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Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has run into a surprising buzz saw in his bid to sell himself as the Republican Partys most electable standard-bearer in 2024 and it has more to do with President Biden than it does with Donald J. Trump.

For months, Republican voters have consumed such a steady diet of clips of Mr. Biden stumbling, over words and sandbags, that they now see the 80-year-old Democratic incumbent as so frail that he would be beatable by practically any Republican even a four-times-indicted former president who lost the last election.

As Mr. Trumps rivals take the stage for the first debate of the 2024 primaries on Wednesday, the perceived weaknesses of Mr. Biden have undercut one of the core arguments that Mr. DeSantis and others have made from the start: that the party must turn the page on the past and move beyond Mr. Trump in order to win in 2024.

The focus on electability the basic notion of which candidate has the best shot of winning a general election was most intense in the aftermath of the disappointing 2022 midterms. Republicans were stung by losses of Trump-backed candidates in key swing states like Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania. And the issue offered a way to persuade a Republican electorate still very much in the thrall of Mr. Trump to consider throwing its lot in with a fresh face in 2024. It was a permission slip to move on.

But nine months later, interviews with pollsters, strategists, elected officials and Republican voters in early-voting states show that the dim Republican opinion of Mr. Bidens mental faculties and political skills has complicated that case in deep and unexpected ways.

I mean, I would hope anybody could beat Joe Biden at this point, said Heather Hora, 52, as she waited in line for a photo with Mr. Trump at an Iowa Republican Party dinner, echoing a sentiment expressed in more than 30 interviews with Iowa Republicans in recent weeks.

Mr. Trumps rivals are still pushing an electability case against the former president, but even their advisers and other strategists acknowledge that the diminished views of Mr. Biden have sapped the pressure voters once felt about the need to nominate someone new. When Republican primary voters in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll were asked which candidate was better able to beat Mr. Biden, 58 percent picked Mr. Trump, while 28 percent selected Mr. DeSantis.

The perception that Biden is the weakest possible candidate has lowered the electability question in the calculus of primary voters, said Josh Holmes, a Republican strategist and a longtime adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader.

Though the urgency of electability has plainly waned, it remains one of the most powerful tools Mr. Trumps rivals believe they have to peel the party away from him and some privately hope that Mr. Trumps growing legal jeopardy will eventually make the issue feel pressing again. For now, the fact that many polls show a razor-thin Biden-Trump contest has made it a tougher sell.

Conservative media, led by Fox News, has played a role in shaping G.O.P. views. Fox has often elevated Mr. DeSantis as the future of the Republican Party, coverage that has frustrated the former president. But the networks persistent harping on Mr. Bidens frailties may have inadvertently undercut any effort to build up Mr. DeSantiss campaign.

More than two-thirds of Republicans who described Fox News or another conservative outlet as the single source they most often turned to for news thought Mr. Trump was better able to beat Mr. Biden in the Times/Siena College poll, a 40-point advantage over Mr. DeSantis. Those who cited mainstream news outlets also said Mr. Trump was the stronger candidate to beat Mr. Biden, though by less than half the margin.

There is little question that Mr. Biden has visibly aged. The presidents slip onstage at an Air Force graduation ceremony in June his staff subsequently blamed a stray sandbag is seen as a moment that particularly resonated for Republicans, cementing Mr. Bidens image as frail, politically and otherwise.

Google records show search interest for Biden old peaking three times in 2023 during his State of the Union address in February, when he announced his 2024 run in late April and when he fell onstage in June. The number of searches just for Biden was higher after his fall than it was around the time of his re-election kickoff.

Interviews with Republican voters in Iowa in recent weeks have revealed a consistent impression of Mr. Biden as weak and deteriorating.

Its just one gaffe after another, Joanie Pellett, 55, a retiree in Decatur County, said of Mr. Biden as she settled into her seat in a beer hall at the Iowa State Fair four hours before Mr. Trump was set to speak.

