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Thomas Massie joins Chip Roy in supporting the Florida governor, who has yet to officially declare his candidacy.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
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Thomas Massie endorsed Ron DeSantis for president in 2024 — another House Republican backing someone other than Donald Trump.
Republican lawmakers override veto of transgender bill in Kentucky
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Nineteen people were arrested and charged with third-degree criminal trespassing, Kentucky State Police said. Officers gave each person “the option to leave without any enforcement action or be placed under arrest,” said Capt. Paul Blanton, a police spokesperson.
Republican House Speaker David Osborne later said it was a decision by state police to remove and arrest protesters.
“I think it’s unfortunate that it reached that level and certainly they were given, as I’ve been told since then, multiple opportunities to either quiet their chants or to leave voluntarily,” Osborne said.
The bill’s opponents framed the issue as a civil-rights fight. Democratic Rep. Sarah Stalker declared: “Kentucky will be on the wrong side of history” by enacting the measure.
The debate about the transgender bill will likely spill over into this year’s gubernatorial campaign, with Beshear’s veto drawing GOP condemnation as he seeks reelection to a second term. A legal fight also is brewing. The American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky reaffirmed that it intends to “take this fight to the courts” to try to preserve access to health care options for young transgender people.
“While we lost the battle in the legislature, our defeat is temporary. We will not lose in court,” said Chris Hartman, executive director of the Fairness Campaign, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization.
In praising the veto override, David Walls, executive director of The Family Foundation, said the bill puts “policy in alignment with the truth that every child is created as a male or female and deserves to be loved, treated with dignity and accepted for who they really are.”
Activists on both sides of the impassioned debate gathered at the statehouse to make competing appeals before lawmakers took up the transgender bill following an extended break.
At a rally that drew hundreds of transgender-rights supporters, trans teenager Sun Pacyga held up a sign summing up a grim review of the Republican legislation. The sign read: “Our blood is on your hands.”
“If it passes, the restricted access to gender-affirming health care, I think trans kids will die because of that,” the 17-year-old student said, expressing a persistent concern among the bill’s critics that the restrictions could lead to an increase in teen suicides.
Bill supporters assembled to defend the measure, saying it protects trans children from undertaking gender-affirming treatments they might regret as adults. Research shows such regret is rare, however.
“We cannot allow people to continue down the path of fantasy, to where they’re going to end up 10, 20, 30 years down the road and find themselves miserable from decisions that they made when they were young,” said Republican Rep. Shane Baker at a rally.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )Why a Glenn Youngkin Presidential Candidacy Makes Sense for the Republican Party
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It’s a matter of taste, to be sure, but many people do not find Youngkin painful. His approval ratings among Virginians is at 58 percent, according to a recent Roanoke College poll. Those who recoil at his rhetorical contradictions and the evident calculation behind them are heavily concentrated here around the state capitol: Legislators who resent what they regard as his unseemly haste in pursuing national ambitions, or local reporters stiffed by a governor who doesn’t much care about their questions.
When politicians can play both ends of the keyboard — sounding notes of grievance and aspiration with equal fluency — they often go far. This spring will likely force a decision by Youngkin about how far, and how fast, he wants to try to go. Should he run for president, even as he was only elected governor, his first foray into politics, less than a year and a half ago?
The reasons to be skeptical are fairly simple. The Republican donor and operative class that wants to put Trump out of their misery for good — the people Youngkin will need if he runs — are worried that the field of candidates will grow too large, dividing the anti-Trump vote. Youngkin’s biography, a wealthy private-equity executive known for his earnest religiosity, conveys a superficial resemblance to Mitt Romney. The 2012 nominee was an establishment natural and may have won some suburban independents that Donald Trump never could — but hardly enough to compensate for his lack of populist energy.
The reasons Youngkin could win over the voters Romney could not — and be an intriguing addition to the field — are more complex. Republicans are divided over the question of division. Do people want an end to the politics of conflict and bombast represented by Trump and his one-time protégé, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis? Or is exploiting the alleged cultural and ideological excesses of the Democratic left the path to defeating President Joe Biden? Youngkin’s potential appeal is that it isn’t necessary to decide — just say yes to both questions.
At first blush, Youngkin attracted national notice for one main reason: He showed that he could harness the coalition of voters who like Donald Trump without having his own reputation and candidacy be hijacked by the former president. His success seemed fueled in significant measure by the national pollical climate and the self-inflicted wounds of his normally skilled opponent, former Gov. Terry McAuliffe.
At second blush, it seems clear that Youngkin’s ascent owes to more than a flukish convergence of circumstances. In terms of political skills, he is plainly as talented as other Republicans hoping to halt Trump’s return as the party’s nominee next year — but talented in different ways. Near-term, Younkin has many obstacles. If he surmounted them on the way to the GOP nomination, the McAuliffe experience leaves little doubt he would be a formidable opponent to President Joseph Biden or another Democratic nominee.
