Election 2024: Republicans express support for Speaker Johnson, Kristi Noem hedges and other updates from the Sunday shows. (2024)

Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, told CBS that President Biden needed to ensure “that young people feel included in the conversation, not just as a vote but as part of the governing coalition.” He added, “I think part of the frustration by young people is that they oftentimes don’t feel heard. They feel like their voices and their votes are taken advantage of come election time.” He said he thought Biden had taken steps toward including them.

Representative Tony Gonzales, a Republican of Texas whose district encompasses a vast swath of the U.S.-Mexico border, delivered a harsh criticism of his hard-right G.O.P. colleagues who voted against the military aid package to U.S. allies, comparing some members with the Ku Klux Klan. “The way to take out the bully is to bloody their nose,” he said after saying that the days where rank-and-file members were “kind of easygoing” and “put their head down” were over. “The fight is here,” he added.

Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, a Republican vice-presidential contender who supported federal abortion bans when she was in Congress, told CNN that she didn’t anymore because the overturning of Roe v. Wade “returned the power back to the states.” She then sought to distance herself from her own state’s law, which bans abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest, saying it was passed before she became governor.

Asked on CNN if Biden should debate Trump, Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Democrat of Illinois, said Biden was “a terrific debater” but Trump “lies and lies and lies, and it’s so hard to respond to that in the middle of a debate.” He added, “Do you talk about what you want to do for the future, or do you respond to the lies that have come out of Donald Trump’s mouth every minute? So I’m concerned about that, just to be honest with you.”

Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, a potential vice-presidential pick for Donald Trump, refused to say on CNN whether she would have certified the 2020 election as Mike Pence did on Jan. 6. “That was the day we hope we never see again,” she said. “We did not do justice by our country by showing and fighting over that day. We should focus on our freedoms and continue to uphold our Constitution. So talking in hypotheticals is not something that I do.”

President Trump’s campaign committee ended March with $45 million on hand, up from $33.5 million at the end of February, an improvement as he seeks to close the formidable fund-raising gap with President Biden, whose campaign had $85.5 million. It’s not just about donors, though: The Trump campaign’s spending has slowed – in March, it spent just $3.7 million, compared with $29.2 million spent by the Biden campaign.

Lawmakers reiterate support for Johnson on heels of approval of foreign aid package

It echoed the bipartisan messaging from a broad coalition of Democrats and mainstream Republicans who are eager to keep Mr. Johnson in power as far-right members of the House have vehemently opposed his efforts to advance bills that he once opposed. That has required negotiations with Democrats on major legislation, like a $1.2 trillion spending bill that did not feature any of the demands by the ultraconservative flank to impose deep cuts.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, made the case for the speaker’s removal earlier this month and accused Mr. Johnson of presiding over a “complete and total surrender” to President Biden and Democrats.

She dialed up her rhetoric on Sunday after the aid bill passed the House, calling for Mr. Johnson’s resignation and vowing to remove him if he did not step down.

“Mike Johnson’s speakership is over,” she said on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”

But more moderate members of Ms. Greene’s party were deeply critical of those efforts to paint Mr. Johnson’s bipartisan maneuvers as a betrayal.

“The House is a rough and rowdy place, but Mike Johnson is going to be just fine,” Representative Tony Gonzales, Republican of Texas, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “We’re at a point where we’re just trying to govern, and that’s what Mike Johnson has done: governing in an honorable way.”

Voicing his support for the speaker, Mr. Gonzales also vowed to resist the far-right faction of his own party. “The way you take care of a bully is to bloody their nose,” he said. “That’s where we’re at.”

Representative Ro Khanna, the progressive Democrat whose district encompasses parts of Silicon Valley in California, credited Mr. Johnson for the passage of the aid bill.

“I disagree with Speaker Johnson on many issues, and I’ve been very critical of him,” Mr. Khanna said on ABC’s “The Week.” “But he did the right thing here and he deserves to keep his job.”

Mr. Khanna praised Mr. Johnson’s strategy in dividing the bill into three parts, allowing members to vote separately on the aid for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan.

Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas and the chairman of Foreign Affairs Committee, echoed Mr. Khanna and signaled his interest in changing the House rule to make it more difficult for far-right lawmakers to pressure the speaker with his removal.

