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      Ron DeSantis to meet UK ministers on tour to boost foreign policy credentials

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      Ron DeSantis is due to spend Friday in Britain on the last leg of a world tour aimed at enhancing his foreign policy credentials before an expected run for the Republican nomination.Formally, DeSantis will meet the foreign secretary, James Cleverly, and the business secretary, Kemi Badenoch, in his role as governor of Florida, the third most populous US state.Nigel Farage’s new rightwing Reform UK party is also trying to secure a meeting with DeSantis, Politico reported on Thursday.Despite being greeted by the prime ministers of Japan and South Korea on earlier legs of the trip, he won’t meet the British prime minster, Rishi Sunak – in part because it is not standard diplomatic protocol for a prime minister to meet a US governor, UK officials say.There is additionally an issue of logistics, with Sunak in Scotland on a pre-planned trip to the Conservatives’ conference there.DeSantis’s visit is not completely on a pretext. The UK regularly ranks as Florida’s top business partner, and there are more than 600 British businesses in the state, employing more than 50,000 Floridians. However, the timing of DeSantis’s tour, which has also included Japan, South Korea and Israel, has been dictated by the brewing primary contest with Donald Trump. It is a race in which he is trailing badly, though as he pointed out on the Japanese leg of the trip, the numbers could change when he formally declares his bid.The fact he has not officially entered the race has not stopped attacks from the Trump camp, who view him as the only serious challenger. While Trump boasts of his personal rapport with some of the world’s leaders, suggesting it gives him a unique ability to resolve big conflicts around the world, DeSantis’s previous experience abroad is limited to his deployment as a legal adviser to a Navy Seal team in Iraq, and some limited travel as Florida governor. This trip, and the accompanying footage of handshaking with foreign officials, will provide a rebuttal to claims he is too inexperienced in the ways of the world to be president.“It’s an irony that people like him who make the case that America should focus more on itself, also sees it as indispensable to go around and present themselves in a dog and pony show to the world,” Elisabeth Braw, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said.Trump is due to be in the UK next week for a visit to his golf course in Scotland.Such tours are a rite of passage for presidential candidates. In 2008, Barack Obama, who also had a foreign policy experience deficit, visited Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Germany, France and the UK. On the last three stops, Obama met Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown. But, unlike DeSantis, he had already secured the nomination at that point.The inclusion of Tokyo and Seoul in DeSantis’s tour is telling, a reflection of how the centre of US foreign policy has shifted.“I think it really does indicate a growing focus in US foreign policy generally, but even in the public consciousness, on the Indo-Pacific, on competition with China,” Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center thinktank, said. “I think the fact that he chose to go there really does suggest that’s the direction foreign policy is moving.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIsrael has long been a must-do for US presidential hopefuls on tour, though now that is more true of Republicans, who are generally in lockstep with Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-right government, than Democrats. It has been called the “new Iowa” for Republican hopefuls – a primary for the Jewish and evangelical vote.In his speech at the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem on Thursday, DeSantis repeated a story about how he had used water from the Sea of Galilee to baptise his children. He talked about “Judeo-Christian values” binding the two countries. The only mention of the world “Palestinian” was in a line about terrorism.DeSantis disowned the Biden administration’s criticism of Netanyahu’s efforts to curb the independence of the judiciary, saying: “It shouldn’t be for us to butt in to these important issues”, but there was nothing of substance separating his position from Trump’s.The one area of policy difference with the Republican frontrunner is over Ukraine. DeSantis’s support for a ceasefire and for less US involvement sparked a backlash from the more hawkish end of the Republican party, and Cleverly can be expected to echo those misgivings. DeSantis has tried to hedge his position, potentially opening space between his stance and Trump’s pro-Moscow inclinations.DeSantis’s world tour has come at an awkward time, as support among congressional Republicans has slid towards Trump in his absence, but the fact that he felt he had to leave the US at all, suggests that the maxim foreign policy does not matter in US presidential elections is not always true.“Differences over foreign policy can matter in the team-building phase of the campaign,” Daniel Drezner, professor of international politics at Tufts University, said. “This seems like a box-checking exercise and actually a horribly timed one from DeSantis’s perspective, because the last thing you want to do, when your campaign is faltering, is go overseas.” More

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      DeSantis assembles senior staff for expected 2024 presidential campaign

