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Tag: Republican

  • Sen. Kyrsten Sinema says she has no interest in becoming a Republican

    Sen. Kyrsten Sinema says she has no interest in becoming a Republican

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    leaked documents investigation 55934

    “No,” Sinema said, adding: “You don’t go from one broken party to another.”

    Sinema, who left the Democratic Party in December 2022, has not said whether she plans to run for reelection in 2024.

    “I’m not here to talk about elections today,” she Sunday when pressed about her plans.

    If she does run, Sinema will, at the least, face challenges from Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego and Republican Mark Lamb, the sheriff of Pinal County. But the senator has used her party transition to call for and end to the rise in the partisanship in Congress.

    “I would suggest that what I tried to do in the United States Senate right is to show that we have differences, differences which should be celebrated,” Sinema said Sunday. “That’s an important part of a democracy. But those differences shouldn’t stop us from getting things done.”

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Republican voters return to the polls for the first time since their 2022 disappointment

    Republican voters return to the polls for the first time since their 2022 disappointment

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    It’s been a long time since Kentucky was a competitive state in national politics: Bill Clinton carried it twice in the 1990s, but Republicans have won it by double-digits in every election since 2000, including then-President Donald Trump’s 26-point win in 2020. But Gov. Andy Beshear’s narrow victory in 2019 — and enduring popularity since taking office — means ticket-splitting may still be alive and well.

    This month’s primary will only determine Beshear’s November opponent, not the fate of his governorship. But the primary marks key demographic and strategic drivers of politics in the state, foreshadowing the dynamics of the looming general election. Here are five key numbers to know:

    21 percent

    Just like Saturday’s Kentucky Derby, the race started off with a clear favorite: State Attorney General Daniel Cameron broke strongest from the gate among the dozen candidates for the GOP nomination and has Trump’s endorsement. But Kelly Craft, who served separate stints as Trump’s former ambassador to Canada and the U.N., has been mounting a late charge.

    Back in January, a Mason-Dixon Polling and Research survey found Cameron well ahead of Craft, 39 percent to 13 percent. There hasn’t been much public polling since, but an Emerson College/WDKY-TV poll last month had a much closer race, with 21 percent of voters still undecided.

    Cameron’s allies dispute that the race has closed, circulating their own internal poll showing him still comfortably leading — but with 19 percent undecided.

    Like horse races, primaries break late, since the voters and the candidates are mostly ideologically aligned. Cameron and Craft, the top two GOP hopefuls, will be angling for those voters still waiting to make up their minds.

    $7.2 million

    If Craft can’t catch Cameron on the May. 16, it won’t be for a lack of financial resources.

    Craft, the wife of billionaire coal magnate Joe Craft, has already spent or booked $5.8 million in TV advertising, according to data from AdImpact, an ad-tracking firm. She’s also been boosted by $1.4 million in ads from Commonwealth PAC, an outside group funded largely (though not entirely) by Joe Craft, though those ads aren’t on the air anymore. That means she’s spent at least $7.2 million on the primary alone.

    Cameron, by contrast, has spent or booked only $564,000. He does have an outside group, Bluegrass Freedom Action, which has added $2.1 million to help him close the gap. The group is running ads touting Trump’s endorsement.

    The spending advantage has been a double-edged sword for Craft. She’s come under attack from Cameron for relying on her family’s money in the primary, but she can also offer Republicans the prospect of a blank check to fund an expensive and grueling general election against Beshear.

    46 percent

    Kentucky Republicans finally did it last year: They eclipsed Democrats in voter registration for the first time in history, a key milestone in the state’s rapid red shift.

    Four years ago, Democrats still retained a significant registration advantage, 49 percent to 42 percent. That’s already reversed: Republicans outnumber Democrats in registration heading into this primary, according to the state Board of Elections, 46 percent to 44 percent.

    The erasure of Democrats’ ancestral registration advantage has been rapid. Twenty-four years ago, when Republicans chose Peppy Martin for an ill-fated run against Democratic Gov. Paul Patton, Republicans accounted for only 32 percent of registered voters, outnumbered almost 2-to-1 by Democrats (61 percent). When Beshear’s father, former Gov. Steve Beshear was first elected in 2007, Democrats had a 20-point registration advantage, 57 percent to 37 percent.

    This year, more voters can participate in the Republican primary for the first time.

    63 percent

    Despite the state’s rightward shift, Beshear remains popular.

    How popular? According to Morning Consult’s quarterly tracking, Beshear has the highest approval rating of any Democratic governor at 63 percent. He outpaces governors in solidly blue states like Massachusetts, Maryland, Hawaii, California and New York.

    Beshear’s sky-high approval rating isn’t an artifact of Morning Consult’s methodology or long field period, either: The January Mason-Dixon poll gave him a similarly high, 61 percent positive job rating.

    Republicans have started the process of trying to knock down Beshear’s popularity. An outside group affiliated with the Republican Governors Association began running culture war-tinged TV ads late last month hitting the Democrat for “allow[ing] sex changes for children as young as 8- or 9-years-old.”

    72 points

    So exactly how does Beshear cobble together a winning coalition in a state that’s become so Republican?

    It involves a lot of crossover Trump voters.

