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Tag: Republicans

  • Virginia Could Decide the Future of the GOP’s Abortion Policy

    Virginia Could Decide the Future of the GOP’s Abortion Policy

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    A crucial new phase in the political struggle over abortion rights is unfolding in suburban neighborhoods across Virginia.

    An array of closely divided suburban and exurban districts around the state will decide which party controls the Virginia state legislature after next month’s election, and whether Republicans here succeed in an ambitious attempt to reframe the politics of abortion rights that could reverberate across the nation.

    After the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide right to abortion in 2022, the issue played a central role in blunting the widely anticipated Republican red wave in last November’s midterm elections. Republican governors and legislators who passed abortion restrictions in GOP-leaning states such as Florida, Texas, Ohio, and Iowa did not face any meaningful backlash from voters, as I’ve written. But plans to retrench abortion rights did prove a huge hurdle last year for Republican candidates who lost gubernatorial and Senate races in Democratic-leaning and swing states such as Colorado, Washington, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona.

    Now Virginia Republicans, led by Governor Glenn Youngkin, are attempting to formulate a position that they believe will prove more palatable to voters outside the red heartland. In the current legislative session, Youngkin and the Republicans, who hold a narrow majority in the state House of Delegates, attempted to pass a 15-week limit on legal abortion, with exceptions thereafter for rape, incest, and threats to the life of the mother. But they were blocked by Democrats, who hold a slim majority in the state Senate.

    Read: Abortion is inflaming the GOP’s biggest electoral problem

    With every seat in both chambers on the ballot in November, Youngkin and the Republicans have made clear that if they win unified control of the legislature, they will move to impose that 15-week limit. Currently, abortion in Virginia is legal through the second trimester of pregnancy, which is about 26 weeks; it is the only southern state that has not rolled back abortion rights since last year’s Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.

    Virginia Republicans maintain that the 15-week limit, with exceptions, represents a “consensus” position that most voters will accept, even in a state that has steadily trended toward Democrats in federal races over the past two decades. (President Joe Biden carried the state over Donald Trump by about 450,000 votes.) “When you talk about 15 weeks with exceptions, it is seen as very reasonable,” Zack Roday, the director of the Republican coordinated campaign effort, told me.

    If Youngkin and the GOP win control of both legislative chambers next month behind that message, other Republicans outside the core red states are virtually certain to adopt their approach to abortion. Success for the Virginia GOP could also encourage the national Republican Party to coalesce behind a 15-week federal ban with exceptions.

    “Candidates across this country should take note of how Republicans in Virginia are leading on the issue of life by going on offense and exposing the left’s radical abortion agenda,” Kelsey Pritchard, the director of state public affairs at the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told me in an email.

    But if Republicans fail to win unified control in Virginia, it could signal that almost any proposal to retrench abortion rights faces intractable resistance in states beyond the red heartland. “I think what Youngkin is trying to sell is going to be rejected by voters,” Ryan Stitzlein, the vice president of political and government relations at the advocacy group Reproductive Freedom for All, told me. “There is no such thing as a ‘consensus’ ban. It’s a nonsensical phrase. The fact of the matter is, Virginians do not want an abortion ban.”

    These dynamics were all on display when the Democratic legislative candidates Joel Griffin and Joshua Cole spent one morning last weekend canvassing for votes. Griffin is the Democratic nominee for the Virginia state Senate and Cole is the nominee for the state House of Delegates, in overlapping districts centered on Fredericksburg, a small, picturesque city about an hour south of Washington, D.C. They devoted a few hours to knocking on doors together in the Clearview Heights neighborhood, just outside the city, walking up long driveways and chatting with homeowners out working in their yards.

    Their message focused on one issue above all: preserving legal access to abortion. Earlier that morning, Griffin had summarized their case to about two dozen volunteers who’d gathered at a local campaign office to join the canvassing effort. “Make no mistake,” he told them. “Your rights are on the ballot.”

    The districts where Griffin, a business owner and former Marine, and Cole, a pastor and former member of the state House of Delegates, are running have become highly contested political ground. Each district comfortably backed Biden in 2020 before flipping to support Youngkin in 2021 and then tilting back to favor Democratic U.S. Representative Abigail Spanberger in the 2022 congressional election.

    The zigzagging voting pattern in these districts is typical of the seats that will decide control of the legislature. The University of Virginia’s Center for Politics calculates that all 10 of the 100 House seats, and all six of the 40 Senate districts, that are considered most competitive voted for Biden in 2020, but that nearly two-thirds of them switched to Youngkin a year later.

    These districts are mostly in suburban and exurban areas, especially in Richmond and in Northern Virginia, near D.C., notes Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of the center’s political newsletter, Sabato’s Crystal Ball. In that way, they are typical of the mostly college-educated suburbs that have steadily trended blue in the Trump era.

    Such places have continued to break sharply toward Democrats in other elections this year that revolved around abortion, particularly the Wisconsin State Supreme Court election won by the liberal candidate in a landslide this spring, and an Ohio ballot initiative carried comfortably by abortion-rights forces in August. In special state legislative elections around the country this year, Democrats have also consistently run ahead of Biden’s 2020 performance in the same districts.

    “There’s this idea that Democrats are maybe focusing too much on abortion, but we’ve got a lot of data and a lot of information” from this year’s elections signaling that the issue remains powerful, Heather Williams, the interim president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, told me.

    Virginia Republicans aren’t betting only on their reformulated abortion position in this campaign. They are also investing heavily in portraying Democrats as soft on crime, too prone to raise taxes, and hostile to “parents’ rights” in shaping their children’s education, the issue that Youngkin stressed most in his 2021 victory. When Tara Durant, Griffin’s Republican opponent, debated him last month, she also tried to link the Democrat to Biden’s policies on immigration and the “radical Green New Deal” while blaming the president for persistent inflation. “What we do not need are Biden Democrats in Virginia right now,” insisted Durant, who serves in the House of Delegates.

    Griffin has raised other issues too. In the debate, he underscored his support for increasing public-education funding and his opposition to book-banning efforts by a school board in a rural part of the district. Democrats also warn that with unified control of the governorship and state legislature, Republicans will try to roll back the expansions of voting rights and gun-control laws that Democrats passed when they last controlled all three institutions, from 2019 to 2021. A television ad from state Democrats shows images of the January 6 insurrection while a narrator warns, “With one more vote in Richmond, MAGA Republicans can take away your rights, your freedoms, your security.”

    Yet both sides recognize that abortion is most likely to tip the outcome next month. Each side can point to polling that offers encouragement for its abortion stance. A Washington Post/Schar School poll earlier this year found that a slim 49 to 46 percent plurality of Virginia voters said they would support a 15-week abortion limit with exceptions. But in that same survey, only 17 percent of state residents said they wanted abortion laws to become more restrictive.

    In effect, Republicans believe the key phrase for voters in their proposal will be 15 weeks, whereas Democrats believe that most voters won’t hear anything except ban or limit. Some GOP candidates have even run ads explicitly declaring that they don’t support an abortion “ban,” because they would permit the procedure during those first 15 weeks of pregnancy. But Democrats remain confident that voters will view any tightening of current law as a threat.

    “Part of what makes it so salient [for voters] is Republicans were so close to passing an abortion ban in the last legislative session and they came up just narrowly short,” Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist with experience in Virginia elections, told me. “It’s not a situation like New York in 2022, where people sided with us on abortion but didn’t see it as under threat. In Virginia, it’s clear that that threat exists.”

    In many ways, the Virginia race will provide an unusually clear gauge of public attitudes about the parties’ competing abortion agendas. The result won’t be colored by gerrymanders that benefit either side: The candidates are running in new districts drawn by a court-appointed special master. And compared with 2021, the political environment in the state appears more level as well. Cole, who lost his state-House seat that year, told me that although voters tangibly “wanted something different and new” in 2021, “I would say we’re now at a plateau.”

    The one big imbalance in the playing field is that Youngkin has raised unprecedented sums of money to support the GOP legislative candidates. The governor has leveraged the interest in him potentially entering the presidential race as a late alternative to Trump into enormous contributions to his state political action committee from an array of national GOP donors. That torrent of money is providing Republican candidates with a late tactical advantage, especially because Virginia Democrats are not receiving anything like the national liberal money that flowed into the Wisconsin judicial election this spring.

    Beyond his financial help, Youngkin is also an asset for the GOP ticket because multiple polls show that a majority of Virginia voters approve of his job performance. Republicans are confident that under Youngkin, the party has established a lead over Democrats among state voters for handling the economy and crime, while largely neutralizing the traditional Democratic advantage on education. To GOP strategists, Democrats are emphasizing abortion rights so heavily because there is no other issue on which they can persuade voters. “That’s the only message the Democrats have,” Roday, the GOP strategist, said. “They really have run a campaign solely focused on one issue.”

    Jerusalem Demsas: The abortion policy most Americans want

    Yet all of these factors only underscore the stakes for Youngkin, and Republicans nationwide, in the Virginia results. If they can’t sell enough Virginia voters on their 15-week abortion limit to win unified control of the legislature, even amid all their other advantages in these races, it would send an ominous signal to the party. A Youngkin failure to capture the legislature would raise serious questions about the GOP’s ability to overcome the majority support for abortion rights in the states most likely to decide the 2024 presidential race.

    Next month’s elections will feature other contests around the country where abortion rights are playing a central role, including Democratic Governor Andy Beshear’s reelection campaign in Kentucky, a state-supreme-court election in Pennsylvania, and an Ohio ballot initiative to rescind the six-week abortion ban that Republicans passed in 2019. But none of those races may influence the parties’ future strategy on the issue more than the outcome in Virginia.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • A Final Chapter Unbefitting an Extraordinary Legacy

    A Final Chapter Unbefitting an Extraordinary Legacy

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    Senator Dianne Feinstein, who died last night at 90, braved one of the most remarkable political expeditions in American history—and also one of the grimmer spectacles at the end of her life and career.

    Is it too soon to point this out? Yes, perhaps. With the official notice of her death today, Feinstein received her just and proper tributes, hitting all the key markers: How Di-Fi, as she is known in Washington shorthand, had stepped in as mayor of San Francisco after her predecessor was assassinated in 1978. How she was a fervent proponent of gun safety, the longest-serving woman in the Senate, and the chamber’s oldest member. How, as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, she presided over the preparation of an incriminating report describing the CIA’s torture of suspected terrorists in secret prisons around the world. How she was a trailblazer, stateswoman, powerhouse, force, grande dame, etc. Give her her due. She deserves it.

    But Congress can be a tough and ghoulish place, with its zero-sum math and unforgiving partisanship. Over her last year, Feinstein’s declining health became a bleak sideshow—her absences and hospitalizations, shingles, encephalitis, and bad falls; the lawsuits over her late husband’s estate and the cost of her medical bills and long-term care.

    Feinstein’s insistence on remaining in the Senate—and the uncertainty of her schedule—complicated life for Democrats, making it harder for them to hold votes, set strategy, and confirm judges. Her colleagues and White House officials whispered their frustration. And she became the latest exemplar of a basic, egalitarian principle in lawmaking: Even the most legendary figures ultimately amount to a vote. Often your most important job is simply to be available, show up, be counted.

    Franklin Foer: Dianne Feinstein and the cult of indispensability

    When that is in doubt, patience can wear fast. Questions about “fitness” arise. Such is the price of continued residency in the senior center of the Capitol. Feinstein resisted quitting for years, and only grudgingly said she wouldn’t seek reelection in 2024, leaving the race to succeed her in a kind of morbid suspension.