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      Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, is quietly assembling a senior staff for an expected 2024 presidential campaign that will be headed by his top political adviser, Generra Peck, and around seven other Republican operatives serving as top advisers, according to two people familiar with the matter.The leadership roster remains subject to change since the campaign – which could launch as soon as the start of next month – does not yet technically exist and most salaries are being paid, for the moment, through the state Republican party.But some of the senior staff have started to move in recent weeks to the campaign’s base in Tallahassee, the people said, as DeSantis prepares to announce his presidential ambitions as perhaps the closest challenger to Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination.The leadership roster, described to the Guardian, shows an initial team of advisers drawn from people who have previously worked for the governor, either from his time in Congress or his re-election campaign last year, as well as relative newcomers to his circle.Yet the lack of presidential campaign experience among the senior staff and the wisdom of recruiting a team that appears conventional in nature to take on an unconventional candidate like Trump has emerged as an early concern among some of the governor’s allies.DeSantis has recently taken curveballs from the Trump campaign, which cut a television ad mocking him for using his fingers to eat chocolate pudding, something he has denied, and slammed him as unelectable in a general election after he became the face of a six-week abortion ban in Florida.The campaign manager is expected to be Peck, one of DeSantis’s most trusted advisers, who most recently shepherded his 2022 re-election effort for Florida governor, which saw him defeat the Democratic challenger and former governor Charlie Crist by almost 20 percentage points.Peck is considered a highly adept political operator – notably including by Trump’s own team – who associates say earned the trust of DeSantis and his wife, Casey. At the governor’s inauguration, Peck was one of the people he thanked for his success.The political director is expected to be Ryan Tyson, another top DeSantis adviser and one of the best-known Republican pollsters, who has been tasked with turning DeSantis’s legislative record in Florida into campaign policy that could work for a national audience.Tyson has had a rocky start. This week, DeSantis made a special trip to Washington to meet with Republican members of Congress, only for them to mostly turn around and endorse Trump. The only endorsement for DeSantis came from Representative Laurel Lee, who served in his administration.The policy team is expected to be headed by Dustin Carmack, DeSantis’s chief of staff when he was a member of Congress, from 2013 until 2018, before he ran for Florida governor. Carmack was also the chief of staff for the director of national intelligence during the Trump administration.The communications team is expected to be headed by David Abrams, who came over from the Republican State Leadership Committee. Abrams previously worked for the former New Jersey governor Chris Christie and the New Hampshire governor, Chris Sununu – both potential 2024 candidates.Also a senior adviser for press is Christina Pushaw, responsible for rapid response. Pushaw came under scrutiny last year when the justice department directed her to retroactively register as a foreign agent for her work on behalf of the former president of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili from 2018 until 2020.In a reflection of Casey DeSantis’s influence on her husband’s political career, her top aide, Melissa Peters, is also expected to serve as a senior adviser, with the title of chief financial officer overseeing operations, acting effectively as “the voice” of the would-be first lady on the campaign.The chief technology officer is expected to be Carl Sceusa, who helped set up the WinRed platform, which generated more than $1bn in digital fundraising for Republican candidates in the 2020 election in only 15 months. He is expected to work with Ethan Eilon, who is heading the digital team.DeSantis had discussed having Heather Barker run the finance operation, but last month, she joined Never Back Down Pac – the main fundraising vehicle for the DeSantis campaign. Barker’s deputy, Tucker Obenshain, is now expected to lead the advance team.Also regarded as senior staff is Jason Johnson, the former chief strategist for Senator Ted Cruz, though it was unclear whether he will be leading a specific team or whether he will take on a broader top advisory role with the campaign.A spokesperson for DeSantis declined to comment on personnel moves.The senior staff roster effectively outlines a leadership team of around eight people as DeSantis looks to finalize his campaign operation ahead of a 2024 announcement that could come as early as the first two weeks of May or as late as July, one of the people said.That number could still expand, and some DeSantis allies have told associates that they believe other close aides to the governor could yet join the campaign. One name that has frequently been floated as an expected addition to the senior staff, for example, is the veteran national Republican operative Phil Cox.The campaign’s ambition is to reach a headcount of around 80 people by the time DeSantis announces. That would rival the Trump campaign, which has been staffing up since November – but it is unclear whether DeSantis has a payroll system in place for such an expansion, the person said. More

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      ‘Worst-case scenario’: Rick Wilson on Tucker Carlson, presidential nominee