What strength as a candidate? Does he have any? Rick Danowsky, a financial consultant who lives in Sigourney, Iowa, asked of Mr. Biden as he waited for Mr. DeSantis at a bar in downtown Des Moines earlier this month.

Hes a train wreck, said Jack Seward, 67, a county supervisor in Washington County, Iowa, who is considering whether to vote for Mr. Trump or Mr. DeSantis.

Kevin Munoz, a campaign spokesman for Mr. Biden, said Republican depictions of Mr. Biden as old were recycled attacks that had repeatedly failed.

Put simply, its a losing strategy and they know it, he said. Republicans can argue with each other all they want about electability, but every one of them has embraced the losing MAGA agenda.

Some Republicans worry that their voters have been lulled into a false sense of complacency about the challenge of beating a Democratic incumbent president. The last one to lose was Jimmy Carter more than four decades ago.

Electability is more than just beating Biden Republicans need to choose a candidate who can build a majority coalition, especially with independents, to win both the House and Senate, said Dave Winston, a Republican pollster.

There were always structural challenges to running a primary campaign centered on electability. For more than a decade, Republican voters have tended to care little about which candidate political insiders have deemed to have the best shot at winning and have tended to revolt against the preferences of the reviled party establishment.

Then there are the hurdles specific to Mr. Trump, who was portrayed as unelectable before he won in 2016, and whose 2020 loss has not been accepted by many in the party.

In a sign of how far electability has diminished, Republican voters today say they are more likely to support a candidate who agrees with them most on the issues over someone with the best chance to beat Mr. Biden, according to the Times/Siena College poll. They are prioritizing, in other words, policy positions over electability.

Mr. DeSantis has sharpened his own electability argument heading into the first debate, calling out Mr. Trump by name. Theres nothing that the Democratic Party would like better than to relitigate all these things with Donald Trump, Mr. DeSantis said in a recent radio interview. That is a loser for us going forward as a party.

The picture is brighter for Mr. DeSantis in Iowa, according to public polling and voter interviews, and that is where he is increasingly banking his candidacy. More than $3.5 million in television ads have aired from one anti-Trump group, Win It Back PAC. Those ads are explicitly aimed at undermining perceptions of Mr. Trump with voter testimonials of nervous former Trump supporters.

For 2024, Trump is not the most electable candidate, one said in a recent ad. I dont know if we can get him elected, said another.

Likely Republican voters in Iowa see Mr. Trump as able to beat Joe Biden more than Mr. DeSantis despite that advertising onslaught, according to a separate Times/Siena College Iowa poll. But the margin is far smaller than in the national poll, and a larger share of Iowa Republicans say they would prioritize a candidate who could win.

Mr. DeSantiss improved standing in the state when it comes to electability is heavily shaped by the views of college-educated Republicans. Among that group, Mr. DeSantis is seen as better able to beat Mr. Biden by a 14-point margin compared with Mr. Trump.

Mr. DeSantis faces his own electability headwinds. Some of those same party insiders who are worried about Mr. Trump topping the ticket have expressed concerns that the hard-line stances the governor has taken especially signing a six-week abortion ban could repel independent voters.

Mr. Danowsky, the financial consultant who was at the bar in downtown Des Moines, worried that Mr. DeSantis was a little extreme, including on transgender rights.

But more Iowa Republicans volunteered concerns about Mr. Trumps viability as the top reason to move on from him, even as they saw Mr. Biden as weak.

I might be one out of 1,000, but I dont think he can beat Biden, Mike Farwell, 66, a retired construction worker in Indianola, said of Mr. Trump. He added that Mr. Biden would be an easy president right now to beat if he faced a strong enough opponent.

Don Beebout, 74, a retiree who lives in Chariton and manages a farm, was worried about Mr. Trump as the party nominee as he waited to hear Mr. DeSantis speak at the state fair. But he also was not sold on any particular alternative.

He may be easy to beat, he said of Mr. Biden, if we get the right candidate.

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan contributed reporting.

