Politics

WASHINGTON (AP) — A football legend who held a gun to his ex-wife’s head. Rivals who nearly brawled during a televised debate. A venture capitalist who voiced sympathy for the Unabomber.

And that’s just to name a few.

Republican Senate primaries in several pivotal states last year exuded a carnival-like aura, dominated by far-right candidates whose ill-advised remarks and damaging personal baggage ultimately cost the party its chance of retaking a majority. But even as alarms sounded over a growing crisis of electability, party leaders mostly stood by, including Florida Sen. Rick Scott, the Senate GOP’s campaign chief, who insisted on remaining neutral in the nominating contests.

Now, at the dawn of the 2024 campaign season, Republicans say they are taking steps to avoid a repeat. The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which Scott formerly led, intends to wade into party primaries in key states, providing resources to its preferred candidates in a bid to produce nominees who are more palatable to general election voters.

It may be easier said than done. Similar efforts have backfired in recent years, with the party’s restive base rejecting the attempts. The new push will test anew whether the GOP establishment can steer a party reshaped by Donald Trump’s insurgent presidency back to mainstream appeal.

“One thing I kept hearing when I took this job was that Republicans are sick and tired of losing,” said Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, the new chairman of the NRSC. “This is our last chance this decade to target red-state Democrats, so we’re going to do whatever it takes to recruit candidates who can win both a primary and general election.”

The new approach was on display this month during an NRSC retreat at the Breakers, a luxury resort in Palm Beach, Florida, which drew senators and potential candidates, including Dave McCormick. The hedge fund CEO narrowly lost Pennsylvania’s 2022 Republican Senate primary to Dr. Mehmet Oz, a Trump-backed TV personality who was defeated in the general election by Democrat John Fetterman by roughly 5 percentage points.

McCormick, who is considering another run in 2024, spoke at the multiday event, according to two senior Republican strategists, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the details of the private gathering.

Later, before a crowded banquet room that included at least one other potential rival for the Pennsylvania seat, Daines singled out McCormick with praise, saying he would make an excellent candidate, according to one of the strategists.

If he enters the primary, McCormick has also been promised support from the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC linked to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that spends millions of dollars on TV advertising, according to two other Republican strategists familiar with the matter.

That serves as a warning to anyone else thinking about the race: If McCormick gets in, he would have the full weight and resources of the Senate Republican campaign operation behind him.

Another example of recent intervention is the committee’s early endorsement of Rep. Jim Banks in Indiana’s Senate primary. Though Indiana is reliably Republican, a crowded primary, like in 2018, could sap resources better spent in competitive states. Banks has yet to draw a serious competitor.

The move could also be viewed as a show of good faith to Trump, as well as the conservative group Club for Growth, who have often worked at cross-purposes with Republican Senate leaders. Banks is close with Donald Trump Jr., Trump’s oldest son, and he has also been championed by Club for Growth.

Some Republicans contrast the new approach the NRSC intends to take with that of Scott. Consider his handling of Colorado’s Senate primary in 2022. Joe O’Dea, a moderate Republican and construction company owner, was viewed by many as the kind of candidate who could win in the onetime swing state during a good year for the GOP.

But Scott pointedly declined to endorse O’Dea during a trip to the state, while also offering praise for O’Dea’s rival, a state legislator who espoused conspiracy theories, crossed police lines at the U.S. Capitol during the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection and struggled to raise campaign cash.

O’Dea ultimately lost the general election by nearly 15 percentage points. But the incident offers an example of power centers within the party working at cross purposes — in this case, Scott declining to get behind a candidate many viewed as the party’s only chance to win.

It also helped fuel a feud between Scott and McConnell, which sowed chaos throughout the Senate Republican campaign effort and culminated in a failed challenge by Scott of McConnell’s position as Senate leader.

A spokesman for Scott declined to comment. Scott previously said that “the nice thing” about the campaign chief job is that “everybody gets to try what they believe works,” while calling for the party to stay out of primaries and “let the voters do it.”

In a statement, Josh Holmes, a top McConnell adviser, offered praise for Daines’ leadership of the committee, which Daines took over late last year.

“Leader McConnell enthusiastically supports Senator Daines and his effort to help recapture the majority,” Holmes said. He “has a high level of confidence in his ability to deliver the best candidate for every race across the map.”

Yet there are limits to what the NRSC can do. Trump, who remains a potent force in GOP politics, was largely successful pushing a slate of far-right candidates in marquee Senate primaries last year. With his third bid for the White House now underway, it’s unclear whether he intends to do the same in 2024.

Beyond recruiting candidates, the NRSC also plans to conduct media training. In some cases it intends to stay out of primaries in which its involvement could become a liability. It also plans to lend fundraising assistance, help candidates build out their infrastructure and keep tabs on whether its candidates are running competent digital operations.

That’s basic politics and may sound obvious. But many of the first-time candidates running during last year’s midterms failed to pay attention to such details, ultimately requiring last-minute intervention from the party ahead of the general election.

Former NFL star Herschel Walker struggled on the campaign trail to address his messy personal life, including allegations of domestic abuse and children he fathered and largely abandoned.

Lackluster fundraising by then-Senate candidate J.D. Vance in Ohio forced a bailout from the Senate Leadership Fund, which spent millions of dollars on TV advertising on his behalf on his ultimately successful campaign. In the primary, Vance bested two rivals who nearly came to blows in a debate. One of them, Mike Gibbons, is viewed as a potential contender in the state’s 2024 contest.

Then there is Arizona candidate Blake Masters, who excelled in the primary thanks to an endorsement from Trump and $15 million that his mentor, tech billionaire Peter Thiel, invested in a pro-Masters super PAC.

