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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is running hard into the New Hampshire GOP presidential primary, saying he will compete in the First-in-the-Nation state while also running an all-out campaign in Iowa.

“We’re all-in on all the early states,” DeSantis said Thursday.

And, the Florida governor demonstrated he is also all-in when it comes to taking on Trump directly, hammering the former president over his praise for Hezbollah in the wake of attacks on Israel.

 DeSantis took shots at Trump’s criticism of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — and praise for the terrorist group Hezbollah —  in the wake of the Hamas terrorist attack. 

“Now is not the time to do what Donald Trump did by attacking Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, attacking Israel’s defense minister, saying that somehow Hezbollah were very smart. Now’s not the time to air personal grievances about an Israeli prime minister; now’s the time to support their right to defend themselves to the hilt,” DeSantis told reporters Thursday.

And, DeSantis added, in a time of international crisis, he is ready to lead — unlike President Joe Biden. “You’ve got to take that 2 a.m. phone call; you can’t be sleeping like this president did,” he said.

Biden’s administration is mistaken in thinking it can deal with Iran, which has been using Hamas and Hezbollah as proxies to wage war on Israel, DeSantis said. America needs to support Israel’s efforts to eliminate Hamas, starting by cutting funds for Iran.

“(Israel) needs to uproot and eliminate the entire Hamas network and Hamas members,” he said.

Hundreds of supporters and dozens of media members packed into Secretary of State David Scanlan’s office to watch DeSantis file his nomination papers and gladhand with State House staff afterward. 

DeSantis sat with New Hampshire reporters to make his case for the nomination after filing. In a crowded Republican field, DeSantis said he is the only candidate ready to be president on day one.

“If you want a change from Trump, I think I’m the best leader, and I give you the best chance to do well,” he said. “I’ve delivered  more for Republicans, conservative ideas, America First principles than anybody running.”

Trump is facing multiple criminal indictments and, because of that, is unable to focus on the job, DeSantis said. Trump would also be a lame-duck president, only able to serve one term if he were to get reelected.

“I don’t know how, as a lame duck president, with all the stuff he’s dealing with, he can get done what we need to get done.

“A Trump nomination guarantees the next election will be all about Trump, his court cases, his grievances, and his controversies. This sets up Democrats for an easy campaign,” DeSantis said.

“It wouldn’t be about the issues people are concerned about, and it would give the Democrats a huge advantage,” DeSantis added.

While he consistently comes up short of Trump in polling data, usually in second or third place, DeSantis said he is confident he will pick up support closer to the primary. Polls don’t capture the whole picture of the race, he said.

“If you look at the favorability ratings I’ve had, I’m one of the most well-liked Republicans in the country,” DeSantis said.

DeSantis was an early favorite for many Republicans who want to turn the page on Trump, and as a result, he has taken heat from Democrats, Republicans, and the media. 

“I’ve been attacked more than all the other candidates,” DeSantis said.

Minds will start to change once voters can see him up close and learn about his record as governor, he said. He said how he dealt with the COVID crisis, hurricanes, Black Lives Matter protests, and other events showed he is ready and able to lead.

“We showed our mettle when it was called for,” he said. 

Gov. Chris Sununu is happy to debate his support for Education Freedom Accounts, his push to get communities to build more affordable housing, and his problems with the congressional maps drawn by the House GOP majority.

Just don’t call him “John Kasich.”

The New Hampshire Republican has been making news of late by criticizing members of his own party, in particular former President Donald Trump. He has said Republicans in the U.S. Senate are “just as bad” as their Democratic counterparts — a comment quoted by President Joe Biden in his most recent press conference to push the blame for his legislative failures on the GOP.

He has criticized Trump’s suggestion criminals who participated in the January 6 Capitol riot should be pardoned, and he called Trump “misinformed” when he repeatedly claimed (without evidence) New Hampshire’s 2020 election results were in doubt.

But when asked if he is moving into the “John McCain, John Kasich” lane of GOP politics — “The Republican who runs on the fact that he hates Republicans” — Sununu says absolutely not.