The contrast with DeSantis is telling. The Florida governor’s ascent has been powered in large measure by his zeal at cultural and ideological scab-picking, such as his battles with the Walt Disney Company over the state’s bill banning public schools from discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity before fourth grade. The appeal is essentially Trumpism without Trump.
Youngkin, too, regularly wades into the cultural politics swirling around public education, including such topics as whether schools teach racial history. He’s scored local high schools in Northern Virginia for being slow to tell students they won merit scholarship awards, allegedly because school officials thought these violated principles of equity. During his election, he went to battle with school officials in Loudoun County for their handling of sexual assault on a student in a girl’s bathroom by a male classmate wearing a skirt. Like DeSantis, he often goes on favored platforms like Fox News to talk about these issues.
Unlike DeSantis, however, he also pivots at other moments to sound like a Republican version of Bill Clinton’s 1990s centrism. He says the GOP must avoid exclusionary rhetoric and ideological litmus tests. “What I’d seen in Virginia, and I think I see across this nation, is we in fact have to bring people into the Republican Party, we have to be additive, not [rely on] subtraction.” (For more from the Youngkin interview, see my colleague Daniel Lippman’s report.)
In an age when many politicians emphasize mobilization—firing up voters who are already natural supporters with grievance-based appeals —nYoungkin said his experience shows politicians must also revive the art of persuasion.
Virginia is a state where most statewide races trended Democratic in recent years. “People thought it was purple,” Youngkin said, but in fact “it was pretty darn blue….It required us to, yes, bring new people in, to persuade a number of folks who might not have ever voted for a Republican in their lives.”
The reality is that Youngkin is less an updated version of Mitt Romney than he is of someone who actually became president, George W. Bush. Apparently by chance rather than design, what Youngkin articulates is something very much like “compassionate conservatism,” the credo that got Bush elected in 2000 and then went into retreat as he became a war president after 9/11 and the Iraq War. That is reflected in Youngkin’s prominent advocacy of improved state mental health services — “Nobody has been spared this crisis” — and a state partnership with the impoverished and predominantly Black city of Petersburg, just south of the capital.
Like Bush early in his national career, Youngkin combines the background of a wealthy elite with an affable jockish sensibility — Youngkin played Division I basketball at Rice — that helps with populist messaging. As with Bush, his political persona is intertwined with a plainly sincere if showy religiosity. “Can I say grace real quick?” he asked during a recent interview. Assured by his more secular visitors this was fine, he spoke aloud a minute-long prayer to the Heavenly Father, thanking him for the meal of fried chicken tacos and seeking his blessing for the “General Assembly members and the work we are about to do.”
As he ponders a presidential run, Youngkin presumably is seeking guidance from a higher power than political journalists. Even so, the political press has an obvious interest in his answer: A Youngkin candidacy would be an entertaining addition to the 2024 race. And it would test the hypothesis that there is a future for a brand of GOP politics that lies somewhere between the nihilism of Trumpism and the pallor of Romneyism.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )Republican Candidates 2024: Meet the GOP Presidential Hopefuls
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We put the presidential hopefuls into categories based roughly on their chances to get the GOP nomination.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )Abortion on the ballot? Not if these Republican lawmakers can help it
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Legislatures in Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio and Oklahoma are debating bills this session that would hike the filing fees, raise the number of signatures required to get on the ballot, restrict who can collect signatures, mandate broader geographic distribution of signatures, and raise the vote threshold to pass an amendment from a majority to a supermajority. While the bills vary in wording, they would have the same impact: limiting voters’ power to override abortion restrictions that Republicans imposed, which took effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year.
After watching the pro-abortion rights side win all six ballot initiative fights related to abortion in 2022 — including in conservative states such as Kansas and Kentucky — conservatives fear, and are mobilizing to avoid, a repeat.
“It was a wake-up call that taught us we have a ton of work to do,” said Kelsey Pritchard, the state public affairs director for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, which plans to spend tens of millions of dollars on ballot initiative fights on abortion over the next two years. “We’re going to be really engaged on these ballot measures that are often very radical and go far beyond what Roe ever did.”
In Mississippi, where a court order froze all ballot efforts in 2021, GOP lawmakers are advancing legislation that would restore the mechanism but prohibit voters from putting abortion-related measures on the ballot.
“I think it just continues the policy of Mississippi and our state leaders that we’re going to be a pro-life state,” said Mississippi state Rep. Nick Bain, who presented the bill on the House floor.