In the general election, however, Democrats seized on past comments made by Masters, and voters recoiled. Those comments included sympathetic remarks made by Masters about the Unabomber as well as his calls for privatizing Social Security in a state with an outsize share of voters who rely on the program. Masters was also out-fundraised nearly 8-1 in the general election. The party eventually cut him loose, and he lost by the greatest margin of any Republican running statewide.

“We need people running who can win,” said Steven Law, the CEO of the Senate Leadership Fund. “We’re raising the resources to ensure we have quality candidates.”

Recent history indicates those efforts don’t always work out.

Luther Strange, who had the party’s backing in 2017, lost a fierce Senate primary to Roy Moore, a former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice who was credibly accused of sexual misconduct, including pursuing relationships with teenagers when he was in his 30s.

Retired Army Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc, a far-right purveyor of conspiracy theories, won his primary last year in New Hampshire even after a super PAC financed by Law’s Senate Leadership Fund spent $4.6 million against him, campaign finance disclosures show.

Even Walker, perhaps one of the most disastrous Republican candidates in recent memory, was endorsed by McConnell and other top Republicans before the primary.

“Let’s not get caught in the assumption that the only thing that determines who candidates are is Mitch McConnell and the NRSC,” said J.B. Poersch, who leads Senate Democrats’ main super PAC. “These are not stupid people, and they have a lot of experience. But there seems to be denial about who their party is and where they are currently. The MAGA right is also part of this process.”

___ Associated Press writer Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, contributed to this report.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Bestselling self-help author Marianne Williamson, who brought quirky spiritualism to the 2020 presidential race, has announced she’s running for president again, becoming the first major Democrat to challenge President Joe Biden for his party’s nomination in 2024.

Williamson, 70, is formally kicking off her campaign with an event in Washington on Saturday. Without mentioning former President Donald Trump, she noted in a weekend Facebook post that his unconventional White House win makes it “odd for anyone to think they can know who can win the presidency.”

“I’m not putting myself through this again just to add to the conversation,” Williamson wrote. “I’m running for president to help bring an aberrational chapter of our history to a close, and to help bring forth a new beginning.”

Williamson running against a sitting president from her own party would be the longest of long shots under any circumstances. But that’s especially true this cycle, as the Democratic establishment — and even potential presidential hopefuls who could have competed with Biden from the left or middle — has closed ranks with remarkable uniformity behind the president.

Williamson says she plans to follow her Washington announcement with travel to states voting early in the Democratic primary. That includes New Hampshire, where she’s suggested she’d participate in the state’s primary if it defies Democratic National Committee rules and holds the nation’s first presidential nominating contest despite the party making South Carolina its leadoff state for 2024.

“I feel my forty years being up close and personal with the trauma of so many thousands of individuals gives me a unique perspective on what is needed to help repair America,” Williamson wrote. “We need a politics that treats not just symptoms, but cause. That does not base itself on the crass imperatives of endless corporate profit, but on the eternal imperatives of our principles and values.”

Biden hasn’t yet announced a formal reelection bid that aides say is likely to come in the next few months. First lady Jill Biden recently told The Associated Press that there was “pretty much” nothing left for the president to do but pick a time and place to announce his reelection bid. Biden himself, though told ABC that “there’s too many other things I have to finish in the near-term before I start a campaign.”

A spiritual adviser to Oprah Winfrey and purveyor of physic memorabilia online, Williamson spent about a year seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020.

One of her signature proposals was a plan to create a U.S. Department of Peace. She also advocated that the federal government pay massive financial reparations to Black Americans as atonement for centuries of slavery and discrimination.

She suspended her campaign in the weeks before 2020′s leadoff Iowa caucus and later endorsed Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 bid. He finished second in the Democratic primary against Biden.

The author of more than a dozen books and an unsuccessful independent candidate for Congress from California in 2014, Williamson first made a name for herself on the national political stage during the 2016 presidential race. That’s when she was a vocal support of Sanders’ progressive challenge of eventual Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

This time, she evoked a theme Biden used frequently before last fall’s midterm elections, when Democrats showed surprising resilience. The president argues that American democracy is under threat from extreme “MAGA Republicans” loyal to Trump’s Make America Great Again movement. Williamson said the nation’s political traditions may not endure today’s threats.

“If we don’t preserve the blessings of democracy today,” she wrote in her Facebook post, “we should expect the threat of authoritarianism later.”

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LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan will seek the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Democrat Debbie Stabenow in 2024, becoming the first high-profile candidate to jump into the battleground state race.

In a video announcing her campaign, Slotkin says that the nation seems “to be living crisis to crisis” but that there “are certain things that should be really simple, like living a middle-class life in the state that invented the middle class.”

“This is why I’m running for the United States Senate,” Slotkin says in the video released Monday morning. “We need a new generation of leaders that thinks differently, works harder and never forgets that we are public servants.”

Slotkin, a 46-year-old former CIA intelligence officer and third-term representative, is coming off an impressive victory in last year’s midterms, winning reelection despite having been considered vulnerable. Her contest against Republican state Sen. Tom Barrett was the third-most expensive House race in 2022.

She is the first Democrat to announce her intentions to run for a seat that will be crucial to the party’s efforts to maintain control of the Senate, where it holds a 51-49 majority. The only other candidate in the race so far is Republican Nikki Snyder, a State Board of Education member.

Slotkin, first elected to Congress in 2018 when she flipped a traditionally Republican district, has consistently won close races in the battleground state and has proved herself to be an effective fundraiser.

After narrowly winning reelection in 2020, she was targeted by Republicans in last year’s midterms after new congressional maps divided her home district. She was forced to run in Michigan’s new 7th Congressional District, where she was a new face for about a third of the district’s voters, many in rural GOP-leaning counties north of Lansing.