    According to a POLITICO analysis of election results, Trump in 2020 outran then-Gov. Matt Bevin’s 2019 performance in each of Kentucky’s 120 counties. In one rural county, Beshear won it by 20, and the next year Biden lost it by 51. The result is an unheard-of 72-point gap between those two races.

    In the bluer population centers, the differences were significant, but relatively modest: Beshear won Fayette County, home to Lexington, by 33 points in 2019, while President Joe Biden carried it by 21 points a year later. In Louisville, Beshear won by 35 points, but Biden won by 20.

    The gap between the two races was greatest outside the cities — especially in Eastern Kentucky, where Democrats once dominated but now barely register in presidential races. Take tiny Elliott County, where Trump beat Biden by a three-to-one margin, 75 percent to 24 percent, in 2020. Beshear actually won it over Bevin — and it wasn’t particularly close: 59 percent to 39 percent.

    The same phenomenon is evident in other surrounding, conservative counties. In Boyd County, home to Ashland — the largest city in Eastern Kentucky’s coal region — Beshear won by 6 points in 2019, but Trump carried it by a whopping 33 points a year later.

    Whoever wins this month’s GOP primary will undoubtedly try to nationalize the race to depress Beshear’s appeal in these solidly red areas — though it’s worth noting that Bevin pursued the same strategy in 2019 and ended up losing.



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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Biden’s Running. Which Republican Has the Best Chance of Beating Him?

    Biden’s Running. Which Republican Has the Best Chance of Beating Him?

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    Perhaps most importantly, Biden proved in 2020 that not only could he rebuild the so-called Blue Wall (Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin), he could snag increasingly purple Arizona and Georgia.

    So which Republican contender is best positioned to take on Biden and win back those swing states? Here’s a clear-eyed look at their strengths and weaknesses.

    Former President Donald Trump

    Twice impeached, once indicted, the only president since the advent of polling whose approval ratings never cracked 50 percent, Trump doesn’t exactly cut the profile of a model challenger. Even in his two presidential runs, his high-water mark in the popular vote was just under 47 percent. But in 2016, he showed there was a path to an Electoral College win nonetheless.

    In a rematch with Biden, Trump would likely be better politically positioned than many of his GOP rivals on issues like entitlement reform and abortion, where he’s tacked a bit more to the center. Still, there is the matter of the five states that Biden flipped in 2020. Trump wouldn’t need to win all of them back to recapture the White House but he would likely need at least three of those states — and none of them is a slam dunk.

    That’s not because of Biden’s strengths, but Trump’s flaws. There are clear signs of a more professionalized Trump campaign operation than in the past. But Trump is still Trump (see, for example, his Easter message on the holiest day on the Christian calendar). The swing states that will decide the 2024 election are among those that have been the most destabilized by Trump’s polarizing politics, either because of his conflicts with the state parties or the forces unleashed by his baseless claims of election fraud.

    Take Georgia: The 2022 Republican primary there represented a massive repudiation of the former president; the cherry on top came in the December Senate runoff, when Trump’s handpicked nominee Herschel Walker was defeated. In Arizona, ground zero for election denialism, the Trump-endorsed statewide candidates crashed and burned in November. Biden was no asset to Democrats in 2022, but Trump was equally damaging. While 38 percent of Arizona voters said they cast their votes to oppose Biden, according to exit polls, 35 percent said their votes were to oppose Trump.

    The Blue Wall that Trump cracked in 2016 is equally daunting. Democrats are now in ascendance in Michigan and Pennsylvania — which have moved in tandem in presidential elections for close to 40 years — in no small part due to a backlash against Trump in their most populous suburbs. Short of a massive rural turnout in those states, or a black swan event, Biden has a decided edge against Trump in both places.

    In Wisconsin, the closest of the three states in 2020, a mere 20,000 votes separated Biden and Trump. But the trendlines for the GOP aren’t promising there either. In both 2016 and 2020, Trump ran behind traditional Republican margins in the conservative suburbs of Milwaukee that are essential to GOP chances. Worse, the Trump era has seen the rise of liberal Dane County as an electoral powerhouse — witness the recent state Supreme Court election — and a Trump-led GOP ticket is guaranteed to generate another monster turnout there.

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis

    In the view of many Republican officials, DeSantis is Trump without the baggage and drama. If he runs, they envision a conservative big-state governor, fresh off a landslide reelection, prosecuting a vigorous case against an enfeebled Biden — an incumbent who’s nearly twice his age.

    It’s true that DeSantis might staunch the bleeding in traditionally Republican suburbs, particularly across the Sun Belt, while maintaining the other elements of the MAGA coalition. Just as important, his robust performance among all Latino groups in Florida in his 2022 reelection caught both parties’ attention — he outpaced even Trump’s 2020 Latino gains.

    But the governor’s recent stumbles have raised real questions about how he’d fare on the national stage under the relentless pressures of a presidential election — where there is no place for the press-averse DeSantis to hide from the media. And the disciplined approach and sharp political instincts that enabled his rapid rise on the national scene haven’t been sufficient to shield him from Trump’s assault. If he does emerge from a smashmouth primary against Trump — and with Trump, there is no other kind — DeSantis will enter the general election against Biden with deep scars to show for it.

    In presidential elections, governors typically face questions about their lack of foreign policy experience, and DeSantis’ description of Russia’s war in Ukraine as a “territorial dispute” — which he later walked back amid bipartisan criticism — will only bolster the case for Biden as an experienced hand.