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      The most irresponsible thing you can do these days is look away from the worst-case scenario.” So says Rick Wilson. In the week Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, Wilson’s worst-case scenario is this: a successful Carlson campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.Wilson is a longtime Republican operative turned co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project and a media company, Resolute Square, for which he hosts the Enemies List podcast.He says: “Tucker is one of the very small number of political celebrities in this country who has the name ID, the personal wealth, the stature to actually declare and run for president and in a Republican primary run in the same track Donald Trump did: the transgressive, bad boy candidate, the one who lets you say what you want to say, think what you want to think, act how you want to act, no matter how grotesque it is.“Among Republicans, he’s a beloved figure. He’s right now in the Republican universe a martyr – and there ain’t nothing they want more than a martyr.”Carlson’s martyrdom came suddenly on Monday, in the aftermath of the settled Dominion Voter Systems defamation suit over Trump’s election lies and their broadcast by Fox News. The primetime host, a ratings juggernaut, was gone.On Wednesday night, the New York Times reported that Carlson’s dismissal involved “highly offensive and crude remarks” in messages included in the Dominion suit, if redacted in court filings. Carlson, 53, released a cryptic video in which he said: “Where can you still find Americans saying true things? There aren’t many places left, but there are some … see you soon.”Other than that, he has not hinted what’s next. To many, a presidential campaign may seem unthinkable. To Wilson, that is precisely the reason to think it.Before Trump launched in 2016, “people used to say, ‘Trump? There’s no way he’ll run. He’s a clown. He’s a reality TV guy. Nobody ever is gonna take that seriously’ … right up until he won the nomination. And then they said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, it can’t be that bad. What could possibly be as bad as you think?’ Well, everything.“And so I think we live in a world where the most irresponsible thing you can do is look away from the worst-case scenario. I do believe that if Tucker ran for president, there is an argument to be made that he’s the one person who could beat Trump.”In the words of the New York Times, at Fox Carlson created “what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news – and also … the most successful”. Pursuing far-right talking points, he channelled the Republican base.Now he has lost that platform. Wilson discounts a move to another network or a start-up, like the Daily Caller Carlson co-founded in 2010, after leaving CNN and MSNBC. But to Wilson, Carlson has precious assets for any political campaign: “He has an understanding of the camera, he has an understanding of the news media, infrastructure and ecosystem. He can present. He can talk.”Which leads Wilson to Ron DeSantis, still Trump’s closest challenger in polling, though he has not declared a run. Carlson “is unlike Ron DeSantis. He can talk to people, you know? He is the guy who can engage people on a on a human basis. Ron is not that guy.”The Florida governor has fallen as Trump has surged, boosted by his own claimed martyrdom over his criminal indictment and other legal problems. DeSantis has also scored own-goals, from his fight with Disney to his failure to charm his own party, perceived personal failings prompting endorsements for Trump.Wilson thinks DeSantis’s decision to run in a “Tucker Carlson primary”, courting the far right, may now rebound.“DeSantis’s people had been bragging for a year. ‘Oh, we’re winning the Tucker primary. His audience loves us. We’re gonna be on Tucker.’ And it was an interesting dependency. It was an advantage that DeSantis was booked on Fox all the time and on Tucker, and mentioned on Tucker very frequently. But that has now disappeared. Fox is all back in on Trump.”Wilson knows a thing or two about Republican fundraising. If Carlson ran, he says, he would “absolutely destroy with small donors. He would raise uncounted millions. Mega-donors would would not go for it. The racial aspect of Tucker is not exactly hidden. I think that would be a disqualifier for a lot of wealthy donors. But Tucker could offset it. He would be a massive draw in that email fundraising hamster wheel.“Remember, in 2016 the large-donor money for Trump was very late in the game. Before that, they were all with Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz or Chris Christie.“I have very high confidence you’re gonna see another iteration of, you know, ‘We love you Ron, we’re never leaving you Ron,’ and then they’re gonna call him one day and say, ‘Hey, Ron, I love you, man. But you’re young. Try again next time.’ And they’ll hang up with Ron and go, ‘Mr Trump, where do I send my million dollars?’“I’ve been to that rodeo too many times now.”So if Carlson does enter the arena, and does buck DeSantis into the cheap seats, can he do the same to Trump?“This iteration of Trump’s campaign is a lot smarter than the last one. I predict they would say, ‘Let’s bring Tucker in as VP and stop all this chaos, be done with it. You know, there are very few good options [for Trump] if Tucker gets in the race.”Joe Biden and Kamala Harris versus Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson? It seems outlandish.“Again, I think the worst thing we can do is imagine the worst-case scenario can never happen. Because the worst-case scenario has happened any number of times in the last eight years.” More