Throughout the campaign, Slotkin touted herself as a Democrat representing a Trump-voting district, emphasizing to voters her pragmatism and highlighting her role on the House’s bipartisan Problem-Solvers Caucus.

She has represented two congressional districts that experienced mass shootings, and she has called for stronger gun laws. Now a congresswoman for the Lansing area, she represents an area that includes Michigan State University, where a gunman killed three people and injured five others this month. She previously represented Oxford, where a school shooter killed four students and injured seven others at Oxford High School in 2021.

The dean of Michigan Democrats, the 72-year-old Stabenow shocked many in the party when she announced last month that she would not be seeking a fifth term, saying she had “decided to pass the torch” to a new generation of leaders.

Slotkin was immediately named as a favorite to replace the outgoing senator and began forming a national campaign team, telling the AP in January that she was putting her “ducks in a row” before an announcement.

With Michigan having one of the deepest Democratic benches in the country, many expected the primary to be highly competitive. But in the days leading up to Slotkin’s announcement, multiple high-profile candidates withdrew their names from consideration.

“Serving our state in Washington, DC would be a great opportunity, but instead I will keep standing tall for Michigan, right here at home,” Democratic Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist II said on social media on Sunday.

Also on the Democratic side, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson has been discussed as a potential candidate. State Sen. Mallory McMorrow, a rising star in the party, said last week that she would not run for the Senate.

Former Rep. Peter Meijer, who lost his Republican primary last year after voting to impeach President Donald Trump in 2021, is still considering a GOP run for the seat. Freshman Rep. John James, one of Republicans’ top choices to run for the Senate in 2024 after two previous unsuccessful bids, filed last week to instead run for reelection in his Detroit-area House district next year.

Republicans have taken just one of Michigan’s last 15 Senate races, winning an open seat in 1994.

Slotkin’s Senate run creates an open House race in the 7th Congressional District in 2024. Barrett, who lost to Slotkin by 5 percentage points in their House contest last year, plans to run in the district again in 2024, with an announcement expected in the coming weeks, spokesman Jason Cabel Roe confirmed on Monday.

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Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot faces eight challengers in the city’s elections on Tuesday, a tough reelection campaign for an incumbent who made history as the first Black woman and first openly gay person to serve in the role.

A former federal prosecutor who had never before run for political office, Lightfoot was something of a surprise winner four years ago, claiming an overwhelming victory in a runoff. Her four years in office have included issues with high crime rates and ongoing friction with the city’s teachers union, and should she lose her bid to return to city hall, Lightfoot would become the first Chicago mayor in decades to run for reelection and fail.

With nine candidates in the race, it is unlikely that anyone will exceed the 50% threshold needed to win the officially nonpartisan election outright. That means the winner is likely to be decided in an April 4 runoff between the top two vote-getters.

Most observers peg the race as a four-person contest among Lightfoot, former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas, U.S. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson.

Vallas, the only white candidate in the race, is positioning himself as a moderate, with backing from the Chicago police union. Garcia, the only Hispanic candidate, is focusing hard on Latino neighborhoods and Hispanic TV and radio. Johnson is an organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union with a strong ground game made up of union volunteers.

Here’s a look at what to expect on election night:

ELECTION DAY

Polls close at 8 p.m. ET.

HOW CHICAGO VOTES

Chicago holds nonpartisan jungle-style primaries that are open to all voters, who can register on election day. A candidate must win more than 50% of ballots cast to win outright. If no candidate does, the top two advance to a runoff election on April 4.

AP will declare winners in the race for Chicago mayor. AP will also tabulate an additional 57 races, for Chicago alderperson and police council, but will not call winners in those races. In the 2022 general election, AP first reported results in Chicago at 8:35 p.m. ET. The election night tabulation ended just before 1 a.m. ET, with 88% of votes counted.

DECISION NOTES

The AP does not make projections and will only declare a winner when it’s determined there is no scenario that would allow the trailing candidates to close the gap.

Should a candidate declare victory or offer a concession before the AP calls a race, we will cover newsworthy developments in our reporting. In doing so, we will make clear that AP has not yet declared a winner and explain why.

The AP may call a race in which the margin between the top two candidates is 0.5% or less, if we determine the lead is too large for a recount and legal challenge to change the outcome. In Illinois, there are no automatic recounts. Trailing candidates can request recounts if they receive at least 95% of the total votes of the winning candidate.

However, recounts in Illinois are for the purposes of legal discovery only and cannot by themselves change the results of an election.

Q: WHAT DO TURNOUT AND ADVANCE VOTE LOOK LIKE?

A: As of Jan. 1, 2023, there were 1.6 million registered voters in Chicago. As of Sunday, 207,940 voters had cast advance ballots.

In the 2022 primary election, 49% of Chicago voters cast their ballots before election day. Mail-in ballots can arrive as late as March 14 and be counted so long as they are postmarked by election day.

Election officials have said the number of mail ballots is up sharply from the last mayor’s race, in 2019, which could delay results.

Q: HOW LONG DOES COUNTING USUALLY TAKE?

A: Chicago counts a significant number of votes after election day, which could delay race calls in a competitive election. In the 2022 general election, the city counted 12% of votes after election day.

Election officials said they plan to start releasing citywide results shortly after polls close at 8 p.m. ET. However, they don’t expect to start releasing results by ward until around 1 a.m. ET.

Following election day, the Board of Elections plans to update results several times each day on Wednesday and Thursday, and then periodically through the March 14 deadline to receive mail ballots.