    Politics, of course, runs on its own schedules and follows its own rules. A few weeks ago, I asked Adam Schiff, one of the California House Democrats running to succeed Feinstein in the Senate, whether she should step down. In other words, was she fit to serve? Again, maybe this was harsh, but it had become a standard question around Washington and California, and perfectly germane, given the tight split in the Senate. “It’s her decision to make,” Schiff said, a classic duck, but also practical. “I would be very concerned,” he continued, “that the Republicans would not fill her seat on the Judiciary Committee, and that would be the end of Joe Biden’s judicial appointments.” (Politico reported today that Republican Whip John Thune, of South Dakota, said he expects that his party will not resist efforts to fill committee seats left vacant by Feinstein’s death.)

    Schiff added that he had continued to have a productive working relationship with Feinstein’s office, despite her health struggles. He was a proponent of business as usual, for as long it lasted, and Feinstein was still there. The pageant continued, the government heading for another shutdown, House Republicans tripping toward an impeachment and over themselves.

    In the hours after Feinstein’s death was announced, Washington took a brief and deferential pause. Statements and obituaries were dispatched, most prepared in advance. Then it was on to the next. Who would California Governor Gavin Newsom pick to serve out Feinstein’s term? How would that affect the race to succeed her next year? Who would replace Feinstein on the Judiciary Committee, and when would they be seated?

    Ronald Brownstein: Who will replace Dianne Feinstein?

    The hushed questions about how long the nonagenarian senator could hang on finally had their resolution. Far too many people in power resist the option of a restful denouement. The stakes can be high, even harrowing, for the country. These sagas can be distressing to follow, but there’s no shortage of dark fascination. Stick around too long, and you risk losing control of the finale. It can happen to the best, and at the end of the most extraordinary careers.

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    Mark Leibovich

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  • Let’s Not Sleepwalk Into Another Donald Trump Presidency

    Let’s Not Sleepwalk Into Another Donald Trump Presidency

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    In late September 2016, Salena Zito wrote glowingly in The Atlantic about Donald Trump on the campaign trail in Pittsburgh and famously postulated that “the press takes him literally, but not seriously,” while “his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” Leaving aside Zito’s kid-glove treatment of Trump, she wasn’t wrong about the media, which even now—a chaotic presidency, a couple impeachments, an insurrection, and four criminal indictments later—isn’t taking the former guy returning to power “seriously” enough. With the 2024 cycle in full swing, he’s being largely covered like a normal candidate rather than someone who tried to end democracy. As Trump recently tossed out wild accusations of “treason” this past weekend, The Nation’s Jeet Heer noted how the Drudge Report “is more accurately conveying the gravity of Trump’s threat to USA democracy than the mainstream media.”

    I can’t speak to what lurks in the hearts of political reporters and editors, but one has to wonder why there isn’t more coverage about Trump musing about sentencing the nation’s highest ranking general to death than, say, the age of the current president. “Mark Milley, who led perhaps the most embarrassing moment in American history with his grossly incompetent implementation of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, costing many lives, leaving behind hundreds of American citizens, and handing over BILLIONS of dollars of the finest military equipment ever made, will be leaving the military next week. This will be a time for all citizens of the USA to celebrate!” Trump wrote Friday on Truth Social, a day after an Atlantic story about how Milley, the soon-to-be-retired chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, had “protected the Constitution” from the former president.

    “This guy turned out to be a Woke train wreck who, if the Fake News reporting is correct, was actually dealing with China to give them a heads up on the thinking of the President of the United States,” Trump continued. “This is an act so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH! A war between China and the United States could have been the result of this treasonous act. To be continued!!!”

    Oddly, Trump’s dangerous rant was not treated as the major news it absolutely should have been. “Only CNN and MSNBC covered Trump’s inflammatory Truth Social post about the general,” Media Matters noted Tuesday, “while broadcast news outlets and Fox News completely ignored it.”

    Someone who surely didn’t ignore Trump’s post was Paul Gosar, the white nationalist adjacent congressman from Arizona. He wrote Sunday in his congressional newsletter how “in a better society, quislings like the strange sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung.” The notion of a Republican front-runner floating the idea of executing the chair of the joint chiefs of staff—a scenario echoed by a sitting member of Congress—is the kind of thing that should make your blood run cold. This is not what happens in a normal, healthy functioning democracy. We, in the media, need to be clear-eyed here.

    One of the few TV hosts who captured the gravity of the situation was MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who told his audience on Tuesday, “That’s not a dog whistle. That is an invitation. Just like ‘come on January 6, it’s going to be wild,’ when he says things like Mitch McConnell has a, and then an all caps, a DEATH WISH, that is an invitation for his people to step up and assassinate Mitch McConnell, or General Milley. And you can ask the question, where are these Republicans? Why aren’t they critical of Donald Trump for saying that about General Milley?” That certainly seems like a good question to pose to Republican lawmakers, many of whom are already backing Trump’s 2024 bid.

    Speaking of MSNBC, Trump “truthed”—oh, the irony—on Sunday that the cable network and its broadcast sibling, NBC “are almost all dishonest and corrupt, but [owner] Comcast, with its one-side and vicious coverage by NBC NEWS, and in particular MSNBC, often and correctly referred to as MSDNC (Democrat National Committee!), should be investigated for its ‘Country Threatening Treason.’” His attack on the First Amendment continued with a threat, “I say up front, openly, and proudly, that when I WIN the Presidency of the United States, they and others of the LameStream Media will be thoroughly scrutinized for their knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage of people, things, and events.”

    Trump routinely attacked journalists during his four years in office, and, taking a page from Josef Stalin, declared the media to be the “enemy of the American people.” Now, eyeing a return to the White House, Trump is only ramping up the anti-press rhetoric by accusing a media company of “Country Threatening Treason.” Whether Republicans support Trump’s view could be another good line of inquiry for the press.

    Joe Biden certainly doesn’t agree, marking yet another clear distinction between the two likely general election candidates when it comes to democracy and free speech. “President Biden swore an oath to uphold our Constitution and protect American Democracy. Freedom of the press is a fundamental Constitutional right,” the White House said in a statement. “To abuse presidential power and violate the Constitutional rights of reporters would be an outrageous attack on our democracy and the rule of law. Presidents must always defend Americans’ freedoms—never trample on them for selfish, small, and dangerous political purposes.”

    As anyone who lived through the past eight years can attest, you underestimate Trump at your own peril. By glossing over the unhinged things Trump is saying and doing, we in the mainstream media are enabling him to do even more.

    Perhaps the largest underreported story out of Trumpworld right now is his hand in the coming government shutdown. It’s very likely the government will shut down on Saturday because Republicans in the House are refusing to fund it. (Something else many in the news media aren’t saying explicitly.) Matt Gaetz, who has emerged as Kevin McCarthy’s biggest antagonist, accusing the Speaker of empty politicking rather than accomplishing things for the right, certainly isn’t ignoring the former president. “Trump Opposes the Continuing Resolution. Hold the line,” Gaetz recently posted on X, along with a screenshot of Trump’s Truth Social post urging Republicans to “defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots.” Gaetz, part of the burn-it-all-down caucus, appears inspired by the biggest arsonist: Donald Trump.

    After so many years of Trump’s outrageous comments, lies, grievances, and threats, it’s hard to be shocked anymore. And perhaps that’s our problem. This is the most likely Republican nominee, and a man who is leading Biden in some polls. Trump is not getting better—if anything he’s getting worse. Beyond the treason talk, he recently engaged in antisemitism toward liberal Jews on Rosh Hashanah—“Let’s hope you learned from your mistake & make better choices moving forward!”—he suggested—and he seemed ready to buy a glock Monday in South Carolina while out on bail, which could be a federal gun crime, you know, like the one Hunter Biden is currently being charged with. (A Trump spokesperson later clarified that he didn’t buy it, but “simply indicated that he wanted one.”)

    Now, I understand the mainstream media may be bored with the crazy, but our country is once again sleepwalking into disaster, and if journalists aren’t clear about the stakes of a second Trump presidency, it will be, at least partially, our fault.

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    Molly Jong-Fast

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  • Why Republicans Can’t Keep the Government Open

    Why Republicans Can’t Keep the Government Open

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    Yesterday was not a good day for House Republicans or for their struggling leader, Speaker Kevin McCarthy. In the morning, McCarthy was forced to scrap a procedural vote on a GOP proposal to avert a government shutdown that will commence at the end of this month if Congress doesn’t act. In the afternoon, a handful of conservatives tanked McCarthy’s bid to advance legislation funding the Pentagon.

    The failure of the proposal to prevent a shutdown was the more ominous defeat, both for Republicans and for the country. Yet even if McCarthy manages to pass a version of this, it will almost certainly be an exercise in futility. For starters, it would fund the government for a mere 30 additional days. And its basic provisions—cutting spending by 8 percent for all but the Defense and Veterans Affairs Departments, restarting construction of the southern border wall, cutting off pathways for asylum seekers—will likely be stripped out by Senate Democrats.

    Despite the GOP’s evident dysfunction, Representative Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota was in a chipper mood when he called me from the Capitol. The McCarthy ally was scurrying between meetings in an effort to help resolve the latest crisis threatening the speaker. “We’re a long way from landing the plane, but there are really productive conversations going on,” Armstrong told me. If the plane represents, in Armstrong’s metaphor, a functioning federal government, then House Republicans are still hovering at about 30,000 feet, with the runway coming rapidly into view.

    Watch: The Republicans threatening to shut down the government

    The Democrats who run the Senate aren’t involved in the “productive conversations” Armstrong was referencing. If they were, McCarthy might already have lost his job. Before he can negotiate with the Democrats, the speaker must broker a peace among the warring factions of his own party, who cannot even agree on an opening offer. Groups representing the conservative Freedom Caucus and the more pragmatic Main Street Caucus announced a deal on Sunday to support the 30-day extension, with spending cuts and border restrictions attached. But almost immediately, hard-liners rejected the proposal as insufficiently austere. Led by Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, several of these Republicans are threatening to oust McCarthy if he caves to Democrats on spending, and a few of them are openly itching for a government shutdown.

    Any five Republicans can torpedo proposals that don’t have Democratic support—as five GOP lawmakers did yesterday in blocking the defense bill—and any five could topple McCarthy by voting along with Democrats for a procedural tool known as a motion to vacate the chair. This has effectively made him a hostage of his caucus, with precious little room to maneuver.

    Even the relatively optimistic Armstrong acknowledged the difficulty of McCarthy’s position. “It’s a pretty untenable argument to say you don’t have enough Republican votes to pass anything and you can’t negotiate with Democrats on anything,” Armstrong told me.

    McCarthy has tried many times to shake off threats to his speakership, alternately daring members like Gaetz to make a bid to oust him and pointing out that with such a narrow majority, any other Republican replacement would find themselves in the same unenviable position. I asked Armstrong whether McCarthy should simply ignore the hard-liners in his conference and strike a deal with Democrats to keep the government open, come what may. “I’m not sure he should yet,” he said.

    House Republicans have received hardly any backing from their brethren in the Senate, who have shown no appetite for a shutdown fight and have been more willing to uphold the budget deal that McCarthy struck with President Joe Biden in the spring. By bowing to conservative demands for deeper spending cuts, the speaker is reneging on the same agreement, which allowed Congress to raise the debt ceiling and avoid a catastrophic default. “I’m not a fan of government shutdowns,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters yesterday. “I’ve seen a few of them over the years. They have never produced a policy change, and they’ve always been a loser for Republicans.”

    For now, McCarthy allies such as Armstrong are adamant that this spending battle must result in a change in administration policy. They have zeroed in on the border, seeing an opportunity to force Biden’s hand and take advantage of an issue on which even some Democrats, such as New York City Mayor Eric Adams, have been critical of the president. “If we can’t use this fight to deal with the single most pressing national-security issue and humanitarian issue of our time, then shame on us,” Armstrong said.