    Yet that stance may not be nearly so politically problematic as the bill he signed recently banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. DeSantis — who is expected to announce his candidacy in May, after the legislative session — may have advanced his prospects in a GOP primary, but polling and recent election results in the swing states that will decide the presidency suggest his position could be a millstone. If DeSantis is the GOP nominee, the ban makes it more likely than ever that abortion rights will be a central issue in 2024, drowning out the other issues where Biden would be more vulnerable.

    Former Vice President Mike Pence

    Biden proved that former vice presidents can sit on the sidelines for four years and still return to win the presidency. But Pence is no ordinary vice president. For one thing, his boss expressed support for hanging him amid the Jan. 6 riot.

    That strained relationship with Trump has made Pence, who said Sunday he’ll announce his 2024 presidential decision “well before” late June, a longshot to win the nomination. The best case for Pence in a general election is that he is a Reagan conservative whose loyal service to Trump could bridge the gap between traditional Republicans and the MAGA wing of the party. As a former Midwestern governor, he’s positioned to compete in the industrial swing states that flipped to Biden in 2020. Georgia’s 16 electoral votes would also seem to be in reach for Pence, given the architecture of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s successful 2022 reelection campaign.

    The flip side is that some corners of the MAGA movement might never forgive Pence’s refusal to bend to Trump’s pressure to block certification of the 2020 Electoral College votes. And Pence’s vote-winning appeal on his own remains uncertain. Despite his estrangement from Trump — and a suburban dad image — he can’t easily sidestep his affiliation with Trump’s slash-and-burn politics. Pence ran statewide just once — in 2012 in Indiana, a red state where he ran well behind Mitt Romney’s pace that year. He was no shoo-in for reelection in 2016 before Trump plucked him to join his presidential ticket.

    Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley

    The daughter of Indian immigrants, Haley would be a historic nominee — the first woman and the first person of color to lead the GOP ticket. That status, along with her age — she’s roughly 30 years younger than Biden — would make for a stark contrast on the campaign trail.

    Haley, who announced her bid in February, also offers the prospect of shrinking the gender gap in the general election — which was a yawning 57-42 in 2020. Exit polls from her 2014 reelection also showed Haley ran strong in the suburbs and with independents, two additional groups Trump lost in 2020.

    But establishing her independence from Trump won’t be easy. She’s frequently been critical of the former president, including in 2016 when she decried “the siren call of the angriest voices.” But she also went to work for Trump as his ambassador to the U.N. and has spent the last few years praising his agenda — positions that could limit her appeal with voters looking for a clean break from Trump.

    South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott

    Scott’s formidable political skills have been on display since then-Gov. Nikki Haley appointed him to the Senate in 2013. Within a year, he had outperformed both Haley and senior Sen. Lindsey Graham on the ballot. In 2016, he ran ahead of Donald Trump in South Carolina by more than 86,000 votes.

    In his three Senate campaigns, however, Scott has never faced serious Democratic opposition or intense media scrutiny. It showed on his second day of campaigning after announcing a presidential exploratory committee, when he stumbled badly on the question of whether he’d back federal abortion restrictions.

    And any expectation that Scott, who would be the GOP’s first Black presidential nominee, could carve out some of Biden’s considerable support among Black voters must be tempered by Scott’s actual performance. While the senator has improved his percentages over the past decade, he regularly loses the majority of the state’s nine majority Black counties.

    Other Candidates

    Several candidates making the early state rounds — among them, Vivek Ramaswamy and Perry Johnson — don’t have an electoral record to assess. But former two-term Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson and current New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu have met with success at the ballot box, not to mention some of the highest approval ratings in the nation. As popular, traditional conservatives who have been lonely Trump critics within the party, they’d likely be well positioned to compete across the map in a general election — but the GOP base doesn’t show much appetite for nominating a Trump critic.

    Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a one-time Trump ally who has become a sharp critic, faces the same predicament. He’s the rare conservative who’s won statewide in a blue state and his successful stint as chairperson of the Republican Governors Association gives him familiarity with the demands of running competitively across the national map.

    But an experience during his failed 2016 presidential campaign captured both the promise and the flaws of a potential candidacy. In winning the coveted endorsement from the New Hampshire Union-Leader, a prominent voice in the early state’s primary, publisher Joseph McQuaid described Christie as “a solid, pro-life conservative” who managed to win and govern in a liberal state.

    Several months later, however, the newspaper rescinded its endorsement after Christie’s surprise endorsement of Trump. “Watching Christie kiss the Donald’s ring this weekend — and make excuses for the man Christie himself had said was unfit for the presidency — demonstrated how wrong we were,” McQuaid wrote. “Rather than standing up to the bully, Christie bent his knee.” Biden wouldn’t have to try very hard to remind the public.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Republican in-fighting gets heated in the most important governor’s race in 2023

    Republican in-fighting gets heated in the most important governor’s race in 2023

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    “Craft has bought herself into a two person race,” said Scott Jennings, a well-known Republican operative in the state who has remained neutral in the contest. “The question is ‘is there enough runway left?’”

    But the brutal primary between the two could also come at a cost. The Kentucky governorship is a prime target for Republicans this year — with Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear occupying the governorship in a state Trump won by 26 points in 2020. The circular firing squad now unfolding in the GOP primary is giving an already popular Democratic incumbent an opening to peel off at least a sliver of Republican voters turned off by the in-fighting.