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How G.O.P. Views of Biden Are Helping Trump in the Republican ... - The New York Times

Press Release from the Branford Republican Party

The Branford Republicans are announcing a primary election for the 5th District Representative Town Meeting race. This primary will be held at Indian Neck School, inviting all registered Republicans to exercise their voting rights and participate in shaping the future of the district.

Scheduled for Tuesday, Sept. 12, the primary will take place between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m. at Indian Neck School, 12 Melrose Avenue.

A primary election is triggered when an individual seeks to challenge the selections made by the Republican Town Committee. This requires petitioning for the opportunity. Notably, one individual has successfully met the petitioning requirements, leading to the initiation of this primary.

When voters arrive at the polling booths, they will encounter a ballot featuring two distinct sections:

Row A: This section showcases the candidates endorsed by the Republican Town Committee, including Donald Conklin, Dennis Flanigan, Ray Ingraham, and Kyle Nelson.

Row B: Here, voters will find the challenging candidate, Carolyn Sires, who is contesting the choices put forth by the Republican Town Committee.

For those unable to attend the voting location in person, an option for absentee voting is available. Starting Aug. 22, registered Republicans meeting specific criteria can request absentee ballots. To be eligible, voters must meet the following conditions: have a valid reason for absentee voting; be a registered voter within the state of Connecticut; possess a valid Connecticut drivers license, with a recorded signature at the Department of Motor Vehicles; specifically, for this primary, voters must be registered Republicans residing in the 5th District.

An online absentee ballot application is accessible for eligible voters at oabr-sots.ct.gov/ streamlining the process for those meeting the specified criteria.

Additionally, a printable absentee ballot application form can be downloaded from https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/SOTS/ElectionServices/AB-Application/AB_Application_20220922/ED-3-Rev-English-20220922

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Branford Republicans Announce Primary Election for 5th District ... - Zip06.com

There are few things that Republicans and Democrats agree on. But one area where a significant share of each party finds common ground is a belief that the country is headed toward failure.

Overall, 37 percent of registered voters say the problems are so bad that we are in danger of failing as a nation, according to the latest New York Times/Siena College poll.

Fifty-six percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said we are in danger of such failure. This kind of outlook is more common among voters whose party is out of power. But its also noteworthy that fatalists, as we might call them, span the political spectrum. Around 20 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say they feel the same way.

Where they disagree is about what may have gotten us to this point.

Republican fatalists, much like Republican voters overall, overwhelmingly support Donald J. Trump. This group is largely older two-thirds of Republicans over 65 say the country is on the verge of failure and less educated. They are also more likely than Republican voters overall to get their news from non-Fox conservative media sources like Newsmax or The Epoch Times.

Many of these gloomy Republicans see the Biden administrations policies as pushing the country to the verge of collapse.

Things are turning very communistic, said Margo Creamer, 72, a Trump supporter from Southern California. The first day Biden became president he ripped up everything good that happened with Trump; he opened the border let everyone and anyone in. Its just insane.

She added that there was only one way to reverse course: In this next election if Trump doesnt win, were going to fail as a nation.

Many Republicans saw the pandemic, and the resulting economic impact, as playing a role in pushing the country toward failure.

Covid gave everyone a wake-up call on what they can do to us as citizens, said Dale Bowyer, a Republican in Fulton County, Ind. Keeping us in our houses, not being allowed to go to certain places, it was complete control over the United States of America. They think were idiots and we wouldnt notice.

While fewer Democrats see the country as nearing collapse, gender is the defining characteristic associated with this pessimistic outlook. Democratic and Republican women are more likely than their male counterparts to feel this way.

I have never seen things as bleak or as precarious as they have been the last few years, said Ann Rubio, a Democrat and funeral director in New York City. Saying its a stolen election plus Jan. 6, its terrifying. Now were taking away a womans right to choose. I feel like Im watching the wheels come off something.

For many Democrats, specific issues especially abortion are driving their concern about the countrys direction.