    Read: Kevin McCarthy is a hostage

    Yet House Republicans have found themselves isolated, and bickering over legislation that—like most of their proposals this year—stands no chance of becoming law. A bipartisan majority in the Senate is likely to simply return a temporary spending bill to the House without the conservative priorities, perhaps with additional funding to aid Ukraine in its war with Russia. What then? I asked Armstrong. “I would shut it down,” he replied.

    Democrats in the House, meanwhile, have watched the unfolding GOP drama with a mix of schadenfreude and growing horror. The Republican infighting could help Democrats win back a House majority next year. But a shutdown would not reflect well on either party, and voters could end up blaming Biden as well as the GOP for the fallout. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers would be furloughed, and millions of Americans might have to wait longer for Social Security checks and other needed benefits. “The rest of the world looks at us like we’re incompetent and dysfunctional,” Representative Gerry Connolly, a Democrat whose Northern Virginia district includes thousands of federal workers, told me. “How do you explain to our European allies that we can’t fund our government?”

    Connolly is in his eighth term and, like America’s allies, has seen this brinkmanship play out several times before. He told me that whereas earlier in the month he thought Congress had a 50–50 chance of keeping the government open, he now puts the odds of a shutdown at 90 percent. “Sometimes you feel like we’re going to avert this cliff, and then there are times that you go, ‘No, we’re going off this cliff,’” Connolly said. “This one feels like we’re going off the cliff.”

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    Russell Berman

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  • In Victory for Trump Over DeSantis, Florida GOP Rescinds Loyalty Pledge

    In Victory for Trump Over DeSantis, Florida GOP Rescinds Loyalty Pledge

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    In a victory for former president Donald Trump and embarrassment for his chief rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the Florida GOP reneged Friday on plans to require GOP primary candidates to sign a loyalty oath.

    The pledge would have required every GOP presidential candidate to promise to support the eventual nominee in order to be listed on the state’s primary ballot in March. Trump, who currently leads DeSantis by over 40 points, has balked at signing the oath, and his team lobbied to have it removed.

    The change shows the power Trump has over DeSantis even in their shared home state, which re-elected DeSantis by a 20-point margin last November. DeSantis’s allies worked unsuccessfully to keep the loyalty pledge in place, the Sarasota Herald Tribune reported.

    The vote was largely viewed as a referendum on DeSantis’s support within the party in his home state. “Right or wrong, it would be viewed as a f— you to DeSantis,” a prominent Florida Republican told NBC News in advance of the vote. There were reportedly talks of a compromise measure in the works last week, one that would have kept the pledge requirement but given it more flexible wording.

    The push to change the policy was led by Joe Gruters, a Sarasota state senator and Trump supporter. He said that the change passed on an “overwhelming voice vote.” “I think the party did the right thing,” he said. “We do not want to create unnecessary road blocks for qualified candidates for president, and I think once again this shows the Republican Party of Florida and the base loves the former president.” Gruters added that “the president is battling a lot of different fights on a lot of fronts, certainly it shouldn’t be with the party.”

    In a statement to CNN after the vote, DeSantis spokesman Bryan Griffin said, “Once Ron DeSantis secures the party’s nomination, we hope everyone in the field will join him in that fight.” “We believe anyone who wants to run for president as a Republican should be willing to pledge their support for our eventual nominee,” Griffin added. “It is surprising that anyone interested in seeing the defeat of Joe Biden in 2024 would disagree.”

    This isn’t the only instance of a loyalty pledge serving as a campaign flashpoint. As part of its debate qualification standards, the Republican National Committee has required candidates to promise to support the eventual nominee in order to be admitted onto the debate stage. DeSantis signed the RNC’s pledge in August and criticized the former president for his persistent refusal to do so.

    Trump, of course, declined to participate in the first debate in Milwaukee, and on Thursday told Megyn Kelly that he doesn’t plan to join any GOP debates. “I don’t see it,” he said, pointing to his gargantuan (and growing) lead over the rest of the primary field. “Why would I do it?”

    DeSantis will likely need to capture his home state if he wants any chance at securing the nomination. Yet the majority of the state’s GOP congressional delegation has already endorsed Trump, and the latest primary polling has Trump dominating DeSantis among Florida voters by around 30 points.

    Florida GOP primary voters will head to the polls on March 19.

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    Jack McCordick

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  • Video: For Christie, New Hampshire’s Primary Is Do or Die

    Video: For Christie, New Hampshire’s Primary Is Do or Die

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    We’re here in New Hampshire, outside a brewery with Gov. Chris Christie because, as he told us, this is his make-or-break state. His path to the Republican nomination runs through New Hampshire, the first-in-the nation primary. “If Donald Trump wins here, he will be our nominee. And everything that happens after that is going to be on our party and on our country.” “You’re about second in the polls in New Hampshire, but President Trump is still 20 points ahead. How do you see your path now that this race has started to actually winning this?” “I see it right where we’re sitting. The path is to beat him here. I think once Donald Trump loses in one place, that entire rotted building will crumble.” “Is there any scenario that you could see where you would drop out?” “Look, Nick, if I don’t do well in New Hampshire, then I’ll leave. I mean, it’s like I’ve been through this before. I know what these races mean. And if I do very well here, then you bet I’ll continue on through the convention.” More so than any other candidate in this race, Governor Christie has been harshly critical of former President Trump. Most of the field has been trying to keep Trump out of it. Christie has made it central to his argument for why he deserves the presidency. “And we watched you stand up there and say that, you know, Donald Trump was unfit, and you were very right. We agree. And then all of a sudden, you back out of the race and we see you on the stage next to him.” “Yup.” “Sucking up to him —” “Yup.” “So I want to know why? And how do I know that you’re not going to do that again this time?” “Well first off, why was because I didn’t want Hillary Clinton to be president, and I was convinced he was going to be the nominee at that point.” “It’s retail campaigning in New Hampshire. You don’t come up here to give big policy speeches, normally. What you do is come up here to meet voters. Gotten a chance to meet a lot of voters, take a lot of photos, shake some hands. It’s amazing that this is the way we elect a president in this country. But it is. But just remember, the future of this country is going to be determined here. So America is counting on you, and I’m counting on you too.”

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    Kassie Bracken, Emily Rhyne and Mark Boyer

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  • McCarthy Juggles Government Shutdown And Biden Impeachment Inquiry As House Returns To Messy Fall

    McCarthy Juggles Government Shutdown And Biden Impeachment Inquiry As House Returns To Messy Fall

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is a man who stays in motion — enthusiastically greeting tourists at the Capitol, dashing overseas last week to the G7 summit of industrial world leaders, raising funds back home to elect fellow Republicans to the House majority.

    But beneath the whirlwind of activity is a stubborn standstill, an imbalance of power between the far-right Republicans who hoisted McCarthy to the speaker’s role yet threaten his own ability to lead the House.

    It’s a political standoff that will be tested anew as the House returns this week from a long summer recess and McCarthy faces a collision course of difficult challenges — seeking to avoid a government shutdown, support Ukraine in the war and launch an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.

    “They’ve got some really heavy lifting ahead,” said the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, John Thune, of South Dakota.

    McCarthy, of California, is going to “have his hands full trying to figure out how to navigate and execute,” he said.

    Congress has been here before, as has McCarthy in his nearly two decades in office, but the stakes are ever higher, with Republicans powered by an increasingly hard-right faction that is refusing to allow business as usual in Washington.

    With former President Donald Trump’s backing, McCarthy’s right-flank pushed him into the speaker’s office at the start of the year only after he agreed to a long list of conservative demands — including the ability to call a quick vote to “vacate the chair” and remove him from office.

    That threat of an abrupt ouster hovers over McCarthy’s every move, especially now.

    To start, Congress faces a deadline to fund the government by the end of the month, or risk a potentially devastating federal shutdown. There’s just 11 working days for Congress to act once the House resumes Tuesday.

    Facing a backlash from conservatives who want to slash government funding, McCarthy may be able to ease the way by turning to another hard-right priority, launching a Biden impeachment inquiry over the business dealings of the president’s son, Hunter Biden.

    For McCarthy, running the two tracks — a government funding process alongside an impeachment drive — is an unusual and politically fraught undertaking.

    But starting a formal impeachment inquiry into Biden could help to appease Republican allies of Trump, who has emerged as the GOP frontrunner to confront Biden in the 2024 election for the White House.

    FILE – Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., talks to reporters at the Capitol in Washington, Monday, July 17, 2023. McCarthy faces a political standoff when the House resumes this week. He needs to steer the House to fund the government and avoid a government shutdown. But he’s also trying to launch an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden over his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

    “He’s being squeezed,” Brad Woodhouse, a veteran Democratic operative, said of McCarthy. Woodhouse is now a senior adviser to the Congressional Integrity Project, which is preparing to criticize Republicans over the Biden impeachment.

    The White House has said Biden is not involved in his son’s business dealings.

    But Trump’s allies among House Republicans are working furiously to unearth any links between Biden and his son’s business as they portray Hunter Biden as trading on the family name for financial enrichment and work to erode public support for the president ahead of the presidential election.

    Republicans have not yet been able to produce evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden.

    White House spokesman Ian Sams said, “Speaker McCarthy shouldn’t cave to the extreme, far-right members who are threatening to shut down the government unless they get a baseless, evidence-free impeachment of President Biden. The consequences for the American people are too serious.”

    Meanwhile, what should have been a fairly prescribed process to fund the government after McCarthy and Biden negotiated a more than $1 trillion deal earlier this summer over the debt limit appears to be falling apart. Even a stopgap measure to simply keep government funding at existing levels for a few months while Congress tries to finish the spending bills is a nonstarter for McCarthy’s right flank.

    Conservatives powered by the House Freedom Caucus are insisting federal spending is rolled back to 2022 levels and they want to add other priorities to the legislation.

    If not, they say they will oppose a temporary measure, called a continuing resolution, or CR, to keep government running.

    “We must rein in the reckless inflationary spending, and the out-of-control federal bureaucracy it funds,” the Freedom Caucus wrote in a statement at the end of August.

    With command of dozens of votes, the hard right can deny McCarthy the support he needs to pass a Republican bill on its own. But relying on Democrats for votes would bring other problems for McCarthy if he is seen as disloyal to his ranks.

    The conservatives want to beef up border security and address what Republicans deride as the “weaponization” of the Justice Department’s prosecutions, including of those charged in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. They also want to end what they call the Pentagon’s “woke” policies as the Defense Department tries to provide diversity, equity and inclusion to service personnel.

    Signaling the hard road ahead, Trump-ally Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., mockingly reposted one of McCarthy’s recent videos welcoming tourists at the Capitol.

    “Kevin thinking this was the video we needed at this moment is depressingly revealing,” Gaetz said on social media.

    “We need a SPEAKER not a GREETER.”

    Congress also has a pending request from the White House to provide an additional $40 billion on three fronts — some $21 billion in military and humanitarian relief for Ukraine as it battles the Russian invasion; $12 billion to replenish federal disaster aids after floods, fires and other problems, including to curb the flow of deadly fentanyl at the southern U.S. border with Mexico.

    McCarthy has vowed there won’t be any “blank check” for Ukraine as he works to appease skeptical Republicans who want to end U.S. involvement in overseas affairs, particularly involving Russia.

    While the shutdown is the more pressing problem for McCarthy, the Biden impeachment inquiry is his bigger political gamble.

    McCarthy has signaled an impeachment inquiry is coming. But there is “no date circled on the calendar,” said a person familiar with his thinking and granted anonymity to discuss it.

    Not all House Republicans are eager for impeachment proceedings. “We can waste our time on issues that are not important, or we can focus on issues that are,” Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colo., said Sunday on MSNBC’s “Inside with Jen Psaki.”

    Trump faces his own more serious charges of wrongdoing, including the federal indictments over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election he lost to Biden and his refusal to return classified documents stored at his Mar-a-Lago estate. He has been indicted four times this year.

    Watching from the Senate, which has been working to pass all 12 of the regular bills needed to fund government operations through committees ahead of floor votes starting next week, Republicans hope cooler heads in the House will prevail on all fronts.

    Several Republicans have made no secret of their disinterest in impeachment proceedings against Biden.

    And GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski said those who don’t think a federal shutdown of government operations is a big deal ought to visit her state of Alaska and see “real life.”

    During a previous government shutdown, Murkowski said crab fisherman couldn’t get out in the water because federal permits could not be issued.

    “You know, we’ve got a lot of things going on here in the Congress right now,” she said. “So the House is going to have to sort through their priorities and hopefully, they’re going to be priorities that are in the best interests of the operations of good governance.”

    Follow the AP’s coverage of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy at https://apnews.com/hub/kevin-mccarthy.

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  • Donald Trump’s First Post-Mugshot Rally Doesn’t Disappoint: “I’m Being Indicted For You”

    Donald Trump’s First Post-Mugshot Rally Doesn’t Disappoint: “I’m Being Indicted For You”

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    Facing a grand total of 91 charges across four criminal cases, former president Donald Trump was in South Dakota Friday for his first big event after having his mugshot taken in Georgia. “They’re just destroying our country,” Trump said to a crowd of about 7,000 gathered in Rapid City. “And if we don’t take it back — if we don’t take it back in ’24, I really believe we’re not going to have a country left.”

    “I’m being indicted for you,” Trump added. “That’s not part of the job description.”

    Trump spent parts of his rambling, 110-minute speech singling out competitors in the 2024 presidential race. “You know a guy who was very disloyal ’cause I got him elected, so I call him Ron DeSanctimonious,” he said, non-sequitur style, of his chief rival for the GOP nomination, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. President Joe Biden, Trump’s likely counterpart in the general election, was both “grossly incompetent and very dangerous”—a puzzling combination of attributes—and “the most crooked president in history.”

    Trump bragged that he is the “only person in the history of politics who has been indicted whose poll numbers went up.” While it’s certainly true that Trump’s stranglehold on the GOP primary has only grown stronger in the last six months despite two federal indictments and two state indictments, polling about his criminal cases is more of a mixed bag. Most Americans believe the criminal cases brought against him are warranted, and Trump’s conduct in the criminal cases is rated far less favorably than that of Biden and DOJ officials.

    Trump was also in South Dakota Friday to accept the endorsement of the state’s governor, Kristi Noem, who has long been a staunch Trump ally. “I will do everything I can to help him win and save this country,” Noem said before the former president took the stage. She added that other GOP candidates, including Vivek Ramaswamy and Tim Scott, had been invited to Friday’s event, but “all of them told us that they had better things to do.” Noem’s endorsement makes her just one of a handful of the country’s 26 Republican governors who have endorsed so far.

    The early endorsement is stirring more speculation that Noem is angling to be Trump’s running mate. Several rally attendees sitting behind Trump held up Trump/Noem 2024 signs, and a Trump/Noem graphic momentarily appeared on the screen behind the stage during Noem’s address.

    Two Republican insiders familiar with Noem’s thinking told the Associated Press she planned the event to increase face-time with Trump as he considers potential running mate and cabinet picks. The clock is ticking for Noem, who will be term-limited in 2026 and is eyeing her next move to maintain prominence in the GOP.

    Trump continues to spend less time campaigning in early-voting states than most of his rivals, according to AP. But he will return to Iowa, the first state on the GOP nomination calendar, on Saturday to attend the college football game between Iowa and Iowa State.

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    Jack McCordick

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  • Mitch McConnell’s Freeze-Ups Haven’t Fractured Senate Republicans—Yet

    Mitch McConnell’s Freeze-Ups Haven’t Fractured Senate Republicans—Yet

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    Even some former McConnell dissidents have thrown their lot in with the Kentucky senator after last week’s incident. In a twist, Florida senator Rick Scott—who unsuccessfully challenged McConnell for party leader and is a frequent critic—responded “absolutely” when asked whether he would continue to support McConnell as leader. “I’m sure he will continue to do his job.” Even when pressed and asked whether McConnell should step aside at the end of this Congress, Scott held firm. “No,” he said, adding that if McConnell “feels comfortable” he should continue serving.

    That isn’t to say there aren’t detractors in the mix. Fellow Kentucky senator Rand Paul called on McConnell to “be more forthcoming with what’s going on,” and was dismissive of the explanation that the freezes could be explained away by dehydration; he later sought to clarify that his remarks were regarding the medical explanation—not necessarily a comment on McConnell’s fitness. But Senator Josh Hawley, who didn’t back McConnell in the last leadership race, has been vocal about his concerns, which he said are shared by his constituents. “I just got back from a month at home where I was asked about this constantly,” the Missouri lawmaker told reporters. “This is just where we are. So is that a good thing? No. So am I concerned? Yeah.” 

    Hawley fears that McConnell’s issues have become a distraction—and could continue to be as the 2024 election cycle ramps up. “That’s an important election cycle for Republicans in this body,” he said. “I just hope that we are 100% focused on that.”

    Late Tuesday evening, the Kentucky senator sought to quash the chatter. In his first public remarks since the second freeze, he briefly addressed the incident on the Senate floor. Running through an inventory of events he participated in during the recess, McConnell expressed chagrin: “One particular moment of my time back home has received its fair share of attention in the press over the past week, but I assure you August was a busy and productive month for me and my staff back in the commonwealth.”

    Within hours, McConnell’s team released the letter from Monahan, the Senate physician. Monahan wrote, “There is no evidence that you have a seizure disorder or that you experienced a stroke, TIA or movement disorder such as Parkinson’s disease.” He noted that there are “no changes recommended in treatment protocols” for McConnell following his fall in March, during which he suffered a concussion. On Wednesday, McConnell took the floor once again, but avoided his health entirely, instead largely focusing on taking shots at the Biden administration’s foreign policy and urging for continued support for Ukraine in its war with Russia. “This is not the time to ease up,” he said. “It’s not the time for America to step back.”

    But as McConnell and his allies maintain there is nothing to see here, massive legislative battles loom.

    In the final days before lawmakers departed the Beltway for the August recess, tensions had reached a fever pitch among lawmakers when House Speaker Kevin McCarthy called it quits early as a number of key spending bills stalled out amid growing fissures within his caucus. Faced with the looming September 30 deadline to fund the government, it was a troubling portent. As House Democrat Suzan DelBene told Vanity Fair at the time, Congress was, “On a fast track to a shutdown.” Speaking on the Senate floor Wednesday, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer made a plea for both sides of the aisle to work together to fund the government. “If both sides work in good faith, embrace bipartisanship … then there will be no shutdown.” But that is hard to imagine.

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    Abigail Tracy

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  • Ron DeSantis Super PAC Admits They’re Scared of Vivek Ramaswamy, Leaked Recording Reveals

    Ron DeSantis Super PAC Admits They’re Scared of Vivek Ramaswamy, Leaked Recording Reveals

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    The head of Ron DeSantis’s mammoth super PAC privately admitted to spreading opposition stories on upstart candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, whose recent rise in the polls is threatening the Florida Governor’s increasingly tenuous hold on (a very distant) second place in the GOP primary race.

    “Everything you read about him is from us,” Jeff Roe, who runs the pro-DeSantis Never Back Down political action committee, told a gathering of donors just before the first GOP primary debate in Milwaukee on August 23. “Every misstatement, every 360 he’s conducting or 180 that he is going through in life, is from our scrutiny and pressure. And so, he’s not going to go through that very well, and that will get worse for him.”

    A recording of the comments, parts of which had previously been reported by CNN and The New York Times, was obtained by Politico and reported on Sunday.

    The official DeSantis campaign has struggled to fundraise from small-dollar donors, and much of the day-to-day campaign activity has been overtaken by Never Back Down, even as super PACs are barred from explicitly coordinating with any campaign.

    Roe will be launching a $50 million fundraising push following Labor Day, and told donors he hoped to raise the bulk of it before the second GOP debate on September 27, the Times previously reported.

    “​​Now the good news is that we have all the money we need in this room,” Roe told the donors gathered in Milwaukee. “The bad news is it’s still in your wallet.”

    “We’ve just been playing without pads, practicing without pads,” he said in the part of the recording reported by Politico Sunday.

    The Ramaswamy campaign responded to the report Sunday morning. “When DeSantis’s Super Pac campaign, Chris Christie, the New York Times, MSNBC and the rest of the bipartisan establishment are all going after you at the same time, you know you’re right over the target,” Ramaswamy spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told Politico. “America watched Vivek dominate the debate stage, it’s no wonder Never Back Down is pissing away another $20+ million after Labor Day.”

    The campaign is laser-focused on the early primary states, added Roe. “Iowa is a real state for us because of its education — it’s a highly educated state — because of income, because of bible reading,” he said. “New Hampshire is a terrible state for Donald Trump. But he’s going to lose the first two states. We’re going to beat him in Iowa.”

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    Jack McCordick

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  • Vivek Ramaswamy, Eminem, and the Rich History of Musicians Who’d Really, Really, Really Prefer Republican Candidates Delete Their Playlists

    Vivek Ramaswamy, Eminem, and the Rich History of Musicians Who’d Really, Really, Really Prefer Republican Candidates Delete Their Playlists

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    There are rules about when and how a politician can use music. Technically Republican primary combatant Vivek Ramaswamy had actually followed them before he performed Eminem’s self-hype anthem “Lose Yourself” in a half-viral moment at the Iowa State Fair on August 12. In May, Ramaswamy’s campaign signed an agreement with the performing rights organization BMI, giving him the rights to play songs from the thousands of artists they represent. But there are also a few unwritten codes that supersede the licensing business, and something about the biotech entrepreneur turned MAGA stan’s lackluster performance must have violated them in the rapper’s eyes. Less than two weeks later, BMI asked the campaign to stop using Eminem’s music. According to the letter, which Deadline obtained, the artist reached out to his longtime licensing company and asked them to exclude his music from the agreement with the Ramaswamy campaign. (ASCAP, another rival rights organization, advises campaigns to seek permission from the artists’ management before playing a song to ensure the use doesn’t infringe on the artists’ rights to publicity or represent a false endorsement.) Ramaswamy’s campaign spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said the campaign will comply with the request to stop using Eminem’s music. “To the American people’s chagrin, we will have to leave the rapping to the real Slim Shady.”

    Eminem’s politics surely had something to do with the complaint, but I would be surprised if “don’t be cringe” wasn’t an equal part of the subtext. It’s likely a coincidence that the letter went out the same day that Ramaswamy’s profile rose significantly in the first GOP presidential debate of the 2024 election cycle, but it’s fitting. Perched in the center of the stage, Ramaswamy’s lively performance impressed the likes of Matt Gaetz and earned attacks from his fellow debaters. In any case, the Eminem letter was its own strange mark of legitimacy. In Republican politics, you’re no one until someone is beseeching you to please, for the love of god, stay away from their back catalog.

    The tussles between right-wing politicians and left-leaning musical artists are nothing new. In the wake of the 1984 Reagan campaign’s appropriation of “Born in the U.S.A.,” Bruce Springsteen quipped about the president missing, well, the whole point of the song. The visibility of these technical and legal matters changed after Donald Trump’s 2016 run for president, if only because celebrity outcry against Trump was loud and the campaign had the bad habit of continuing to use music long after rights organizations tried to intervene. “Musicians who oppose Donald Trump’s use of their music” now has its own Wikipedia page and entries ranging from Adele to the White Stripes, with Elton John, Neil Young, and the Village People among the names in between. Despite intervention from the rightsholders, performances of “Macho Man” were still taking place at Mar-a-Lago as recently as May, and that’s unlikely to change. Trump is set in his ways.

