Election Updates: Haley Spends Friday on Offense While Trump Has a Bad Day in Court

Since Mr. Manchin, 76, announced in November that he would not run for re-election, he had been the subject of months of public and private guesswork about whether he would seek the presidency. In particular, he had flirted with becoming the candidate for No Labels, a centrist group aiming to recruit a third option in what is shaping up to look like a general-election race between Mr. Biden and former President Donald J. Trump.

But on Friday, he pledged, “I will not be a deal breaker or a spoiler.”

Mr. Manchin’s decision takes off the table the highest-profile candidate that the leaders of No Labels had sought to attract. The group had told donors and allies in recent months that they planned to name a Republican to lead their ticket, ostensibly taking Mr. Manchin out of contention, but they have so far not found any takers.

Former Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a moderate Republican, quit the No Labels board in January. After endorsing former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina for president, he announced his own campaign for Senate in Maryland last week.

With the most obvious No Labels ticket out of play, the group vowed on Friday to continue its efforts to secure ballot slots in all 50 states. The group’s co-chairmen — former Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the civil rights leader Benjamin F. Chavis Jr. and former Gov. Pat McCrory, Republican of North Carolina — said the group “will announce in the coming weeks whether we will offer our line to a Unity ticket.”

But the group’s options have slimmed considerably, it has secured ballot access in only 14 states, and whoever might accept the No Labels offer would have to deal with an onslaught of litigation from Democrats determined to squelch the effort.

“Quite frankly, they ought to just pull the plug on their presidential effort,” said Doug Jones, a former Democratic senator from Alabama who has been trying to head off a No Labels ticket.

Since Mr. Manchin said he would not run again, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, has been pleading with him to formally leave the Democratic Party and run again for Senate as an independent, according to two people familiar with their conversations.

West Virginia’s deadline to file to run in a Senate primary race was in January, but independent candidates have until Aug. 1 to declare their candidacy.

Without Mr. Manchin, Democrats have written off the possibility of holding the Senate seat in deep-red West Virginia. They have an uphill battle to try to keep control of the chamber, with several incumbents defending seats in states won by Mr. Trump.

Mr. Manchin has been known in the Senate for bipartisan deal-making and also for frustrating some of his party’s most ambitious policy goals.

During his speech on Friday at West Virginia University, Mr. Manchin denounced the state of Congress, which he described as the most dysfunctional body he had worked with.

“This will be the least productive, most destructive Congress that we have ever had in the history of the United States,” he said.

The No Labels push has foundered for months now. Potential donors, especially Republicans, have closed their wallets, waiting to see if Ms. Haley could gain traction against Mr. Trump. As long as she remains in the Republican primary contest, the push for ballot access has been slow, and without ballot access, recruiting candidates has been difficult.

A public convention planned for Dallas in April to name a ticket has been scotched in favor of a secret committee. No Labels leaders have let it be known they would love to recruit either Ms. Haley or Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who ran an unsuccessful primary bid against Mr. Trump.

But Mr. Christie has said he would do nothing that could help send Mr. Trump back to the White House, and No Labels opponents are confident Ms. Haley would not want to harm her future with the Republican Party.

Both candidates would face lawsuits over “sore loser laws” in several states that prohibit failed candidates from jumping from one party to another.

That could leave the group with no high-profile options, said Matt Bennett, a senior vice president at Third Way, a centrist Democratic group that has spearheaded efforts to neutralize the No Labels push.

“It’s vitally important to emphasize that Joe Manchin and Larry Hogan, as co-chairs of No Labels, had as much insight into what No Labels had to offer as anyone on planet earth, and they took a pass,” Mr. Bennett said. “Anyone else is going to look at that and think, ‘What did they know that we don’t know?’”

Carl Hulse contributed reporting.

“Putin did this. The same Putin who Donald Trump praises and defends,” Ms. Haley, a former governor of South Carolina who served Mr. Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, wrote on the social media platform X on Friday.

She referenced comments that Mr. Trump made in 2015, during his first run for president, when he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that, “In all fairness to Putin, you’re saying he killed people. I haven’t seen that.”

Russian authorities announced on Friday that Mr. Navalny, an anticorruption activist who was openly critical of Mr. Putin and was serving multiple sentences that would likely have kept him in prison until 2031, had died in a prison inside the Arctic Circle. President Biden said on Friday afternoon that U.S. officials did not have a full understanding of the situation’s circumstances, but that he believed “there is no doubt that the death of Navalny was a consequence of something that Putin and his thugs did.”