But in most states, the GOP proposals to tighten restrictions on ballot initiatives are not explicitly targeting abortion. The push to change the rules began years before the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade in June of 2022 — spurred by progressive efforts to legalize marijuana, expand Medicaid and raise the minimum wage in several red states — though it reached new heights over the past year as voters and elected officials clashed over abortion policies.
Still, some anti-abortion activists worry that the trend could backfire, preventing groups from using the tactic to pass their own constitutional amendments via popular vote.
“In Florida, it’s a double-edged sword,” said Andrew Shirvell, the leader of the group Florida Voice for the Unborn that is working to put an anti-abortion measure on the 2024 ballot. “So we’re conflicted about it, because there is a large contingent of pro-life grassroots advocates who feel our governor and legislature have failed us on this issue for far too long and want to take things into our own hands.”
Interest on the left in using ballot initiatives to protect or expand abortion access exploded in the wake of the 2022 midterm elections. Efforts are already underway in Missouri, Ohio and South Dakota to insert language restoring abortion rights into the states’ constitutions, while advocates in several other states are mulling their options.
The campaign is furthest along in Ohio, where abortion rights advocates began collecting signatures this week. A coalition of anti-abortion groups called Protect Women Ohio formed in response and announced a $5 million ad buy this week to air a 30-second spot suggesting the proposed amendment would take away parents’ rights to decide whether their children should obtain abortions and other kinds of health care.
At the same time, some Ohio lawmakers are pushing for a proposal that would raise the voter approval threshold for constitutional amendments from a simple majority to 60 percent.
In Missouri, where progressive groups have submitted several versions of an abortion-rights ballot initiative to state authorities for review, lawmakers are similarly weighing proposals to impose a supermajority vote requirement and mandate that the measure pass in more than half of Missouri House districts to take effect.
“It’s about making sure everyone has a voice, and that includes middle Missouri as well,” said Missouri Right to Life Executive Director Susan Klein. “We have known for some time that the threat to legalize abortion was going around different states and would ultimately come to Missouri. We’ve been hard at work preparing for this challenge and we’re ready.”
In Idaho, lawmakers are trying to require backers of initiative petitions to gather signatures from 6 percent of registered voters to qualify for the ballot.
“I call these bills ‘death by a thousand cuts,’” said Kelly Hall, the executive director of the progressive ballot initiative group The Fairness Project. “When you hear about each one in isolation, they seem like not that big a deal. But taken together, they have an exclusionary effect on people’s participation in democracy.”
Conservative lawmakers and advocates pushing the rule changes say they reflect their beliefs about how laws should be crafted and are not solely about abortion — but they are upfront about wanting to make it harder to pass the kind of broad protections voters in California, Michigan and Vermont enacted last year.
“I did not start this out due to abortion, but … Planned Parenthood is actively trying to enshrine a lack of protections for the unborn into constitutions,” said North Dakota state Sen. Janne Myrdal, who heads the state legislature’s Pro-Life Caucus. “You can sit in California or New York or Washington and throw a dart, attach a couple million dollars to it, and you change our constitution.”
The resolution Myrdal is sponsoring, which passed the Senate last month and is awaiting a vote in the House, would require proposed constitutional amendments to pass twice — during the primary and general elections — and bump up the signature-gathering requirement from 4 percent to 5 percent of residents. If approved, the proposed changes would appear on the state’s 2024 ballot.
Major national anti-abortion groups say they’re not formally endorsing these efforts, but support the GOP lawmakers behind them.
“It starts to diminish the importance of a constitution if it can be changed by the whim of the current culture,” Carol Tobias, the president of the National Right to Life Committee, said.
Even in states that have not yet taken steps to put an abortion-rights measure on the ballot, conservative fears of such a move are driving some surprising legislative action.
In Oklahoma, the anti-abortion leader Lauinger is arguing to lawmakers that polling shows overwhelming support for rape and incest exceptions — as one lawmaker has proposed in a bill that cleared its first committee last month — and overwhelming opposition to leaving the state’s ban as-is.
If the state didn’t have a ballot measure process, he said, he wouldn’t support exceptions. But since that threat exists, he argued, “We must not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.”
“The abortion industry has the weapon to defeat what we regard as the ideal policy,” Lauinger told the lawmakers. “The initiative petition is their trump card.”
Lauinger did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Yet National Right to Life, the parent group of his organization, told POLITICO it backs his argument that it’s better to make exceptions for rape and incest than risk a sweeping ballot initiative enshrining the right to abortion in the state constitution.
“This isn’t a betrayal,” insisted Tobias. “If you really look at what we’re facing, we could either save 95 percent of all babies or we could lose everything and all babies could be subject to death. It’s kind of hard to not see the reality.”