READ UP ON THE RACES

Here’s more on this year’s Chicago elections:

— Chicago mayor’s race dominated by concerns about city crime

— She made history as Chicago mayor. Reelection may be harder

___

Follow AP’s coverage of politics and elections at: https://apnews.com/hub/politics

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NEW YORK (AP) — A top political adviser to Glenn Youngkin insisted on Monday that there’s room for the Virginia governor to enter the Republican presidential primary a day after the aide said the campaign was a “two-person race between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.”

Jeff Roe, a strategist for Youngkin, told The Associated Press that his weekend comments on Fox News were not a signal of Youngkin’s intentions or future prospects.

“The current field and the current race shows two strong front-running candidates, but politics changes and a year is a lifetime in politics,” Roe said Monday.

He called Youngkin “a unicorn in American politics,” the first Republican in more than a decade to be elected governor of Virginia, and only a year after Trump lost there to Democrat Joe Biden by 10 percentage points.

If Youngkin decides to run for president, “he will make a lane for himself,” Roe said. “He doesn’t need a lane created for him.”

Youngkin has been seen as a potential presidential candidate but has repeatedly demurred about whether he will run. In a separate interview on Fox News Channel on Sunday morning, Youngkin said that he was “very focused on Virginia,” where the legislative session just ended and budget negotiations are underway.

“My eyes right now are really on Virginia and we’ve got a lot of good work to do here,” Youngkin said.

On the same network, Roe said during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday” that the field of 2024 GOP candidates will be very small because of Trump’s and DeSantis’ strength and looming Republican National Committee rules requiring candidates to show broad support by meeting donor and polling thresholds in order to participate in debates.

“The reality is, this is a two-person race between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis,” Roe said.

Seeming to close the door, he added, “There’s simply no room for a third or fourth, or even fifth person in this race.”

But he said on Monday that he was not broadcasting any advice to Youngkin.

“The governor makes his decisions based on his ability to win, on his ability to make a difference and what his heart leads him to do,” Roe said. “He doesn’t make decisions like that based on politics or political consultants or hacks.”

“There’s a time and a place for decisions like this to be made,” he said.

Asked for comment about Roe’s remarks, Youngkin political aide Becca Glover did not directly address them. Instead, she said: “The governor is always flattered to have his name come up in conversations about 2024, especially given that he’s now a respected leader within the party, not just a new face.”

Speculation about a possible bid by Youngkin began after he captured national attention by defeating Democratic former Gov. Terry McAuliffe in 2021.

He’s taken other steps that have added to the chatter, including traveling the country stumping for other Republican candidates for governor last year, hosting campaign-style policy events within the state and throwing a private event for high-profile donors.

An adviser to Youngkin confirmed he is scheduled to meet in New York City this week with Republican donors and political figures. The meetings were first reported by The New York Times.

Youngkin is a wealthy former private-equity executive who loaned his 2021 campaign $20 million and has business-world contacts he’d be able to draw on for campaign contributions.

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Associated Press writer Sarah Rankin in Richmond, Virginia, contributed to this report.

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COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris promoted the Biden administration’s achievements on broadband internet access during a visit to South Carolina, recently minted as the site of Democrats’ first presidential votes of the 2024 campaign.

In Monday’s trip, her fourth to the early-voting state since becoming vice president, Harris lauded more than $175 million being spent to help improve high-speed internet infrastructure at historically Black colleges and institutions, which she called “centers of academic excellence.”

“Many of those that we focus on currently do not have reliable access to high-speed internet on campus,” said Harris, herself a graduate of an HBCU. “This means that more students will be able to use the internet for their everyday needs.”

Harris’ remarks to a room of at least 100 supporters and student leaders from Benedict College, an HBCU in Columbia, came as Democrats’ national attention hones in on South Carolina, where a landslide 2020 primary win gave Joe Biden the momentum to notch Super Tuesday wins and bounce several opponents from the race.

Biden has repeatedly acknowledged the state’s pivotal role in his nomination as well as the significance of its heavily Black Democratic electorate. During remarks at a fundraiser last year, Harris thanked South Carolina Democrats, who “set President Joe Biden and me on a path to the White House.”

Late last year, Biden asked the Democratic National Committee to move the state to the top of the presidential primary voting calendar, which party officials did this month. Via its email lists, South Carolina’s Democratic Party has already begun selling buttons, mugs and apparel flaunting the state’s new status with the tagline “South Carolina Democrats Pick Winners.”

But Harris’ appearance also comes as a debate swirls over whether Biden — who, at age 80, is the nation’s oldest president — should seek a second term in office, as is widely expected. According to a poll released this month from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, just 37% of Democrats said they wanted Biden to seek a second term.

Though he’s long said it’s his intent to seek reelection, Biden has yet to make it official, struggling to dispel questions about whether he’s too old to continue serving as president. In an exclusive interview last week with The Associated Press, first lady Jill Biden gave one of the clearest indications yet that her husband will run in 2024, saying that there’s “pretty much” nothing left to do but figure out the time and place for the announcement.

The Republican candidate field is already forming, with a focus on South Carolina, home to the first GOP presidential primary in the South. Former President Donald Trump held a campaign event in the Statehouse last month, and former Gov. Nikki Haley announced her candidacy in Charleston a few weeks later. Sen. Tim Scott is also mulling a potential bid.

Equalizing access to high-speed internet has been a priority for Biden, who in 2021 signed into law a $1 trillion infrastructure package that, alongside traditional public works projects like building roads and bridges, included $65 billion for broadband expansion.

Expanding broadband internet availability also has been a top priority for Rep. Jim Clyburn, one of the White House’s top Capitol Hill supporters and South Carolina’s lone congressional Democrat. Clyburn, the chamber’s assistant Democratic leader, has long advocated for more widespread internet access nationwide, pushing for affordable, high-speed networks in rural communities.