    Public polling for the primary has been incredibly sparse in the race — a recent poll from Emerson College/Fox56 released last week had Cameron at 30 percent and Craft at 24 percent — but Republicans believe the race has tightened since the beginning of the year, when Cameron was broadly believed to have a yawning lead.

    Republicans point to two big inflection points left on the calendar: The lone debate where all three of the top-tier candidates will share a stage — a May 1 faceoff hosted by Kentucky Educational Television — and arguably the biggest event all year in the state: The Kentucky Derby. It falls just 10 days before the primary election.

    Craft has loaned her campaign $7 million since the start of the year, according to campaign finance reports filed on Tuesday night, with an additional $260,000 coming from other donors. Cameron, by comparison, raised just over $400,000 in that same time period.

    Ryan Quarles, the state agriculture commissioner, is a possible viable third candidate in the race — especially if the fight between Cameron and Kelly becomes hotter. Quarles was at 15 percent in the Emerson poll, the only other candidate sniffing double digits, and has touted a deep bench of endorsements from across the state’s 120 counties.

    Craft’s campaign and Commonwealth PAC, a super PAC supporting her bid, have been throwing most of the haymakers, with Craft until relatively recently having the TV airwaves all to herself.

    A pair of ads from her campaign looked to tie Cameron to President Joe Biden, Beshear and Obama on the future of a West Virginia coal plant — a deep blow in a state that has historically been the home to the coal industry.

    And in a series of ads, the super PAC has used an extended motif of Cameron being a “soft establishment teddy bear,” literally transforming Cameron into a stuffed bear in a suit at the end of the ads. The most recent one is the Bragg ad, going after Cameron for at one point supporting cash bail reform. (“Prosecuted Trump!” the ad declares as a video of Bragg talking about bail reform plays.) It ends by morphing the two men into teddy bears.

    Cameron’s backers have just started hitting back on the airwaves. On Tuesday, a pro-Cameron super PAC Bluegrass Freedom Action launched a new ad saying a “desperate Kelly Craft falsely attacks” Cameron, while noting that Trump has endorsed Cameron, not Craft. And in a statement to POLITICO, the super PAC’s general consultant Aaron Whitehead questioned if she was eligible to run for office under the state’s residency requirement.

    “Absentee Ambassador Kelly Craft was a no show for her previous job — and now she’s pulling the same trick on Kentuckians by trying to buy her way out of a scandal,” Whitehead said. “No one knows if she actually lives in Kentucky or still lives in Oklahoma — which could disqualify her from the ballot.”

    The group’s charge relies on reporting from POLITICO in 2019 that found she spent roughly a third of her time as U.S. ambassador to Canada in Kentucky or Oklahoma, along with federal and state political donations she has made through the 2022 cycle with an Oklahoma address. State law requires gubernatorial candidates to be a “citizen and resident of Kentucky for at least 6 years next preceding his [sic] election.”

    Craft’s campaign was dismissive of the broadside from the super PAC. “The only thing more palpable than the momentum behind Kelly Craft is the Cameron team’s desperation,” Kristin Davison, a senior adviser for Craft, said in a statement.

    Cameron could also lean more into Trump — who endorsed his campaign last summer, shortly after Craft and her husband, coal magnate Joe Craft, were prominently pictured with the former president at the Kentucky Derby but months before her own campaign launch.

    Kentucky’s most powerful Republican in Washington, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, meanwhile, has not publicly weighed in on the race. But he has close ties to both candidates.

    Craft and her husband have been longtime financial supporters of McConnell and the Republican Party more broadly. The then-Senate majority leader was instrumental in getting Craft nominated and confirmed to be U.N. ambassador.

    Cameron has perhaps even deeper ties. He worked in McConnell’s office for two years and was widely assumed to be the successor-in-waiting for McConnell’s seat in the Senate when he eventually retires. Cameron’s decision to run for governor caught many by surprise, both in Washington and Kentucky.

    Davison, the adviser to Craft, took a swipe at that close relationship between the two men in her statement, saying Cameron’s team was “having a bad morning after finding out their Mitch McConnell-groomed candidate has fallen a net 19 points over the last few weeks.”

    Madison Fernandez contributed to this report.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Republican donor retreat suggests Donald Trump is far from a coronation

    Republican donor retreat suggests Donald Trump is far from a coronation

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    Without mentioning Trump’s name, Kemp pinned blame on the former president’s election loss grievances and warned that “not a single swing voter” will vote for a GOP nominee making such claims, calling 2020 “ancient history.”

    Kemp, who found himself the object of Trump’s ire after declining to intervene to reverse his Georgia loss in 2020, represents a wing of the Republican Party that has sought to resist Trump’s grasp. So does New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu. So does former Vice President Mike Pence. Here — while Trump held his own private meetings out of sight — all three were given prime speaking slots.

    That the Republican committee invited dissenters of Trump, even prospective challengers in next year’s presidential primary, points to the fact that even though Trump has first place in the polls, there are still many months of fighting ahead of him. His potential nomination is unlikely to come as a coronation.

    The party’s donors are still weighing whether there is a viable alternative to Trump, though there is still no clear consensus on the matter, several said in interviews this weekend.

