Politics

By Trevor Hunnicutt

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The deal to end the United States’ debt limit standoff was classic Joe Biden politics: eke out a narrow compromise from an ugly beginning and declare victory.

It has deeper meaning as well.

Biden’s pact with Republican Kevin McCarthy, who once voted to overturn the president’s 2020 election win, became law on Saturday. It suspends the $31.4 trillion U.S. debt ceiling, avoiding an economic crisis, in exchange for setting spending caps in the coming two fiscal years.

It also represents a step towards a key campaign promise: he will make bipartisanship succeed in Washington, and ultimately restore “the soul of the nation” by getting Americans to work together again.

But it remains to be seen whether narrow victories in Congress can help push the United States from the extremist path displayed in the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol.

Biden has been “trying to strike a chord that we need to put our partisanship aside so that we can better govern the country,” said family friend, Bishop Silvester Beaman, who gave the benediction at Biden’s inauguration. “That’s easier said than done.”

So far, agreements on deeper issues that Biden and Democrats promised to tackle, from police brutality to protecting voting rights to a battle over women’s right to abortion remain out of reach with Republicans. Biden’s own popularity has withered over the course of his term, with some Democrats pointing fingers at the very strategy he touts.

“A lot of Americans are very disaffected by mainstream politics and by the compromises that the Democrats have made,” said Premilla Nadasen, a professor of history at Columbia University’s Barnard College.

Over two years in office, Biden has crafted agreements on narrow issues, often with political opponents who have questioned his fitness, legitimacy and values.

The result is a string of legislative compromises on veteran healthcare, semiconductor chips, infrastructure spending and federal judges – more than 350 bipartisan bills overall, the president told Americans on Friday night.

“I know bipartisanship is hard, and unity is hard,” Biden said during his first-ever Oval Office address on Friday. “No matter how tough our politics gets, we need to see each other not as adversaries, but as fellow Americans. Treat each other with dignity and respect. To join forces as Americans to stop shouting, lower the temperature, and work together.”

Deals with Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and Senate swing-vote Joe Manchin on infrastructure, climate and guns reflect Biden’s deal-making strategy over 50 years in politics. But he has also tailored them to what he privately calls the extreme division of the moment, aides and advisers say – hoping to show that government is serving all voters’ interests, not the captured, deep-state conspiracy to thwart them that some hard line Republicans believe.

Washington can be an example for the rest of the nation, some historians believe.

“How best to contain the anti-democratic conspiratorial right in America – that is the project that you’re seeing Biden work on,” said Matthew Dallek, a political historian and professor at George Washington University.

Biden’s focus is on showing as many people as possible that the two parties can still govern and bureaucracies can still function, he said.

“If you let the dysfunction run amok, it plays into the argument of anti-government extremists. It ratifies their argument that government is conspiring as a deep state against people’s interests and that it needs to be blown up.”

Biden has applied the across-the-aisle strategy outside Capitol Hill, too.

Mitch Landrieu and other top Biden advisers recently negotiated an electric vehicle charger agreement with Elon Musk, the Tesla Inc billionaire who has called Biden a “damp (sock) puppet,” and has expressed support for Ron DeSantis, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination.

“This is what’s amazing about working for this president: irrespective of what other noise is going on, outside of whatever it is that you’re talking about, he’s focused on solving the problem,” Landrieu said.

The debt ceiling deal has left neither side fully satisfied – and the top Republicans and Democrats who crafted it say that’s just the way it should be. Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell said after the deal was struck that “divided government means negotiated deals – it means nobody gets everything they want.”

The brief peace in Washington after the deal may be short-lived, however, some political strategists warn.

Matt Bennett, at the center-left think tank Third Way, said the benefits may not last as the 2024 campaign nears, and the dominant voice of the Republican party again becomes Trump or someone with a similar aggressive style of politics.

“If this bill bought a reprieve from extreme partisan warfare, it’s temporary,” he said.