Last week, Clyburn appeared alongside Republican Gov. Henry McMaster to announce the formation of a program — funded by the bipartisan infrastructure package — designed to identify the areas of greatest need in South Carolina and invest in broadband infrastructure.

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Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP.

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NEW YORK (AP) — Republican presidential contenders typically fight for prime speaking slots at the Conservative Political Action Conference. But as conservative activists gather in suburban Washington this week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis will be courting donors more than a thousand miles away in Texas and California.

The apparent CPAC snub is nothing new for DeSantis, who has emerged in the early phase of the 2024 presidential election as a leading contender for the GOP nomination even as he ignores many conventions of modern politics.

DeSantis is a frequent voice in conservative cultural fights on cable television, but he often avoids gatherings of fellow Republican governors and party leaders, who are quick to complain in private about his go-it-alone approach. He is the only top-tier presidential prospect yet to court voters in Iowa, New Hampshire or South Carolina, the states hosting the GOP’s opening presidential primary contests. And he is often at odds with the press, refusing even to notify local media of last week’s rare three-state tour with law enforcement.

Indeed, as DeSantis moves toward a White House run, it is becoming increasingly clear that the 44-year-old Republican governor will manage his presidential aspirations in his own way, on his own timeline, with or without allies in national GOP leadership or relationships with the press.

“DeSantis has, in his style and the actions he’s taken as governor, shown a willingness to fight the traditional powers that be, the establishment,” said David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth, an influential conservative group based in Washington. McIntosh described DeSantis’ style as “refreshing” and suggested the GOP is ready to move on from former President Donald Trump.

For now, DeSantis is perhaps the most potent threat to Trump’s effort to win the GOP nomination for the third time. The Club for Growth will host DeSantis among a half-dozen presidential prospects at a closed-door retreat in Florida next weekend with top donors. Trump is not invited.

Meanwhile, DeSantis has quietly begun to expand his political coalition on his terms just as he releases a book, “The Courage to be Free,” which comes out Tuesday.

He spent the weekend huddled behind closed doors at a south Florida luxury hotel for a “Freedom Blueprint” retreat with more than 100 donors, elected officials and conservative influencers. The attendees included former Trump chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and Texas-based donor Roy Bailey, a former member of Trump’s national finance committee.

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt and Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee were also in attendance, along with Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, Utah Sen. Mike Lee, Texas Rep. Chip Roy and Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham hosted a fireside chat with DeSantis on Sunday before he joined a “fighting back against woke” discussion with Chaya Raichik, who runs the “Libs of TikTok” social media account.

Details from the gathering were disclosed by participants who requested anonymity to discuss the the private event.

Trump was largely ignored throughout the weekend retreat, although conservative commentator Ann Coulter seized on his failure to build a wall spanning the entire U.S.-Mexico border during a Saturday panel discussion with DeSantis on border security, according to one person in the room. She accused the former president of never actually wanting to build it in the first place.

In the coming days and weeks, DeSantis will use the release of his book to introduce himself to voters beyond Florida, having established his political dominance there last fall by winning reelection by more than 19 percentage points.

He is expected to make his first appearances in key states on the primary calendar such as Iowa and New Hampshire in the coming weeks in addition to general election battlegrounds like Georgia and Pennsylvania. Last week, he made surprise stops in New York City, Philadelphia and Chicago to court law enforcement leaders, although the events were private and he did not notify local media.

The Florida governor is already scheduled to headline two Republican fundraisers in Texas on Saturday. The next day he’ll speak at a $500-a-head reception for the GOP of Orange County, California. He’ll serve as the keynote speaker for the Alabama GOP the following week.

While he has begun to expand his profile, DeSantis has done far less than most of the early 2024 class to connect with primary voters and would-be allies in key states.

He has long avoided gatherings of Republican governors or top GOP officials, who privately condemn his approach as arrogant. He’s never set foot in Iowa.

Former New Hampshire GOP chair Jennifer Horn noted that Republican primary voters often embrace anti-establishment candidates “who are willing to create their own lane or take their own path.”

“But when you’re running for president, and in this environment, I think he has to be careful not to be a victim of his own arrogance,” she said. “He has this belief that he knows better than everyone about everything, and that’s never a good thing.”

Meanwhile, DeSantis’ team feels no urgency to enter the 2024 contest, which already features three Republican candidates. Trump announced three months ago.

He’s also shown no interest in responding to Trump’s increasingly personal attacks, which include recent social media posts suggesting that DeSantis behaved inappropriately with underage girls when he briefly taught high school in his early 20s.

Trump refers to the Florida governor as Ron DeSanctimonious” and “Meatball Ron.”

By contrast, DeSantis in his new book actually credits Trump for helping him win the Florida governorship in 2018.

“I knew that a Trump endorsement would provide me with the exposure to GOP primary voters across the State of Florida, and I was confident that many would see me as a good candidate once they learned about my record,” DeSantis writes, according to an early copy obtained by the Guardian.

Trump’s increasing focus on DeSantis may unintentionally help the Florida governor by defining him as the strongest Republican Trump alternative, according to Sam Nunberg, a former Trump aide turned critic.

“Look, Donald is worried, and if I was working for him, I’d say he needs to update the playbook,” Nunberg said.

In the meantime, DeSantis is focused on expanding his conservative agenda in Florida’s looming state legislative session, which runs from March through May.

Already, he has pushed to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs from Florida’s public universities and colleges. Among his other priorities: allowing people to carry guns in public without a permit; weakening laws protecting journalists from lawsuits; and cracking down on illegal immigration, including a plan to eliminate in-state tuition for college students in the country illegally.

In a nod to his political strength, DeSantis is under attack from a growing group of Republican rivals.

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu publicly condemned DeSantis’ decision to use the levers of government to punish private businesses like Disney that push back against his policy priorities. North Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s team has criticized DeSantis’ record on abortion as insufficiently conservative.