    Standing in the lobby of the Four Seasons on Saturday, Sununu talked about Trump like this: “I don’t think he can win in 2024,” the governor said in an interview. “You don’t have to be angry about it. You don’t have to be negative about it. I think you just have to be willing to talk about it and bring real solutions to the table.”

    Trump spokesman Steven Cheung referenced a POLITICO report of Trump’s robust first-quarter fundraising and said, “Poll after poll [shows] President Trump crushing the competition, there is no doubt whoever stands in his way will get eviscerated.”

    Over breakfast, according to a person in the room and a copy of his speech obtained by POLITICO, Kemp told the donors the Republican nominee “must” be able to win Georgia’s 16 electoral college votes in order to win the White House.

    “We have to be able to win a general election,” Kemp said. His comments could apply not only to Trump, but also to the defeat this fall of Trump-backed and scandal-plagued candidates like Herschel Walker, who lost his race even as Kemp defeated a well-funded Democratic challenger by nearly 8 points.

    So far, a solution to stopping Trump has proved elusive to donors and operatives who have claimed for years they were trying to do just that.

    Other likely primary opponents of Trump, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), were also invited to the RNC gathering, but declined due to scheduling conflicts. Former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate Asa Hutchinson, who called for Trump to drop out of the race post-indictment, and a sunglasses-clad Perry Johnson, a Michigan businessman running for president, also received invitations. Hutchinson and Johnson buzzed around the retreat, but did not have speaking slots.

    “They’re sorting through it,” Hutchinson said, referring to how donors here and party activists elsewhere have responded to officials like Kemp, Sununu, himself and others who say the party must avoid a repeat of the 2020 general election. “But they’ve got to hear that message, and it’s like realism is coming to the party. And it takes people actually having the courage to say it before people will face that reality.”

    Sheltered from the party-tractors circling a honky-tonk district just beyond the doors, some of the GOP’s deepest pocketed supporters gathered inside the luxury hotel Friday and Saturday. There, they hoped to be reassured of the party’s upcoming electoral prospects after a bruising midterm cycle and as an uncertain presidential election looms. Donors sipping white wine in the lobby lounge gawked at the pink-cowgirl-hat-clad bachelorette parties on the sidewalk outside. Inside the hotel Friday afternoon, a couple in town for a country music concert squealed at the sight of Kellyanne Conway, who was among the panelists at the weekend-long donor summit.

    Ahead of the get-together and throughout the weekend, a slate of Republican 2024 hopefuls jetted up and down the East Coast and across the Midwest, the mad dash of candidates marking the busiest campaign week to date in the nascent presidential race. And that primary contest, of course, is a fight for what appears to be an increasingly difficult shot at dethroning Trump.

    “How in God’s name could Donald Trump be portrayed as a victim? But it’s being done,” said one Republican donor at the event referencing Trump’s indictment, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, like others there who discussed with POLITICO the unfolding presidential primary.

    The donor charged that Trump as the 2024 nominee “would lose even against Biden, which is tragic in its own sense,” but raised doubts about whether the candidates he did like — Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo — had the charisma or ability to push through.

    Just minutes after the donor floated Pompeo’s name as a candidate of interest, the former secretary of state announced Friday evening he wouldn’t seek the nomination after all. Pompeo’s decision came after the GOP primary field has gradually swollen — and as Trump has surged in public polling.

    But it didn’t stop Trump’s detractors from taking a swing in front of the audience of donors.

    In his Friday night address and as donors dined on filet mignon and mashed potatoes, Pence decried “the politics of personality” and “lure of populism unmoored to timeless conservative values,” according to a copy of his prepared remarks. And Trump’s former running-mate described the presidential primary as not just a contest between the candidates involved, but a “conflict of visions” with existential implications.

    Pence went after Trump directly on a number of policy areas, from defense and intervention in Ukraine to a ballooning national debt and Trump’s opposition to reforming entitlement programs, referring to him as “our former president.” He criticized Republicans’ waning interest in waging war against marriage equality, and the reticence some now appear to have about further restricting abortion rights — two areas where he finds himself at odds with his former boss.

    The uncertain political atmosphere this weekend is much different from the RNC’s donor retreat a year ago, when an optimistic set of top party benefactors in New Orleans were expecting to see a red wave in the 2022 midterm elections. President Joe Biden and Democratic incumbents had approval numbers in the tank, and the GOP had just given Virginia Democrats an unexpected shellacking months earlier.

    But the anticipated Republican Senate takeover this fall never materialized — in fact, the party lost a seat in the chamber — and the GOP only narrowly took over House control (or, as Kemp put it Saturday, “barely won the House majority back.”). Republicans lost gubernatorial races in Arizona and Pennsylvania that were widely believed to be winnable, if not for nominating candidates who espoused Trump’s stolen-election claims and other conspiracy theories that proved unpopular with the general electorate.

    As the party elite gathered this time, any sense of optimism about Republicans’ electoral prospects was much less palpable.

    Another donor, who said he was no diehard Trump fan, questioned not just DeSantis’ ability to break through in the primary but whether he could win in a general election. Calling the recent indictment against Trump “jet fuel” in the primary, the donor — like others here — said he was nearly resolved to the fact that Trump will be the party’s 2024 nominee.

