. Those are Trump people. We’re not reaching those people.”He could not think of a single new factory that opened in Burlington during the Trump years. To Democrats, the fact that Iowans did not punish Mr. Trump in November for failing to bring a renewal of blue-collar jobs speaks to the power of perception over reality.“It’s just this constant slide and they don’t feel like anybody’s doing anything for them, but they believe that Trump was trying,” said Mr. Link, the Democratic strategist. “More than anything, Trump resonated with them in that he was indignant and angry about the status quo, and angry about elites. They’re not getting that same perception from Democrats.”High school students hanging out in the parking lot of the abandoned Shopko in Burlington. Jacob Moscovitch for The New York TimesRepublicans on the riseIn many ways, Mr. Davis, 72, is the obverse of Mr. Courtney. Although he, too, started as a blue-collar worker, an electrician for railroads, Mr. Davis climbed the ranks of management. By the early 2000s he was the superintendent of a Burlington Northern locomotive plant. When the railroad shut down the operation, idling hundreds of union workers in Burlington, Mr. Davis helped with the downsizing. He took early retirement.Mr. Davis had promised his own driving tour of Burlington, but instead sat in his double-cab pickup with a reporter for two hours in the parking lot of a Dick’s Sporting Goods. He wore khaki work pants and a black golf pullover. He spoke in a forceful, folksy voice.Once a Democrat who voted for Bill Clinton, Mr. Davis said he became a Republican because he disagreed with Democrats on abortion and same-sex marriage, as well as what he called handouts to the undeserving.He recalled chatting at a railroad reunion with one of his former electricians who had taken a job at Case. The man told him that he, and many other union workers at the plant, had voted for Mr. Trump.Mr. Davis recalled him saying: “We pay 140 bucks a month to the union, every one of us does. They take that money and give it to a political party that gives it to people that don’t work. The more we thought about it, we thought, ‘I ain’t doing that anymore.’”The electrician added, “You’d be surprised how many of those people voted for Trump.”Terry Davis, the chair of the Des Moines County Republican Party. “This was a pretty blue county, but we had a lot of Democrats come over to our side,” he said.Jacob Moscovitch for The New York TimesLike Mr. Courtney, Mr. Davis expressed some puzzlement about why Mr. Trump had done so well despite not delivering on his promise to bring back blue-collar jobs. “It’s kind of hard to figure,” he said. Mr. Davis was born in Missouri and worked in Kansas City before being transferred to Burlington. He agreed that the quality of life in town was lackluster. “My wife — don’t take this wrong — she’s not going to buy clothes here,’’ he said. “We go to the Quad Cities or Iowa City or Chicago or St. Louis to shop and mainly to kind of get out of town.”He readily acknowledged that Mr. Biden had won the presidency. But he also said that most Republicans in Des Moines County probably believed Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about a stolen election.Democrats say that conservative talk radio, even more than Fox News, has spread conspiracy theories and disinformation to Republican voters. In places like Des Moines County, people now must drive far to see a dentist or buy a pair of shoes, and all of those hours in their cars have increased the influence of right-wing radio.“People are driving all the time, they’ve got their radios on all the time,” Mr. Courtney said. He mentioned a local station, KBUR, “which used to be a nice friendly station.” It was known for a show “to auction things off” and another that was a call-in “question and answer thing,” Mr. Courtney said. Now it broadcasts Sean Hannity for hours each afternoon.Mr. Courtney passed a shuttered middle school. “It’s just hard for me to believe that 15 years ago, we had three big thriving middle schools,” he said, “and today we’re down to nothing like that.”“Folks have left town,” he added.The now-closed Siemens factory in Burlington.Jacob Moscovitch for The New York Times‘There was a racism card’But Mr. Courtney acknowledged another reason, too: white flight to schools in West Burlington. “People will tell you it’s not, but there’s no question it is,” he said. Burlington’s population is 8.2 percent Black. Public school enrollment is 19 percent Black.Barack Obama carried Des Moines County twice, including by 18 points in 2012, before Mr. Trump flipped it. It is one of 31 Obama-Trump pivot counties in Iowa, which has more of them than any other state in the country. A study by sociologists at Iowa State University in 2019 concluded that the state’s hard pivot from Mr. Obama was not because of “economic distress.” It pointed instead to Mr. Trump’s “nativist narrative about ‘taking back America.’”The study found that the counties that gyrated most sharply away from Mr. Obama were almost entirely white.Mr. Courtney does not dispute that racism drove part of that swing, and he has his own theory of why some of the same voters had earlier backed Mr. Obama.“I think they wanted to say they voted for a Black man,” he said. After two terms with Mr. Obama in office, however, Mr. Trump’s brazen attacks on Mexicans, Muslims and other racial and religious minorities gave people permission to indulge inner grievances, Mr. Courtney said. “There was a racism card that came out and people said, ‘I’m sick of this Black guy, I want to go back to a white guy,’” he said. “I hesitate to say that, but it’s the only thing that makes sense.’’Barack Obama carried Des Moines County twice, including by 18 points in 2012, before Donald J. Trump flipped it in 2016.Jacob Moscovitch for The New York TimesThe road back in Iowa for Democrats is long and complicated. The state once prided itself on having more registered independents than Republicans or Democrats, but since 2018, in keeping with national trends toward polarization, independents now rank behind both major parties. Democrats have suffered a net loss of 120,000 registered voters compared with Republicans. Those votes alone are 10 percent of turnout in nonpresidential years.The party’s setbacks have reheated the debate over whether to cancel Iowa’s caucuses as the leadoff nominating contest. Many national Democratic officials argue that a larger and more diverse state should go before either Iowa or New Hampshire. Even some Iowa Democratic strategists have supported killing off the caucuses to focus on local issues and reduce the influence of the national progressive wing of the party.Mr. Courtney said the voters he knew didn’t care much about cultural issues that Democrats elsewhere dwell on, like gun control and immigration. “All they really want to know is where can they get a good job that pays the most money so that they can take care of their family, and we’re not touching on that,” he said.He has cautious hopes for Mr. Biden’s infrastructure proposal. “If we can put people to work making good money building that stuff, it could be like the W.P.A. back in the day,” said Mr. Courtney, whose parents worshiped Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.Even Mr. Davis, the G.O.P. chair, conceded that a robust infrastructure plan that brought jobs to Burlington would make it harder for Republicans to continue their winning streak.“It probably will be tough in four years if things are good,” he said. More