(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt; Editing and additional reporting by Heather Timmons; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

source

By Jason Lange

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Neither President Joe Biden’s Democrats nor Republicans in Congress emerged as a clear winner in the battle to raise the $31.4 trillion debt ceiling, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll.

The survey, conducted after Congress passed a bipartisan deal to raise the borrowing limit, found that 50% of Americans thought neither party emerged as a winner, while another 20% said both sides won.

Another 20% said they thought Democrats emerged with the better side of the deal, while 11% said Republicans had done better, according to the four-day poll which concluded on Monday.

The poll found self-identified Democrats were more likely to be satisfied with the outcome. Some 80% of Democrats liked how President Joe Biden handled their side’s end of the talks, while just 13% took a dim view of Biden’s performance.

By contrast, only 44% of Republicans approved of how their party’s top congressional official, U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, drove the bargain for Republicans. Forty-two percent disapproved.

McCarthy’s poor marks reflect the deep divisions within his party. Hard-line Republicans who sought deeper government spending cuts in the talks have warned that McCarthy’s job could be in danger.

Biden and McCarthy reached a deal last week to suspend the debt ceiling weeks of negotiations between Biden’s White House and Republicans who control the House of Representatives.

Biden signed the deal into law on Saturday, averting the financial disaster that would have unfolded if Washington were forced to stop paying all its bills.

Politicians on both sides have presented the deal as a victory, with Republicans touting a reduction in non-military spending. Biden said the compromises in the deal were a sign the polarized nation could bridge its political divides.

Critics of the deal on the right said the cuts did not go far enough, while progressives criticized increased work requirements for struggling Americans receiving food or monetary assistance and provisions streamlining approvals for fossil fuel projects amid a climate change crisis.

The deal would cut spending by $1.3 trillion, less than the $4.8 trillion Republicans had sought. It does little to slow growth in federal debt that is on pace to exceed $50 trillion in a decade.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll surveyed 1,004 U.S. adults nationwide and had a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of about 4% in either direction.

(Reporting by Jason Lange; editing by Andy Sullivan and Aurora Ellis)

source

By Jasper Ward

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu said on Monday he would not join the crowded field vying for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, saying too many candidates will help former President Donald Trump win the nomination.

“Our party is on a collision course toward electoral irrelevance without significant corrective action,” Sununu said in a Washington Post opinion piece.

“The stakes are too high for a crowded field to hand the nomination to a candidate who earns just 35 percent of the vote, and I will help ensure this does not happen.”

Sununu, who has served as governor of the small New England state since 2017, had said he was considering a run. He ultimately concluded he could have more influence on the Republican Party by staying out of the race and leading the first-in-the-nation presidential primary state, he wrote.

Trump is the front-runner among at least nine Republicans who have entered the Republican contest or said they planned to.

Sununu said Trump did not deliver on several election promises during his time in office, and pointed to the former president’s ongoing legal challenges.

“If he is the nominee, Republicans will lose again. Just as we did in 2018, 2020 and 2022. This is indisputable, and I am not willing to let it happen without a fight,” Sununu said.

Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, became the latest to join on Monday. Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum were expected to launch their campaign this week.

Sununu said Republican candidates should not enter the race to further “a vanity campaign, to sell books or to audition to serve as Donald Trump’s vice president.”

He pointed to the party’s losses in the ballot since 2017, adding that it will continue to happen unless Republicans “undergo a course correction.”

(Reporting by Jasper Ward; Editing by Doina Chiacu)

source

By Trevor Hunnicutt

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The deal to end the United States’ debt limit standoff was classic Joe Biden politics: eke out a narrow compromise from an ugly beginning and declare victory.

Biden’s pact with Republican Kevin McCarthy suspends the $31.4 trillion U.S. debt ceiling, avoiding an economic crisis, in exchange for setting spending caps in the coming two fiscal years.

Both sides got something out of the deal and Biden said it fits with a declared goal throughout his political career: striking bipartisan deals to fix problems and take the venom out of the country’s ideological divide.

