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Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, five months into her first run for president, acknowledges the position she is in.

Though she was the first Republican to announce a challenge to former President Donald J. Trump, she hasnt spent a dime on television ads, is polling well behind Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and has struggled at times to make a case for her campaign.

But in an interview on Friday, at a picnic table outside a Veterans of Foreign Wars post in the small town of Lancaster, N.H., Ms. Haley downplayed concerns about her standing in the primary. Its early in the race, she said, and many voters have yet to tune in to the campaigns.

I look at it like one goal after another; I dont look at the end, she said. I know that by mid-fall, this is going to be totally different. Once you pass Labor Day, the numbers start to shift. And you can look at history for that. Thats not me just hoping, thats me knowing.

As she traversed small towns in the mountainous North Country region of New Hampshire last week, she tacitly acknowledged the uphill race, while also telling her story of overcoming long political odds to win South Carolinas governorship in 2010, making her the first woman to serve as governor of the state and the second governor of Indian descent.

During her appearances, Ms. Haley also mixed in subtle digs at her primary rivals.

I did not go to an Ivy League school like the fellas that are in this race, she told voters in a North Conway community center on Thursday. I went to a public university. Touting her degree in accounting from Clemson University, she said: Im not a lawyer. Accountants are problem solvers.

Ms. Haleys most recent swing through New Hampshire, which holds the partys first primary, was billed by her campaign as a grass-roots-focused trip, and one intended to introduce her to voters in this part of the state as a former state executive with roots in the rural South, rather than an establishment figure with Washington ties.

Frank Murphy, 54, who moved to northern New Hampshire from South Carolina in 2016, knows Ms. Haley as his former governor. When she introduced herself to the voters crowded into the Lancaster V.F.W. post, he raised his hand within the first few minutes of her speech to tell her he was from Charleston.

I got to see firsthand what she did to help the economy down there, he said, adding that he was elated to see her running for president. To come into a small town meeting like this and to speak to people and to get them to engage and to talk and ask questions? Thats what you want from a politician, he said.

The challenge for Ms. Haley is that her credentials might be more of a liability than an asset in a Republican primary that seems to be geared more toward personality than policy, with much attention concentrated on Mr. Trumps legal troubles and Mr. DeSantiss focus on social and cultural issues.

In small events and meet-and-greets, Ms. Haley spoke as much about her family and personal background as she did about the economy and foreign policy.

She complimented the scenery of the North Country, adding that its close-knit communities reminded her of her hometown, Bamberg, S.C. Her upbringing as a member of the only Indian American family in town We werent white enough to be white, we werent Black enough to be Black, she said taught her to look hard for the similarities she shared with others.

Speaking to voters at the V.F.W. outpost in Lancaster on Friday, she poked fun at the southern accents she is used to hearing in South Carolina and tested out a New England twang, asking those present if her saying Lan-cah-stah made her sound local.

Somebody said I sounded like I was from Boston, she acknowledged, to sympathetic laughs.

Ms. Haley has focused intensely on New Hampshire. By the end of this week she will have made 39 stops in the Granite State, far outpacing most of the Republican field. She is one of the few 2024 Republican contenders along with Vivek Ramaswamy to visit the counties in the states North Country region, which sits less than 200 miles from the Canadian border and has woodsy, winding roads stretching through the White Mountain range.

Her campaign says it is hanging its hopes on a growing network of supporters and volunteers in the far corners of the state, rather than spending money on radio or television ads a longstanding tradition of glad-handing and retail politicking.

The strategy has yet to generate much momentum. Most polls of the primary in New Hampshire show her in fourth place, behind Mr. Trump, Mr. DeSantis and former Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, who has also spent a significant amount of time in the state.

Ms. Haleys supporters have expressed frustration and confusion that their preferred candidate whose past roles as U.N. ambassador and governor prompted an event moderator to ask a crowd on Thursday to decide by applause which title he should use to introduce her has barely polled above 4 percent in most national public polls.