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      Joe Biden formally announces 2024 White House run

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      Joe Biden has formally announced his campaign for re-election in 2024, asking Americans for four years to “finish this job”, possibly setting up an extraordinary rematch with Donald Trump.In a three-minute video opening with images of the US Capitol attack, Biden warned that the US remains under threat from the anti-democratic forces unleashed by his predecessor, who he beat in 2020.Biden said: “When I ran for president four years ago, I said we were in a battle for the soul of America – and we still are.”The president launched his re-election campaign on the fourth anniversary of his return to politics in 2019, when he declared his third presidential run. Since then, the political landscape has changed.The US is still grappling with the scars of a pandemic that killed more than 1.1 million and with inflation that has eased from historic highs but remains painful. Americans remain deeply divided, convulsed by the loss of federal abortion rights, near-weekly mass shootings and worsening climate disasters.Already the oldest president, Biden would be 86 before the end of a second term, nearly a decade older than Ronald Reagan was when he left the White House in 1989. Trump is 76.In his video, Biden warned that “Maga extremists” – Trump’s slogan is “Make America Great Again” – were working to strip away “bedrock freedoms”.“Cutting social security that you’ve paid for your entire life while cutting taxes for the very wealthy,” Biden said. “Dictating what healthcare decisions women can make, banning books and telling people who they can love. All while making it more difficult for you to be able to vote.”The president and his wife, Jill Biden, had made his intentions known. But Biden felt little need to rush after a better-than-expected Democratic performance in the midterm elections tamped down calls for a serious primary challenge.Ultimately, the president chose to wait until after his tour of Ireland, a three-day trip he said restored his “sense of optimism”. Returning home, he told reporters he planned to “run again”.The vice-president, Kamala Harris, the highest-ranking woman and person of color in US politics, will be Biden’s running mate again.Biden is dogged by low approval ratings and concerns about his age. Only a quarter of Americans want him to run, according to the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Among Democrats, that figure is 50%. Should Biden win the nomination, as expected, most Democrats will support him.On Tuesday, Biden was due to welcome the president of South Korea. Next month, he will travel to the G7 summit in Japan. His team will begin to formalize a campaign expected to be headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware.Julie Chávez Rodríguez, a senior White House adviser and granddaughter of the celebrated labor leader César Chávez, will be campaign manager. Her principal deputy will be Quentin Fulks, a strategist who ran Raphael Warnock’s Senate re-election campaign in Georgia, a battleground state Biden won in 2020. The announcement begins a fundraising sprint. Donors have been summoned to Washington.Hours after making his candidacy official, during remarks to union workers at a conference in Washington, Biden was greeted by chants of “four more years”.“Our economic plan is working,” he said in a speech rife with references to his working-class upbringing in Scranton, Pennsylvania.“Let’s finish the job,” he said.Biden has made clear he plans to run on accomplishments in the first half of his presidency, when Democrats had majorities in Congress.Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, delivering financial assistance to those hit hard by Covid. He also approved a $1tn infrastructure bill; signed the first major federal gun safety bill in nearly 30 years; pursued initiatives to both treat veterans exposed to toxic burn pits and boost the semiconductor industry; and made Ketanji Brown Jackson the first Black woman on the supreme court.Perhaps his most significant legislative achievement to date is the Inflation Reduction Act, the most significant US response to the climate crisis.But while Biden’s policies are broadly popular, he has struggled to earn credit. He has spent the last few months attempting to sell his economic policies and rally Americans before a showdown with Republicans over the federal debt limit.On the world stage, Biden has rallied a global coalition behind Ukraine in response to Russia’s invasion while seeking to strengthen US defenses against China. The chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, however, was among the lowest points of Biden’s presidency, even as he fulfilled a promise to end America’s longest war.Republicans greeted Biden’s announcement by assailing his handling of immigration and the economy.“Biden is so out-of-touch that after creating crisis after crisis, he thinks he deserves another four years,” said Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee. “If voters let Biden ‘finish the job’, inflation will continue to skyrocket, crime rates will rise, more fentanyl will cross our open borders, children will continue to be left behind, and American families will be worse off.”Biden must negotiate with a divided Congress, Republicans holding the House. Biden plans to use a showdown over raising the federal borrowing limit to draw a contrast with Republican economic priorities, which he argues are aligned with big business and special interests.In his campaign video, Biden warned that individual freedoms are under attack by far-right Republicans who have trampled reproductive, voting and LGBTQ+ rights.