“I know bipartisanship is hard, and unity is hard,” Biden said during his first-ever Oval Office address on Friday. “No matter how tough our politics gets, we need to see each other not as adversaries, but as fellow Americans.

But it remains to be seen whether this deal can help the longer-term effort of healing what Biden refers to as the “soul of the nation.”

“That’s easier said than done,” said Bishop Silvester Beaman, a family friend who gave the benediction at Biden’s inauguration and credits him with “trying to strike a chord that we need to put our partisanship aside so that we can better govern the country.”

In his first two years as president, Biden used Democratic majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate to push through massive stimulus packages despite the protests of Republicans.

But he also crafted compromises deals on veteran healthcare, semiconductor chips, gun safety legislation, and now the debt ceiling.

Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell said after the debt deal was struck that “divided government means negotiated deals – it means nobody gets everything they want.”

Some of those compromise deals have upset elements of Biden’s Democratic Party, who wanted him to do more to tackle a wide range of issues that he campaigned on, ranging from addressing police brutality, to protecting voting rights, to the battle over women’s right to abortion.

“A lot of Americans are very disaffected by mainstream politics and by the compromises that the Democrats have made,” said Premilla Nadasen, a professor of history at Columbia University’s Barnard College.

Biden’s own popularity has withered over the course of his term, now standing at around 40%.

COMPROMISE

But some analysts give him credit for trying to bring the country back towards the political middle and isolate radicals who embraced former President Donald Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election and were involved in the assault on Congress on Jan 6, 2021.

“How best to contain the anti-democratic conspiratorial right in America – that is the project that you’re seeing Biden work on,” said Matthew Dallek, a political historian and professor at George Washington University.

Biden has at times applied the across-the-aisle strategy outside Capitol Hill, too.

Mitch Landrieu and other top Biden advisers recently negotiated an electric vehicle charger agreement with Elon Musk, the Tesla Inc billionaire owner who has called Biden a “damp (sock) puppet” and has expressed support for Ron DeSantis, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination.

“This is what’s amazing about working for this president: irrespective of what other noise is going on, outside of whatever it is that you’re talking about, he’s focused on solving the problem,” Landrieu said.

McCarthy, who negotiated the debt ceiling deal with Biden, was critical of the president during the crisis, saying he had “wasted time and refused to negotiate for months,” although he later had warmer words for Biden’s deal-makers.

“I do want to thank the president’s team that he put together,” McCarthy said, calling them professional and smart, despite “very strong beliefs that are different than ours.”

The brief peace in Washington after the deal may be short-lived, as both sides gear up for the 2024 presidential election.

Trump and DeSantis, the leading Republican candidates, seem focused for now on attacking each other but they are expected target Biden with fierce rhetoric.

And former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley says a vote for Biden is a vote for President Kamala Harris, suggesting she believes Biden could die or be forced from office before completing a second term, putting his vice president in power.

“If this (debt ceiling) bill bought a reprieve from extreme partisan warfare, it’s temporary,” said Matt Bennett, at the center-left think tank Third Way.

(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt; Additional reporting by Heather Timmons; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Lincoln Feast)

source

By Trevor Hunnicutt and Jarrett Renshaw

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Joe Biden’s Democratic allies are planning a private Chicago fundraiser with billionaire Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker as soon as this month, two people briefed on the president’s plans say.

A specific date for the tentative event had not been confirmed and a spokesman for Biden’s presidential campaign declined to comment.

Biden’s early big-money donor events will test the president’s appeal with wealthy voters, with the goal of raising hundreds of millions of dollars over the next several months. The campaign, which officially launched April 25, plans to ramp up fundraising events this month.

Advisers believe a strong cash haul will set Biden, who is almost certain to get the Democratic nomination, apart from a Republican Party that is picking its candidates from a large field that includes front-runner Donald Trump, the former president defeated by Biden in 2020. Biden raised more than $1 billion in 2020.

Two more entrants, Former Vice President Mike Pence and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, are set to enter the race this week.