We dont understand that because shes doing so well, said Beverly Schofield, an 84-year-old Republican voter, clad in red, white and blue, who drove from Vermont with her daughter to see Ms. Haley in New Hampshire on Friday. Its very impressive that shes doing as well as she is. But Id like to see her move up that ladder quickly.

Ms. Haleys standing reflects the challenges of campaigning in this particular primary more than it does her political capabilities, her supporters say. The Republican field has ballooned to a dozen candidates, splintering the anti-Trump vote, while his recent and prospective indictments seem to have only put the former president closer to capturing the nomination. Ms. Haleys supporters are wondering how the campaign intends to turn things around.

Thats the question I wanted to ask her, said Ted Kramer, 81, a retired marketing executive who attended Ms. Haleys town hall in North Conway. Shes got to get the profile up.

Ms. Haley pointed to previous Republican front-runners who later fizzled out, such as Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and former Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin. The race so far has been painted largely as a two-man race between Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis, Ms. Haley said, but voters are likely to sour on one.

I know the reality of how quickly somebody can go up and how quickly they can fall, she said. The shiny object today is not the shiny object tomorrow. So its about not peaking too soon.

She added, Im very realistic about what the benchmarks are and what we need to overcome.

Those markers include securing the required number of donors and funds to make the debate stage in August which she has done. She also said she would continue to focus on Iowa and New Hampshire while building on the base she has in South Carolina, another early state, where she and Senator Tim Scott, who represents the state, are aiming to leverage similar voter bases and donor networks. The two have not spoken since he launched his campaign, she said.

Ms. Haley also admitted to feeling underestimated in the race. She is often included in conversations about vice-presidential contenders, though she has emphatically said she is not eyeing the position. She also said that many, particularly in the news media, failed to recognize the street cred that I have, listing political wins and averted crises seen during her tenure as South Carolina governor and as United Nations ambassador. I mean, these were no small jobs, she said.

Republicans longing for an alternative to Mr. Trump made up a large portion of the crowds at Ms. Haleys events, along with moderate Republicans and independent voters. Few who attended Ms. Haleys events this week said they were fully committed to supporting her, and many said they wanted to test the political waters, a signature of campaigning in New Hampshire, where most primary voters can expect to hear from every candidate in person, usually more than once.

Ms. Haley, eager to sway some of those who were on the fence, made policy points on the stump and condemned Democrats on race, education and inclusion of transgender athletes. She criticized both Democrats and Republicans for the handling of Covid-19 and chastised Congress, asking voters if they could point to anything their representatives in Washington had done for them.

She also drew on her foreign policy background, saying that the biggest threat to the United States is China and repeatedly criticizing the Biden administration on its approach, folding in terse words for Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who is visiting the country this week.

Joanne Archambault, an independent voter who lives near North Conway, said she liked Ms. Haleys message and saw her as an authoritative speaker on policy issues. Still, she said that Ms. Haleys talk of foreign policy distracted from domestic priorities.

I think theres too much focus about overseas stuff, too much talk about the border and about China, she said. Lets talk about the problems we are facing you know, gun violence, abortion, lets talk about those things. Lets focus on this country and not what other countries are doing.

Her closing message to voters has been an entreaty to them to tell others to support her. That was good news to Mr. Murphy, the South Carolina transplant who said he was committed to voting for Ms. Haley in the primary in January.

She said tell 10 people. Ill probably tell 20, he said.

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Nikki Haley Is Focused on New Hampshire and Moving Up in the ... - The New York Times

By Steve Miller Real Clear Wire

COSTA MESA, Calif. I cant begin to understand what ballot harvesting is, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the former Republican House Speaker, said in an interview in the wake of a 2018 political upset in Orange County, California. Democrats had swept the congressional seats in one of Californias few Republican strongholds, largely due to a well-executed strategy of harvesting, or the collection and submission of ballots by someone other than the voter.

Three election cycles later, Republicans are still on the back foot when it comes to the nation's recent embrace of absentee, mail, and early voting. But what critics call election month looks likely to endure indefinitely after taking hold in pandemic-prompted voting procedures widely adopted in 2020, ostensibly as a health precaution to promote social distancing.