    Kemp in his speech outlined the policies he ran on to cruise to reelection as governor, a race he won against one of the Democratic Party’s top stars. Rather than moving to the middle on policy, Kemp in his campaign still touted deeply conservative measures like a six-week abortion ban, approving the permitless carry of handguns and banning certain lessons in schools about racism.

    But throughout his speech, Kemp chided Republicans who have become “distracted” by claims about stolen elections and, more recently, Trump’s current and pending legal cases in New York and Georgia, asserting that such conversations only help Democrats.

    Johnson, the Michigan candidate not currently registering in presidential polls, carried a stack of his book, “Two Cents to Save America,” around the hotel lobby restaurant on Saturday. He laughed recounting his takeaways from conversations with donors this weekend, as well as from a panel of RNC advisory council members Friday evening.

    “Obviously, they know Trump lost,” Johnson said. “Even though we may have had an irregular situation in elections, they’re saying right on stage, it hasn’t changed. We’re going to continue to have mass mail ballots. And if the Republicans want to win, they have to live under the new reality.”

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Up close in Taiwan with the Republican who compared Xi to Hitler

    Up close in Taiwan with the Republican who compared Xi to Hitler

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    mccaul2

    McCaul is hardly alone in making saber-rattling comments about Taiwan while visiting East Asia. Most provocative may have been Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of State who previously served with McCaul in the House. Pompeo last year used a trip to Taiwan to call for the U.S. to recognize the island as an independent nation — the ultimate diplomatic red line for mainland China.

    President Joe Biden has also engaged in McCaul-style gestures toward ditching strategic ambiguity. He has repeatedly indicated that the U.S. would defend Taiwan from an invasion, only to have his aides walk it back in the press.

    But McCaul’s remarks underscored a reality that the Brookings Institution warned about in an analysis published while he was on the ground: American politicians who go too far in defense of Taiwan run the risk of drawing unwanted Chinese attention to the island.

    A “client” state like Taiwan might normally enjoy support from a “patron” state like America, the Brookings authors wrote. But when “its security environment appears to be deteriorating, a client might not welcome signals of support from the patron if the client considers those signals to be so provocative that they undermine its security.”

    The security risks are real. Hours before McCaul met with Tsai, China announced three days of live-fire military exercises around the island. Beijing imposed sanctions on the hosts of Tsai’s meeting with McCarthy, bringing U.S.-China relations to a recent low point, and later separately announced sanctions against McCaul, which he deemed a “badge of honor” in a statement.

    But in an interview, McCaul didn’t back down. He stood by his comparison between Xi and Hitler, arguing that Russia and China together presented a threat unseen in generations.

    “We really haven’t seen anything quite like this, on this scale and a threat to Europe and the Pacific, since World War II,” the 61-year-old said.

    McCaul has made it his personal mission to enlist other Republicans in support of hawkish foreign policy, even as loud voices on the right — including Donald Trump — have questioned America’s interest in countering China and confronting Russia’s invasion. He brought fellow Texas GOP Reps. Keith Self and Jake Ellzey with him on a recent Ukraine trip, part of what Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) called his effort to “educate” Republican colleagues.

    He’s particularly active on the U.S. airwaves.

    “I joke with Mike because every time I turn on the Sunday TV shows, I’ll see McCaul. And then I’ll click over to the next channel, and I’ll see McCaul,” Fitzpatrick said in an interview. “He gets more TV time than the speaker.”

    In the interview, McCaul notably declined to criticize Trump’s approach to both Xi and Putin. Trump “at least projected strength,” the GOP lawmaker said, alleging that Biden “seems so weak” compared with his predecessor.

    McCaul even argued that Trump’s “personality probably prevented an invasion” of Ukraine during his administration and “certainly would have deterred Chairman Xi from invading Taiwan” — both dubious claims, given the former president’s past praise for both Xi and Putin.

    The former president’s polling lead in the 2024 primary could soon force McCaul and other GOP backers of Ukraine to grapple with a standard-bearer whose foreign policy views clash with theirs.

    While McCaul steered clear of Trump, he conceded that he is not certain Congress would be prepared to vote to authorize or otherwise fund a U.S. military response should Beijing escalate: “I do worry about that,” he said.

    Even as he reiterated one-on-one that he wouldn’t shrink from supporting a military response against China, he used a public press conference in Taipei to sound a note of characteristic bravado that may or or may not go over well in Beijing.

    Asked by a reporter near the end of his trip if officials like Tsai had shared concern privately about his harsh rhetoric, McCaul responded that the Taiwanese president “welcomes” the American lawmakers’ backing, particularly because it was bipartisan.

    “Obviously,” he added about China, “you don’t want to poke the Panda.”

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • This Korean American Republican is trying to educate her party — in the U.S. and abroad

    This Korean American Republican is trying to educate her party — in the U.S. and abroad

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    main beavers kimprofile lede

    It remains to be seen how comfortable the House GOP can be as a home for Steel and Kim, emigres from South Korea whose friendship long predates their service in Congress. These days, both represent districts that Democrats have targeted in recent campaigns.

    Steel acknowledged that the women’s entry into the congressional Republican ranks hasn’t always been smooth.

    “A lot of people, the first year, they couldn’t recognize the differences between Kim and me,” she recalled. “I had to mention that I’m taller than her, I have longer hair than her.”