DeSantis did himself no favors inside the Republican National Committee last month when he publicly sided with RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel’s challenger during her bitter reelection fight. McDaniel easily won reelection to her post.

“We are going to move forward. And that’s what I’m focused on,” McDaniel said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” when asked about her relationship with DeSantis. “The one thing Republicans can do to make sure we don’t win is fight each other all the time.”

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CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — South Carolina is accustomed to increased attention in the years leading up to presidential elections, with the state hosting the South’s first voting contests for several of the last cycles.

But even by those standards, 2024 feels different.

Democrats elevated South Carolina to the top of their presidential primary calendar, leapfrogging Iowa and New Hampshire. Republicans, meanwhile, could potentially have two homegrown South Carolina presidential candidates in the race, a prospect that has already caused friction among the state’s GOP circles of supporters.

A look at why so many political roads to 2024 will lead to South Carolina:

THE DEMOCRATS

Earlier this month, the Democratic National Committee approved its 2024 calendar, an effort to give a prominent voice to a more diverse electorate.

President Joe Biden had endorsed a plan placing South Carolina first on the party’s calendar for the coming presidential cycle, followed by New Hampshire, Nevada, Michigan and Georgia.

Biden’s recognition of the role South Carolina played in reviving his 2020 campaign, after less-than-stellar performances in earlier-voting states, has been clear since his victory celebration three years ago in February.

“You brought me back,” Biden told supporters. His win built momentum that helped him plow through the Super Tuesday votes that followed.

Last year, in a fundraiser for South Carolina Democrats, Vice President Kamala Harris offered her gratitude, saying, “We see how South Carolina Democrats set President Joe Biden and me on a path to the White House. … Thank you, South Carolina.”

The Biden administration has keep close ties with the state, where Biden’s roots run deep and include family vacations to the state, as well as friendships with late Sens. Fritz Hollings and Strom Thurmond, and lawyer Dick Harpootlian, a former state party chairman who is now a state senator.

On Monday, Harris will return to South Carolina to discuss the administration’s advancements on broadband internet expansion, a top priority of Rep. Jim Clyburn, one of Biden’s closest allies and the lone Democrat in South Carolina’s congressional delegation. Other Cabinet officials visited last year.

While South Carolina Democrats have not won a statewide race since 2006, they have begun selling buttons, mugs and apparel flaunting the state’s new status, with the tagline “South Carolina Democrats Pick Winners.” But the party is undergoing a period of transition, with chair Trav Robertson announcing this past week he would not seek another term after six years in the job.

Looking ahead, Robertson noted the regional financial impact that could be felt from the early position of South Carolina, where media markets — and the campaign advertising dollars spent in them — bleed into surrounding states.

“We have long advocated that South Carolina’s position in this process has been extremely beneficial to North Carolina and Georgia and to Tennessee,” Robertson told The Associated Press. “The impact of this is going to be felt for a generation.”

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HOMEGROWN GOP CANDIDATES

Nikki Haley’s official launch to her 2024 presidential campaign, in downtown Charleston two weeks ago, was steeped in references to her six years as South Carolina’s governor.

“It’s a great day in South Carolina!” Haley said, a nod to her gubernatorial catchphrase that she for a time required state Cabinet agencies to use when answering public phone lines.

Haley, the first woman and Indian American to lead the state, also cloaked herself in references to accomplishments during her time in office, including creating jobs. She mentioned leading the state “beyond hate and violence,” a reference to the shooting of an unarmed Black motorist by a white police officer and the slayings of nine Black parishioners by a self-avowed white supremacist.

She did not explicitly mention the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the Statehouse grounds in 2015 after the church shootings — a move she pushed for after years of publicly supporting its presence.

With former President Donald Trump already in the 2024 race, Haley — who served two years as his U.N. ambassador — became the first major Republican to challenge him for the nomination.

Some of South Carolina’s top Republicans, including Gov. Henry McMaster, Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette and U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, have endorsed Trump, whose 2016 victory in South Carolina’s primary helped solidify GOP support behind his campaign.

Haley has lined up support from at least one member of the state’s congressional delegation, Rep. Ralph Norman. Rep. Nancy Mace, whom Haley endorsed for reelection last year, has said that, for now, “my powder is dry” when it comes to the 2024 White House race.

But Tim Scott, South Carolina’s junior senator, has been making moves that seem to put him on the verge of formalizing his own 2024 bid. The day after Haley’s launch, Scott was in Charleston himself, speaking at a Charleston County GOP dinner his team characterized as part of a “listening tour.” Days later, both he and Haley were in Iowa, which holds the GOP’s first 2024 votes.

Scott’s potential entry into the race has led to some awkwardness among the state’s Republicans, many of whom have been supporters of both him and Haley.

Catherine Templeton, who served in Haley’s administration, said Haley and Scott are calling the state’s Republicans seeking support, a process she characterized as “uncomfortable.”

“Generally, a Scott Republican and a Haley Republican are pretty similar creatures, but it is a game of addition, so both candidates are being deferential,” Templeton said. “They are saying, ‘If I can’t be your first, I’d like to be your second.’ You won’t find them criticizing each other, but ultimately, it is uncomfortable to choose between friends.”

Templeton won’t say whom she plans to support and says she expects a similar waiting game among GOP voters and donors in South Carolina.

“People are waiting to see what Tim does before they make a decision,” she said. “But Nikki is in either way.”

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WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?

The 2024 season in only getting started in South Carolina, just as in the other early states. Next month, the state plays host to one of the first leadoff, multicandidate events, when Palmetto Family sponsors its Vision ’24 conference in Charleston.