“This is not a time to be complacent,” he said. “I know America. I know we’re good and decent people.”After nearly a half-century in public life including 36 years as a senator from Delaware and eight years as the vice-president to Barack Obama, Biden called himself a “bridge” to the next generation of Democrats. But only two fringe candidates have challenged him for the nomination: the self-help author Marianne Williamson and anti-vaccine activist Robert F Kennedy Jr.The Republican field is growing. Nikki Haley, a former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador, has entered the race. The South Carolina senator Tim Scott has taken steps to run. The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, is widely expected to announce. Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-president, is also weighing a run.Trump announced his candidacy after the midterms in November. He and Biden both face federal investigations over their handling of classified information. In Biden’s case, documents were discovered at his office and home. His lawyers have stressed they are cooperating.Trump resisted efforts to retrieve materials he took to his Florida estate. But that is just one of many legal challenges he faces. Earlier this month, Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 criminal charges related to hush money payments to a porn star. He also faces investigations into his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, trial over a rape accusation, and a civil suit over his business affairs.Ahead of Biden’s announcement, Trump lashed out, saying the “five worst presidents in American history” combined had not inflicted the “damage Joe Biden has done”.In his video, Biden said: “Every generation of Americans has faced a moment when they’ve had to defend democracy. Stand up for our personal freedoms. Stand up for the right to vote and our civil rights.”
      Joan E Greve contributed reporting. More

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      Biden isn’t going into 2024 very strong. But Republicans are very weak | Moira Donegan

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      It’s not surprising, but now it’s official: Joe Biden is running for re-election. In a video on Tuesday launching his bid for a second term, Biden cast his administration as standing for personal freedom, democracy and pluralism in contrast to what he called “Maga extremists”. The video emphasized abortion rights and contrasted Biden and the Democrats with unsettling images of the Capitol insurrectionists. Echoing a repeated line from his most recent State of the Union address, the president implored Americans: “Let’s finish the job.”There will be no primary. True, Biden has disaffected some members of the Democratic party’s precariously large coalition, and he has failed to capture the hearts and imaginations of Americans the way that, say, Barack Obama did. In 2020, a basketball team’s worth of Democrats entered the presidential primary – partly out of perceptions of then president Trump’s weakness, but also partly because Biden seemed like such a poor fit to be the party’s standard-bearer.He’s an old white man in a party that is predominantly female, increasingly non-white and very young. He is a moderate in a party with a resurgent left. And he is a bone-deep believer in the merits of compromise and bipartisanship, in an era where the Republican party has become anathema to cooperation, hostile to Democratic governance and committed to racial and gender hierarchies that are not worth compromising with. He seemed like a man out of time, responding to the political conditions of a different era; it was unclear, then, that he could see the country as it really was, unclear that he could confront the true threat.As he announces his re-election campaign, four years after he threw his hat into the ring for 2020, Biden has quieted these fears, if not disproved them. The left, leaderless after Bernie Sanders’s defeat in the 2020 primary, has not formed a cohesive bloc, and their pressures on the Biden administration have been noble but sporadic. Congressional Republicans hamstrung most of Biden’s agenda, causing him to abandon, in particular, promises he made to help Americans get affordable childcare; but he still managed to pass a large infrastructure bill, as well as Covid relief.The pandemic has largely receded, and both deaths and new infections are down. Inflation is slowing, and jobs numbers are encouraging. The economy, while not perfect, seems to be benefiting from the stability of Democratic leadership, with stock prices no longer beholden to wild fluctuations in the aftermath of an errant comment or impulsive tweet from Trump.When Russia invaded Ukraine, unleashing horrific humanitarian catastrophes on the people there and endangering other European allies, a trap was laid that could have easily drawn the United States into war. Biden and his administration have deftly kept us out of it. The president who once seemed like an out-of-touch old man has been successfully rebranded as an affable grandfather whose gaffes are thoughtless but aggressively well-meaning.Even major missteps do not seem to have meaningfully injured Biden. The administration was shockingly tone-deaf and ill-prepared following the US supreme court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, having little in the way of policy proposals to reduce the humanitarian and dignity harms imposed on American women – and at one point, trying to appoint an anti-choice judge to a lifetime seat, before withdrawing the nomination under pressure.Despite the primacy Tuesday’s campaign announcement gave abortion rights, Biden has generally seemed uncomfortable and incompetent