    Despite exit polls showing the Asian American electorate generally tilting leftward, Kim’s anti-communist rhetoric has helped her connect with conservative Asian American voters in her Orange County-area district — particularly Vietnamese Americans, who tend to lean more to the right. House Republican leaders, eager to diversify the party’s ranks, have pointed to Kim and Steel as valuable messengers and potential models.

    What has worked for Kim in her district hasn’t quite translated into national success for the GOP, though.

    Republicans still haven’t been able to break through among Asian American voters in other key races, with the fast-growing voting bloc still swinging decisively towards Democrats during the last election in swing states from Georgia to Nevada.

    And Kim is plainly still finding her own way in Washington, too, even as Speaker Kevin McCarthy predicts she could rise to become a committee chair or senator.

    In an interview, Chu, the chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, said Kim had initially expressed some interest in joining the all-Democratic group. Membership in CAPAC might have functioned as a useful platform for a junior lawmaker with hopes of closing the gap between the Republican Party and Asian Americans — and between the U.S. and East Asia.

    But Kim ultimately opted against joining, Chu said, after realizing she would have been outvoted by the group’s executive board on any major decision.

    Wu reported from Washington.

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    #Korean #American #Republican #educate #party #U.S
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Florida Republican apologizes after calling transgender people ‘mutants’

    Florida Republican apologizes after calling transgender people ‘mutants’

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    Named the “Safety in Private Spaces Act,” Republican leaders in Florida are moving on the legislation that would require people to use restrooms and changing facilities according to their sex assigned at birth at places like schools and restaurants.

    After several speakers, some identifying as transgender, spoke out against the bill during public comment, Barnaby sounded off about the “evil, dysphoria, disfunction” he said is gripping society. His remarks embody the tense debate that has followed the culture war bills being pushed by Florida Republicans this year focused on how gender identity and sexual identity intersect with parental rights and education.

    “The lord rebuke you, Satan, and all of your demons and all of your imps who come parade before us,” Barnaby said. “That’s right, I called you demons and imps, who come and parade before us and pretend that you are part of this world.”

    Barnaby, 63, who identifies as Christian, was originally born in Birmingham, England and moved to Florida in 1991. He was elected to the House in 2020.

    Democratic and Republican lawmakers on the panel seemed taken aback by his comments, which came as they debated the bill ahead of advancing it to the House floor.

    “I’m still a little bit thrown off from the last comments here,” state Rep. Kristen Arrington (D-Kissimmee) said after Barnaby’s address.

    She then turned to opponents of the bill, saying: “[I] just really want to let you all know that there are many here who understand and support you.”

    Some Republicans attempted to distance themselves from Barnaby’s remarks and thanked the audience for speaking.

    “You’re not an evil being,” said state Rep. Chase Tramont (R-Port Orange), addressing speakers at the hearing. “I believe that you’re fearfully and wonderfully made, and I want you to live your life well.”

    Minutes after Republicans advanced the bathroom bill, Barnaby apologized for his comments.

    “I referred to trans people as demons,” Barnaby said. “I would like to apologize to the trans community for referring to you as demons.”

    By advancing the proposal, FL H.B.1521 (23R), House Republicans put Florida on the cusp of joining state such as Iowa, Arkansas, Alabama, Oklahoma and Tennessee in passing bills addressing bathroom use.

    Florida’s legislation would open the door for any person 18 years or older to be charged with a second-degree misdemeanor if they enter a restroom or changing facility designated for a person that isn’t the sex they are assigned at birth and refuse to “immediately depart” when asked by someone else. It also requires local school districts to craft code of conduct rules to discipline students who do the same.

    These policies would be enforced at educational institutions, hurricane shelters, substance abuse providers, health care facilities and public accommodations, which by law include lodgings, restaurants, gasoline stations entertainment spaces and more.

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    #Florida #Republican #apologizes #calling #transgender #people #mutants
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • South Carolina Republican says to ignore FDA abortion pill ruling

    South Carolina Republican says to ignore FDA abortion pill ruling

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    image

    The ruling was appealed by the Biden administration as lawmakers, including Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), called on President Joe Biden to use his executive powers to protect the drugs’ availability even sooner. Hundreds of thousands of patients in the United States use the medication both for abortions and treating miscarriages.

    Mace sided with the outspoken Democrats, the first Republican to publicly do so.

    “This is an issue that Republicans have been largely on the wrong side of,” she said. “We have, over the last nine months, not shown compassion toward women, and this is one of those issues that I’ve tried to lead on as someone who’s pro-life and just have some common sense.”

    Mace said there’s “no basis” for the ruling, explaining that the Texas judge cited a Supreme Court decision, which was later overturned, for his decision.

    Over the weekend, Rep. Tony Gonzalez (R-Texas) floated the idea of defunding FDA programs if the ruling is ignored. When asked about those comments, Mace emphasized that most Americans aren’t radically opposed to abortion access and would likely agree with the FDA’s authority to allow the drug’s sale.

    “We are getting it wrong on this issue,” she said. “We’ve got to show some compassion to women, especially women who’ve been raped. We’ve got to show compassion on the abortion issue because by and large most Americans aren’t with us on this issue.”

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    #South #Carolina #Republican #ignore #FDA #abortion #pill #ruling
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • The Republican Party is caught in an abortion trap

    The Republican Party is caught in an abortion trap

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    Going back to the 1990s, Gallup polling showed Americans divided roughly evenly between those who called themselves “pro-life” and “pro-choice.” Exit polls from the 1990s and 2000s showed voters who said abortion or “moral values” were most important to their vote supported Republican candidates in greater numbers.