“When the motion to vacate is threatened every week in the Congress, that is being abused and I think we need to fix that,” Mr. McCaul said on ABC. “They have a gun to the speaker’s head every day, so I think that’s something that we’ll be looking at.”

Representative Jared Moskowitz, Democrat of Florida, who has repeatedly said he would step in to save Mr. Johnson’s job, criticized Ms. Greene’s threat of removal.

“Marjorie Taylor Greene is not a serious person,” he said on “Fox News Sunday,” adding that her efforts to depose Mr. Johnson “would only embolden China, it would only embolden Russia, it would only embolden Iran.”

Luke Broadwater contributed reporting.

Progressive allies rally with Representative Summer Lee as she faces a primary on Tuesday.

Speakers framed Ms. Lee’s race, in Pennsylvania’s 12th District, as crucial to building a movement for working people and to fighting what they cast as billionaire influence in the race.

The rally with several hundred supporters drew a small group of protesters who held signs outside the headquarters of the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers to criticize Ms. Lee and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s stances on the war in Israel and Gaza. Ms. Lee’s primary is one of the first down-ballot electoral tests of the Israel-Gaza conflict this year.

“To fight for common sense in the House is to often be alone. I have seen Summer walk alone,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez said. “On Tuesday, what we must do is show her and show the world and show the people in that big white house that she is not alone.”

“It’s not about winning — it’s about winning big,” she added.

Ms. Lee won a close primary in 2022 against a moderate challenger on her way to become the first Black woman to represent Pennsylvania in Congress. She has garnered broad support from Democrats this year. Even so, she has also faced pressure within her district after becoming one of the first members of Congress to call for an immediate cease-fire, just over a week after Hamas attacked Israel, and Israel responded with a military assault on Gaza.

During her remarks, Ms. Lee reiterated her support for union jobs, affordable housing and a “pro peace movement.” At one point, she told the audience that there was “no room for people who would use our communities against each other for their own political ambitions.”

She framed her race as being about democracy and appeared to acknowledge the heightened focus on her Israel-Gaza stance, saying, “You don’t have a democracy if one issue determines whether or not my community has representation.”

Her opponent, Bhavini Patel, a municipal councilwoman, has repeatedly criticized Ms. Lee’s votes relating to the conflict. Ms. Patel said in an interview that on Sunday she attended a “rally focused on the Jewish community” and decried her opponent’s rally as “bringing people here who are not from here.”

Ms. Lee and her supporters have sharply criticized the involvement of Jeff Yass, a Republican megadonor in Pennsylvania who gave significantly to Moderate PAC, a super PAC backing centrist Democrats and running ads supporting Ms. Patel. Ms. Lee and her supporters have seized on them: Her campaign distributed signs on Sunday that read “Move, Yass! Get out of the way.” (Ms. Patel said she had denounced Mr. Yass and his support.)

Allies of Ms. Lee also indirectly praised her Gaza stance. Mr. Jones told the crowd that Ms. Lee “shows us that solidarity is about consistency in showing up for each other,” and that solidarity includes a spectrum of people, “whether it’s workers in Pittsburgh or the people of Palestine.”

“Summer is somebody who knows that sometimes confrontation is confirmation that we are on the right path for victory,” he said.

And when Ms. Ocasio-Cortez began to criticize AIPAC, the pro-Israel group that is backing challenges to progressive incumbents outside Pennsylvania, the audience promptly booed the group’s mention.

Backers of Ms. Lee have pointed to her diverse coalition as evidence that she can draw support from the groups that the national Democratic Party is looking to motivate, such as young people and voters of color.

Meanwhile, a handful of critics outside the venue, several of whom said they were backing Ms. Patel, held signs that criticized Iran and cast Ms. Lee and Ms. Ocasio-Cortez as opposing Israel. The protesters said they were especially unhappy with Ms. Lee’s vote last week against parts of a foreign aid package that allocated billions to Israel and imposed new sanctions on Iran.

“We as a Jewish community are afraid, and we want her to understand that by not supporting things like Iran sanctions, it makes not just Israel but also America less safe,” said Julie Paris, a regional director for the pro-Israel group StandWithUs and Pittsburgh resident.