Advocates on both sides of the abortion fight stress, however, that a ballot initiative fight in Oklahoma is still possible — even likely — whether the state approves exceptions for rape and incest or not.
“They’re probably going to try to do one anyway, regardless of what we do,” said Oklahoma state Rep. Jim Olsen, a Republican who launched an effort with other conservative lawmakers in the state to defeat the exceptions bill. “The fight hasn’t even come and we’re already backing away.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )Two more Republican states abruptly depart from interstate voter list program
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The exodus of GOP officials from the once-uncontroversial group comes as some prominent Republicans — most notably former President Donald Trump — have publicly attacked it, falsely saying it is a liberal plot to control the county’s voter rolls. Most of the departing states have not echoed Trump’s claims, instead citing disagreements about the governance of the organization, but defenders of ERIC say their complaints are only a pretense to exit the organization.
But the bottom line is that these Republican-led states have turned against an organization they once hailed as a solution to cutting down on voter fraud.
The decision from the states to leave the partnership came shortly following a meeting of ERIC’s board on Friday, where member states voted on significant changes to the governance of the organization.
That meeting resolved one point of contention — the role of non-voting members within the organization — but resulted in a stalemate over disagreements on what members could do with the data collected and distributed by ERIC.
Broadly, ERIC helps organizations maintain their voter rolls by issuing reports on voters who may have moved either within the state or between member states, died, or potentially voted in two different states, requiring members to conduct list maintenance with that information. ERIC also produces data on people who may be eligible to register but haven’t, and requires states to contact those would-be voters.
Some Republican election officials believe the latter requirement, in particular, as superfluous and a waste of resources. LaRose had previously proposed changing ERIC to allow states to choose to use ERIC data “a la carte” — letting member states pick and choose what they want to do with the data produced by the organization — and a proposal to change the organization’s bylaws to allow for that failed at Friday’s meeting. A second vote that would tie the requirement to contact potential eligible voters to a report that helps states catch cases of double voting — meaning states could opt to do either both or neither — also failed.
Both proposals got a majority vote, with the latter having more backers. But ERIC bylaws require 80 percent of the membership to agree to make changes
Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate said the failed votes on Friday don’t “allow each member to do what’s best for their respective state.”
“Ultimately, the departure of several key states and today’s vote is going to impact the ability for ERIC to be an effective tool for the State of Iowa,” he said. “My office will be recommending resigning our membership from ERIC.”
Other states could follow. Alaska’s elections director has said during a legislative hearing earlier this month that the state may leave the organization, while Texas’ secretary of state has taken public steps to prepare her office for a withdrawal should the state drop out. (There is pending legislation in Texas to do as much.)
A spokesperson for the Texas secretary of state did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday. A spokesperson for the Alaska lieutenant governor’s office — the state’s chief election official — did not have an immediate comment on Friday’s meeting.
Simon, the Minnesota Democrat, told POLITICO that he and other ERIC supporters had been reaching out to Republican-led states on Friday afternoon to urge them to stay in the partnership and continue to negotiate.
“I would urge any state who is disappointed with the outcome of today’s board meeting to hit the pause button,” he said in an interview.
Not every Republican-led state is looking to leave. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has been a vocal defender of ERICover the last month, and his office projected hope that states would remain in the organization following a vote at Friday’s meeting that removed non-voting positions from the group’s board, another flashpoint.
“Hopefully this will allow states to stay and help keep clean voter rolls across the nation,” Gabriel Sterling, a senior official in the Georgia secretary of state’s office, tweeted shortly after the meeting.
Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, the Republican chief election official of her state, also voiced support for ERIC on Friday. “As a founding member, ERIC has served Utah and its member states well,” she said in a statement to POLITICO, calling for “compromise between Republican and Democratic member states.”
“I’m hopeful we can find a path forward to keep and attract members,” she added.
And crucially, South Carolina — a state some members were concerned about after Friday’s meeting — said it had no intention of departing.
“South Carolina does not currently have plans to leave ERIC,” John Michael Catalano, a spokesperson for the South Carolina state election commission, wrote in an email. “Despite its flaws, ERIC remains a valuable and (currently) irreplaceable tool that allows states to remove unqualified voters from the voter registration rolls.”
Remaining members lamented the organization’s departures, with several saying that a state leaving ERIC makes the organization’s data worse for everyone: “The more members that leave, the less valuable and effective the organization,” Catalano noted.
And others bemoaned the departures as a bad sign for the culture of cooperation surrounding elections. Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, described the work ERIC does as “technical and boring” but an important part of the “backbone” of American elections.