Brandon Thompson, 37, a Democrat and veteran living in Tampa, Fla., expressed a litany of concerns about the state of the country: The regressive laws being passed; women dont have abortion access in half the country; gerrymandering and stripping peoples rights to vote stuff like this is happening literally all over the country.

If things continue to go this way, this young experiment, this young nation, is going to fall apart, he said.

Pollsters have long asked a simple question to take the countrys temperature: Are things in the U.S. headed on the right track or are they off in the wrong direction?

Americans views on this question have become more polarized in recent years and are often closely tied to views of the party in power. So it is not surprising, for example, that currently 85 percent of Republicans said the country was on the wrong track, compared with 46 percent of Democrats. Those numbers are often the exact opposite when theres a Republican in the White House.

Views on the countrys direction are also often closely linked to the economic environment. Currently, 65 percent of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction. Thats relatively high historically, though down from last summer when inflation was peaking and 77 percent of Americans said the country was headed in the wrong direction. At the height of the recession in 2008, 81 percent of Americans said the country was headed in the wrong direction.

What seems surprising, however, is the large share of voters who say were on the verge of breaking down as a nation.

Weve moved so far away from what this country was founded on, said William Dickerson, a Republican from Linwood, N.C. Society as a whole has become so self-aware that were infringing on peoples freedoms and the foundation of what makes America great.

He added: We tell people what they can and cant do with their own property and we tell people that youre wrong because you feel a certain way.

Voters contacted for the Times/Siena survey were asked the failing question only if they already said things were headed in the wrong direction. And while this is the first time a question like this has been asked, the pessimistic responses still seem striking: Two-thirds of Republicans who said the country was headed in the wrong direction said things werent just bad they were so bad that America was in danger of becoming a failed nation.

Republicans have Trump and others in their party who have undermined their faith in the electoral system, said Alia Braley, a researcher at Stanfords Digital Economy Lab who studies attitudes toward democracy. And if Republicans believe democracy is crumbling, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, in that they will stop behaving like citizens of a democracy.

She added, Democrats are often surprised to learn that Republicans are just as afraid as they are about the future of U.S. democracy, and maybe more so.

Read more:
Poll Shows Sense of Doom Among Voters in Both Parties - The New York Times

Solar panels operating in Detroit. | Paul Sancya/AP Photo

Josh Siegel reports

Not all Republicans want to repeal the climate law that turns 1 today.

In fact, my colleague Kelsey Tamborrino and I spoke to dozens of people from all corners of the country and discovered that many GOP officials in rural areas are welcoming the billions of dollars in clean energy incentives coming from President Joe Bidens signature legislation.

In Rogers County, Okla., Republican Commissioner Ron Burrows looks at the Inflation Reduction Act and sees jobs 1,000 of them to be exact. At least once the Italian giant Enel opens its $1 billion solar manufacturing plant there in 2025.

Burrows is not alone. Other political and economic leaders in Oklahoma, including Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt, are glad to receive the major investments they say theyd never have attracted without the climate law.

You can imagine being in a small rural community and trying to get economic development to come its a challenge, said Rosalie Griffith, a board member of the Rural Economic Development of Inola. But unless you develop, youre going to die.

Burrows said Enels decision to locate in his tiny town east of Tulsa population 1,500 would not have happened without local buy-in.

I just dont see a company making that sort of investment without some level of comfort that its not adversarial, its not split, he said.

By contrast, his local member of Congress GOP Rep. Josh Brecheen views the Inflation Reduction Act through the prism of most national Republicans. Brecheen told me he opposes the use of taxpayer subsidization to bolster Democrats favored green industries and is seeking to repeal the law.

Kelsey and I found that same disconnect between state and local GOP officials in rural areas and their federal representatives across the country.

Theres even a similar, but less dramatic, dynamic unfolding in upstate New York. GOP Rep. Marc Molinaro voted to repeal the Inflation Reduction Acts clean energy incentives, and thats made him a top target of Democrats in the 2024 election. His district is one of 18 that voted for Biden but are held by Republicans.

Inflation Reduction Act money catalyzed Canadian company Zinc8 Energy Solutions decision to locate a planned battery factory in Molinaros purple district.

