Republican primaries 2024

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.

Miami mayor Francis Suarez is running for president, and his opponents already have plenty of attack ad images. The Cuban-American Republican with leading man style might have checked the boxes for an early 2010s GOP. Now it’s 2023 — and it seems no one told Suave Suarez that posing with a Pride flag-emblazoned mayoral sash is way out of style. Suarez’s Twitter feed is littered with rainbow flag paraphernalia. In June 2021, Suarez posted a video pledging Miami’s support of Pride Month. https://twitter.com/FrancisSuarez/status/1403449097453985798 The year prior, Suarez signed an “LGBTQ ordinance” to recognize “the decades of contributions by the LGBTQ Miami residents to the economy and diversity of the city!

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.

Last summer, it seemed clear to me, at least, that should Florida governor Ron DeSantis enter the 2024 primary, a major point of contention with former president Donald Trump would be the contrast in their responses to Covid.  Where Trump gave decision-making power over to the cabal of Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx and the burgeoning public health bureaucracy, DeSantis defied their silly authoritarian approaches in his state to open beaches and businesses. The comparison is obvious and for DeSantis quite beneficial. The open question was how Trump would respond.  Well, a week into the DeSantis campaign, now we know: Trump thinks DeSantis sucked on Covid, and so did Florida!

Ron DeSantis's choice to enter the presidential stakes with a Twitter Spaces conversation is unusual. Odder still is the news that he will do so in an interview conducted by Elon Musk, and a discussion moderated by David Sacks. There are so many questions here: the most obvious being, "why did you choose to roll out with a pair of wealthy tech investors from the PayPal Mafia, known as much for their accomplishments as for their eccentricities?" But here is also the question about the questions: what will DeSantis be asked? One question that might come up given the Very Online nature of this interview concerns one figure whose connections to the billionaire and political class have proven so embarrassing for those in power: Jeffrey Epstein.

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.