    But those surveys were conducted when a right to an abortion was law of the land. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision last year ending that constitutional right has exposed Americans’ broad opposition to the strict abortion bans adopted or proposed in GOP-controlled states. And it’s revealed that public surveys on the matter probably need more nuanced questions now.

    There’s a long history of abortion polling. In the 2000 presidential election, the Los Angeles Times national exit poll found more George W. Bush voters rated abortion as one of their two most important issues than Al Gore voters, and voters were divided 50-50 on whether abortion should remain legal or be made illegal (though with exceptions).

    That poll offered three options when measuring voter sentiment on abortion: keep it legal, make it illegal with exceptions or make it illegal with no exceptions.

    Now, a four-point question probably best measures where Americans sit on the issue: legal in all cases, legal in most, illegal in all and illegal in most. The 2022 national exit poll used this device, finding that 29 percent of voters believed abortion should be “legal in all cases,” while another 30 percent thought it should be “legal in most cases.” That left 26 percent who thought it should be “illegal in most cases” and only 10 percent who said it should be “illegal in all cases.”

    That leaves roughly six-in-10 voters supporting legal abortion in most cases — with the median voter supporting some restrictions — and just over a third who want it to be entirely or mostly illegal.

    The Wisconsin case is instructive on this front. The 1849 ban that was triggered by the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision makes it a felony to perform nearly all abortions (something close to the opinion held by only 10 percent of voters nationally). That ban is currently the subject of litigation, and voters were made very aware of the fact that whoever won Tuesday’s election would help decide the case, since it is almost certain to end up before the state Supreme Court.

    That helps explain the breadth of Protasiewicz’s victory in a state where five of the past six major statewide races for president, Senate and governor have been decided by three points or fewer. The GOP-backed candidate, Dan Kelly, lost a state Supreme Court race by a similar margin in 2020, but that was driven largely by the Democratic presidential primary, which was held concurrently with the state Supreme Court election. (Then-President Donald Trump, who endorsed Kelly in that race, was the only named candidate appearing on the GOP primary ballot, giving Republicans little reason to turn out.)

    Results from Tuesday’s election are still unofficial, but some of the county-level totals suggest younger and more liberal voters were highly motivated. Protasiewicz ran up huge numbers in counties with large colleges and universities, winning 82 percent of the vote in Dane County (University of Wisconsin-Madison), 73 percent in Milwaukee (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Marquette University) and 54 percent in Winnebago County (University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh). Those percentages were greater than Evers’ in all three counties, and turnout in Dane and Milwaukee was higher as a share of the statewide vote than in the 2022 midterms.

    Beyond the numbers, abortion also struck a personal chord for some voters, according to Margie Omero, a Democratic pollster who conducted research around the race but didn’t work directly for Protasiewicz.

    Omero described focus groups that became dominated by the abortion issue. “The number of times that people spoke really personally about their own medical crisis or an abortion they had when they were young, having a friend who had to leave the state,” Omero said, adding, “Every [focus] group had a story like this — where you had to pause the group because they were in tears, and everybody had to comfort that person.”

    But nearly a year removed from POLITICO’s first report that the Supreme Court was poised to strike down Roe v. Wade, abortion isn’t going away as a political flashpoint. In another state, Florida, Republicans are debating their own crackdown on abortion, as GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis prepares to enter the presidential race. State legislators in Tallahassee are undaunted about sending a ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy to DeSantis’ desk soon, replacing the 15-week ban the state enacted just last summer.

    After the Wisconsin defeat — along with numerous others, including abortion-related ballot measures in red states — such a strict prohibition runs headlong into national public opinion. And it raises the question: How, if at all, are Republicans going to find a message that puts the party more in line with the median voter?

    One tack: Paint Democrats as too permissive, willing to support “abortion on demand, for virtually any reason, up until the moment of birth,” as a press release from the Republican National Committee on Thursday put it.

    But those attacks are largely falling flat. President Joe Biden has said repeatedly he supports the Roe v. Wade framework, which allowed states to impose modest restrictions on abortion later in pregnancies. And according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only 1 percent of abortions in 2020 occurred after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

    As an alternative, some conservatives are urging a more moderate stance. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) last year proposed a federal ban on abortions after 15 weeks — introducing limits in states where none currently exist, though states could implement more restrictive bans.

    Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a possible 2024 presidential candidate himself, supports a 15-week ban similar to the current Florida law. The anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List called it a “compassionate bill” and touted polling earlier this year showing a majority of voters in blue-leaning Virginia supported it. The group’s website features reams of public-opinion data showing popular support for 15-week bans.

    Even though the issue has turned in their favor, Democrats are facing their own debates over how far to go in fighting to expand access to abortion, with some activists arguing the party should fight to eliminate any restrictions in ballot measures, even in the reddest of states.

    But the data is now getting clearer. The Roe v. Wade framework — making abortion mostly legal, but allowing states to impose modest restrictions — is where the majority of American voters are. From the midterms, to Wisconsin, potentially to the 2024 elections, they’re continuing to punish the party that’s straying the furthest from that.

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    #Republican #Party #caught #abortion #trap
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )