2024 election

Never Back Down PAC, the political action committee supporting Florida governor Ron DeSantis, has caused a stir in early voting state Iowa — but maybe not in the way they had hoped. The PAC is being accused of disrespecting the Black Hawk County Republicans by sending too many activists to the group's participation in a local parade last weekend. The Black Hawk County Republican chair, Craig Lohmann, sent an email invitation to the campaigns of the GOP primary candidates to walk with them in the annual My Waterloo Days parade. In the email, Lohmann says that campaigns may send "a few" representatives "with shirts with names and some handouts." He cautioned the campaigns and associated PACs to avoid giving the impression that the Black Hawk County GOP was endorsing any candidate.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not an intimidating political opponent. Or at least not on the surface. Yes, he is a scion of Camelot named for his father, a patron saint of American liberalism. But beyond the Kennedy factor, everything about him screams amusing sideshow rather than serious contender. His main contribution to public life over the last few decades has been as the country’s most prominent antivaxxer — a fringe role almost by definition. Many of his policy positions are a long way from mainstream opinion in his party. And his speaking engagements in recent years are as likely to have been at MAGA-friendly conservative organizations as at the sorts of places a Democrat with presidential aspirations tends to want to be seen.

A year after getting its clock cleaned thanks in large part due to abdicating mail-in ballots, everyone in the Republican Party is getting in on the ballot harvesting action. One of the latest entrants is Turning Point USA, which, through its Turning Point Action 501c4 plans to build the “first ever conservative ballot-chasing army,” according to plans obtained by The Spectator — and it won’t come cheap; Turning Point Action estimates that the total cost of its operation will be $108.6 million.

The media should love Jill Casey DeSantis. She’s smart, she’s articulate, she’s attractive and she beat cancer. She’s a mother of three beautiful children and was an Emmy-award-winning journalist, so she was once one of them. She married a man at Disney World, of all places, one who values her opinion; in fact, she is said to be his closest advisor. As the first lady of Florida, she’s spearheaded mental health and substance abuse initiatives as well as innovative plans to lift single mothers and chronically unemployed persons out of poverty. But there’s just one problem: her husband is a Republican. And not just any Republican, but a conservative Republican on a mission to make his state the place where "woke goes to die.

I suspect that Chris Christie’s fondest dream — a dream, that is, not involving calorie intake — is to reprise his barrage against Marco Rubio with Donald Trump as the target. Christie’s preferred rhetorical weapon is the blunderbuss, and he can be quite effective. I used to delight in watching his fusillades against whining public school teachers and, truth be told, I snickered a little watching him blow a hole in Marco Rubio’s presidential aspirations.  Can he do the same thing to Donald Trump? That’s his hope. Christie, who is set to announce his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination in New Hampshire today, is basically running as an anti-Trump attack mastiff.  This was not always his role.

The Republican National Committee today confirmed the criteria for presidential candidates to qualify for their first primary debate, which will take place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Wednesday August 23.

South Carolina senator Tim Scott represents the kind of candidate white Republicans like to vote for: a black conservative who directly undermines the left's claims about the United States' — and the GOP's — innate racism. He can punctuate a pro-American litany of personal stories and generational improvement with "Can't somebody say 'Amen'?" without any qualms. And unlike Herman Cain or Ben Carson, he can do so as a successful politician who, as he says, went from cotton to Congress in his grandfather's lifetime. Cain and Carson overperformed significantly, particularly in the early months of their efforts. Yet Scott is likely to have a ceiling to his own try for the presidency. He is in many ways a throwback to the George W.