But Ms. Lee’s backers vastly outnumbered Ms. Paris and her compatriots.

Will Allison, who served as president of College Democrats at the University of Pittsburgh, said his group had endorsed Ms. Lee, the first primary endorsem*nt he said the group had made.

“We’re very lucky to have her as a congresswoman who can bring the money back to the district and can make the system work for us as her constituents, but who can also authentically hold to her positions and take those tough votes,” he said.

And when Mayor Ed Gainey of Pittsburgh took the stage and asked the crowd, “Y’all know what time it is?” the audience emphatically shouted back: “Summer time!”

Kristi Noem refuses to say whether she would have certified the election on Jan. 6.

When the interviewer, Dana Bash, pressed her on whether Mr. Pence had been wrong to certify the election results, Ms. Noem again avoided a direct answer, instead criticizing Mr. Pence for denouncing Mr. Trump after Jan. 6.

“I wasn’t in Mike Pence’s shoes, and the information that he had at that time — I don’t know how he based his decisions,” she said. “I think he’s a nice man. I think that he’s failed Donald Trump since that day, because he certainly does not recognize that we need someone in the White House who needs him out on the trail advocating for him, instead of constantly criticizing and going back and ripping him apart.”

On abortion, Ms. Noem, who supported a federal ban when she was a member of Congress, said she now believed restrictions should be left to individual states. That is the position Mr. Trump took this month, though his allies have developed plans that could functionally ban abortion nationwide without formally doing so.

Mr. Trump has also expressed support for rape and incest exceptions, which South Dakota’s near-total abortion ban does not include. When asked about that, Ms. Noem tried to distance herself from her own state’s law, noting that it was a “trigger ban” enacted years ago to take effect if the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

“The law in my state was passed decades before I ever became governor,” she said, adding: “That may be a topic that will continue to be discussed in South Dakota. Our law today allows an exception to save the life of the mother, but the people in South Dakota will decide what their laws look like.”

She did not give a clear answer when Ms. Bash asked what she believed South Dakota’s laws should look like.

“I can have an opinion, and I can weigh forward and I can look at the science and what we’ve learned about babies in the womb and believe that we should protect life, but I think that our law today is what South Dakota wants,” she said. “And they’ll continue to have that debate, and I’ll continue to follow through on my role, which is to make sure the will of the people is enforced.”

Ms. Bash repeated her question, and Ms. Noem implied — but did not say outright — that she might oppose a rape and incest exception.

“We have a law that says that there is an exception for the life of the mother, and I just don’t believe a tragedy should perpetuate another tragedy,” she said. Versions of that statement are common among people who believe abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape and incest.

“I believe in taking care of mothers that are in a crisis situation and that we should be locking alongside them, giving them all the information and the best information they can make before they have to be put in a situation where an abortion is the only option that they have,” she added.

Ms. Noem also echoed Mr. Trump’s claims that the criminal charges against him in New York — where his trial began last week — were political, and affirmed that she would support him even if he were convicted of felonies.

“When he was in the White House, every single day as governor, I got to be on offense, I got to solve problems,” she said. “And since Joe Biden has been in the White House, I just have to defend the freedoms of my people in South Dakota. I’m every day trying to push back on what this federal government is trying to do by increasing costs for the everyday families that get up every day and go to work. So yes, Donald Trump should be back in that White House. I’m going to do all I can to help him win.”

Trump campaign slows spending as it tries to close the cash gap with Biden.

Mr. Biden’s campaign had $85.5 million on hand at the end of March, according to its monthly filing with the Federal Election Commission, a significant increase from the month before: He ended February with $71 million in his campaign account while Mr. Trump ended February with less than half that.

As Mr. Trump and Republicans chase the Democrats’ financial edge, Mr. Biden has also started to narrow the polling gap between himself and Mr. Trump. Since late February, the president has cut a deficit of five percentage points to a single point, a virtual tie, according to a recent survey by The New York Times and Siena College.