    Eminem’s quiet rebuke of Ramaswamy recalls the sad saga of Springsteen and his former number-one fan, Chris Christie. Ever the New Jersey man, Christie was devoted to the artist, never mind their obvious political differences. But Springsteen rebuffed his invitation to perform at a state event and publicly criticized his policy positions. It’s not just that Christie wanted the songs, he wanted an embrace from the man himself. He wanted to be cool enough for Bruce. Christie soon switched his allegiance to another son of the Garden State and struck up a friendship with Jon Bon Jovi.

    If stars were once hesitant about rebuking politicians they disagreed with, the Trump era broke the seal for good. Though close observers know that Eminem circa 2023 is a fairly progressive guy, the contingent of his fan base who might remember him, approvingly, as the avatar of early 2000s homophobia got a shock when he used his 2017 BET Hip-Hop Awards performance to announce his proud membership in the Resistance. In a rap, he called Trump a “racist 94-year-old grandpa” who would “probably cause a nuclear holocaust.”

    Sure, there were a few fans who expressed outrage on Twitter, complaints from the type of person who might also find themselves in Tom Morello’s mentions lamenting that Rage Against the Machine got so political. For many sectors of the culture industry, the lesson of the Trump era was that Republicans do buy sneakers too, but not that many of them, and not the ones the trendsetters want to wear.

    Now that we’re in the middle of another election cycle, more Republican presidential campaigns will inevitably face headlines like this. We’re also in the middle of a ferocious backlash against the vaguely liberal urban consensus over racial equality and tolerance that coalesced in the 2010s. While its most dire consequences have been laws that criminalize abortion or gender-affirming care, it’s also been waged widely in the culture, from the war on Disney to uproar about rainbows at Target. The right is now realizing that the decades-long groundwork they laid to capture American politics did little to net them the cultural supremacy they desperately crave.

    This is quite clearly a part of what motivates Ramaswamy. In a profile by The New Yorker’s Sheelah Kolhatkar which labeled him “the CEO of anti-woke,” he lamented conservatism’s image problem on Ivy League campuses. “He mentioned a white, heavyset conservative male classmate at Harvard who was considered uncool,” Kolhatkar wrote, “and argued that the social pecking order was stacked against him ‘more than some athletic Black kid who came and got a place on the basketball team.’ Ramaswamy blamed affirmative action and similar policies for forcing élite institutions to lower their standards.”

    For the most part, the attempts to change the tide have the quixotic air of Ben Shapiro’s efforts to make Nashville a conservative Hollywood. But there have been a few successful campaigns to seize the means of popularity, from a depressingly effective boycott of Bud Light over a single influencer’s sponsored post to the lackluster Jason Aldean provocation that spent a few weeks on the chart this summer.

    So it was darkly hilarious to hear the newly minted folk hero Oliver Anthony react with dismay after his song “Rich Men North of Richmond” was played before the Fox debate last week. Anthony’s would-be corporate media boosters had impeccable right-wing bona fides, but Anthony still has the muddled, anti-establishment centrist politics of a regular guy. “It’s aggravating seeing people in conservative news try to identify with me like I’m one of them,” he said in a YouTube video. “It was funny seeing my song at the presidential debate. Cause it’s like, I wrote that song about those people. So for them to have to sit there and listen to that, that cracks me up.”

    The brand is strong—just turns out even their own hand-selected standard-bearers don’t want to be associated with it.

    Listen to Vanity Fair’s DYNASTY podcast now.

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    Erin Vanderhoof

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  • Vivek Ramaswamy, Beelining for the 2024 MAGA Vote, Is Listed As “Unaffiliated”

    Vivek Ramaswamy, Beelining for the 2024 MAGA Vote, Is Listed As “Unaffiliated”

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    Ever since he entered the presidential race in February, Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has made a hard play for MAGA voters, an effort on full display in his debate performance last Wednesday. And yet, according to his voting records, the biotech multimillionaire is listed as an “unaffiliated” voter in Franklin County, Ohio, where he’s been registered to vote since moving to Columbus in 2021.

    Ramaswamy’s public voting history shows that he skipped half of the elections held since then, including two primary elections in 2022 and one this year. He did vote in favor of a Republican-backed ballot measure that would have made Ohio’s state constitution more difficult to amend, a move widely seen as an attempt to undercut an abortion rights measure on the ballot in 2024.

    In a major victory for abortion rights, the ballot measure was resoundingly defeated earlier this month. Ramaswamy also voted in the 2021 and 2022 general elections.

    This isn’t the first time Ramaswamy’s voting record has complicated his “hardcore” MAGA appearance. In digital interviews in June and July, Ramaswamy asserted that his first vote for president was for Donald Trump in 2020. Throughout the campaign, he chalked up his apathy to a lack of enthusiasm about the candidates on offer. In an August interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity, Ramaswamy said he was a “jaded person” in his 20s.

    But late in July, when The Washington Examiner confronted Ramaswamy with voting records showing he first cast a vote in 2004, his campaign initially said he could not remember who he voted for, before admitting he voted for Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik. During that campaign, Badnarik ran on a strong pro-choice platform, and supported ending “immigration restrictions for peaceful individuals who come to America to work, study and live.”

    Notably, Badnarik also flirted with 9/11 conspiracism. In a blog post commemorating the 10th anniversary of the attacks, he wrote, “We should assiduously follow the evidence until we uncover the cold, unvarnished truth, even if we discover that certain members of our own government were [knowledgeable], or even complicit in planning the attack.”

    In a wide-ranging profile in The Atlantic last week, Ramaswamy was quoted as claiming it is “legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers.” “It probably is zero for all I know, right?” he added. “I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero.”

    In an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Ramaswamy claimed he’d been misquoted, but The Atlantic later published audio of the interview proving the comments were authentic.

    Ramaswamy currently sits in third place in FiveThirtyEight’s average of GOP primary polls. His numbers have more than doubled since early July when he was sitting at around 4%.

    The second GOP debate will be held on September 27 at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute in Simi Valley, California.

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    Jack McCordick

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  • We gave 2 groups of American voters opposite scenarios for the U.S. economy and asked them about the culture wars. No one cared about ‘wokeness’ in case of a recession

    We gave 2 groups of American voters opposite scenarios for the U.S. economy and asked them about the culture wars. No one cared about ‘wokeness’ in case of a recession

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    After Congress grazed the edge of default in last spring’s debt ceiling negotiations, Fitch Ratings downgraded its U.S. debt rating from its top AAA rating to AA+ in a controversial move due to “a steady deterioration in standards of governance.”

    With the potential to affect everything from mortgage rates to international contracts, the demotion stoked new fears of a recession that would also change the dynamics of the 2024 U.S. election.

    Largely ignoring America’s economic jitters, Republican frontrunners for president are hinging their campaigns on culture war topics like immigration and school curricula about race and gender. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, one of the top-polling alternatives to former President Donald Trump who faces multiple federal criminal indictments, has made his “war on wokeness” a singular focus.

    Their bet is that latent frustration with liberals’ pursuit of social justice and equity will drive Americans to the polls in 2024, even as the U.S. faces growing foreign policy threats, intensifying climate change, and fresh economic uncertainty. But will there be similar impassioned debates about undocumented immigrants and girls’ sports if the American economy tanks?

    The answer is no, according to a new experiment from Ipsos. Americans will perceive culture war issues to be less important in case of a destabilized economy.

    We offered separate groups of survey respondents opposite perspectives on the state of the American economy that mimic the debate playing out among top economists today.

    One group was reminded that inflation remains near high levels that haven’t been seen since the 1980s and that over the last 14 months, the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates faster than at any time in the last four decades.

    Another group of respondents was reminded that the unemployment level is currently below 3.5%–lower than during the economic booms of the 1990s or late 2010s–and that U.S. wage growth has been faster in the last two years than over any two-year period in the last few decades.

    After being exposed to these contrasting economic outlooks, we asked respondents to identify the policy issues that were most important to them. Those who read the negative outlook were less likely to care about divisive social questions, particularly DeSantis’ signature issues–“wokeness” and immigration, which both registered the steepest drops in importance.

    Exposed to bad economic news, Republicans’ level of concern over wokeness and critical race theory dropped more than any other issue. Wokeness also loses more standing than any other issue among women and people without university degrees. In fact, its priority drops with just about every U.S. demographic.

    A term that began to spread a decade ago in left-wing social justice circles and was then seized upon by right-wing leaders to signify Democrats’ overreach, “wokeness” is not a long-established political issue in America. This likely makes it uniquely susceptible to changes of mind. In a recent CNN interview, DeSantis himself acknowledged that many Americans don’t even know what it means exactly.

    “Not everyone really knows what wokeness is,” DeSantis said.

    The relevance of immigration–which has been a core Republican issue for two decades–also drops among key demographic groups once they are exposed to a pessimistic economic outlook. These include Republicans, white voters, and voters without university degrees.

    Of course, if the U.S. economy’s current rebound suddenly stumbles, Democrats and President Biden’s reelection campaign will have their own problems.

    Still, the survey results suggest the futility of fixating on issues that hold little appeal among average Americans (and critically, the independents who swing elections). Wokeness, masculinity, and issues related to transgender individuals rank among their lowest priorities. And while a 55% majority of Republicans list immigration as one of their top three policy concerns, only about a quarter of independents do the same.

    This reflects the glaring weakness of America’s primary election system, which motivates many candidates to appeal to the fringes of their party’s most passionate supporters in a manner that devalues the priorities of most Americans.

    On the other side of the aisle, when Democratic voters are exposed to a negative economic outlook, their concern for social issues like immigration, gender, and critical race theory also drops–at an even greater magnitude than among Republicans.

    Notably, women’s concern over abortion rights does not change with the nation’s economic fortunes. They are unwavering.

    The fragility of culture war issues’ salience would be less of a problem for Democrats if they continue to center the 2024 campaign on the bread-and-butter legislative achievements of the Biden administration–which has deliberately avoided divisive culture war battles and invested in reinforcing U.S. infrastructure and countering climate change, resisted Russian aggression in Ukraine without involving American troops, and moved to reduce the burden of student loans and the price of prescription drugs.

    Coincidentally, the priorities that change minimally with a bad economic outlook are infrastructure, foreign conflicts, inequality, and health care.

    If the economy stays strong, Democrats look poised to meet Americans where they are. And should it weaken, Republicans cannot continue to talk about “woke” when Americans are broke.

    Clifford A. Young is the president of Ipsos Public Affairs, United States. 

    Justin Gest is a professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government.

    The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

    More must-read commentary published by Fortune:

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    Clifford A. Young, Justin Gest

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  • Georgia Made It Easier For Parents To Challenge School Library Books. Almost No One Has Done So

    Georgia Made It Easier For Parents To Challenge School Library Books. Almost No One Has Done So

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    CUMMING, Ga. (AP) — When Allison Strickland urged a suburban Atlanta school board in June to remove four books from school libraries, she was following a path cleared by Georgia’s Republican lawmakers.

    But after the bitterly debated Georgia law took effect Jan. 1, The Associated Press found few book challengers are using it.

    One key element restraining complaints: The law only allows parents of current students to challenge books.