on the issue, even as women face degradation and medical emergencies inflicted at the hands of conservative states; he has largely shied away from directly addressing abortion, and shunted it off to his unpopular, largely powerless vice-president, Kamala Harris – whose own marginalization within the administration is a signal of how little he values the issue.Even since Dobbs, Biden has been entirely unwilling to confront the federal judiciary – a captured and unaccountable extremist rightwing body that will foil his whole agenda, and gradually eliminate both pluralist society and representative democracy, if it is not reformed. Yet the Republicans’ virulent misogyny and bald sadism on abortion seems poised to be a boon to Democrats anyway: it was mostly abortion that drove voters to give a worse-than-expected showing to Republicans in the 2022 midterms, and to allow Democrats to keep control of the Senate.In that sense, the political fallout of the Dobbs decision may serve as a good model for the Democrats’ emerging 2024 strategy: they don’t need to be especially good, because the Republicans are so cruelly and chaotically worse. The Republican party is in shambles – internally divided; married to gruesome and unpopular policies, particularly on gender, that alienate voters; branded as violent, antisocial and creepy. There’s still a long way to go, but the Republican party seems only slightly less eager to anoint Trump as their nominee than the Democrats have been to appoint Biden.It very well may wind up being a rematch of the 2020 election – only now, Trump is even weaker, even more marginal, even more disliked, linked forever the memory of the January 6 violence and devoid of what was once his novelty and comedy and reduced to a rambling catalogue of personal grievances. With an opponent like that, it might not matter much if all that Biden has to offer is a series of charming anachronisms, or grinning photo ops in his aviators.All the Republicans have to offer is sex obsession and cheesy fraud, parading a series of candidates for state and federal office who talk like a collection of snake-oil salesmen and gun fetishists. Biden isn’t going into 2024 particularly strong. But right now, the Republicans are particularly weak.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      An end to political deadlock? Arizona’s experiment with third parties

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      In a swing state that’s likely to decide the next presidential election, two new third parties want to get on the ballot and other groups want to remake the way votes are cast and counted.Arizona, which voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 as the state has grown more purple, could see big shifts to its political establishment in the next year, all premised on the idea that the dominance of the two main political parties creates dysfunction and prevents progress on issues that matter to voters. That has Democrats and Republicans here worried.One new party, No Labels, gathered enough signatures to put candidates on the ballot in 2024. Another new party, Forward, is starting to gather signatures to get ballot status.Separately, a coalition of voting groups has surveyed voters to understand their thoughts on ranked-choice voting and open primaries in an effort to run a 2024 ballot measure that would greenlight the concepts in Arizona.While similar efforts are afoot in other states and nationwide, Arizona provides a fertile place to experiment with attempts to reimagine elections.About one-third of Arizona voters aren’t registered with a political party. Both major parties try to court these independent voters to build winning coalitions. In recent years, Democrats have been more successful at amassing independent support, though Republicans dominated for decades before that.The state also has one of the country’s most prominent independents – Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the former Democrat who left the party earlier this year and hasn’t said whether or how she’ll run to keep her seat in 2024.Because of its new status as a swing state, donors are now much more interested in spending money in Arizona. This influx of cash means more groups can afford to gather signatures and promote ballot measures, both of which can cost millions in Arizona.And with a state Republican party that’s affixed to the far right, there’s an opening for centrist and center-right candidates who could seek support from moderate Republicans and right-leaning independents.The level of extremism and dysfunction shows why a two-party system with closed primaries doesn’t work, said longtime consultant Chuck Coughlin, who is working with Save Democracy Arizona, a group advancing ranked-choice voting in Arizona.“You did experience the same election I just did, did you not? You did experience this overwhelming feeling of joy with candidates you had to choose from?” he joked about the vitriolic 2022 campaigns. “The obvious answer is because the system is so badly broken right now.”The rise of third partiesPaul Bentz, a Republican consultant and pollster in Arizona, said the dissatisfaction with the two main parties has created a lane for third parties. One big hurdle, though, is that independents often pride themselves on their lack of party affiliation.