Mr. Trump has not yet commented publicly on Mr. Navalny’s death, prompting Ms. Haley to also seize on his silence. In another post to X, she wrote that, “Putin murdered his political opponent and Trump hasn’t said a word after he said he would encourage Putin to invade our allies. He has, however, posted 20+ times on social media about his legal drama and fake polls.”

Since reports of Mr. Navalny’s death surfaced Friday morning, Mr. Trump delivered posts on Truth Social that criticized Fani T. Willis, the prosecutor in his Georgia election interference case; said that the world had “experienced misery, destruction, and death” during Mr. Biden’s term in office; and promoted his appearance at “Sneakercon” in Philadelphia on Saturday. But as of Friday afternoon, there was no mention of Mr. Putin or Mr. Navalny.

Ms. Haley has been increasingly critical of Mr. Trump’s approach to foreign policy, and specifically his attitude toward Mr. Putin. She told voters at recent stops in South Carolina that Mr. Trump had taken “the side of a thug,” after the former president said in South Carolina last weekend that he might “encourage” Russia to attack N.A.T.O. allies delinquent on payments to the military alliance.

Her campaign issued a statement later on Friday that attempted to further connect Mr. Trump’s past praise to his recent comments.

“Donald Trump continues to side with Vladimir Putin — a man who kills his political opponents, holds American journalists hostage, and has never hidden his desire to destroy America,” Ms. Haley said. “Trump continues to side with Putin over our allies and our military service members.”

And earlier this month, James O’Keefe, the former leader of Project Veritas, issued a statement after one of its sources recanted his story about fraud in Erie, Pa. “I am aware of no evidence or other allegation that election fraud occurred in the Erie Post Office during the 2020 Presidential Election,” Mr. O’Keefe said.

The admissions are familiar. The conspirators of many other false theories about the 2020 election, when forced to provide evidence that would hold up in court, similarly could not.

In the days immediately after the 2020 election, Rudolph W. Giuliani, then a lawyer for Mr. Trump, claimed that the election was “an absolute fraud.” Days later, under questioning by a Pennsylvania judge, he conceded, “This is not a fraud case.” Last year, Mr. Giuliani admitted that public comments he made saying that two Georgia election workers committed ballot fraud were false.

The falsehoods have come with consequences. Former President Donald J. Trump and 19 of his allies were indicted on multiple charges for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia. Fox News agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle defamation claims over the network’s promotion of misinformation about Dominion election machines during the 2020 election. Mr. Giuliani was ordered to pay $148 million in damages to the two election workers.

Mr. Giuliani was among some election deniers who, in private, admitted that evidence was lacking.

“We’ve got lots of theories,” he told the leader of the Arizona Legislature after the 2020 election, according to testimony from the Jan. 6 committee. “We just don’t have the evidence.”

The admission by True the Vote that it did not have any evidence of ballot trafficking further undermined the claims that formed the basis for the debunked voter fraud film “2,000 Mules.” The movie, despite its false claims, reached a wide audience.

And even though the false conspiracy theories are continually repudiated, Mr. Trump carries on perpetuating the election lies in his campaign speeches and public appearances.

The mess of conspiracy theories about stolen and rigged elections has become dogma to a large faction of the conservative base, irreparably damaging their trust in the nation’s electoral system and spawning an election denialism movement that has overwhelmed large parts of the Republican Party apparatus.

As of August, nearly 70 percent of Republican voters did not believe President Biden’s victory in 2020 was legitimate, according to a poll conducted by CNN. In June, a poll from Monmouth University found that 30 percent of Americans believe Mr. Biden won in 2020 only because of voter fraud.

The two polls were conducted after numerous conspiracy theories about the 2020 election were proven false in courts, making it unlikely that the further repudiation of 2020 falsehoods will have much of an effect on the 2024 election.

That may be partly because voters in the current hyper-polarized climate are drawn to excuses for losses, such as cheating, said Matthew Germer, the governance director at R Street Institute, a conservative organization. Another factor: These lies make money for the liars.

“Conspiracy theories are great for fund-raising, and terrible for democracy,” Mr. Germer said. “And that, again, is preying on our tendencies to want to be on a winning side.”