The rivals each capitalized on splashy fund-raisers in the past month that brought in tens of millions of dollars for their respective campaigns. But Mr. Trump’s haul from an April 6 event in Palm Beach, Fla., will be reflected on a future filing. His campaign reported that it and the Republican National Committee raked in more than $50.5 million from the dinner, which was held at the home of the billionaire John Paulson.

The total nearly doubled the $26 million that Mr. Biden’s campaign said it raised on March 28 at Radio City Music Hall in New York, a star-studded event headlined by the president and two former presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Those funds were included in Mr. Biden’s March fund-raising numbers.

Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump are primarily raising money though joint fund-raising agreements with their respective parties, arrangements that legally allow them to pull in hundreds of thousands of dollars from individual donors, some of which flows into their campaigns.

Joint fund-raising committees for both candidates filed reports with the Federal Election Commission this week, providing the first details of 2024 of major donors to both candidates, and the total scale of their fund-raising haul.

But the F.E.C. reports for presidential campaigns, which are filed monthly in election years, offer different insights about candidates’ activities and how the committees backing them are spending money.

For example, federal law guarantees political campaigns bottom-dollar rates for broadcast advertising, so campaign committees are often used to pay for television time. In the first three months of 2024, Mr. Biden’s campaign has spent $45.2 million on media buys and production, filings show — more than half of its total of $74.1 million in spending.

The Biden campaign has spent $6.9 million on payroll and related expenses, and an additional $6.9 million on “text message outreach.” His campaign’s spending shot up in March, after two relatively steady months.

In contrast, Mr. Trump’s campaign spending has slowed sharply since the beginning of the year, when he was still fending off Republican primary challengers.

Since Jan. 1, Mr. Trump’s campaign has spent $23 million — but just $3.7 million of that was in March. His campaign has paid $6 million for placed media this year, all of it before Super Tuesday.

One of Mr. Trump’s committees — a leadership PAC called Save America, which he has used to pay his legal bills — reported on Saturday that it had almost $4.1 million on hand at the end of March, roughly the same amount as it had at the end of February.

The group spent $5 million in March, including $3.7 million in bills to the legal teams defending him. Mr. Trump’s campaign itself also paid about $473,000 in legal expenses.

A super PAC backing Mr. Trump, MAGA Inc., reported raising $14.4 million in March, including a $5 million contribution from the former Trump cabinet official Linda McMahon and $4.2 million from Robert T. Bigelow, an aerospace and real estate mogul. The group also transferred $5 million to Save America — part of a huge refund of money from the super PAC to the committee over the past year.

With national polls consistently suggesting that the rematch between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden could hinge on a few states or a single one, that has magnified the candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running as an independent.

It has also drawn attention to how the liberal scion is paying for his campaign and what he is spending money on, including for ballot access and security.

His selection of Nicole Shanahan, a wealthy Silicon Valley lawyer and investor, as his running mate already appears to have become a boon for his campaign. Of the $5.4 million that Mr. Kennedy raised in March, $2 million came from Ms. Shanahan, who until last year was married to the Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Trump rally, a return to the campaign trail after a week on trial, is called off because of storms.

Ninety minutes later, the skies darkened to charcoal and lightning flashed. As thunderstorms swept toward the area and the National Weather Service issued watches and warnings concerning dangerous winds and hail, the rally was canceled over safety concerns.

“We’ll make up for this very quickly at another time,” Mr. Trump said on a call he made into the rally that was broadcast over the speakers. “We’ll do it as quick as possible. I’m devastated that this could happen.”

But the cancellation, which Mr. Trump indicated was out of his hands, highlights the challenges that he may face as he tries to balance his presidential campaign with a criminal trial that will keep him busy through May.

For much of the last week, Mr. Trump’s public comments had been limited to social media posts and remarks to reporters outside the courtroom. His only campaign stop was at a bodega in New York City, in a state he overwhelmingly lost in the last two elections and that is not expected to be in play in November.

Saturday’s rally was expected to serve as a preview of the upcoming weeks, with Mr. Trump traveling on weekends to campaign in battleground states that are more central to his efforts to return to the White House.

He has repeatedly claimed that the trial is preventing him from campaigning in places like North Carolina, which he won in 2016 and 2020, but where Democrats are making a big push in November. Opening arguments are slated to start on Monday, and the trial is set to last six to eight weeks.

As is often the case with Mr. Trump’s rallies, the crowds began lining up hours ahead of his expected remarks. Among those gathered outside was a group wearing shirts with the logo of the Proud Boys, a prominent far-right extremist group. One person held a sign that read “Free All of the J6 Prisoners,” a reference to those serving sentences in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.

Mr. Trump, who faces four criminal indictments that include charges tied to his efforts to overturn his election loss, has recently embraced dozens of Jan. 6 defendants. He has called them “hostages” and has said he would consider pardoning them.

In a statement, Ammar Moussa, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, criticized the group’s presence, pointing to remarks Mr. Trump made in a debate in 2020, in which he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”

“This is Donald Trump’s America: where white nationalists and violent far-right extremists are empowered and working families are left behind,” Mr. Moussa wrote.

Chris LaCivita, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, responded in a statement, “We don’t comment on stupid.”

Mr. Trump’s remarks were expected to face particular scrutiny given that he is under a gag order in his criminal trial that bans him from attacking witnesses, prosecutors, jurors and court staff, as well as their relatives and relatives of the judge. Prosecutors have said Mr. Trump has violated the gag order seven times, and there is a hearing about the issue on Tuesday.

Mr. Trump did travel to North Carolina earlier in the day, attending a fund-raiser in Charlotte in the afternoon. When he called into the rally, he told the attendees that he was minutes away from “flying in” to Wilmington but that the authorities “would prefer that we not come in” over safety concerns.

“I’m so sorry,” Mr. Trump said. “But we’ll do it again, and we’ll do it bigger and better. You have my promise.”

As the crowd left to seek shelter in their cars, vendors outside were still selling an array of merchandise, some of which had been created specifically for the occasion. One T-shirt promoted what it called the Wilmington stop on Mr. Trump’s “Save America” tour.

“I was there!” The shirt read. “Where were you???”

Robert Draper contributed reporting.

Coming to Alabama: Gavin Newsom’s abortion-access ad, depicting an arrest.

It will appear on Monday in Alabama, where Republicans have called for prosecuting women who travel elsewhere for an abortion. The state’s abortion ban, one of the nation’s strictest, outlaws the procedure at all stages of pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape and incest.

“Trump Republicans want to criminalize young Alabama women who travel for reproductive care,” the ad’s narrator says.

The ad then shows the patrolman approaching the vehicle: “Miss, I’m going to need you to step out of the vehicle,” he says, tapping the kit on the driver’s side door, “take a pregnancy test.”

The ad is scheduled to run on broadcast and cable television, along with digital platforms like YouTube, for two weeks, according to the PAC. The cost of the ad buy was not immediately available.

Alabama’s attorney general, Steve Marshall, a Republican, has clashed with the Justice Department and abortion assistance providers over whether the state has the authority to prosecute individuals or groups that help women leave the state to have the procedure.

Last month, Republicans introduced a bill in the Alabama House that would make it a misdemeanor to harbor or transport a minor to seek abortion services.

Mr. Newsom has emerged as a key surrogate for President Biden while harboring future White House ambitions of his own. He has regularly skirmished with G.O.P. governors and Republican-led states over abortion access, immigration, crime and other issues.

While Republicans have seized on crossings at the southern border in their messaging, Democrats have harnessed the issue of abortion-access after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. It helped propel Democratic candidates to key victories during the midterm elections in 2022 and in races last year.

In February, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos were people with rights, casting a cloud of uncertainty over in vitro fertilization. The state later passed a law giving I.V.F. clinics criminal and civil immunity, but it did not address whether embryos have the legal status of human beings.

In another seismic ruling, the Arizona Supreme Court this month upheld an 1864 law that bans nearly all abortions. The decision could have far-reaching consequences for women’s health care and election-year politics in the state, a critical political battleground.

Mr. Newsom said in a social media post at the time that California, which borders Arizona, would provide a refuge for women affected by the decision.

“Arizona wasn’t even a state — it was a territory — when this draconian abortion ban was passed,” he said. “That’s how extreme this is. California remains ready to help Arizonans access reproductive health care.”