The project is expected to bring up to 500 new jobs to a Hudson Valley region still suffering from the loss of its manufacturing base in the 1990s. Thats exciting James Quigley, a Republican who drives a Tesla and is the supervisor for the town of Ulster, where Zinc8 plans to locate.

Im a businessman. Ill take the money, thats all I care about, Quigley said. I will move heaven and earth to get projects done over here.

Its Wednesday thank you for tuning in to POLITICOs Power Switch. Im your host, Arianna Skibell. Power Switch is brought to you by the journalists behind E&E News and POLITICO Energy.

A big thanks to Josh Siegel for sharing his and Kelsey Tamborrinos reporting with us today, and to my neighbors for supplying internet as Duke Energy works to restore my and thousands of other customers power following a major outage here in Durham, N.C. I am waiting, if you will, for my power switch fix.

Send your tips, comments, questions to [emailprotected]. And folks, lets keep it classy.

Today in POLITICO Energys podcast: Alex Guilln breaks down how a group of young people in Montana won a historic lawsuit when a judge ruled that the states pro-fossil-fuel laws and policies violated the state constitution.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) speaks with other Democrats and climate activists. | Francis Chung/POLITICO

Looking ahead to 2024 Biden and his Cabinet are celebrating the first year of their massive climate law. But his partys climate hawks are already planning for whats next, writes Emma Dumain.

Climate change is an existential threat, and the IRA was a modest step forward, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told Emma. Many liberal lawmakers and climate advocates say Democrats must make combating global warming the partys top priority the next time they gain unified control of Congress and the White House.

If a Republican president takes the White House, however, the law could be hindered through executive action, write Hannah Northey and Timothy Cama.

That would likely hurt U.S. efforts to be a world leader on climate change and meet international commitments, while undercutting Democrats top achievement in recent years.

Bidens climate law & the state of EVs The Inflation Reduction Act is the biggest policy boost for electric vehicle production in U.S. history, but will its promise translate into actual factories and job gains, along with support across the political spectrum?

David Ferris breaks down how many jobs could be created, whether Republicans will become EV champions and if a domestic EV supply chain is within reach.

Complicating the picture is a push in Texas and other states to create punitive barriers to the EV transition, write Mike Lee and Adam Aton.

Britain declines IRA route to investments U.K. government officials say Britain will not follow in Bidens $369 billion footsteps when it comes to spurring clean energy. Instead, they will rely on existing policy levers to counter the U.S.'s domestic manufacturing incentives, writes Stefan Boscia.

U.K. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt promised to deliver Britains official response to the Inflation Reduction Act this coming fall. The anticipated modest approach may upset U.K. businesses calling for more interventions to compete with Bidens law, but a minister told POLITICO that the money just isnt there.

Delivered hot: Millions of app delivery drivers are feeling the strain as the nation experiences some of the hottest months in recorded history.

Damage control: A new study found that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius would save half the worlds glaciers.

A showcase of some of our best subscriber content.

A sign indicates the presence of a pipeline below the ground in Daisytown, Pa., on Oct. 22, 2020. | Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

Pennsylvania researchers have found that children who live within a mile of an oil or gas well are five to seven times more likely to develop lymphoma, a rare form of cancer.

Biden and first lady Jill Biden will travel to Maui, Hawaii, on Monday after wildfires on the island left over 100 people dead.

Extreme heat in Oregon is testing the effectiveness of new worker protections enacted after a record-shattering heat wave struck the Pacific Northwest in 2021, killing at least 800 people.

Thats it for today, folks! Thanks for reading.

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The small-town Republicans who love IRA - POLITICO

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speak on a book tour in Des Moines on March 10, 2023.

Photo: Rachel Mummey for The Washington Post via Getty Images

It reads like a headline pulled from a dystopian near future: Artificial intelligence is being used to ban books by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou from schools. To comply with recently enacted state legislation that censors school libraries, Iowas Mason City Community School District used ChatGPT to scan a selection of books and flag them for descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act. Nineteen books including Morrisons Beloved, Margaret Atwoods The Handmaids Tale, and Khaled Hosseinis The Kite Runner will be pulled from school library collections prior to the start of the school year.