“What we’re seeing is the product of disinformation,” she said in a Friday interview. “It has made ERIC a lightning rod in some circles.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )U.S. should temporarily guarantee all bank deposits, senior House Republican says
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“If you don’t do this, there’s going to be a run on your smaller banks,” he said. “Everyone’s going to take their money out and run to the JPMorgan’s and these too-big-to-fail banks, and they’re going to get bigger and everybody else is going to get smaller and weaker, and it’s going really be bad for our system.”
Luetkemeyer is one of the first Republican lawmakers to call for a broad-based deposit guarantee as a remedy for the banking crisis, leaning into a Biden administration response that other GOP politicians have blasted as a bailout. Luetkemeyer is among the House Republicans supporting regulators’ recent actions to contain the banking meltdown, in line with House Financial Services Chair Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.).
“The thought process here is that this is a contagion that could be spread across the entire banking system if it’s not contained and if people don’t stop and and be calm about their assessment of the situation,” Luetkemeyer said. “This is a Chicken Little situation. You know, the sky is falling. Everybody runs around like that, the whole thing’s going to implode.”
Luetkemeyer’s concerns come as the smallest, “community” banks try to make the case that they’re not engaged in the kind of risk-taking that that brought down their larger, regional competitors.
The Independent Community Bankers of America, a trade association for the smallest lenders, is calling on policymakers to impose stricter oversight on the largest financial institutions and to spare community banks from having to pay for the deposit bailout of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. It’s also a competitive concern, as the biggest global banks appear to be attracting deposits from other banks.
Luetkemeyer pointed to a temporary policy established after the 2008 meltdown that established unlimited deposit insurance above the $250,000 limit.
“So what you could do right now is that very same thing and say, hey, look, for another 12 months here or six months, we’re going to guarantee you every single deposit in this country and every bank until we get this interest rate situation resolved and these banks get back on solid footing,” he said.
He later changed his position on the potential duration, with a spokesperson saying the guarantee could be in place “perhaps 30 to 60 days.”
Still, Luetkemeyer said “the system is sound” and “in better shape than it’s been in probably 20 years.”
“But,” he said, “we do have a few problems in it that need to be worked out.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )Opinion | The Vibes Are Off With the Republican Party
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Vish Burra, who worked for Bannon’s “War Room” podcast and is now an aide to another lightning rod, Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), once told me about the MAGA movement, “We don’t have an ideology, we have vibes.”
As I saw firsthand over the last few days while mingling with MAGA fans wearing over-the-top merch, the vibes were off at CPAC this year — a worrisome thing for a party built on vibes.
Vibes matter, and not just in today’s hyperactive political-media ecosystem, where everyone craves authenticity and a shared sense of style and spirit — elements which more or less define a vibe. The centrality of vibes goes back to 18th century philosopher and grandfather of the conservative movement, Edmund Burke, who spoke of politics’ need for “pleasing illusions” and “sentiments which beautify.” A shared vibe can transcend difference, unite ideologues and tap into a larger shared spirit. It’s something former President Donald Trump was able to do in 2016. And in the years since, as the Republican Party gave up on defining any agreed set of ideas or policies — famously failing to pass a party platform in 2020 — vibes were pretty much all the party had left.
Nowhere in the Republican universe did this seem to be more true than at CPAC. Since its inaugural conference in 1974 (during which future President Ronald Reagan spoke) CPAC has acted as a “hot or not” barometer for emerging conservative stars, ideas and aesthetics. It’s the flagship meeting of grassroots conservatism and media activism.
But this year, from the start, things were amiss — and it wasn’t just because of the drama surrounding CPAC chair Matt Schlapp, who is battling sexual assault allegations from a male campaign staffer, a claim he denies. Speakers like Donald Trump Jr. and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) addressed nearly empty rooms. Fewer trainings on conservative activism were being held, cutting down on opportunities for interest groups to interact. Even the Wi-Fi failed to work at times, leaving press members disgruntled.
Who wasn’t there said a lot about what was missing. MAGA darling and CPAC favorite Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA were nowhere to be found — along with their legions of Instagramming College Republicans. Only a few TPUSA ambassadors lurked. Fox News was not a sponsor and did not set up their usual broadcast booth in the media row. Likely presidential contender Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis instead was attending conflicting event hosted by the Club for Growth in his state. The absences confirmed the sense that a Trump–DeSantis proxy war has begun and CPAC was clearly Trump territory.
If there was a single transcendent moment for attendees, it came during Trump’s appearance on stage when he delivered the most compelling speech of CPAC. He used the majority of nearly two hours to focus on issues that could potentially appeal to Americans beyond the CPAC circuit — critiquing “free trade fanatics,” military interventionism and corrupt establishment Republicans.
But even he is not the powerful figure in politics he used to be. Now a former president, he is no longer an insurgent underdog for disaffected Republicans to take a risk on. Meanwhile, his bombastic style has been mimicked tirelessly without generating the same real nationalist populist appeal, and voters have grown wary of a broader insurgent energy that can’t sustainably deliver promises beyond endless controversy.