    Although not new, book challenges have surged since 2020, part of a backlash to what kids read and discuss in public schools. Conservatives want to stop children from reading books with themes on sexuality, gender, race and religion that they find objectionable. PEN America, a group promoting freedom of expression, counted 4,000 instances of books banned nationwide from July 2021 to December 2022.

    But while fights are ongoing in Forsyth County, where Strickland was protesting, at least 15 other large Georgia districts surveyed by AP said they have received no demands to remove books under the law.

    Georgia conservatives last year aimed to ease book challenges. But lawmakers knew a parents-only restriction would also limit them.

    “We are not going to turn this bill into a weapon for every taxpayer to harass the school system,” said state Rep. James Burchett, a Republican from Waycross, during a 2022 hearing.

    Still, some books are disappearing. Kasey Meehan, PEN America’s Freedom to Read director, said some schools are removing books even before parents ask. That’s happened in Forsyth County, where documents obtained by AP show a librarian “weeded” two books Strickland was protesting from another high school’s library, just before they were challenged there.

    Those who object to books say Georgia’s law is being interpreted too narrowly and removing books should be easier. In most states anyone can challenge a book, not just parents, Meehan said. But some districts elsewhere also limit protests over books to parents.

    The Georgia law may be preventing widespread challenges by a handful of conservative activists. Research has found complaints nationwide are largely driven by just a few people — who sometimes aren’t parents.

    Forsyth County, a fast-growing suburb with 54,000 students, has been a hotbed for conservative agitation over public education.

    A parent of two West Forsyth High School students, Strickland complained in March about sexually explicit books, attaching excerpts from BookLooks. The conservative website highlights passages that its writers consider objectionable. Strickland was working with the Mama Bears, a group recruiting book challengers.

    Strickland targeted four novels: “Dime,” by E.R. Frank, in which a girl is lured into prostitution; “Tilt,” by Ellen Hopkins, in which a 17-year-old girl gets pregnant and a 16-year-old boy falls in love with an HIV-positive boy; “Perfect,” another Hopkins book about teens facing unrealistic expectations; and “Oryx and Crake,” by Margaret Atwood, about a plague that kills most humans.

    The principal examined the books, as legally required. In April, a Forsyth principal sided with a complaint, removing “The Nerdy and the Dirty” by B.T. Gottfred. But the West Forsyth principal concluded the books Strickland targeted should remain on shelves. She appealed to the school board.

    “There is not one educational thing to be had from any of these books,” Strickland told board members, saying the books “run the gamut of child prostitution, forced rape, pedophilia, bestiality, sodomy, drug and alcohol abuse, all of very young minor children, often with adult partners.”

    Others dissented, including T.J. McKinney, a departing teacher at a Forsyth middle school. She said students need to see their struggles reflected in books, and it’s pointless to shield older students from vulgarity or sex.

    “The book is not introducing kids to sex. If you’re in high school, they’re having sex,” McKinney said. “They are not learning this from books.”

    Forsyth Superintendent Jeff Bearden supported the principal’s recommendation to keep the books, as he did twice earlier. But the law requires the board to decide.

    In April, board members backed administrators, retaining “Endlessly Ever After,” a choose-your-own-adventure fairy tale. But in May, the board overruled Bearden and required advance parental consent before students could read Gottfred’s “The Handsome Girl & Her Beautiful Boy.”

    Faced with Strickland’s challenges in June, board members also required parental approval for the four books. The compromise left many unhappy.

    “Members of the board, I ask you, are you really going to compromise on child pedophilia?” asked Mama Bears leader Cindy Martin before the vote. “If the answer is yes, then what will you compromise on next?”

    “I see it as a loss,” McKinney said after the meeting. “The students still don’t have a right to choose their own books.”

    Forsyth County was once a rural locale where white mobs terrorized the Black minority into fleeing in 1912. But suburban growth made it well-educated, affluent and diverse. Only 47% of Forsyth students were white and non-Hispanic last year.

    But it’s also heavily Republican, and crowds attacked the system’s diversity, equity and inclusion plan in 2021. Agitation bled over into book protests. Officials pulled eight books from libraries in early 2022. They would later return all except “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” George M. Johnson’s memoir of growing up queer.

    Opponents organized against the bans. High school student Shivi Mehta said she wants libraries to “stay whole.”

    “I don’t want to have some books locked away,” Mehta said. “I don’t want to have books that I can’t read or can’t have access to because a group of politicians said I couldn’t.”

    Critics continued reading explicit book excerpts at board meetings, urging removal. After telling a Mama Bears member to stop, the board banned her from speaking at meetings. The Mama Bears sued, and in November, a federal judge ruled the policy unconstitutionally restricted free speech. The district paid $107,000 in lawyer’s fees.

    Others complained to the U.S. Department of Education that the district was excluding stories about people not white or straight. In a May warning, the department agreed, saying Forsyth schools may have created a hostile environment violating federal laws against race and sex discrimination, “leading to increased fears and possibly harassment” among students.

    The district settled the complaint, agreeing to explain the book removal process, offer “supportive measures” and survey students about the issue.

    But while federal government concerns may restrain administrators, the fight isn’t over.

    “I think the momentum to ban or restrict books is not going away anytime soon,” Mehta said.

    The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Ron DeSantis’s “Listless Vessels” Comment Roils MAGA Supporters, Sparks Feud With Vivek Ramaswamy

    Ron DeSantis’s “Listless Vessels” Comment Roils MAGA Supporters, Sparks Feud With Vivek Ramaswamy

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    Florida Governor Ron DeSantis‘s oblique reference to Donald Trump supporters as “listless vessels” has roiled the GOP primary, prompting demands for an apology from Trump surrogates and escalating a growing feud with biotech investor Vivek Ramaswamy, who has been gaining ground on DeSantis in recent weeks.

    “A movement can’t be about the personality of one individual,” DeSantis said in an interview with The Florida Standard, an upstart outlet run by a former Trump supporter that has ingratiated itself with the governor.

    “If all we are is listless vessels that’s just supposed to follow, you know, whatever happens to come down the pike on Truth Social every morning, that’s not going to be a durable movement.”

    DeSantis had previously used the “listless vessel” barb to describe President Joe Biden during his May campaign launch.

    Trump surrogates immediately pounced on the comment, drawing comparisons to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 now infamous campaign speech comparing half of the former president’s supporters to a “basket of deplorables.” After an uproar, the former first lady apologized the next day: “I regret saying ‘half’ — that was wrong,” she said in a statement.

    “DeSantis goes full-blown Hillary and call[s] MAGA supporters ‘Listless Vessels,’” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung wrote on X. “Looks like Ron DeSanctimonious just had his ‘Basket of Deplorables’ moment,” chirped Trump adviser Jason Miller.

    In a statement, MAGA, Inc. spokesperson Karoline Leavitt called on the Florida governor to “immediately apologize for his disgraceful insult.” “To Hillary Clinton, Trump supporters are ‘deplorables.’ To Ron DeSantis, they are ‘listless vessels.’ The truth is, Trump supporters are patriots,” Leavitt said.

    Trump press secretary Bryan Griffin denied that DeSantis’s comment was referring to Trump supporters but rather allies in Congress. “The dishonest media refuses to report the facts—Donald Trump and some congressional endorsers are “listless vessels.” Why? Because Trump and DC insiders feel he is entitled to your vote,” Griffin said. “@RonDeSantis believes your trust should be earned and has the vision, plan, and record to beat Joe Biden and reverse the decline of our country. That’s why Ron DeSantis will be showing up on Wednesday night to debate, and Donald Trump will not.”

    In the interview, DeSantis did criticize Republican politicians who he said view support for Trump as the sole factor determining whether someone is a “RINO,” or “Republican in name only.” “You could be the most conservative person since sliced bread, unless you’re kissing his rear end, they will somehow call you a Rino,” he said.

    Without naming any names, DeSantis cited “huge Trump supporters, like in Congress, who have like incredibly liberal leftwing records that [are] really just atrocious” and proceeded to tout his support from “people like [Texas] congressman Chip Roy, who’s endorsed me, [Kentucky] congressman Thomas Massie,” who he said “have records of principle.”

    Republican presidential candidate and biotech investor Vivek Ramaswamy, who currently sits third in the polls, got into the mix on Sunday and wrote that “the real danger to our movement is the rise of ‘listless-vessel’ robot politicians who blindly follow the commands of their Super PACs.”

    The jab appeared to be a veiled reference to a trove of documents posted by a firm associated with DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down ahead of Wednesday’s debate in Milwaukee. The memos, first reported by The New York Times, encourage the Florida governor to “take a sledgehammer to Vivek Ramaswamy,” even supplying him with the ready-made epithets of “‘Fake Vivek’ Or ‘Vivek the Fake.’”

    On Saturday, DeSantis acknowledged the memo in an interview with Fox News, but said he hadn’t read it. “It’s just something that we have and put off to the side,” he said. And in a campaign memo obtained by Axios on Saturday, DeSantis’s new campaign manager seemed to disavow the strategy outlined by the super PAC, telling donors and top supporters that the candidate would focus on promoting “his vision to beat Joe Biden, reverse American decline, and revive the American Dream.”

    The memo added that “we are fully prepared for Governor DeSantis to be the center of attacks and on the receiving end of false, desperate charges from other candidates and the legacy media.”

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    Jack McCordick

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  • What the Polls May Be Getting Wrong About Trump

    What the Polls May Be Getting Wrong About Trump

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    In the months since Donald Trump’s indictments started piling up, pollsters have noticed something remarkable: The dozens of criminal charges brought against the former president have seemed to boost his standing in the Republican presidential primary. Trump has widened his already commanding lead over his rivals, and in poll after poll, GOP voters have said that the charges make them more—not less—likely to vote for him again.

    The dynamic has turned an infamous example of Trumpian bravado—his 2016 claim that “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters”—into something approaching a prophecy. To his critics, the emerging conventional wisdom that the indictments have benefited Trump politically is a dispiriting and even dangerous notion, one that could embolden politicians of any ideological stripe to disregard the law.

    Those fears, however, may be premature.

    David A. Graham: The Georgia indictment offers the whole picture

    A new, broader survey of Republican voters suggests that the indictments have, in fact, dented Trump’s advantage in the primary. The study was designed by a group of university researchers who argue that pollsters have been asking the wrong questions to assess how the indictments have affected Republican voters.

    Most traditional polls have asked respondents directly whether the indictments have changed their attitude about Trump or their likelihood to vote for him. According to Matt Graham, one of the authors of the new survey and an assistant professor at Temple University, this type of query leads to biased answers. And it devolves into a proxy question for whether voters—and Republicans in particular—like the former president in the first place. “Respondents don’t always answer questions the way we want them to,” Graham told me. Republicans “want to say, ‘Well, I still support him regardless of the indictment.’ And if you don’t give them a chance to say that, they’re going to use the question to say that.”

    The researchers spotted a similar polling flaw in the high-profile 2017 special election for an open Senate seat in Alabama, where Republicans told pollsters that the many accusations of sexual assault against Roy Moore only made them more likely to support him. Moore went on to lose the election to Democrat Doug Jones after a sizable number of Republicans deserted him in a deeply red state.

    Graham and his colleagues believed that they could elicit more accurate answers about Trump by asking respondents to assess their view of him—and their likelihood of voting for him—as if they did not know he had been indicted. To test their theory, they commissioned a SurveyMonkey poll of more than 5,000 Americans in which half were asked questions in this counterfactual format: “Suppose you did not know about the indictment. How would you have answered the following question: How likely are you to vote for Donald Trump?” They asked the other half questions that pollsters more commonly use.

    The experiment produced significantly different results. Like other surveys, the poll based on the traditional format found that the indictments increased Trump’s support among Republican primary voters. But the poll based on the counterfactual framing found that the indictments slightly hurt his standing in the party, reducing by 1.6 percent the likelihood that Republicans would vote for him.