This intersection of generative AI and Republican authoritarianism is indeed disturbing. It is not, however, the presage of a future ruled by censorious machines. These are the banal operations of reactionary social control and bureaucratic appeasement today. Unremarkable algorithmic systems have long been used to carry out the plans of the power structures deploying them.

AI is not banning books. Republicans are. The law with which the school district is complying, signed by Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds in May, is yet another piece of astroturfed right-wing legislation aimed at eliminating gender nonconformity, anti-racism, and basic reproductive education from schools, while solidifying the power of the conservative family unit.

Bridgette Exman, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction at the Mason City Community School District, noted in a statement that AI will not replace the districts standard book banning methods. We will continue to rely on our long-established process that allows parents to have books reconsidered, Exman said.

At most, the application of ChatGPT here is an example of an already common problem: the use of existing technologies to give a gloss of neutrality to political actions. Its well established that predictive policing algorithms repeat the same racist patterns of criminalization as the data on which theyre trained theyre taught to treat as potentially criminal those demographics the police have already deemed criminal.

In Iowas book ban, the algorithmic tool a large language model, or LLM followed a simplistic prompt. It didnt process for context. The situation in which a school district is looking to ban texts with descriptions of sex acts had already shaped the outcome.

As Iowa newspaper The Gazette reported, the school district compiled a long list of commonly challenged books to feed to the AI program. These are books that fundamentalist Republicans taking over school boards and leading state houses have already sought to ban. Little surprise, then, that books dealing with white supremacy, slavery, gendered oppression, and sexual autonomy were included in the algorithms selection.

Further comments from Exman reveal more about the operations of authority at play, which have little to do with powerful AI control. As she told Popular Science, Frankly, we have more important things to do than spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to protect kids from books. At the same time, we do have a legal and ethical obligation to comply with the law. Our goal here really is a defensible process.

Both casually dismissive of the Republican legislation, yet willing to scramble with tech shortcuts to appear in swift compliance, Exmans approach reflects both cowardice and complicity on the part of the school district. Surely, protecting students access to, rather than protecting them from, a rich variety of books is what school systems should be doing with their time. But the myth of algorithmic neutrality makes the book selection defensible in Exmans terms, both to right-wing enforcers and critics of their pathetic law.

The use of ChatGPT in this case might prompt tech doomerism fears. Yet focusing on concerns about generative AI as a potentially all-powerful force ultimately serves Silicon Valley interests. Both concerns about AI safety and dreams of AI power fuel companies like OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, with millions of dollars going into researching AI as an allegedly existential risk to humanity. As critics like Edward Ongweso Jr. have pointed out, such narratives look, either fearfully or hopefully, to a future of AI almighty, while overlooking the way current AI tools, although regularly shoddy and inaccurate, are already hurting workers and aiding harmful state functions.

From management devaluing labor to reactionaries censoring books AI doesnt have to be intelligent, work, or even exist, wrote Patrick Blanchfield of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research on Twitter. Its real function is just to mystify / automate / justify what the powerful were always doing and always going to do anyways.

To underline Blanchfields point, the ChatGPT book selection process was found to be unreliable and inconsistent when repeated by Popular Science. A repeat inquiry regarding The Kite Runner, for example, gives contradictory answers, the Popular Science reporters noted. In one response, ChatGPT deems Khaled Hosseinis novel to contain little to no explicit sexual content. Upon a separate follow-up, the LLM affirms the book does contain a description of a sexual assault.

Yet accuracy and reliability were not the point here, any more than protecting children is the point of Republican book bans. The myth of AI efficiency and neutrality, like the lie of protecting children, simply offers, as the assistant superintendent herself put it, a defensible process for fascist creep.

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AI Isn't Banning Books in Iowa Schools. Republicans Are. - The Intercept