2024 election

After Linda Como, a sixty-four-year-old administrative assistant from Quincy, Massachusetts, was fired from her hospital job for refusing to be vaccinated against Covid, she discovered Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine activism, and it resonated with her. But that’s not the only reason Como came to the Boston Park Plaza hotel one morning in April to see Kennedy launch his long-shot 2024 presidential campaign. “I grew up in Boston, went to Boston public schools, so you know the Kennedy family,” Como told me. “They’re like the royal family. So I’ve always been a fan of the Kennedys.” Kennedy lore runs deep in Boston. This is where Robert Kennedy’s father Robert F. Kennedy and his uncles John F. Kennedy and Edward M.

GOP campaign consultant Jeff Roe is the subject of new reporting in the Washington Post that shows his company, Axiom Strategies, takes in 63 percent of every dollar spent by the campaigns it is managing. A general consultant typically only takes in less than 10 percent. So what is Jeff Roe doing with all of that extra cash? According to a recent photo being passed around among journalists, campaign consultants, and even among members of Congress, Roe is icing up. The consultant was spotted at the Kentucky Derby wearing a blinged-out dollar sign chain. A tipster sent the picture Cockburn's way: Cockburn’s sources say Roe was telling people at the horse race that it was real, but now is downplaying it as a joke.

One of Ron DeSantis's contemporaries in Congress strongly believes he should wait out 2024 and run in the future as opposed to challenging Donald Trump for the GOP nomination. Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin — the subject of an extensive upcoming Spectator profile — related his views in his hometown of Stilwell, Oklahoma this past week, noting that DeSantis, his fellow congressional class of 2012 member, has struggled to connect with people and has limits to any personality-based approach to politics. "Ron just isn't charismatic, he doesn't make you want to invite him to sit with you for a beer," Senator Mullin said.

Newly-minted Maryland Senate candidate David Trone threatened to “execute” a delivery worker at one of his business locations in Tempe, Arizona, according to a police report exclusively obtained by The Spectator. Trone, who has accumulated millions of dollars as the founder and co-owner of the country’s largest independent wine and spirits retailer, Total Wine & More, was in Arizona on December 15, 2021. It was there that he allegedly threatened to execute Crescent Crown Distributing merchandiser Cody Huard, who was at the time making a delivery at the Total Wine Tempe location; Huard called the police following a heated run-in with Trone.

The biggest horse race in Kentucky this year isn't the Derby; it's this fall's gubernatorial race, pitting incumbent Democrat Andy Beshear against a to-be-confirmed Republican. The contest is set to be a bellwether for the 2024 elections, in which Republicans must oust several name-brand Democrats if they are to win control of the Senate. Unlike so many statewide primaries in recent years, Kentucky isn't even a proxy battle between Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell. Both have formally and informally backed the state’s attorney general, Daniel Cameron. Instead, it's a fight between the candidates with the most money versus those with the most statewide organization.

There are two categories of people who most desperately want Donald Trump to be the Republican Party's nominee in 2024: people who love Donald Trump, and people who hate Donald Trump. The people who love Donald Trump are obvious about it. The people who hate him are obvious about it too — but only if you pay attention. Consider this latest ad from Liz Cheney, targeted to run in New Hampshire, where Trump will be holding a town hall on CNN this evening. It's not designed to convince anyone to change their minds about Donald Trump. It's not designed to boost any non-Trump Republican candidates. It's designed to troll Donald Trump in ways that people who hate him will enjoy — but more importantly, to boost Trump's chances of becoming the Republican nominee.

“What a revoltin’ development this is.” That catch phrase from the 1950s sitcom The Life of Riley succinctly describes America’s political morass today. It sums up Washington’s diddling over the debt ceiling, the administration’s inability to close the southern border and, most of all, the dismal quality of the two presidential frontrunners. The phrase, “what a revoltin’ development,” was Chester A. Riley’s description of his woeful situation at the end of each episode — sitting on his front steps, bemoaning his fate over the consequences of some bad decision or ill-conceived scheme. Then, we sympathized as viewers. Now, we identify as American citizens, looking at the country’s leadership. Let’s begin with the sitting president.