“What independents do care about is the candidates, and they want to choose based on the issues,” Bentz said. “So if this gives a platform for an alternative individual to present different issues and let independents choose them, that would be something that’s very attractive to them. But there is no independent party because independents specifically don’t want to be part of a party.”No Labels, a centrist party founded in 2010, so far has ballot status in Alaska, Oregon, Colorado and Arizona, though the group wants to be on the ballot in 22 states by the end of the year, spokesperson Maryanne Martini said.It’s not clear if the party will run any candidates in Arizona next year. Martini said the group isn’t actively recruiting candidates at this point.Soon after No Labels gained ballot status, the Arizona Democratic party sued to try to get it removed. Democrats overall have been more vocally concerned than Republicans about these incoming centrist parties, fearing they will peel off votes from the left and spoil races for Democrats.In its lawsuit, the Arizona Democratic party alleges No Labels isn’t following requirements for political parties and didn’t follow laws for signature-gathering, so it shouldn’t be recognized as a party in the state.“Arizonans deserve better and voters deserve to know who is behind this shadowy organization and what potentially nefarious agenda they are pushing,” the Arizona Democratic party spokesperson Morgan Dick said when the lawsuit was announced.Martini called the lawsuit “undemocratic and outrageous”.“If either party in Arizona is worried about a No Labels candidate taking votes away from them, we think they should focus more on appealing to the growing commonsense majority they often ignore and less on filing baseless lawsuits to try to kick competitors off the ballot,” she said.The Forward party, a moderate party co-chaired by former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, has legal status in six states and is working toward it in nearly two dozen others this year. In addition to gathering signatures, the party is hosting community events in Arizona to build support, said Chris Hendrickson, the state lead for the party.At a kick-off event in March, four Democratic members of the Arizona house of representatives declared themselves “Forward Democrats”. They aren’t leaving their party, but they support Forward’s mission. Last year, Forward endorsed Democratic US senator Mark Kelly and independent congressional candidate Clint Smith.“I don’t think the objective is to push out any one party or another,” Hendrickson said. “We really need to have four or five legitimate parties who all bring something to the table.”A lot of the consternation over centrist parties relates to the 2024 presidential election. Democrats worry a third-party candidate could cost them the presidency and throw the election to Republicans, possibly to Trump.No Labels said it “is not running and will not run a presidential campaign”. The Forward party also said it won’t run a presidential candidate in 2024 and is primarily interested in state and local elections.Tony Cani, a Democratic consultant, said the third parties would serve more to hurt Democrats than dismantle a two-party system, though he understands voters’ interest in ending two-party dominance.“The problem is adding minor parties doesn’t put an end to a two-party system,” Cani said. “It just creates new minor parties that will end up with the same chance of winning elections as the Libertarian and Green parties.”A push for ranked-choice votingOther groups want to see the way Arizonans vote change to allow more moderate candidates to win elections and force the parties to run more broadly appealing campaigns.Ranked-choice voting comes in different forms, but typically asks voters to rank candidates in order of their preference. If a voter’s top choice doesn’t get enough votes, their second and subsequent choices are counted until someone gets more than 50% of votes. The system sometimes necessitates an open primary election, where voters don’t need to select which party’s primary to participate in.Coughlin, the consultant who’s working on a potential ballot measure, said the group is still surveying voters to understand whether a measure could be successful. So far, the groups are looking at a final-five version of voting, where all candidates appear on one primary ballot and the top five move to a general.“Our goal is to make sure that nobody can win in a primary and that all of the decisions are made in November and that we create the greatest amount of competition possible,” he said.Ranked-choice voting confuses some voters, but the idea of open primaries tends to get more support. Partisan, closed primaries are now paid for by taxpayers in Arizona, and focus groups have strongly favored defunding them, Coughlin said.To gather enough signatures and then run a campaign to support a ranked-choice ballot measure would cost around $20m. Coughlin said the group would need to start collecting signatures by August.Though Save Democracy Arizona may not shoot for a ballot measure next year, the idea of ranked-choice voting has Republican lawmakers pushing proposed laws to stop the effort.Republicans in the legislature sent a question to the ballot for next year that would prohibit anything but the kind of primary elections Arizona has now. That means there could be measures to approve ranked-choice voting and to prohibit it on the same ballot.They also approved a bill that prohibits ranked-choice voting at any level in Arizona, though that proposal was vetoed. The Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, said the bill was unnecessary as the practice isn’t used in Arizona, and that ranked-choice voting “is used successfully elsewhere in the country”. More

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      Biden expected to announce 2024 presidential campaign on Tuesday