After President Trumps defeat in 2020, Republican-led legislatures worked to turn back the emergency voting measures in many states, to mixed success, and after an expected GOP wave fizzled in 2022 the Republican Party has turned away from Trumps vilification of absentee voting to essentially say, If you cant beat em, join em.

"We don't want to wait till the fourth quarter to start scoring touchdowns when you have four quarters to put points on the board," Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said last month in promoting the new strategy. We have to change the culture among Republican voters.

But a range of factors suggest that Republicans are a long way from implementing that change. This impression emerges from interviews with election veterans from both parties in a number of pivotal states; disclosures about the lefts prodigious fundraising for private assistance to local election offices; and Democrats reinvigorated focus on community organizing in dense urban areas. The latter is a tradition reaching back more than a century but exploited in recent cycles to overwhelm the GOPs onetime edge in collecting absentee ballots from the elderly and members of the armed forces.

The left is about 20 years ahead on getting these votes, said Michael Bars, executive director of the conservative Election Transparency Initiative. You can say its an absentee, get-out-the-vote model, an absentee ballot chase or ballot harvesting. But theyre ahead.

And catching up isnt easy, an RNC official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in giving a grim assessment of a ground game still unfamiliar to the GOP.

Strangers going door-to-door met with a ton of resistance from Republican voters, the official said. He was referring to a strategy shift in 2016 when the RNC changed its field structure to resemble the work that the Obama campaign did in 2008 and 2012 by focusing on training people to be organizers, to put together teams that were part of the community. It turned out that, with Republicans tending to live in suburban developments, soliciting was frowned upon, and even prohibited, while the Democrats were, as ever, more welcome in urban settings, visiting apartment buildings, public libraries, and residential centers.

With even McDaniel still saying she doesnt like absentee voting, not every Republican official is embracing the message.

We promote in-person voting and we promote a message around in-person voting, said Marci McCarthy, chairman of the DeKalb County (Georgia) Republican Party, in a jurisdiction that contains part of Atlanta and where President Biden won 83% of the vote in 2020. Nationally, 65% of the roughly 65 million absentee and mail-in voters said they voted for Biden in 2020.

The Golden State Lesson

After enacting new voting rules in 2016 that allowed harvesting, California Democrats in the 2018 midterms dispatched volunteers and paid staffers to neighborhoods rich in registered Democrats who had received an absentee ballot but had not returned it. Some of the agents collected up to 200 ballots at a time and turned them in for counting.

Results were delayed as the ballots trickled in a harbinger of todays prolonged ballot counts as more states rely on mail voting. But the result was eventually clear: a GOP drubbing in Orange County.

We got our asses handed to us, said Jessica Millan Patterson, chair of Californias Republican Party, whose 2019 election to office was in part based on her vow to embrace harvesting for the party and avenge the Orange County defeat. Democrats in California have normalized what would be considered voter fraud in the rest of the country. If I had my way, harvesting would be illegal, but we have to win more elections if we want to change laws.

After taking over the partys ground game, she coordinated each county partys street teams, assembling paid staffers and volunteers to knock on doors of registered Republicans or those who have not registered but may be open to voting.

By 2020, local Republicans were holding ballot parties as part of campaign events, where people could hand over their ballots, specified in social media invitations as a secure location, to be delivered to the election office.

The Opposition

Progressives defended their advantage. They followed their California triumph in 2018 with widespread ballot collection efforts in 2020s presidential election and the 2022 midterms, where they largely thumped Republicans nationally, including holding the Senate despite widespread predictions that Republicans would sweep both houses of Congress.

Conservative critics contend that illegal harvesting was behind Democrat wins in Georgia and Arizona in 2020, although investigations failed to find illicit activity.

What they did find, though, was a well-oiled progressive machine with roots in community organizing, working with like-minded state administrations on ballot design, drop-box placement, and deploying lobbyists to push progressive voting strategies.

These are funded in part by $1 billion from nonprofits and individuals, the most influential of which is the Center for Technology and Civic Life, led by Tiana Epps-Johnson, a former fellow at the Obama Foundation who is joined at the center by staffers who learned their politics in progressive advocacy groups.