He added, “I’m optimistic that the more of these conspiracies that crumble, that it undermines the credibility of those who are promulgating them.”

“People can really only put up with so much,” he said. “But I guess it remains to be seen where those limits lie and how long it can last.”

“No president has ever said anything like it,” the ad’s deep-voiced narrator says.

The spot will run through the Super Tuesday primaries on March 5 and will target voters in three states that are critical to Mr. Biden’s re-election chances. Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are “home to more than 2.5 million Americans who identify as Polish, Finnish, Norwegian, Lithuanian, Latvian or Estonian — all NATO countries that border Russia and face the threat of an expansion of Putin’s aggression in Ukraine,” the Biden campaign said in a statement.

Mr. Trump’s disparagement of NATO allies came at a time when Mr. Biden and his Democratic supporters are trying to take the focus away from voters’ concerns about the president’s age. In an address at the White House on Friday in response to the death of the Russian activist Aleksei A. Navalny, Mr. Biden condemned Mr. Trump’s comments as “outrageous” for an American president, saying that “from Truman on, they’re rolling over in their graves hearing this.” (The United States joined NATO under President Harry Truman in 1949.)

Mr. Biden’s campaign described the ad as a “six-figure” push but declined to say exactly how much it was spending. It said the ad would run in a variety of forms on Meta, Google, Yahoo Native and YouTube.

On the main street, protesters accused the White House of neglect and asked why it had taken Mr. Biden so long to visit. More than 100 Trump supporters, some of whom had driven in from out of state, held up “Impeach Biden” signs. And still others said they were sick of their town being used as a political prop and wanted answers about their long-term health.

Mr. Biden alluded to some of those differences during remarks near the crash site, saying that “it doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or Republican or independent.”

“What matters is we’re all Americans,” Mr. Biden continued. “We look out for one another. We leave no one behind. And we come back stronger than before.”

Mr. Biden also said the National Institutes of Health would issue six grants to research universities to study “the short and long term impacts” of the toxic spill — a key concern among residents, many of whom complain of health problems since the accident.

Tens of thousands of tons of contaminated solid waste and millions of gallons of wastewater have been shipped out of East Palestine since the derailment, the Environmental Protection Agency said. Ohio declared the drinking water safe just weeks after the crash.

“The president has no concerns with drinking the water in East Palestine,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said this week. She was responding to a reporter who mentioned that President Barack Obama had drunk filtered tap water in Flint, Mich., in 2016 after a lead contamination crisis in the city.

During Friday’s visit, Mr. Biden took a sip of coffee brewed with tap water while visiting a local candle-making workshop and also had a cup of water beside him as he met with the business owners and local residents.

Still, the fact that it took Mr. Biden a year to visit East Palestine, a town of 5,000 people, bothered many people in the community, particularly because he had promised to do so soon after the derailment.

Republicans and many residents have said his absence was a sign of disrespect.

“It’s sad he waited so long,” said Kathleen Unkefer, 68, a lifelong resident of East Palestine and florist who watched the different rallies through the window of the Flowers Straight From the Heart shop. “I just feel it’s all political. It’s an election year.”

The White House has said Mr. Biden wanted to go at a moment when his visit would not be disruptive. And Biden administration officials have defended the federal response, saying the government has sent a steady flow of federal resources to the community, and deployed hundreds of people to assess the risks in the days after the spill.

The administration has said Norfolk Southern should be held accountable for the harm caused by the derailment.

“While there are acts of God, this was an act of greed that was 100 percent preventable," Mr. Biden said on Friday.

Mr. Biden has not approved a presidential disaster declaration, as Ohio’s governor requested last year, and as many residents were hoping he would announce on Friday. But he assured residents that the federal government would stay invested in its recovery.

“What they do not make whole, what they cannot make whole, the government will make whole,” he added of Norfolk Southern. “We have an obligation.”

Norfolk Southern has said the cost of the derailment cleanup, legal costs and assistance to the community will be more than $800 million. The company also has committed more than $100 million toward costs including direct payments to residents and reimbursements for emergency medical workers.

“We’re committed to helping them make it an even more vibrant, thriving place,” Alan H. Shaw, the chief executive of Norfolk Southern, said in a statement.

The train was carrying more than 700,000 pounds of vinyl chloride, a carcinogen used to produce pipes, furniture and packaging, when it derailed. Emergency responders set the chemicals ablaze during a so-called controlled burn to avert a wider explosion.