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      Joe Biden is expected to announce his 2024 re-election campaign as early as Tuesday, possibly setting the stage for an extraordinary rematch with Donald Trump.A Tuesday launch would come exactly four years after Biden announced his 2020 presidential bid, in which he warned that the “soul” of the nation was at stake after four tumultuous years under Trump.More than two years into his own presidency, Biden has struggled to heal political and cultural divisions he believes are tearing American society. But he has racked up a list of legacy defining legislative accomplishments while working to restore US leadership on the world stage.Following Democrats’ better-than-expected performance in the November midterms, Biden has been open about his intention to seek a second term. For months, the question was not if he would run, but when and how he would announce.Just before leaving Ireland earlier this month, Biden declared that the ancestral journey had reinforced a “sense of optimism” about what he might accomplish. He told reporters the “calculus” on a second term had been completed and he planned to run. An announcement, he said, would come “relatively soon”.Asked again on Monday, Biden replied: “I told you I’m planning on running. I’ll let you know real soon.”Partial to symmetry and nostalgia, Biden appears to have signed off on a plan to announce his 2024 campaign with a video outlining his vision, as he did in 2019. The president is scheduled to speak at the North America’s Building Trades Unions’ US Legislative Conference in Washington on Tuesday, an echo of his first campaign event in 2019, when he spoke at a union hall in Pittsburgh.Much has changed. The pandemic that reshaped US life for nearly three years has receded, due in large part to the mass vaccination campaign the Biden administration oversaw. Decades-high inflation is abating, though economic uncertainty lingers. A loss of federal abortion protections and threats to democratic institutions have fueled Democrats in key battleground elections.“Part of the case President Biden will make to the public after he announces his reelection campaign is that he needs more time to do more and build on the things he has done during his first term,” Biden’s former press secretary, Jen Psaki, said on her MSNBC show on Sunday. “That’s the message: ‘Let me finish the job I started.’”Biden’s team is touting the historically productive start to his term, which included a pandemic-relief package that temporarily halved child poverty; a generational investment in infrastructure; rare action to reform gun laws; a wide-ranging effort to combat climate crisis; lower healthcare costs; and efforts to boost US competitiveness and arrest inflation, leading to an unexpectedly successful midterm election season.With Republicans in control of the House and major legislative action unlikely, Biden has focused the second half of his term on selling these policies to the public. Visits to Japan and Australia next month will bring an opportunity to emphasize efforts to rally the world in defense of Ukraine and against the growing influence of China.But Biden will also have to contend with voter disapproval of his handling of the economy and Republican attacks on immigration.Perhaps most urgently, Biden must decide how to engage with House Republicans in a debt limit standoff. The speaker, Kevin McCarthy, has proposed dramatic spending cuts, including to Biden’s landmark climate and healthcare bill, in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling and avoiding default. Accusing Republicans of holding the economy hostage in order to cut social programs, the White House has repeatedly called on Congress to keep negotiations over the debt ceiling separate from debate about fiscal restraint.Biden is dogged by low approval ratings and concerns about his age. Already the oldest president in American history at 80, he would be 86 by the end of a second term. Polling has consistently shown that most Americans, including a majority of Democrats, do not want him to seek re-election. That lack of enthusiasm is especially prevalent among young voters, who were skeptical of Biden in 2020 but ultimately turned out in high numbers to help him beat Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe has also tangled with progressives who accuse him of returning to his moderate roots on crime, immigration and climate. Yet the desire to keep Trump or a Trumpian alternative out of the White House remains strong among Democrats and independents. Most Democrats say they will back Biden if he is their nominee.While Biden is not expected to face any major challenge for the nomination, the field of Republican contenders remains unsettled. Trump leads the pack.The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, is expected to jump into the race, offering a combative alternative to Trump, who faces legal challenges stemming from his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, his handling of classified documents, payments to a porn star, a rape allegation and his business affairs.Biden is also confronting a legal inquiry into his handling of classified documents as vice-president and before that as a Delaware senator.Biden ran unsuccessfully for president twice before 2020. To defeat Trump, he mobilized a coalition of young people, women and voters of color while persuading independents soured on his opponent.Biden presented himself as a bridge to the next generation of leaders. But with his mind now made up about a second term, and little agreement over who might succeed him if he did step aside, he appears best placed to be the party’s standard-bearer in 2024.“Running for the president the first time is aspirational. You can make all sorts of big bold promises,” Psaki said. “Running for reelection is when you actually get your report card from the American people.” More