So far, one announced candidate — Haley — is scheduled to attend, though potential ones, including Scott and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, are set to come. Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, former Vice President Mike Pence and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are among those yet to RSVP.

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Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Ever the outsider, Jimmy Carter served a turbulent term in the White House. His presidency was beset by soaring interest and inflation rates, gasoline pump lines and the Iran hostage crisis that eventually led to his re-election defeat.

But he rose to even greater heights with his post-presidential career, devoting another four decades to working as an international envoy of peacemaking and democracy. James Earl Carter Jr., a peanut farmer who became the 39th president of the United States, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

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EDITOR’S NOTE — Walter Mears was an Associated Press special correspondent who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the 1976 presidential campaign. Prior to his death in 2022, Mears wrote this retrospective article in appreciation of Carter, who entered hospice care on Feb. 18.

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Trounced by Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election, Carter was, at 56, a politician with only a past and “a potentially empty life” ahead. Then, in 1982, he organized the Carter Center in Atlanta.

It kept him traveling, negotiating, leading election observation teams and speaking out, often to the discomfort or even resentment of the government he’d once led. Carter’s Nobel citation honored “his decades of untiring effort” to resolve conflicts, promote democracy and foster economic development.

The man who conceded that some considered him “a failed president” made himself the most active and internationally engaged of ex-presidents. “My role as a former president is probably superior to that of other presidents,” he said in a 2010 television interview.

When he ran for president as a one-term former Georgia governor, Carter was so improbable a candidate that he said his mother asked him, “President of what?”

To answer that and his all-but-invisible name recognition rating, he started campaigning early. Carter covered some 50,000 campaign miles, his garment bag draped over his shoulder.

He won the Democratic nomination and challenged President Gerald Ford, Nixon’s appointed vice president.

Ford had pardoned Nixon for any Watergate crimes. In the aftermath of Watergate, Carter was the anti-Richard Nixon figure. “I will never lie to you,” he told voters. But Carter was elected by only 2 percentage points.

The newly elected president and wife Rosalynn shunned the limousine and walked from the Capitol to the White House after his inauguration and tried to drop some of the pomp surrounding the presidency. But his solo style and unintended snubs left him short of political allies when he’d need their help.

For all that, Carter’s term left landmarks, such as the Israel-Egypt peace accord he engineered in personal negotiations at Camp David in 1978.

He won the beginnings of an energy conservation policy. He gained ratification of the treaties that yielded U.S. control of the Panama Canal. He opened full diplomatic relations with China. The departments of energy and education were created. But his administration struggled and Carter shook up his Cabinet amid “a crisis of confidence.”

And then things got worse.

On Nov. 4, 1979, Iranian demonstrators invaded the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, incited by their ayatollah to retaliate for the exiled former shah’s admission into the United States for medical treatment. Fifty-two Americans were held hostage for more than a year. Carter tried to negotiate, and when that didn’t work, he ordered the military rescue attempt that failed disastrously in the desert in April 1980.

Eight Americans were killed in the attempt. It was Carter’s bleakest hour.

The hostage crisis shadowed and essentially crippled Carter’s re-election campaign. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy challenged him in the Democratic primaries.

After that, it was all uphill against Reagan. Carter carried only six states to Reagan’s 44.

Minutes after Reagan was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 1981, the hostages were freed after 444 days in captivity. Carter’s first major act as an ex-president was as Reagan’s special envoy to welcome the freed hostages in Wiesbaden, Germany, the next day.

Jimmy Carter, the only president inaugurated by nickname, was born in tiny Plains, Georgia, where he arranged to be buried. The father for whom he was named was in the peanut business, with a farm and warehouse. His father, brother, Billy, and two sisters all died of pancreatic cancer.

Carter graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946, the year he married Rosalynn Smith, also of Plains. They had three sons and a daughter, Amy, the youngest child, who went with them to the White House.

Carter spent nearly seven years in the Navy’s nuclear submarine force, resigning to take over the family business after his father died in 1953. His first political stop was in the Georgia State Senate. A Democratic moderate with a New South image, Carter was elected governor of Georgia in 1970, succeeding segregationist Lester Maddox and gaining his first national note when he declared in his inauguration address “the time for racial discrimination is over.”

After he lost his presidential re-election bid, a shaken Carter retreated to Plains, to “an altogether new, unwanted” chapter in his life.

He began the Carter Center which, he said later, offered “superior opportunities to do good.” He and Rosalynn also worked with Habitat for Humanity, building housing for the poor in the United States and abroad.

Carter was a tireless peacemaker who bypassed usual diplomatic channels and, as he said in 1994, went “where others are not treading” — places such as Ethiopia, Liberia and North Korea, where he secured the release of an American who had been imprisoned after wandering across the border in 2010.

He helped oversee democratic elections in Nicaragua and Haiti, and the first Palestinian elections. Altogether, he participated in 39 of the center’s 100 election observation trips.

Carter said his center “filled vacuums in the world. When the United States won’t deal with troubled areas, we go there.”

And not always quietly.

He went to Cuba in 2002, met with Fidel Castro, then delivered a televised speech calling for an end to the U.S. trade embargo. He likened Israeli policy toward the Palestinians to apartheid. He denounced the Iraq war as “based upon lies.” He said George W. Bush was the worst president in history in foreign affairs.

That prompted a Bush White House spokesman to describe Carter as “irrelevant.”

He could be meddlesome, a freelance diplomat who irked more than one administration.

But never irrelevant.

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CHICAGO (AP) — For years, Republicans have sought to win over voters by depicting Democratic-led cities as lawless centers of violence that need tough-on-crime policies. In Chicago, some of the Democrats running for mayor are deploying the same strategy as they debate how to make the city safer.