The consequence is clear as the 2024 presidential campaign begins: Conservatives — both Trump and institutional Republicans alike — aren’t vibing with each other. They are as disjointed and uncoordinated as the understaffed CPAC employees trying to get the Internet to turn on and the badge machines to print the correct names of speakers. The party has lost its vibes.
The GOP Loves Vibes
Republicans know that vibes are a powerful tool when used correctly. Vibes are magnets: They bring people together and they bring people in.
Speaking of the new-right in 1967, the philosopher Theodor Adorno noted, “Propaganda actually constitutes the substance of politics.” Adorno — a refugee from Nazi Germany — knew that the most effective propaganda elicited strong feelings of belonging. When the GOP is at its most powerful, aesthetics, style and rhetoric are more central than policy, institutions and processes, generating that important feeling of belonging to a community. Case in point? Trump enthralled America with his TV-ready speeches and transgressive Tweets — echoed by online and cable outlets from Breitbart to Fox. Vibes are essential. Once the vibe is lost, power is too.
Trump understood that better than any of his conservative peers and marketed himself as a guy who vibed with everyday Americans — he understood their plight at the hands of “globalists” and fought to “Make America Great Again.” He was seen as authentic, and gave the GOP both new narratives and symbols for a party that was not known for being “cool.” At the time, Republicans knew they had no choice but to embrace him as they saw how his populist style trumped tired tax cut talk.
At the time, this was in stark contrast to Democrats, who no longer had former President Barack Obama at the top of the ticket. With Hillary Clinton as their nominee, Democrats were perceived by many as wonkish policy types lacking in style, authenticity, and, well, vibes. Clinton’s long laundry list of policy proposals may have been well thought out, but it was also boring and felt as inauthentic as her cringy attempt at SNL comedy. Trump and his surrogates on the other hand, embraced a high-drama tabloid style that elicited an emotional response, and it worked.
Now, after Trump’s 2020 defeat, the Jan. 6 riot, a disappointing 2022 midterms with Trump himself partly to blame, it’s clear this approach isn’t working.
Vibes address the present moment, but on this year’s CPAC mainstage? There were few fresh talking points, new players, or even, quite frankly, good jokes.
Unlike his father, Donald Trump Jr. didn’t land his bits, including those attacking Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), to the near-empty room he spoke to. Instead of realistically addressing the United States’ trade dependency on China, CPAC speakers fixated on communism in a kind of “Zombie Reagan” Cold War gripe. Even though these events were tailored as greatest hits to their activist fandom, the audience felt it was low energy. “It’s stale,” said one organizer of a conservative advocacy group. “It’s self-building stardom.”
“Anti-wokeism is the closest thing they have that could have a cultural texture and emotional punch,” Reece Peck, author of Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class, told me over the phone. “But this discourse has become so overly coded as a Republican talking point, it fails to have a broader transcendent element. It’s not something interesting like Trump critiquing Hillary from the left on trade in 2016.”
“Apart from Trump, the wider movement is listless because it is now dominated by people whose primary motivation is appearances,” Raheem Kassam, editor of the National Pulse and former CPAC darling, told me when I texted him to get his take on this year’s conference, which he decided to skip. “The appearance of influence. The appearance of answers. And the appearance of contrarianism. The same side who banged on about authenticity has handed the keys over to those who have none.”
A Post-Vibe GOP
CPAC’s failure as a MAGA-fest may seem like a win for the establishment, but in reality, it spells out trouble for the party in the long run.
CPAC has long been a hub for student activists and grassroots movement — a place for them to network and strategize, keeping the conservative movement robust and energized. Animated youth and subcultures bring a bottom-up authentic spirit.
That was no longer happening at scale at this year’s CPAC.
There have been fewer young faces at the convention ever since Turning Point USA started its own flagship event, America Fest, in 2021. College Republicans flock there instead for concerts and high-energy confettied talks, and to mingle directly with social media influencers. The noticeable lack of students and Turning Point presence at CPAC indicates that Kirk might take his legions and their cultural power to another candidate and away from Trump.
Similarly, interest groups and grassroots organizers — from tax wonks to anti-abortion advocates — who used to meet in breakout rooms did not use CPAC to train or convene to the extent of years past. Even visually, clothing that used to advertise niche causes was replaced with MAGA hats or anti-CCP totes (with the exception of a 12-year CPAC veteran wearing a “cops say legalize heroin” T-shirt).
One of the few conservative activist groups to have a CPAC-advertised breakout session at the convention were prosecuted Jan. 6 protestors — a tiny radicalized faction that took part in a riot that a majority of Americans saw as a threat to democracy. If CPAC’s most visible interest group is also its most fringe, this does not bode well for the party’s future for relatability or coalition building.