“Don’t compare me to John Kasich. John Kasich is an angry guy who goes out of his way to bash his own party. That’s crazy,” Sununu told NHJournal on Wednesday.

As for his critiques of the GOP, Sununu said he was simply upholding a standard he believes leaders of both parties should maintain.

“I’ve expressed frustration, but I didn’t call anyone out by name. Most Americans are frustrated with both parties. Democrats spent four years stonewalling President Trump, and Republicans stonewalling now. And both parties, when they’re in a majority, not reaching out to find consensus.

“I just demand a higher sense of accountability from my fellow elected officials. I think everybody does. I’m not about bashing Republicans,  not at all.”

A few hours later, Trump advisor and Granite State GOP strategist Corey Lewandowski told radio host Howie Carr the former president had tasked him with “finding someone to run against Chris Sununu.”

The governor did not respond to requests for comment on Thursday.

Sununu was traveling between Cato Institute appearances in Florida and flying to the island Republic of Cabo Verde for a signing ceremony to officially establish a State Partnership under the National Guard Bureau’s State Partnership Program.

A few days earlier, he met with Canadian ambassador to the U.S. Kirsten Hillman. Asked if he was burnishing his foreign-policy credentials in advance of a 2024 presidential bid, Sununu just laughed.

The New Hampshire governor was in Florida to tout his state’s Cato ranking as the freest state in America. And for Sununu, that also includes the state’s new Education Freedom Account (EFA) program. Democrats spent most of this week pushing legislation to dismantle or restrict EFAs, which allow students to take the state’s share of their public school funding and use it for private, parochial, or other non-public education options.

The program, in its first year, has more than 1,600 participants.

“The EFAs have been a phenomenal success, and folks who are trying to get rid of them are stuck in an antiquated mentality, as opposed to saying ‘the family and the kids come first,” Sununu said. “Everybody sees it as a success, and most importantly those families are seeing the success — especially the lower-income ones. So we’re excited to keep it growing.”

He also had harsh criticism for EFA opponents like state Rep. Marjorie Porter (D-Hillsborough), who recently testified before the House Education Committee that she pulled her own son out of public school and sent him to a private academy. “It was good we had that option,” she said, though she opposes letting low-income families use state funding to do the same.

“That’s exactly the type of hypocrisy we need to get out of government,” Sununu said. “People see right through that. They’re disgusted by it. The ‘good enough for me, but not for thee’ type of mentality.”

Interestingly, education is also part of what Sununu believes is the biggest challenge facing New Hampshire — a lack of housing. Communities are reluctant to allow new housing construction, particularly housing for younger families because they are convinced educating their children will increase property taxes.

Sununu says that’s misguided NIMBYism.

“Just because of demographics, our schools are going to lose three to five percent of kids over the next few years, so it’s not like they’re going to be overrun with children,” Sununu said. In fact, if we can bring in families, it’s just the opposite. The community’s going to grow, you’re going to avoid funding crises. So you want a healthy balance, I get that.

“But this 1990s mentality of fearing young families moving into your community because they’re going to increase costs to your community? That’s old-fashioned thinking that will just lead to bad economics for that town.”

Tuesday night Gov. John Kasich was on the set of “Cuomo Primetime” with Chris Cuomo, a show that regularly features liberal commentators like Paul Begala, Sally Kohn and Bill Press. Their topic Tuesday night–and every night–is how horrible Donald Trump is and, by extension, how awful the Republican Party is.  Cuomo linked Trump to the “white nationalist” comments of Iowa Congressman Steve King and called him the most untrustworthy person in politics he’d ever seen. Kasich nodded, sighed and largely agreed.

It was the beginning of John Kasich’s career as a paid political analyst for CNN and the end of his campaign for president as a Republican.

Short of volunteering to testify at President Trump’s impeachment hearings, it’s hard to imagine anything the former Ohio governor could do that would damage his viability in the GOP more than going to work for CNN. He and his team must realize how much the Republican base reviles the network of Anderson Cooper and Jim Acosta.  Even MSNBC would be less damaging to Kasich with the GOP base because they view it as openly partisan and, therefore, accept its biases as fair play.