One leading candidate, who touts his endorsement from the Chicago police union, says “crime is out of control” and the city needs hundreds more officers patrolling its streets. Another hopeful says that if suspects flee a crime scene, officers should be able to “hunt them down like a rabbit.”

Even incumbent Lori Lightfoot, the first Black woman and first openly gay person to serve as Chicago mayor, has used language right out of the GOP playbook, saying a top rival in her reelection bid wants to defund the police.

The shift in rhetoric reflects the degree to which concerns about crime have dominated Tuesday’s mayoral election in Chicago and threatened Lightfoot’s reelection bid. Far from being an outlier, the nation’s third-largest city is just the latest Democratic stronghold where public safety has become a top election issue.

In San Francisco, progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin was ousted in a recall election last year that was fueled by frustration over public safety. In Los Angeles, two Democrats running for mayor debated how to deal with rising crime rates and an out-of-control homelessness crisis. In New York City, voters elected Eric Adams as mayor, elevating a former city police captain who pledged to fix the department and invest more in crime prevention. And in Philadelphia, candidates running for mayor this year are debating how to curb gun violence.

The increased attention on public safety follows a spike in crime rates in many communities that coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic. High-profile incidents of police misconduct drew more scrutiny of policing, and there has been disagreement even among Democrats about so-called progressive public safety policies such as ending cash bail or providing safe injection sites for drug users.

Jaime Domínguez, a political science professor at Northwestern University, said it’s the first time in 20 years that he’s seen public safety be “front and center” in a Chicago mayoral election.

The difference, he said, is that crime is no longer largely isolated to some predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods. As more crime is occurring in other parts of the highly segregated city, including in the downtown and other areas frequented by tourists, public safety is also top of mind for white voters.

“Historically, it was primarily a pocketed matter. It was still pernicious and candidates spoke to it, but it didn’t really affect areas where you see crime occurring now,” Dominguez said. “That has been blown up. It’s just, it’s everywhere.”

Chicago has a higher per-capita homicide rate than New York or Los Angeles, but it’s lower than other Midwestern cities, such as St. Louis and Detroit. Still, the number of homicides in Chicago hit a 25-year high in 2021 with 797, according to the Chicago Police Department.

That number decreased last year but is still higher than when Lightfoot took office in 2019. Other crimes, such as carjackings and robberies, have increased in recent years.

Nine candidates are running in Tuesday’s officially nonpartisan mayoral election. With no candidate expected to get over 50% of the vote, an April 4 runoff between the top two vote-getters is likely.

Randall Fearnow, a 67-year-old health care attorney who is white and who lives near Wrigley Field on the city’s north side, experienced the city’s crime problem firsthand when he and his wife walked in the back door of their home one day last October and discovered burglars inside. The criminals ransacked the home and stole thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry and money before running out the front door, he said. Police didn’t catch the perpetrators.

“It happened in the broad daylight,” Fearnow said. “When you step out, it makes you feel a little uneasy. … You’re not immune anywhere from crime in the city.”

Fearnow cast an early ballot for Paul Vallas, who was endorsed by the Chicago police union. He also voted against Lightfoot four years ago, saying he believed her rival in the 2019 runoff was “much more level-headed.” This year, Fearnow said the two most important factors in his vote were crime and rising property taxes.

“The city gets more expensive to live in and less safe,” he said. “So somebody needs to do something.”

As she fights to land a spot in the April runoff, Lightfoot has taken on opponents she sees as a threat — among them Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson. In a recent ad, Lightfoot accuses Johnson of wanting to defund police, using video of him speaking on a local radio program in 2020. During the interview, Johnson said reducing the amount of money spent on policing isn’t a slogan but “an actual real political goal.”

His statements came after the protests across the United States over the killing by Minneapolis police of George Floyd. Johnson also sponsored a nonbinding resolution, passed by the county board, that said money should be redirected from policing and incarceration and into social services.

Lightfoot said Johnson, who avoids the word “defund” when speaking on the campaign trail about policing, isn’t being candid with voters.

“He’s asked direct questions at a variety of forums, and that guy’s got more bobs and weaves than Muhammad Ali,” Lightfoot said.

Johnson, a former teacher and union organizer endorsed by the Chicago Teachers Union, says he wants to invest more in areas such as mental health treatment. In a statement responding to Lightfoot, his campaign said that doesn’t mean cuts to the police department. Johnson also notes that Chicago still has a violence problem even though the police budget grows every year.

“Lori Lightfoot hasn’t made Chicago safer, but I will,” Johnson says in a new ad. “It’s time to get smart, not just tough.”

All of Lightfoot’s opponents want to fire the police superintendent she hired, saying that the former Dallas police chief has been ineffective and that hiring an outsider hurt morale. Lightfoot has defended the superintendent, David Brown, and says that while the city faced never-before-seen challenges such as the pandemic, their strategies are working and some crimes are falling.

Vallas, an adviser to the Fraternal Order of Police during the union’s contract negotiations with Lightfoot’s administration, says that if he becomes mayor, he would promote a new leadership team from within the department. Vallas says he would welcome back hundreds of officers who have retired or gone elsewhere out of frustration with Lightfoot. He also wants to return to a community policing strategy, with dedicated officers assigned to patrol each of the city’s nearly 300 police beats.

“We’ve got to restore public safety,” said Vallas. “Everything proceeds from that.”

Wealthy businessman Willie Wilson, another mayoral candidate, has doubled down on his comment that suspects in violent crimes should be hunted down like rabbits. Wilson says he lost a son to gun violence, and he believes police officers are being prevented from doing their jobs.

The other candidates are Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, Chicago City Council members Sophia King and Roderick Sawyer, activist Ja’Mal Green and state Rep. Kambium “Kam” Buckner.

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Associated Press writer Claire Savage contributed to this report.

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