    The real-world implications of the researchers’ findings are, well, limited—at least for now. Trump’s polling lead in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire averages more than 25 points; the gap widens to nearly 40 points in recent national surveys. A drop of 1.6 percent suggests that charging Trump with multiple felonies is akin to tossing a pebble at a fast-moving train. “I don’t know that I make much of it at all,” Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist who regularly conducts focus groups of voters, told me.

    In Longwell’s experience, the response from Trump supporters to the indictments has been consistent for months: “They say they do not care about them.” Views about the former president have been locked in place for years, Longwell said, and most Trump supporters give either a neutral response to the indictments or say that the charges make them even more likely to vote for him. Almost no one, she told me, said the indictments make them less supportive.

    Watch: Making sense of Donald Trump’s 91 felony charges

    If anything, they help Trump reclaim the status of an outsider fighting establishment forces, which was central to his appeal in 2016, says Chris Jackson, the head of public polling at Ipsos, a nonpartisan research firm that frequently conducts surveys for news organizations. In Jackson’s surveys, Republican voters have told pollsters that the indictments make them more likely to support Trump. Still, he told me, he doesn’t think the charges themselves are helping Trump’s candidacy: “I think the media attention that the indictments have created have helped him.”

    In polls conducted by Ipsos and other firms, Trump has widened his lead among Republican primary voters since he was indicted by a grand jury in New York this spring. But that shift, Jackson said, is less about Trump than about his opponents, and particularly Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has lost support during that time. “He hasn’t actually gained in his share of the Republican electorate,” Jackson said. “I don’t actually think Trump’s strengthened so much as his challengers have weakened.”

    Jackson’s interpretation of the polling data is similar to what Graham and his colleagues found in their counterfactual experiment: The indictments may not have hurt Trump much among Republican voters, but they haven’t really boosted him either. “The way a question is worded always has an impact in survey research,” Jackson said. “So, yeah, I think it matters, but it’s not necessarily uncovering some deeper truth.”

    Graham, too, isn’t arguing that his team’s findings should fundamentally alter perceptions about Trump’s chances of becoming the Republican nominee. But he believes that the emerging and, it seems, false narrative that charging a political candidate with dozens of serious crimes will redound to his benefit is an important one to dispel. “I don’t think that survey researchers should be sending the public profoundly pessimistic messages about how their fellow citizens think and reason when those aren’t actually true,” Graham told me. “There’s plenty to be pessimistic about in our politics, but we don’t need to pile on by acting like people think that indictments are good.”

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    Russell Berman

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  • Vivek Ramaswamy Says He Wants To Run the Government Like Elon Musk

    Vivek Ramaswamy Says He Wants To Run the Government Like Elon Musk

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    A day after Elon Musk described Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy as a “very promising candidate,” the biotech exec is returning the favor, signaling a growing closeness between the surging candidate and tech CEO, even as Musk has been associated with the Ron DeSantis campaign since its launch in May.

    “What [Musk] did at Twitter is a good example of what I want to do to the administrative state,” Ramaswamy said in a Friday interview with Fox News. “Take out the 75 percent of the dead weight cost, improve the actual experience of what it’s supposed to do.” Ramaswamy also vowed to release government files in the manner of Musk’s “Twitter files” if elected.

    The controversial Tesla owner’s initial positive comments came Thursday in response to a Ramaswamy interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “He states his beliefs clearly,” Musk wrote early Friday morning in response to a Ramaswamy campaign video captioned with the ten “Truths” that Ramaswamy has recently made into a campaign motto. (“God is real” and “There are two genders” are the first two).

    These comments come as Ramaswamy continues to climb in the polls. An Emerson College poll released last week put the biotech investor in a tie for second place with DeSantis, whose numbers continue to slide. When asked about their second choice in a recent Fox News poll, 37% of Trump supporters picked DeSantis, while 22% opted for Ramaswamy. In March, those numbers were 52% and 0%, respectively.

    Ramaswamy appears to be peeling off support from more than one major DeSantis booster. On Friday night, Musk responded to a pro-Ramaswamy post from venture capitalist David Sacks. “Vivek is increasingly looking like a strong candidate,” Musk wrote. Sacks has been a major DeSantis supporter and moderated the Florida governor’s glitchy, error-filled campaign launch conversation with Musk. 

    Throughout the spring, Ramaswamy and Sacks had traded barbs over Sacks’ support for the Silicon Valley Bank bailout, with Sacks accusing the Republican candidate in March of leveling “unfounded ad hominem attacks.” In May, Ramaswamy responded to Sacks’ hosting of the DeSantis campaign launch by arguing that DeSantis should have been asked about the bailout, “since his megadonor @DavidSacks was the most vocal supporter” of it. 

    Ramaswamy’s rise certainly has not gone unnoticed in the DeSantis campaign. A trove of documents posted by a firm associated with DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down ahead of Wednesday’s debate in Milwaukee encouraged the Florida governor to “take a sledgehammer to Vivek Ramaswamy,” The New York Times reported Thursday. The memos advise DeSantis to name-call his competitor “‘Fake Vivek’ Or ‘Vivek the Fake.’”

    “We have a choice between super PAC puppets who are being propped up with prepped lines and millions of dollars to go along with it, versus, in my case, I’m an outsider,” Ramaswamy said on Fox News Thursday in response to the documents.

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    Jack McCordick

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  • Republicans Are Apoplectic Over the Hunter Biden Special Counsel (Who They Demanded Get the Job)

    Republicans Are Apoplectic Over the Hunter Biden Special Counsel (Who They Demanded Get the Job)

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    One of the biggest things that has united the Republican Party over the last several years is its insistence that Hunter Biden is a criminal mastermind, the likes of which this country has never seen. At the same time, they say, Joe Biden has weaponized the Justice Department such that his son will never actually be held accountable for any of his many alleged crimes, including ones that supposedly involve the president (which they’ll have evidence proving any day now). One thing throwing a bit of a wrench in this theory? The fact that Biden’s Justice Department is apparently attempting to blow up the plea deal his son struck in June.

    In a court documents filed on Sunday night, Hunter Biden’s lawyer, Christopher Clark, told a federal judge that the Justice Department is trying to “renege on the previously agreed-upon plea agreement.” (The DOJ, as a reminder, is part of the executive branch of the federal government, which is currently run by one Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.) Specifically, Clark said, prosecutors are trying to pull out of the part of the deal that stipulates that Hunter Biden will avoid prosecution by enrolling in a diversion program for gun offenders, never owning a firearm again, and remaining drug free for two years. (The other part of the deal required him to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges stemming from paying his taxes late in 2017 and 2018.)

    The Sunday filing by Clark came in response to a Friday filing by government attorneys who claimed, per The New York Times, that “they and Mr. Biden were at an impasse over plea negotiations and that no agreement had been reached.” In its three-page response, Biden’s team said that wasn’t true, that Biden had signed the agreement last month, and that newly appointed special counsel David Weiss was trying to back out of a deal both parties had officially agreed to. As Clark noted, not only did Hunter Biden sign the deal in court last month, but prosecutors had as well, making it “binding” and still “in effect.”

    Federal judge Maryellen Noreika, who was nominated by Donald Trump in 2017, gave Weiss until Tuesday at noon to respond. At a hearing last month, Noreika refused to sign off on the plea deal Biden and prosecutors had reached, demanding more information from both sides and saying, “I’m not in a position to accept or reject it. I need to defer.”

    Now, it appears as though Hunter Biden will be headed for a criminal trial that would likely take place before the 2024 election. (Trump, who claimed last month that the first son should’ve gotten the death penalty, is already scheduled for two criminal trials prior to the election; a third could take place in January, and a potential fourth is in the offing.) And if you thought the idea of the president’s son in a courtroom in the midst of the general election would’ve been enough to keep Republicans happy for, like, at least a week, you thought wrong!

    Presently, they’re extremely upset about last week’s appointment of Weiss—who has been investigating Hunter Biden since 2018—to special counsel, despite the fact that they demanded Weiss be given that exact job. Speaking to Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures, Ted Cruz—who literally wrote a letter to Merrick Garland asking for Weiss to be given “special counsel protections and authorities to conduct the Hunter Biden investigation”—called Weiss a “wildly inappropriate” choice, boldly alleging he “either was an active participant in covering up this criminality and protecting Joe Biden in engaging in an obstruction of justice—that is option one—or option two, he wasn’t the driver, he was just complicit.” (Again, Cruz is on the record asking for Weiss to be given the very job he was handed last week.) Naturally, Cruz is not the only member of the GOP raging about Weiss.

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  • Abortion Is Inflaming the GOP’s Biggest Electoral Problem

    Abortion Is Inflaming the GOP’s Biggest Electoral Problem

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    The escalating political struggle over abortion is compounding the GOP’s challenges in the nation’s largest and most economically vibrant metropolitan areas.

    The biggest counties in Ohio voted last week overwhelmingly against the ballot initiative pushed by Republicans and anti-abortion forces to raise the threshold for passing future amendments to the state constitution to 60 percent. That proposal, known as Issue 1, was meant to reduce the chances that voters would approve a separate initiative on the November ballot to overturn the six-week abortion ban Ohio Republicans approved in 2019.

    The preponderant opposition to Issue 1 in Ohio’s largest counties extended a ringing pattern. Since the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide constitutional right to abortion with its 2022 Dobbs decision, seven states have held ballot initiatives that allowed voters to weigh in on whether the procedure should remain legal: California, Vermont, Montana, Michigan, Kansas, Kentucky, and now Ohio. In addition, voters in Wisconsin chose a new state-supreme-court justice in a race dominated by the question of whether abortion should remain legal in the state.

    Read: The abortion backlash reaches Ohio

    In each of those eight contests, the abortion-rights position or candidate prevailed. And in each case, most voters in the states’ largest population centers have voted—usually by lopsided margins—to support legal abortion.

    These strikingly consistent results underline how conflict over abortion is amplifying the interconnected geographic, demographic, and economic realignments reconfiguring American politics. Particularly since Donald Trump emerged as the GOP’s national leader, Republicans have solidified their hold on exurban, small-town, and rural communities, whose populations tend to be predominantly white and Christian and many of whose economies are reliant on the powerhouse industries of the 20th century: manufacturing, energy extraction, and agriculture. Democrats, in turn, are consolidating their advantage inside almost all of the nation’s largest metro areas, which tend to be more racially diverse, more secular, and more integrated into the expanding 21st-century Information Age economy.

    New data provided exclusively to The Atlantic by Brookings Metro, a nonpartisan think tank, show, in fact, that the counties that voted against the proposed abortion restrictions are the places driving most economic growth in their states. Using data from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis, Brookings Metro at my request calculated the share of total state economic output generated by the counties that voted for and against abortion rights in five of these recent contests. The results were striking: Brookings found that the counties supporting abortion rights accounted for more than four-fifths of the total state GDP in Michigan, more than three-fourths in Kansas, exactly three-fourths in Ohio, and more than three-fifths in both Kentucky and Wisconsin.

    “We are looking at not only two different political systems but two different economies as well within the same states,” Robert Maxim, a senior research associate at Brookings Metro, told me.

    The Ohio vote demonstrated again that abortion is extending the fault line between those diverging systems, with stark electoral implications. Concerns that Republicans would try to ban abortion helped Democrats perform unexpectedly well in the 2022 elections in the key swing states of Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, particularly in well-educated suburbs around major cities. Democrats won four of the six governor contests and four of the five U.S. Senate races in those states despite widespread discontent over the economy and President Joe Biden’s job performance. Even if voters remain unhappy on both of those fronts in 2024, Democratic strategists are cautiously optimistic that fear of Republicans attempting to impose a national abortion ban will remain a powerful asset for Biden and the party’s other candidates.