CNN, on the other hand, continually pushes the blatantly #FakeNew that it’s a nonpartisan news platform.  Given its overt, tireless anti-Trump bias (it was the home of Trump-decapitating comedian Kathy Griffin and anti-Trump obsessive Don Lemon) this claim of objectivity drives many conservatives crazy.

Plus–it’s Trump’s target number one.  And John Kasich, who ran for the GOP nomination just three years ago, chooses to go to work for them?  It’s a great way to give Trump the finger, but a lousy way to win the GOP nomination.

“Stick a fork in him, he’s done,” says GOP consultant and longtime NH player Dave Carney. “He’s a non-starter.”

Several other NHGOP politicos agreed. “I don’t know what he’s thinking,” one told NHJournal. “Even if he spends all his airtime bashing Trump instead of the GOP, Republican primary voters are going to hate him for it.”

They weren’t loving him before. A poll of Republicans last year gave Trump a 62-27 margin over Kasich in a primary. Which wouldn’t be so bad…except these were Ohio Republicans.

“Amongst Republicans in New Hampshire who would like to see a challenge to the president, John Kasich rates the highest,” Neil Levesque, executive director of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics told WMUR-TV. “The problem is that he only rates at 9 percent, and the president has a solid 70 percent backing right now amongst Republicans.”

Still, John Kasich is slightly more popular than the Cable News Network.  When asked to name their most trusted news source, only 3 percent of Republicans named CNN.

A Republican activist told NHJournal “Being the Republican who hated Trump the most isn’t going to win you points among the base, even if Trump does crash and burn. ‘I told you so’ is rarely a winning message. Kasich will be in their face, every night on a network they hate, reminding them he’s not on their team. It might be good TV but it’s terrible politics.”

With a legislature like New Hampshire’s, one would think that it would be easier for women to be elected into office and serve their local communities. A recent Dartmouth-led study has found that might not be the case.

The research states that volunteer-based state legislatures may perpetuate gender inequality in political representation. The work-family balance appeared to disproportionately affect female legislators than their male colleagues, since women often take on more family obligations for their households, which then, compete in time and priority with their legislative responsibilities.

“So even though we began this project thinking that the volunteer aspect of the legislature would actually lower the barriers of support for women’s entry into the political sphere, the unpaid and often undervalued nature of the work, actually may heighten them,” said study co-author Kathryn Lively, a professor of sociology at Dartmouth College.

In a volunteer or citizen-based state legislature, for which there is little to no compensation and a lack of resources or staff, members usually draw on their own personal time to fulfill their role as a lawmaker.

The qualitative study focused on the experiences of 17 women legislators in New Hampshire. On average, the women were 60 years old and over, married, and had three children under 18 years old and still living at home. The sample skewed to the left, with 15 respondents affiliating with the Democratic Party and only two with the Republican Party. However, women in the N.H. House tend to be more blue, with 76 representatives in the Democratic Party and 38 lawmakers in the Republican Party out of 400 total legislators. In the N.H. Senate, there are 24 members, and seven are women (four are Democrats and three are Republicans).

Two-thirds of the women in the sample spoke about the stress of juggling work-family obligations with their legislative duties. Respondents said they often were forced to choose between attending committee meetings and staying late to vote in an executive session versus leaving in time to take care of loved ones.

“They’re not going to say, ‘Don’t go take care of your mother,'” one respondent said in the study. “But you feel really bad because you’ll get to [Representatives’ Hall] and your colleagues will be like, ‘Oh, you weren’t here last week, and we had this vote.’ On most votes, you wouldn’t make a difference. But every once in a while, there’s a vote that’s close. If you’re not there, it could change whether it becomes a law or not.”

To juggle their responsibilities, women legislators adopted coping strategies such as bringing their children with them to committee hearings. The women lawmakers often found themselves at a disadvantage, where they simply could not participate as fully in the political process due to the demands and scheduling conflicts associated with child or elder care, the study found.