On Friday, Mr. Biden ignored shouted questions about the timing of his visit after his official remarks.

Presidential visits to devastated communities can sometimes provide the opportunity for Democrats and Republicans to play down their differences and focus on showing empathy. Local leaders have often commended Mr. Biden on such occasions.

But Mr. Biden, who ran for president on a pledge to unite the nation, confronted a community that is a microcosm of the politically divided country.

Former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Biden’s likely opponent in this year’s presidential race, visited East Palestine in the weeks after the derailment. Hours before Mr. Biden arrived on Friday, the Trump campaign issued an advertisement titled “Too Little, Too Late.”

Even the invitation for Mr. Biden to visit from the mayor, Trent Conaway, carried a hint of the division. Mr. Conaway has criticized Mr. Biden for allowing Mr. Trump to visit before him.

Jaime Nentwick, a 37-year-old organizer at an Ohio environmental justice nonprofit, said the situation in East Palestine has been politicized.

“It’s been a prop since the derailment,” she said. “The most important thing in order to give the residents some kind of heightened hope, to restore that, is to give an actual factual reason as to why he hasn’t been here in a year.”

“By my calculations, with Trump endorsing my opponent and the lack of resources, the hill was just too steep,” Mr. Rosendale said in a statement, adding that he had spoken with Steve Daines, the state’s Republican senator, who is also in charge of Senate Republicans’ re-election efforts. “We both agree that this is the best path forward for Republicans to regain the majority in the U.S. Senate.”

The news of Mr. Rosendale’s withdrawal was earlier reported by Politico. Mr. Rosendale did not say whether he would endorse Mr. Sheehy. The news sets up Mr. Sheehy as a favorite to secure the nomination and face Jon Tester, a popular yet vulnerable Democratic incumbent, in November.

It also offers Republicans another boost in their efforts to regain control of the closely divided Senate. By nipping in the bud what could have been a bruising primary fight, Republicans can now coalesce behind Mr. Sheehy and focus on ousting Mr. Tester heading into the fall. His seat, in a deeply red state, is considered one of the most vulnerable on the Senate map, along with those of Democratic incumbents in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Nevada and the Arizona seat held by Senator Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat-turned-independent who has not yet said whether she’s running for re-election. Senator Joe Manchin’s retirement in deep-red West Virginia offers Republicans another seat to flip.

And they got good news last week when Larry Hogan, the popular former Republican governor of Maryland, said he would run for the state’s open Senate seat, potentially expanding the map of possible pickups even further.

In Montana, both traditional establishment and Trump-aligned Republicans had labored to avoid a repeat of 2018 — when Mr. Rosendale lost to Mr. Tester by 3 percentage points in the general election — by elevating Mr. Sheehy, whom they viewed as a more palatable, moderate candidate. Mr. Rosendale has supported a blanket ban on abortions and voted to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election.

Top Republicans from various wings of the party — like Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 3 Senate Republican, and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a close Trump ally — endorsed Mr. Sheehy, conservative super PACs and donors gave him money, and Mr. Rosendale said on a podcast last month that Mr. Daines had pressured him to stay out of the race.

Sheila Hogan, the executive director of Montana’s Democratic Party, focused on Mr. Sheehy in her response to the news, calling him the candidate “handpicked” by the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. “Sheehy is an out-of-state tech millionaire completely out of touch with Montana’s way of life,” she said in a statement, adding that Mr. Tester would “wipe the floor” with him.

Montana Democrats had run advertisements appearing to promote Mr. Rosendale’s conservative credentials — a possible repeat of the controversial strategy Democrats employed in 2022 in which they tried to bolster the chances of more strident right-wing candidates in Republican primaries, calculating that they would be easier opponents in general election matchups.

Still, Mr. Rosendale maintained good will among the Trump-aligned wing of the party and entered the race this month. Just hours later, Mr. Trump cast his support behind Mr. Sheehy, a move that seemed to make Mr. Rosendale’s candidacy a long shot.

Mr. Sheehy expressed his thanks in a post on X after his rival dropped out Thursday, saying to Mr. Rosendale that Montana was “grateful for your service.” Mr. Daines echoed that sentiment in a statement, writing that “it will take all Republicans working together to defeat Jon Tester in November.”

Michael C. Bender contributed reporting.