The voting strategy network is complemented by an impressive cadre of social media influencers. What was termed a block by block street fight by former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe in a 2020 book became a crusade for urban votes. Private funding distributed by the CTCL helped get-out-the-vote efforts in those areas by disproportionately allocating per-vote money to Democratic areas.

Ballot collectors go door-to-door in their targeted areas, working from a daily roadmap of match backs, or a list of voters who have received a mail ballot but have not yet cast it.

In Washington, Republicans start each election at zero and Democrats at 90, said Don Skillman, co-founder of Voter Science, a voter data group based in Bellevue, Washington. Democrats know who donors and voters are and where they are. They have an eco-system with this non-profit outreach and know who they are talking to.

Washingtons state Republican party did not respond to an interview request.

The New Order

The evolving hybrid voting procedures vary widely from state to state and, depending on the ways they came about, may or may not reflect the state autonomy envisioned in the U.S. Constitutions stipulation that the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof.

Ballot harvesting is explicitly illegal in Mississippi, while 11 other states have no law addressing the practice. Some states permit designated people, such as a relative or housemate, to turn in ballots, while 19 states allow a broader form of collection where voters can choose the person they want to act as their agent.

Republican lawmakers around the country have enacted numerous state and local laws since the pandemic-panicked 2020 national election in efforts to curb mail ballots and undo rules that allowed unpoliced mail ballot drop boxes, mass mailing of ballots and applications, and private grants to elections offices that helped progressives get out the vote.

Recent GOP forays into ballot collection include public embarrassments, such as 2018s debacle in North Carolina, where Republican U.S. house candidate Mark Harris enlisted a Democratic operative with ballot harvesting skills. The caper ended up in voter fraud convictions against the harvester and the election results being tossed out.

Last year, a Republican ward leader in Philadelphia was ousted after it was alleged his campaign went door-to-door signing up mail-in voters, then having their ballots sent to the campaign headquarters.

Colorado and Wisconsin

Other states are just starting to embrace the collection strategy. In Colorado, where lawmakers last year sought to return the all-mail voting state to traditional, voting day elections, Republicans are trying to incorporate ballot collection into their ground game.

The 2024 election will be our first foray into ballot harvesting, Colorado GOP party chairman Dave Williams told RealClearInvestigations. Williams is one of several state GOP leaders to confirm that voting mechanisms Republican voters were told just four years ago would ruin the integrity of voting will be embraced by conservative parties and candidates in 2024.

Its going to come down to getting enough money to ensure we can implement a [ballot collection] operation, he said, adding that it will take thousands of volunteers to match the Democrats.

In Wisconsin, the Republican Party now sends mail ballot applications to its base voters as soon as early voting begins, encouraging them to cast their ballots from home. Harvesting in Wisconsin has been part of a legal back-and-forth and the courts will eventually determine its legality in the state, which has moved from swing state to reliably Democratic since 2018.

If it is permitted, we will incorporate that into our ground game, said Wisconsin state Republican Party executive director Mark Jefferson. As much as we may not like the expansion of absentee and early voting, we have to use it.

In a test for 2024, Jefferson said, the party used harvesting in the 2022 state Supreme Court race.

We turned out our base effectively, he said. But the party lost both the race and its majority on the court in a progressive voter backlash to the U.S. Supreme Courts overturning of Roe v. Wade, which had asserted a constitutional right to abortion.

Over the course of several cycles, I think we can get there, Jefferson said, optimistic that the party can use collection and other progressive tactics to win elections. In the meantime, I think we have to push it, but we also need to look for any opportunity to ensure that ballot integrity is still protected.

The Costly Match Back Game

A well-funded harvesting operation has the money to obtain updated match back files almost daily during a voting period. These updated voter lists are available to anyone, although a connection or relationship with the election administration office helps pry them loose. The money to pay for them comes from parties and candidates, or in some cases the activist nonprofits deploying ballot collectors.