“If we’re trying to figure out a meeting time or date, those who aren’t divorced will say, ‘Oh my wife is home, she’ll take care of the kids. I don’t have to be home until whenever,'” one lawmaker said. “But the women, you’ll see every woman pull her iPad, phone, or calendar out and say, ‘Oh I’ve got to take my kid to soccer…’ and that’s what happens, because we do have more and I think our values are greater. So then, the men are the ones who go to the meeting.”

In addition, two-thirds of women legislators indicated that their work seemed to be devalued in comparison to paid employment. Some women said their spouses did not seem to take their role as a legislator seriously given that their work only brought in $100 a year, and was therefore, perceived as if it was charity or volunteer work.

“Oh, my husband teases me about it every day, for 12 years,” one woman lawmaker said. “He calls it my hobby. And I know that doesn’t sound very professional, but he says, ‘You’re doing that for free.’ But you know, it’s my community service.”

Many women also discussed having feelings of guilt for missing family time to perform legislative work. Some stated that they felt like they weren’t being “good mothers,” as defined by gender norms. In prioritizing their work-family and legislative responsibilities, they ended up putting themselves last with little to no personal time. In some cases, this ultimately led to them leaving the legislature all together, even if they would have preferred to keep serving.

This problem isn’t unique to New Hampshire. With over two-thirds of the state legislatures falling somewhere in between a “professional” and “volunteer” system, women legislators may often be experiencing the tensions between legislative and work-family responsibilities. The National Conference of State Legislatures classifies only 10 states as true professional legislatures, and 16 are considered part-time legislatures, with the majority falling somewhere between the two.

Instituting changes, such as by scheduling meetings and votes during times that are more agreeable for all, would help address some of the political inequities and enable women to participate more fully as legislators. Although the number of women politicians at all levels of government has been increasing since the 1970s, women still make up only about one-quarter of state legislators in the United States.

Lively’s co-author, Morgan Matthew — a Dartmouth alum — is  beginning to look at how women participate in the political process in institutions like a volunteer-based legislature. Other research topics could look at how gender intersects with other aspects of women legislators’ backgrounds, like socioeconomic status, race, geographic location, and how that shapes their individual coping strategies.

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There are 19 groups in New Hampshire that have signed on to completely resist President Donald Trump, and they’re trying to take a page out of the Tea Party’s playbook.

A new national organization called “Indivisible” is going back to the basics: push back against Trump from the grassroots level. The group published a manifesto, essentially a manual on how to resist the Trump agenda, written by former Democratic congressional staffers.

“We examine lessons from the Tea Party’s rise and recommend two key strategic components: A local strategy targeting individual members of Congress; a defensive approach purely focused on stopping Trump from implementing an agenda built on racism, authoritarianism, and corruption,” they wrote.

Indivisible, which has more than 2,400 local groups registered with them, is advising voters to assemble at the local level and have members focus on their respective elected senators and representatives by speaking out at town hall meetings, asking their elected officials questions at local photo-ops and ceremonies, showing up at their district offices for meetings, and overwhelming their phone lines with coordinated calls.

“We can all learn from their [the Tea Party] success in influencing the national debate and the behavior of national policymakers,” the group wrote. “To their credit, they thought thoroughly about advocacy tactics.”

Many progressives are trying to recreate the circumstances that led to a wave of Republican victories in Congress and state legislatures in the 2010 midterm elections. Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives, gained more seats in the Senate, and flipped several state legislative seats, mostly campaigning on conservative ideals and anti-President Barack Obama rhetoric. But liberals could find it difficult to implement a similar strategy and might find more success if they work with Trump when possible.

The Democratic Party enters the Trump presidency completely shut out of power, with Republicans in control of the White House, House, Senate, and even most state governments. And they’re already divided amongst themselves with progressives versus moderates, and whether they should oppose Trump or work with him on common interests.