The loss of ideological diversity at CPAC makes it difficult for Republicans running for office to get a survey of their own field. Republicans will have to build a coalition of voters beyond the MAGA wing to stay relevant. But if CPAC falls apart, they lose a key event for grassroots organizations of all conservative beliefs to mingle and energize the party. What’s left is a MAGA faction out for RINO blood — and completely culling the party won’t help them win elections, at least in the near term. It is enough, however, to throw crucial cooperation between the establishment and grassroots into turmoil.
Culture writer Sean Monahan recently declared a “vibe-shift” in our broader culture, described by New York magazine as when “a once-dominant social wavelength starts to feel dated.” As I drifted around the Gaylord, listening to attendees complain about how there was no hot tub like in CPAC Florida, all I could think was that the decline of CPAC signals a vibe-shift for conservatism.
In the end, CPAC did not hedge its bets by keeping relationships hot with other power players in conservatism and it is losing — in finances, numbers and appeal. They tried to mimic Trump’s populist allure and failed to do it authentically. In that process they have hurt Republicans more broadly, who no longer have a Big Tent activist event but instead have a Big Tent circus taking place on the ugly 2008-era carpeting of a cold convention center in Maryland.
While the embattled yet die-hard MAGA movement may try to push forward a Trump campaign, it may not have the transcendent appeal, the vibes, to connect to an emotionally exhausted America any more.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )Larry Hogan will not run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024
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“It was like, I didn’t need that job. I didn’t need to run for another office. It was really I was considering it because I thought it was public service and maybe I can make a difference,” Hogan said.
Though he acknowledged challenging former President Donald Trump would be an uphill battle in a GOP primary, “that didn’t really scare me,” Hogan said.
“It would be a tough race. And he’s very tough. But, you know, I beat life-threatening cancer. So having Trump call me names on Twitter didn’t really scare me off.”
The moderate Republican, who has criticized Trump and members of his own party for claiming the 2020 election was stolen, noted that a “pile up” of candidates would make it more difficult for any one person to gain significant support.
“Right now, you have — you know, Trump and [Ron] DeSantis at the top of the field, they’re soaking up all the oxygen, getting all the attention, and then a whole lot of the rest of us in single digits and the more of them you have, the less chance you have for somebody rising up,” Hogan said.
DeSantis has not yet said whether he intends to run in 2024, though he is widely expected to. When asked, Hogan declined to say whether he would would support the Florida governor.
“The people of Florida just overwhelmingly elected Ron DeSantis. I said earlier that I think governors are a good training ground to become president. We have a lot of great governors to consider. Maybe Ron DeSantis and I have different styles, but, you know, certainly he’s got every right to get out and make the case,” Hogan said.
Hogan did, however, offer his full-throated support for former Vice President Mike Pence.
“Absolutely,“ Hogan said, when asked if he could support Pence. “I have a tremendous amount of respect for Mike Pence, and I thought he certainly, you know, is the kind of guy, he’s full of integrity and experience.“
Besides the possibility of running as a Republican, there had also been talk of Hogan spearheading a third-party ticket, backed by No Labels, the centrist group he co-chairs. He was not asked about that possibility in the CBS interview.
Limited to two terms as governor, Hogan left office in January. During his tenure, he consistently had among the highest approval ratings in the nation of any governor, despite being a Republican governing one of the nation’s bluest states.
David Cohen and Sam Stein contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )The Republican presidential nomination could run through California. Yes, California
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The tenor of Newsom’s statement is likely a preview of what could end up as an ugly fight if, as expected, DeSantis tries to wrest the mantle of the GOP away from Trump — with California and its 5.2 million Republican voters representing a major battleground.
A March 2024 vote and an open GOP field offer California’s beleaguered conservatives a chance to step off the statewide sidelines and into the fray of a national fight.
“I don’t remember the last time we mattered,” said Carl DeMaio, a Republican activist and former San Diego council member. “It’s an immense opportunity.”
The contours are already taking shape. DeSantis will be in California over the weekend to speak at the Reagan Presidential library and then collect cash, both opportunities to make inroads with the state’s GOP base. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Vice President Mike Pence have both stopped by the Reagan library — an indispensable proving ground for Republican hopefuls — in recent months. None of them have officially entered the 2024 presidential race but all are expected to.
Lanhee Chen, who ran for state controller in 2022 and has worked for multiple GOP presidential candidates, recounted a Republican campaign official recently seeking his input on how to navigate California’s sprawling geography and media markets.
“California is a different beast,” Chen said. “A lot of the campaigns are trying to wrap their heads around how they should think about it.”