Pritzker is viewed as an important ally for Biden and a rising star in the Democratic Party. He donated more than $1 million to Biden ahead of 2020, and has pledged to help finance the Democratic National Convention, which is being held in Chicago on Aug. 19-22, 2024.

Biden aides are keeping a close eye on June 30, when quarterly fundraising books close. Campaigns announce these fundraising tallies in mid-July, and the figure will be a sign of how well Biden campaign’s money-raising efforts are going.

So far, Biden’s campaign has only held a handful of events, largely for donors and volunteers. Two fundraising events Biden held last month in New York raised over $3 million, according to a person familiar with those totals.

In the weeks since the launch, Biden has dealt with a debt ceiling crisis that was resolved over the weekend with his signing of a bipartisan deal.

(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt in Washington and Jarrett Renshaw in Philadelphia; additional reporting by Nandita Bose; editing by Heather Timmons and Angus MacSwan)

source

By Tim Reid

(Reuters) – A growing number of contenders for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination could clear the way for a Donald Trump victory while throwing up roadblocks for his main rival Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, party members and strategists said.

Republicans who fear Trump is too polarizing a figure to beat Democratic President Joe Biden in 2024 worry that if too many candidates jump into the party’s contest, they will splinter the anti-Trump vote. That would allow the former president to clinch the nomination, just as he did in similar circumstances in 2016.

Former Vice President Mike Pence, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum are planning to enter the fray this week, bringing the number of challengers to front-runner Trump into the double digits.

Political analysts estimate that Trump can count on a diehard core of supporters, who make up at least a third of Republican voters, to help him secure his party’s nomination.

DeSantis has been aggressively courting those voters, but few are expected to defect from Trump. If DeSantis has any hope of becoming the Republican nominee, political analysts said, he has to try to win over a significant chunk of the other roughly 70% of voters who are up for grabs.

DeSantis must compete with a raft of Republican rivals for those votes. To be sure, many are long shots who barely register in opinion polls, but they can still hamper DeSantis’ efforts to build the coalition he needs to take on Trump.

“I’m very concerned that we appear to be making the same mistakes that we made in 2016,” said Larry Hogan, a popular former Republican governor of Maryland and a fierce critic of Trump.

Hogan seriously considered taking on Trump but decided earlier this year against entering the race because he feared that a large field of contenders would only help the former president to repeat his 2016 victory, when he bested 17 major candidates.

“It’s better for us to have a smaller field with a strong candidate or two rather than 10 or more people who are failing to get attention, who are all in single digits,” in opinion polls, Hogan said in an interview.

“The only one that benefits from that at this point in time appears to be Donald Trump,” said Hogan, a moderate who wants the party to move on from Trump. “It’s the definition of insanity continuing to do the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

On Monday, New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, another moderate who had been considering a White House run, said he decided not to enter the race. He told CNN he wanted to be a more “candid, a little more unleashed voice” outside the confines of a presidential bid, as he seeks to try and move the party beyond Trump.

Right now it’s essentially a two-man race.

Trump dominates the field among potential Republican primary voters with 49% support with DeSantis next at 19%. There is a yawning chasm between the front-runners and the rest of the field: Pence has just 5% backing, while former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley has 4%, according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll conducted in May.

Others are barely registering at all. Christie has just 1% backing him, as does U.S. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, while former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, who declared in April, has 0%.

WHY LONG SHOTS ARE STILL JUMPING IN

A casual observer might ask why candidates with such low poll numbers are jumping into a race that already has a clear front-runner early on.

“Most get in because they truly think they have a chance of winning the nomination,” said Oscar Brock, a Republican National Committee member from Tennessee.

Some know they cannot win, said John Feehery, a Republican strategist, but they might be angling for a cabinet position, or hoping to join the ticket of the eventual nominee as the vice presidential candidate, or simply looking for 15 minutes of fame to secure a book deal.

Long shots have also emerged from nowhere to win past nominating fights, Feehery noted, including Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Trump, who was polling at just 4% when he announced his candidacy in June 2015.