Some groups can afford to buy that file every day, especially in the urban areas, said Michael Der Manouel Jr., former vice chairman of the California Republican Party. And they can do it from election administrators who care about the outcome of the election, and most of them are Democrats.

Obtaining the files is eased by a good relationship with the local election administrator, he added. In Wisconsin in 2020, the quest by progressive agents to retrieve the voter file daily was chronicled in a report generated during the states legislative inquiry into the November election.

Progressive groups have gained influence over election administrations through private grants, conferences and the designing of election materials including ballot applications and election department websites, all with an emphasis on voter recruitment and repeating Democratic talking points, such as purported misinformation and alleged threats to democracy.

Speakers at the conferences include representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union and representatives from the progressive group Democracy Now.

Most recently, four progressive nonprofit foundations have pledged to distribute $125 million in grants as The Election Trust Initiative, a subsidiary of the Pew Charitable Trusts, to provide private funding to elections offices over the next five years.

Their mission is to strengthen the nonpartisan evidence, organizations, and systems that help local and state officials operate secure, transparent, accurate and convenient elections, according to a press release.

The Biden Administration Wades In

The federal government is bolstering its newly created Election Community Liaison office, an arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, offering a salary of up to $183,000 for hires to, in part, pursue election offenses.

A member of President Bidens cabinet also has connections to the move to change voting. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm in 2020 was on the board of the National Vote at Home Institute, a progressive nonprofit that has successfully pressured states through lobbying and funding to adopt more permissive mail voting. The group has also privately funded public elections departments through its grant program. Her one year on the board coincided with an increase in the institutes revenue from $1.1 million in 2019 to $8 million during Granholms tenure.

Several other Biden administration appointees worked for progressive elections operations including Michelle Obamas When We All Vote and the Voter Registration Project.

These groups have been part of a push toward mail voting and looser rules regarding ballot collection, combating Republican efforts to limit or regulate those practices.

Republicans used to own absentee voting, said Paul Bentz, a political consultant in Arizona, referring to traditional GOP efforts to collect the ballots of the elderly and military service members. But theyve given up that advantage.

Critics of the GOPs newfound strategy of ballot collection contend that it may be too late, at least to win in 2024.

The nature of the left is to never stop fighting and usually their fight is smart, said Scott Walter, president of the conservative Capital Research Center, which studies the influence of nonprofits on politics. They have multiple think tanks dedicated to nothing but winning elections. And there are no Republican counterparts.

While Republicans will engage in the same practices as their foes, harvesting for Republicans wont work, said Der Manouel, the former vice chair of the California GOP.

Republican voters dont need to have their vote harvested. The only reason it works for Democrats is because they could never turn out their voters. Whats going to happen is Republicans are going to start doing this and find that they dont have nearly enough ballots to harvest to make a difference.

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Why are Republicans inept at rounding up absentee votes? - The Highland County Press

By the Editorial Board

Remember when Republicans would boldly stand up to any attempts to tell capitalists how to run their businesses? The GOP still claims to be the pro-business party, but you wouldnt know it from the way many in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail are harassing corporations for the sin of responding constructively to societys evolution on issues like climate change and LGBTQ rights.

As unnerving as it is to watch Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and ranking House Republicans attacking corporate America with all the fervor of 1960s anti-capitalism socialists, its a telling illustration of just how situational the partys once staunchly pro-corporate legacy has become.

Corporate America has to a large extent always reflected the societal mores of the nation at large. The pre-sexual-revolution, pre-Civil Rights era of corporate advertising (as dramatized, for example, in the cable TV series Mad Men) vigorously reinforced the stringent gender and racial roles widely accepted at the time until it became profitable for advertisers to recognize the cultural changes around them. Or at least unprofitable to ignore them.

Youve come a long way, baby, declared the iconic late 1960s ad campaign for Virginia Slims cigarettes. It sounds today like paternalism in service to a deadly habit, but it was nonetheless an example of fundamental evolution in how corporate America interacted with a changing society. Similarly, overtly racist corporate ad campaigns were commonplace until the Civil Rights movement rendered them bad for business.