It could feel like a sea change for California Republicans, who have been locked out of statewide office for a generation and are outnumbered two-to-one by registered Democrats. National Republicans swing through California’s red precincts to vacuum up dollars but rarely do any actual campaigning. This cycle could be different.
“There are lots of opportunities for each of these candidates to rack up delegates in California,” said California Republican Party Chair Jessica Millan Patterson, “and I think you’re going to see them coming through the state, not just to raise money but to meet people, get the vote out and make their case.”
By the time the 2016 GOP nominating contest rolled into California, former President Donald Trump had already vanquished his rivals. In early 2023, polling gives DeSantis a substantial lead over the former president. Republican candidates seeking an edge could be compelled to campaign and advertise in a solidly blue state, and not just in the typical conservative strongholds: Delegates will be available deep in the belly of the beast.
“I don’t think Republican voters are even cognizant that this is coming, because it’s just never happened before,” said Matt Shupe, a Republican political consultant. “I’ve been pretty fired up talking about this because this is going to affect the party, from the lowest levels to the highest levels, until March.”
Part of the calculus will involve California’s decentralized nominating process. Most of the state’s delegates are allocated by House district, with the top vote-getter in each district receiving three. California Republican Party officials intentionally made the change many cycles ago to open up a statewide formula that had helped catapult favorite son Ronald Reagan into the White House.
“When we were changing the party rules back in the year 2000, hoping that we might someday play a role like this — it’s certainly surreal that day has arrived,” said Jon Fleischman, who was the party’s executive director at the time. “It only took 23 years.”
That means candidates have 52 separate chances — one for each congressional seat — to pick up votes. Winning a solidly red San Diego seat will be just as valuable as carrying a plurality of San Francisco’s 29,000 Republicans.
“It creates a dynamic where a candidate could say ‘you know what, I’m going to campaign in the Central Valley and hire grassroots people in the Central Valley and just do that,’” Fleischman said.
Republican voters in California run the gamut from Orange County denizens with beachfront views to residents of northern rural counties who hope to create their own state. But Chen said the Republicans he interacted with on the trail had similar views to Republicans in other states. He said he observed bigger contrasts within California.
California Republicans have resoundingly supported Trump, voting for him in record numbers. Supporting him was a prerequisite for leadership in the state party.
But that support is wavering. A recent statewide poll found DeSantis bested Trump by double digits in a head-to-head matchup and scored markedly higher favorability ratings. Republicans around the state described a fluid situation in which some voters unflinchingly back Trump, others are ready to move on, and many are still weighing their options as the field develops.
“It varies so widely. Some people still love Trump and he’s the only one, and a lot of other people are like: ‘absolutely not, DeSantis is our person,’” said Fresno County Republican Party Chair Elizabeth Kolstad.
State Sen. Melissa Melendez was a steadfast Trump supporter who traveled to the White House to discuss immigration in 2018 and represents the Republican stronghold of Riverside County. In a recent interview, Melendez declined to commit to Trump. “Some people have their favorites already decided, but a lot of it is going to come down to what their policies are,” Melendez said, citing stances on China and immigration.
The donor class is also unlikely to unite behind the former president. Gerald Marcil, a fixture of the California Republican donor circuit, said he admired Trump’s record and voted for his re-election. But he is not backing Trump this time around. He likes DeSantis, an impression that was solidified after dining together.
“I think we have to go with Ron DeSantis on this one,” Marcil said, adding he feared a crowded field would hand the nomination to Trump because he begins with an unwavering base. “We’ve got to coalesce and get down to one or two other possibilities.”
Similarly, Orrin Heatlie — a core organizer of the failed 2021 effort to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom — said the grassroots Republicans he speaks with are “swinging heavily towards Ron DeSantis.”
“He has a clear message and basically aligns with their beliefs and their politics,” Heatlie said. “I think Donald Trump is a distraction.”
Some Republicans are balancing genuine admiration for Trump with other political considerations. Republican Assemblymember Devon Mathis, who is vociferously advocating for former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, said he believed Trump had done a good job but wanted someone who could serve out two terms. Mathis also warned of the down-ballot ripples.
“A lot of people want to stay loyal to the former president, and there’s a lot of people who feel like he got robbed,” Mathis said, but “as much as some people don’t like to admit it, Trump was pretty toxic for our delegation. Every single ad was tying Republicans to Trump, in every target seat in California.”
Despite those reservations, the former president is still a formidable candidate who can count on a solid foundation. Republicans are quick to point out how swiftly the contest could change.
“DeSantis starts with an advantage because he’s more well known,” Fleischman said. “But if our governor starts picking his fights with Trump instead of picking his fights with DeSantis, maybe that changes.”
Lara Korte contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