Many may have decided to enter the 2024 race because of the perceived vulnerabilities of the two front runners, Feehery said. Trump faces potential indictments for withholding classified documents and seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election, while DeSantis is trying to regain his footing after losing ground in opinion polls.

“These candidates who are striving to be the alternative see DeSantis continue to stumble and fumble. And they say, ‘Well, why couldn’t that be me?’” said Jason Miller, a senior Trump adviser.

Perhaps with an eye on the soon-to-expand field, DeSantis finally began punching back against Trump on the campaign trail last week after weathering an onslaught of attacks from his former ally for months.

(Reporting by Tim Reid in Los Angeles; Additional reporting by Nathan Layne in Laconia, New Hampshire, editing by Ross Colvin, Grant McCool and Bill Berkrot)

source

By Daniel Wiessner

(Reuters) – The Biden administration has asked a federal judge to toss out a lawsuit by Republican-led states seeking to strike down a rule allowing socially-conscious investing by employee retirement plans.

The U.S. Department of Justice in a filing in Amarillo, Texas federal court on Friday said the rule was needed to replace improper limitations that the Trump administration had placed on considering environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) factors in making investment decisions.

A coalition of 25 states led by Utah and Texas sued in January, claiming the U.S. Department of Labor rule would imperil the retirement savings of millions of Americans by allowing investments to be made based on political agendas rather than financial considerations.

The states moved last month for a ruling permanently blocking the rule, which took effect Jan. 30.

The Biden administration on Friday said the rule makes clear that retirement plans must base decisions primarily on financial factors. But unlike the Trump-era rule, it also recognizes that issues such as climate change and social justice can impact companies’ long-term financial health, the Justice Department said.

The offices of Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes and Interim Texas Attorney General John Scott did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The new rule covers plans that collectively invest $12 trillion on behalf of 150 million Americans.

Congress voted in March to repeal the rule but Democratic President Joe Biden vetoed the proposal.

The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a conservative appointee of former Republican President Donald Trump whose courthouse has become a favored destination for Republicans challenging various aspects of the Biden administration’s agenda.

Kacsmaryk has not scheduled a hearing on the pending motions.

The judge in March rejected the Biden administration’s claim that the states were improperly “judge shopping” by filing the lawsuit in Amarillo, where Kacsmaryk is the only judge.

(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Chizu Nomiyama)

source

By Tim Reid

(Reuters) – A growing number of contenders for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination could clear the way for a Donald Trump victory while throwing up roadblocks for his main rival Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, party members and strategists said.

Republicans who fear Trump is too polarizing a figure to beat Democratic President Joe Biden in 2024 worry that if too many candidates jump into the party’s contest, they will splinter the anti-Trump vote. That would allow the former president to clinch the nomination, just as he did in similar circumstances in 2016.

Former Vice President Mike Pence, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum are planning to enter the fray this week, bringing the number of challengers to front-runner Trump into the double digits.

Political analysts estimate that Trump can count on a diehard core of supporters, who make up at least a third of Republican voters, to help him secure his party’s nomination.

DeSantis has been aggressively courting those voters, but few are expected to defect from Trump. If DeSantis has any hope of becoming the Republican nominee, political analysts said, he has to try to win over a significant chunk of the other roughly 70% of voters who are up for grabs.

DeSantis must compete with a raft of Republican rivals for those votes. To be sure, many of the candidates are long shots who barely register in opinion polls, but they can still hamper DeSantis’ efforts to build the coalition he needs to take on Trump.

“I’m very concerned that we appear to be making the same mistakes that we made in 2016,” said Larry Hogan, a popular former Republican governor of Maryland and a fierce critic of Trump.

Hogan seriously considered taking on Trump but decided earlier this year against entering the race because he feared that a large field of contenders would only help the former president to repeat his 2016 victory, when he bested 17 major candidates.

“It’s better for us to have a smaller field with a strong candidate or two rather than 10 or more people who are failing to get attention, who are all in single digits,” in the opinion polls, Hogan said in an interview.