Say what you will about Republican politicians of those bygone eras, but it generally wouldnt have occurred to them to suggest that big government should second-guess advertising or investment decisions being made in the boardrooms. The GOPs fervent hands-off approach to business regulation wasnt an entirely positive thing, especially in relation to, for example, workers rights and environmental issues. But it was a genuine principle that was consistently applied.

Where is that principle now?

The latest GOP anti-business antics DeSantis campaign against Disney for opposing his dont say gay law in Florida, Hawleys various attacks against corporate entities for supporting what he labels woke capitalism, and now pending House GOP committee hearings pushing back at climate-conscience corporate investing all represent the kind of big-government meddling in business decisions that would have horrified Republicans of a generation ago.

The irony is especially thick when you consider that the GOP today is also pursuing a free-speech crusade that seeks to protect First Amendment rights for people who spread toxic lies online but apparently not for corporations. This from the party that has vociferously supported the landmark 2010 case Citizens United v. FEC, which found that corporations have the same free-speech rights as individuals speech rights some of those same Republicans now seek to curtail.

To borrow from that old cigarette ad, society has come a long way from the days when people were automatically devalued based on their gender, their skin color or who they love. Corporations are merely reflecting that evolution along with growing acceptance of the science behind climate change analysis in their advertising, investments and other public interactions. Those corporations, apparently, have come further along than the political party that used to have their backs.

Views from the editorial board, opinions from guest and national columnists plus the latest letters from our readers.

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Editorial: Corporations are evolving with the times. Their former ... - St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) offered up a head-spinning defense of white nationalists on Monday, saying hes against racism but that many of them just have different beliefs.

Tuberville, who has blocked hundreds of military promotions to protest the Pentagons abortion policy, was asked by CNNs Kaitlan Collins about comments he made in May when asked about white nationalists.

I call them Americans, he said at the time.

He didnt back down, saying hes against racism but believes white nationalists are just Americans and that the term is just a cover word for the Democrats now where they can use it to try to make people mad across the country, identity politics. Im totally against that.

Collins reminded him what the term actually means.

A white nationalist is someone who believes that the white race is superior to other races, she said.

Well, thats some peoples opinion, Tuberville replied, and again he defined a white nationalist as an American.

Its not an opinion; white nationalists are literally defined as one of a group of militant white people who espouse white supremacy and advocate enforced racial segregation, according to Merriam-Webster.

But Tuberville said theyre Americans who have different beliefs while repeating that hes totally against racism.

A white nationalist is racist, senator, Collins reminded him.

Well, thats your opinion, Tuberville said, as he did earlier. Thats your opinion.

(Story continues below video)

Tuberville has a history of racist rhetoric so much so that his own brother called him out over it.

Due to recent statements by him promoting racial stereotypes, white nationalism and other various controversial topics, I feel compelled to distance myself from his ignorant, hateful rants, musician Charles Tuberville wrote on Facebook in May. I DO NOT agree with any of the vile rhetoric coming out of his mouth.

Last year, the NAACP criticized him for flat out racist, ignorant and utterly sickening comments comparing Black people to criminals.

Story continues

Critics on Twitter called him out for his latest comments:

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Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville Slammed For Outrageous Defense Of White Nationalists - Yahoo News

On Tuesday, Republicans in North Carolina overrode Gov. Roy Coopers veto to pass a strict limit on bodily autonomy in the form of a 12-week abortion ban.

In addition to this new limit on abortion, the law extends the waiting period for people seeking abortions to 72 hours and puts onerous new rules on clinics. As intended, the net effect is to limit access to abortion and other reproductive health services to everyone but those with the time and resources to seek care outside the state.

North Carolina Republicans are obviously not the only ones fighting to ban, limit or restrict the right to bodily autonomy, whether abortion or gender-affirming health care for transgender people. All across the country, Republicans have passed laws to do exactly that wherever they have the power to do so, regardless of public opinion in their states or anywhere else. The war on bodily autonomy is a critical project for nearly the entire G.O.P., pursued with dedication by Republicans from the lowliest state legislator to the partys powerful functionaries on the Supreme Court.