Just after his first week in office, it looks like many Democrats and progressive activists want to resist him at every step. The American Civil Liberties Union already filed a lawsuit challenging Trump’s executive order that temporarily bars entry to refugees from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen due to terrorism concerns. A federal judge granted an emergency stay Saturday to stop deportation of people with valid visas who landed in the United States.

But if they continue that mentality, they might run into some trouble in the 2018 midterm elections and even the 2020 presidential election. Even though the party in charge usually doesn’t do well in midterm elections, many House seats will still favor Republican control due to gerrymandering. And Democrats have to defend 10 Senate seats in Republican-controlled states. The political terrain isn’t favorable for them right now.

By refusing to compromise, Democrats may be unable to influence policy even when the president’s agenda aligns with traditional Democratic interests. It’s true that rejecting compromise can reveal internal differences and struggles within the president’s own party, such as with the ongoing Republican debate on repealing Obamacare. More damage could be done by working with Trump and exposing the internal divide in the Republican Party that’s been there since the rise of the Tea Party movement in 2009.

An area some Democrats and Trump could work on together is infrastructure spending, albeit with some disagreements on how to fund it. Trump will almost need Senate Democrats to help get it through Congress. Some of his ideas resemble the “big-government conservatism” of George W. Bush that upset many Tea Partiers. Working out a few deals with Trump could anger some Republicans, and it might do more damage to the president than being vehemently opposed to everything he does.

If the Democrats could unify around that message, they could be in much better shape to retake Congress and the presidency, and ultimately be able to govern themselves and the country better than before.

Uncompromising Democratic opposition is essentially saying the party wants to be more like the Republican Party, by trying to emulate what the Republicans did in 2009. But while the Republicans were “unified” by being anti-Obama anything, they didn’t take the time to rebuild as a party and create a clear message for the base. That was evident by the loss of Mitt Romney in 2012. And now, look at them. They ended up nominating a candidate who barely aligns with their platform. They have full control over the federal government, but they still are struggling to be unified over how to run it, as exhibited by disagreement over many of Trump’s policies.

While it’s understandable that Democrats and progressive activists would want to go about rebuilding their party the same way the Republicans did in 2009, it’s better for their party to engage with Trump in policy debates because those issues are ones they can build a campaign on, and not just on partisan rhetoric.

The Democrats have a prime opportunity to genuinely build their party from the grassroots level up. If the loss of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election taught them anything, it’s that they need to listen to the working class in Middle America again and create a message that appeals not only to their base, but also to disenfranchised voters who feel left out of the system.

It’ll prove to be difficult for them to do that though, especially with some major players on the national stage that see the party going in a different, more radical direction.

Just look at the confirmation hearing battles. Several Democratic senators who are looking to run for president in 2020 won’t vote for anything put forward by Trump out of fear from attacks to their left. John Kelly was confirmed as secretary for homeland security by a vote of 88-11. Some of those “no” votes came from Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.). The more moderate Democrats might feel pressure to vote a certain way in order to follow suit, and especially when the media reports that former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, Warren, and Booker voted one way, it could make it seem like the Democrats who don’t fall in line aren’t supportive of the party.

An unpopular Trump could win another four years if the next Democratic presidential leader is too far outside of the political spectrum.

And speaking of leaders, the race for the next chair of the Democratic National Committee is revealing to show how anti-Trump and against compromise the Democratic Party could be. While members of their party were participating in the Women’s March earlier this month, most of the 10 candidates for DNC chair were at a private fundraising conference held by liberal political operative David Brock. The message that could send to grassroots leaders is that the Democratic Party hasn’t learned its lesson from its recent defeat and instead, continues to listen to big money rather than voters.

The latest forums between the candidates have also shown that there aren’t many disagreements between them; they don’t have many new ideas to jumpstart the party, and they all have zero desire to work with Trump.

“That’s a question that’s absolutely ridiculous,” said New Hampshire Democratic Party chairman Ray Buckley at one of the forums, when he was asked about working with Trump.

If the Democrats try to imitate the Tea Party movement, don’t create a unifying message for its voters, and resist Trump at every turn, then they’re in for a long eight years.

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