“The only one that benefits from that at this point in time appears to be Donald Trump,” said Hogan, a moderate who wants the party to move on from Trump. “It’s the definition of insanity continuing to do the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

Still, right now it’s essentially a two-man race.

Trump dominates the field among potential Republican primary voters with 49% support and DeSantis next with 19%. There is a yawning chasm between the front-runners and the rest of the field: Pence has just 5% backing, while former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley has 4%, according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll conducted in May.

Others are barely registering at all. Christie has just 1% backing him, as does U.S. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, while former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, who declared in April, has 0%.

WHY LONG SHOTS ARE STILL JUMPING IN

A casual observer might ask why candidates with such low poll numbers are jumping into a race that already has a clear front-runner early on.

“Most get in because they truly think they have a chance of winning the nomination,” said Oscar Brock, a Republican National Committee member from Tennessee.

Some know they cannot win, said John Feehery, a Republican strategist, but they might be angling for a cabinet position, or hoping to join the ticket of the eventual nominee as the vice presidential candidate, or simply looking for 15 minutes of fame to secure a book deal.

Long shots have also emerged from nowhere to win past nominating fights, Feehery noted, including Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Trump, who was polling at just 4% when he announced his candidacy in June 2015.

Many may have also decided to enter the 2024 race because of the perceived vulnerabilities of the two front runners, Feehery said. Trump faces potential indictments for withholding classified documents and seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election, while DeSantis is trying to regain his footing after losing ground in opinion polls.

“These candidates who are striving to be the alternative see DeSantis continue to stumble and fumble. And they say, ‘Well, why couldn’t that be me?’” said Jason Miller, a senior Trump adviser.

Perhaps with an eye on the soon-to-expand field, DeSantis finally began punching back against Trump on the campaign trail last week after weathering an onslaught of attacks from his former ally for months.

(Reporting by Tim Reid in Los Angeles; Additional reporting by Nathan Layne in Laconia, New Hampshire, editing by Ross Colvin and Grant McCool)

source

By Tim Reid

(Reuters) – Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley, U.N. ambassador under former President Donald Trump, went after her ex-boss and 2024 rival Ron DeSantis on Sunday over their refusal to say whether they want Ukraine to win its war against Russia.

In recent town hall events, Trump, the favorite for the Republican presidential nomination, said that he wanted the war to end, but that he would help Ukraine and Russia negotiate a settlement.

Florida Governor DeSantis, Trump’s nearest rival for the Republican nomination, said recently that he supports a settlement to the war, and that he hopes fighting will end by the time the next president takes the oath of office in January 2025.

Haley, the only woman in the race for the Republican nomination, lambasted DeSantis for saying this year that Ukraine was a “territorial dispute”, a comment that drew widespread criticism and that he has since walked back.

“For them to sit there and say that this is a territorial dispute – that’s just not the case, or to say that we should stay neutral,” Haley told voters in the early nominating state of Iowa during a televised CNN town hall event.

“It’s in the best interest of our national security for Ukraine to win,” she added.

Ukraine is an issue that divides Republicans, because of an isolationist streak among many of the party’s primary voters.

Haley, 51, a former South Carolina governor, declared her White House bid in February but finds herself in a crowded Republican field that will reach double digits this week with the entrance of more contenders, including former Vice President Mike Pence.

Trump dominates the field among potential Republican primary voters with 49% support. DeSantis is next with 19%. There is a yawning chasm between them and the rest of the field, including Haley; she has just 4% support, according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll conducted in May.

Haley and many of her rivals polling in single digits are trying to differentiate themselves from DeSantis, in the hope that he stumbles and they can become the main alternative to Trump.

But some have also begun to criticize Trump himself, after months of shrinking away from attacking the former president out of a fear of alienating his hardcore supporters.

On Sunday she also criticized Trump for congratulating North Korean leader Kim Jong Un last week after the country was elected to the executive board of the World Health Organization. Trump has also praised the North Korean leader in the past.