    When given the chance to weigh in on the issue directly, voters in communities of all sizes have displayed resistance to banning abortion. As Philip Bump of The Washington Post calculated this week, the share of voters supporting abortion rights exceeded Biden’s share of the vote in 500 of the 510 counties that have cast ballots on the issue since last year (outside of Vermont, which Bump did not include in his analysis).

    But across these states, most smaller counties still voted against legal abortion, including this last week in Ohio. A comprehensive analysis of the results by the Cleveland Plain Dealer found that in Ohio’s rural counties, more than three-fifths of voters still backed Issue 1.

    Opponents of Issue 1 overcame that continued resistance with huge margins in the state’s largest urban and suburban counties. Most voters rejected Issue 1 in 14 of the 17 counties that cast the most ballots this week, including all seven that cast the absolute most votes (according to the ranking posted by The New York Times). In several of those counties, voters opposed Issue 1 by ratios of 2 to 1 or even 3 to 1.

    Equally striking were the results in suburban counties around the major cities, almost all of which usually lean toward the GOP. Big majorities opposed Issue 1 in several large suburban counties that Trump won in 2020 (including Delaware and Lorain). Even in more solidly Republican suburban counties that gave Trump more than 60 percent of their vote (Butler, Warren, and Clermont), the “yes” side on Issue 1 eked out only a very narrow win. Turnout in those big urban and suburban counties was enormous as well.

    Jeff Rusnak, a long-time Ohio-based Democratic consultant, says the suburban performance may signal an important shift for the party. One reason that Ohio has trended more solidly Republican than other states in the region, particularly Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, he argues, is that women in Ohio have not moved toward Democrats in the Trump era as much as women in those other states have. But, he told me, the “no” side on Issue 1 could not have run as well as it did in the big suburban counties without significant improvement among independent and even Republican-leaning women. “In Ohio, women who were not necessarily following the Great Lakes–state trends, I think, now woke up and realized, Aha, we better take action,” Rusnak said.

    The Ohio results followed the pattern evident in the other states that have held elections directly affecting abortion rights since last year’s Supreme Court decision. In Kansas, abortion-rights supporters carried all six of the counties that cast the most votes. In the Kentucky and Michigan votes, abortion-rights supporters carried eight of the 10 counties that cast the most votes, and in California they carried the 14 counties with the highest vote totals. Montana doesn’t have as many urban centers as these other states, but its anti-abortion ballot measure was defeated with majority opposition in all three of the counties that cast the most votes. In the Wisconsin state-supreme-court race this spring, Democrat Janet Protasiewicz, who centered her campaign on an unusually explicit pledge to support legal abortion, carried seven of the 10 highest-voting counties. (All of these figures are from the New York Times ranking of counties in those states’ results.) For Republicans hoping to regain ground in urban and suburban communities, abortion has become “a huge challenge because they really are on the wrong side of the issue” with those voters, Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll, told me.

    The results in these abortion votes reflect what I’ve called the “class inversion” in American politics. That’s the modern dynamic in which Democrats are running best in the most economically dynamic places in and around the largest cities. Simultaneously, Republicans are relying more on economically struggling communities that generally resist and resent the cultural and demographic changes that are unfolding mostly in those larger metros.

    Tom Davis, a former Republican representative from Northern Virginia who chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee, has described this process to me as Republicans exchanging “the country club for the country.” In some states, trading reduced margins in large suburbs for expanded advantages in small towns and rural areas has clearly improved the GOP position. That’s been true in such states as Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas, as well as in Texas, Iowa, Montana, and, more tenuously, North Carolina. Ohio has fit squarely in that category as well, with GOP gains among blue-collar voters, particularly in counties along the state’s eastern border, propelling its shift from the quintessential late-20th-century swing state to its current position as a Republican redoubt.

    But that reconfiguration just as clearly hurt Republicans in other states, such as Colorado and Virginia earlier in this century and Arizona and Georgia more recently. Growing strength in the largest communities has even allowed Democrats to regain the edge in each of the three pivotal Rust Belt states Trump in 2016 dislodged from the “blue wall”: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

    In 2022, Democrats swept the governorships in all three states, and won a Senate race as well in Pennsylvania. Support for legal abortion was central to all of those victories: Just over three-fifths of voters in each state said abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances and vast majorities of them backed the Democratic candidates, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Research for a consortium of media outlets. The numbers were almost identical in Arizona, where just over three-fifths of voters also backed abortion rights, and commanding majorities of them supported the winning Democratic candidates for governor and U.S. senator.

    Those races made clear that protecting abortion rights was a powerful issue in 2022 for Democrats in blue-leaning or purple states where abortion mostly remains legal. But, as I’ve written, the issue proved much less potent in the more solidly red-leaning states that banned abortion: Republican governors and legislators who passed severe abortion bans cruised to reelection in states including Texas, Georgia, and Florida. Exit polls found that in those more reliably Republican states, even a significant minority of voters who described themselves as pro-choice placed greater priority on other issues, among them crime and immigration, and supported Republican governors who signed abortion restrictions or bans.

    Ohio exemplified that trend as powerfully as any state. Though the exit polls showed that nearly three-fifths of voters said abortion should remain legal in all or most circumstances, Republican Governor Mike DeWine cruised to a landslide reelection after signing the state’s six-week abortion ban. Republican J. D. Vance, who supported a national abortion ban, nonetheless attracted the votes of about one-third of self-described voters who said they supported abortion rights in his winning Ohio Senate campaign last year, the exit polls found.

    The fate of Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who’s facing reelection in 2024, may turn on whether he can win a bigger share of the voters who support abortion rights there, as Democrats did last year in states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Arizona. (The same is likely true for Democratic Senator Jon Tester in Republican-leaning Montana, another state that voted down an anti-abortion ballot initiative last year.)

    Read: It’s abortion, stupid

    Brown has some reasons for optimism. After the defeat of Issue 1 last week, the follow-on ballot initiative in November to restore abortion rights in the state will keep the issue front and center. The two leading Republican candidates to oppose Brown are each staunch abortion opponents; Secretary of State Frank LaRose, the probable front-runner in the GOP race, was the chief public advocate for last week’s failed initiative. Most encouraging for Brown, the “no” vote on Issue 1 in the state’s biggest suburban counties far exceeded not only Biden’s performance in the same places in 2020, but also Brown’s own numbers in his last reelection, in 2018.

    For Brown, and virtually every Democrat in a competitive statewide race next year, the road to victory runs through strong showings in such large urban and suburban counties. Given the persistence of discontent over the economy, it will be particularly crucial for Biden to generate big margins among suburban voters who support abortion rights in the very few states likely to decide control of the White House. The resounding defeat of Issue 1 this week showed again that Republicans, in their zeal to revoke the right to legal abortion, have handed Biden and other Democrats their most powerful argument to move those voters.

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    Ronald Brownstein

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  • The Abortion Backlash Reaches Ohio

    The Abortion Backlash Reaches Ohio

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    Officially, abortion had nothing to do with the constitutional amendment that Ohio voters rejected today. The word appeared nowhere on the ballot, and no abortion laws will change as a result of the outcome.

    Practically and politically, however, the defeat of the ballot initiative known as Issue 1 was all about abortion, giving reproductive-rights advocates the latest in a series of victories in the year since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Fearing the passage of an abortion-rights amendment in November, Republicans in Ohio asked voters to approve a proposal that would raise the threshold for enacting a change to the state constitution, which currently requires a simple majority vote. The measure on the ballot today would have lifted the threshold to 60 percent.

    Ohio voters, turning out in unusually large numbers for a summertime special election, declined. Their decision was a rare victory for Democrats in a state that Republicans have dominated, and it suggests that abortion remains a strong motivator for voters heading into next year’s presidential election. The Ohio results could spur abortion-rights advocates to ramp up their efforts to circumvent Republican-controlled state legislatures by placing the issue directly before voters. They have reason to feel good about their chances: Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, statewide abortion-rights ballot measures have been undefeated, winning in blue states such as Vermont and California as well as in red states such as Kansas and Kentucky.

    Read: The next big abortion fight

    In Kansas last summer, an 18-point victory by the abortion-rights side stunned members of both parties in a socially conservative state. By the final day of voting in Ohio, however, the defeat of Issue 1 could no longer be called a surprise. For weeks, Democrats who had become accustomed to disappointment in Ohio watched early-voting numbers soar in the state’s large urban and suburban counties. If Republicans had hoped to catch voters napping by scheduling the election for the dog days of August, they miscalculated. As I traveled the state recently, I saw Vote No signs in front yards and outside churches in areas far from major cities, and progressive organizers told me that volunteers were signing up to knock on doors at levels unheard of for a summer campaign. The opposition extended to some independent and Republican voters, who saw the proposal as taking away their rights. “It’s this ‘Don’t tread on me’ moment where voters are being activated,” says Catherine Turcer, the executive director of Common Cause Ohio, a good-government advocacy group that helped lead the effort to defeat the amendment.

    Opponents of Issue 1 assembled a bipartisan coalition that included two former Republican governors. They focused their message broadly, appealing to voters to “protect majority rule” and stop a brazen power grab by the legislature. But the special election’s obvious link to this fall’s abortion referendum in Ohio drove people to the polls, particularly women and younger voters. “Voters don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the Ohio constitution. They probably don’t spend a ton of time thinking about voting rights,” Turcer told me. But, she said, “the attempt to dilute voter power so that it would impact a vote on reproductive rights made it really concrete, and that was important.”

    Voters in South Dakota and Arkansas last year rejected similar GOP-driven efforts to make ballot initiatives harder to pass. But Ohio’s status as a large former swing state that has turned red over the past decade posed a unique test for Democrats who are desperate to revive their party in the state. “We’ve been beat in Ohio a lot,” Dennis Willard, a longtime party operative in the state who served as the lead spokesperson for the No campaign, told me. That Republicans tried to pass this amendment, he said, “is a testament to them believing that they’re invincible and that we cannot beat them.”

    The defeat of Issue 1 likely clears the way for voters this fall to guarantee abortion access in Ohio, and it will keep open an avenue for progressives to enshrine, with a simple majority vote, other policies in the state constitution—including marijuana legalization and a higher minimum wage—that they could not get through a legislature controlled by Republicans. Democrats, including Willard, are eying an amendment to curb the gerrymandering that has helped the GOP lock in their majorities. They also hope that tonight’s victory will put Ohio back on the political map. “Us winning sends a message to the rest of the country that Ohio has possibilities,” Willard said. “And winning in November demonstrates to people that you can’t write Ohio off anymore.”

    Read: The Kansas abortion shocker

    For the moment, though, the GOP is in little danger of losing its hold on the state. It controls supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature; the Republican governor, Mike DeWine, trounced his Democratic opponent by 25 points last year to win a second term. One Ohio Republican, speaking anonymously before today’s election, told me that the defeat of Issue 1 and the expected passage of the reproductive-rights amendment in November could actually help the party next year, because voters might no longer believe that abortion access is in danger in the state. (The GOP performed better last year in blue states such as New York and California, where abortion rights were not under serious threat.)

    Republicans in Ohio, and in other states where similar ballot measures have flopped, are now confronting the limits of their power and the point at which voters will rebel. Will they be chastened and recalibrate, or will they continue to push the boundaries? It’s a question the proponents of Issue 1 did not want to contemplate before the votes confirming their defeat were counted. Their critics, however, are doubtful that Republicans will shift their strategy. “It’s unlikely that they will stop right away,” Turcer said. “It will take a number of defeats before they’re likely to understand that voters do not want to be taken advantage of.”

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    Russell Berman

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