You might even say that in the absence of a national leader with a coherent ideology and agenda, the actions of Republican-led states and legislatures provide the best guide to what the Republican Party wants to do and the best insight into the society it hopes to build.

I have already made note of the attack on bodily autonomy, part of a larger effort to restore traditional hierarchies of gender and sexuality. What else is on the Republican Partys agenda, if we use those states as our guide to the partys priorities?

There is the push to free business from the suffocating grasp of child labor laws. Republican lawmakers in Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri and Ohio have advanced legislation to make it easier for children as young as 14 to work more hours, work without a permit and be subjected to more dangerous working conditions. The reason to loosen child labor laws as a group of Wisconsin Republicans explained in a memo in support of a bill that would allow minors to serve alcohol at restaurants is to deal with a shortage of low-wage workers in those states.

There are other ways to solve this problem you could raise wages, for one but in addition to making life easier for the midsize-capitalist class that is the material backbone of Republican politics, freeing businesses to hire underage workers for otherwise adult jobs would undermine organized labor and public education, two btes noires of the conservative movement.

Elsewhere in the country, Republican-led legislatures are placing harsh limits on what teachers and other educators can say in the classroom about American history or the existence of L.G.B.T.Q. people. This week in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill that bans discussion in general education courses at public institutions of theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political and economic inequities. He also signed a bill that prohibits state colleges and universities from spending on diversity, equity and inclusion programs beyond what is necessary to retain accreditation as educational institutions.

Nationwide, Republicans in at least 18 states have passed laws or imposed bans designed to keep discussion of racial discrimination, structural inequality and other divisive concepts out of classrooms and far away from students.

Last but certainly not least is the Republican effort to make civil society a shooting gallery. Since 2003, Republicans in 25 states have introduced and passed so-called constitutional carry laws, which allow residents to have concealed weapons in public without a permit. In most of those states, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, it is also legal to openly carry a firearm in public without a permit.

Republicans have also moved aggressively to expand the scope of stand your ground laws, which erode the longstanding duty to retreat in favor of a right to use deadly force in the face of perceived danger. These laws, which have been cited to defend shooters in countless cases, such as George Zimmerman in 2013, are associated with a moderate increase in firearm homicide rates, according to a 2022 study published in JAMA Network Open. Republicans, however, say they are necessary.

If someone tries to kill you, you should have the right to return fire and preserve your life, said Representative Matt Gaetz, who introduced a national stand your ground bill this month. Its time to reaffirm in law what exists in our Constitution and in the hearts of our fellow Americans, he added. We must abolish the legal duty of retreat everywhere.

It should be said as well that some Republicans want to protect gun manufacturers and dealers from lawsuits. Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee did just that this month after a shooting in Nashville killed six people, including three children, in March signing a bill that gives additional protections to the gun industry.

What should we make of all this? In his 1941 State of the Union address, Franklin Roosevelt said there was nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy and that he, along with the nation, looked forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. Famously, those freedoms were the freedom of speech and expression, the freedom of every person to worship God in his own way, the freedom from want and the freedom from fear. Those freedoms were the guiding lights of his New Deal, and they remained the guiding lights of his administration through the trials of World War II.

There are, I think, four freedoms we can glean from the Republican program.

There is the freedom to control to restrict the bodily autonomy of women and repress the existence of anyone who does not conform to traditional gender roles.

There is the freedom to exploit to allow the owners of business and capital to weaken labor and take advantage of workers as they see fit.

There is the freedom to censor to suppress ideas that challenge and threaten the ideologies of the ruling class.

And there is the freedom to menace to carry weapons wherever you please, to brandish them in public, to turn the right of self-defense into a right to threaten other people.

Roosevelts four freedoms were the building blocks of a humane society a social democratic aspiration for egalitarians then and now. These Republican freedoms are also building blocks not of a humane society but of a rigid and hierarchical one, in which you can either dominate or be dominated.

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Opinion | The Four Freedoms, According to Republicans - The New York Times