“Kim Jong Un is a thug,” Haley said. “I don’t think we should congratulate dictators.”

Trump also took fire from DeSantis and Pence over congratulating Kim, in separate weekend events in Iowa, the state that kicks of the nominating battle next year.

(Reporting by Tim Reid in Los Angeles. Editing by Gerry Doyle)

source

By Tim Reid

(Reuters) – A growing number of contenders for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination could clear the way for a Donald Trump victory while throwing up roadblocks for his main rival Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, party members and strategists said.

Republicans who fear Trump is too polarizing a figure to beat Democratic President Joe Biden in 2024 worry that if too many candidates jump into the party’s contest, they will splinter the anti-Trump vote. That would allow the former president to clinch the nomination, just as he did in similar circumstances in 2016.

Former Vice President Mike Pence, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum are planning to enter the fray this week, bringing the number of challengers to front-runner Trump into the double digits.

Political analysts estimate that Trump can count on a diehard core of supporters, who make up at least a third of Republican voters, to help him secure his party’s nomination.

DeSantis has been aggressively courting those voters, but few are expected to defect from Trump. If DeSantis has any hope of becoming the Republican nominee, political analysts said, he has to try to win over a significant chunk of the other roughly 70% of voters who are up for grabs.

DeSantis must compete with a raft of Republican rivals for those votes. To be sure, many of the candidates are long shots who barely register in opinion polls, but they can still hamper DeSantis’ efforts to build the coalition he needs to take on Trump.

“I’m very concerned that we appear to be making the same mistakes that we made in 2016,” said Larry Hogan, a popular former Republican governor of Maryland and a fierce critic of Trump.

Hogan seriously considered taking on Trump but decided earlier this year against entering the race because he feared that a large field of contenders would only help the former president to repeat his 2016 victory, when he bested 17 major candidates.

“It’s better for us to have a smaller field with a strong candidate or two rather than 10 or more people who are failing to get attention, who are all in single digits,” in the opinion polls, Hogan said in an interview.

“The only one that benefits from that at this point in time appears to be Donald Trump,” said Hogan, a moderate who wants the party to move on from Trump. “It’s the definition of insanity continuing to do the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

Still, right now it’s essentially a two-man race.

Trump dominates the field among potential Republican primary voters with 49% support and DeSantis next with 19%. There is a yawning chasm between the front-runners and the rest of the field: Pence has just 5% backing, while former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley has 4%, according to the latest Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll conducted in May.

Others are barely registering at all. Christie has just 1% backing him, as does U.S. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, while former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, who declared in April, has 0%.

WHY LONG SHOTS ARE STILL JUMPING IN

A casual observer might ask why candidates with such low poll numbers are jumping into a race that already has a clear front-runner early on.

“Most get in because they truly think they have a chance of winning the nomination,” said Oscar Brock, a Republican National Committee member from Tennessee.

Some know they cannot win, said John Feehery, a Republican strategist, but they might be angling for a cabinet position, or hoping to join the ticket of the eventual nominee as the vice presidential candidate, or simply looking for 15 minutes of fame to secure a book deal.

Long shots have also emerged from nowhere to win past nominating fights, Feehery noted, including Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Trump, who was polling at just 4% when he announced his candidacy in June 2015.

Many may have also decided to enter the 2024 race because of the perceived vulnerabilities of the two front runners, Feehery said. Trump faces potential indictments for withholding classified documents and seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election, while DeSantis is trying to regain his footing after losing ground in opinion polls.

“These candidates who are striving to be the alternative see DeSantis continue to stumble and fumble. And they say, ‘Well, why couldn’t that be me?’” said Jason Miller, a senior Trump adviser.

Perhaps with an eye on the soon-to-expand field, DeSantis finally began punching back against Trump on the campaign trail last week after weathering an onslaught of attacks from his former ally for months.

(Reporting by Tim Reid in Los Angeles; Additional reporting by Nathan Layne in Laconia, New Hampshire, editing by Ross Colvin and Grant McCool)

source