As a long-time student of Christian Right politics, I’ve been intrigued about how the various 2024 Republican presidential candidates will appeal to this (for them) key constituency, so I was all eyes and ears when Ron DeSantis spoke at Liberty University, as I explained at New York:

For a while now, I’ve had April 14 circled on my calendar as the day when Florida governor and likely presidential candidate Ron DeSantis would be speaking at Liberty University. The huge school in Lynchburg, Virginia, is associated with the late Jerry Falwell Sr., who turned the small Baptist college into a conservative Evangelical powerhouse. For decades, Republican politicians (and a few Democrats) have shown the flag at the school’s regular student assemblies (known as Convocations) to indicate their understanding of — and in many cases their solidarity with — the agenda of the Christian right.

When DeSantis signed a radical new “heartbeat” law banning abortions in Florida after six weeks of pregnancy on the very eve of the speech at Liberty, I thought, Aha. He didn’t make a big deal out of it, inking the draconian measure in private at 10:30 p.m., only 15 minutes after it arrived on his desk. Perhaps he was spooked by polls showing overwhelming opposition to the law among Floridians. Or maybe he was waiting to present the new law like a gift to the culture warriors of Liberty.

But no. Liberty chancellor Jonathan Falwell touted the new abortion law in his introduction of DeSantis to predictably loud cheers. But the hero of the hour did not mention it in his relatively brief remarks.

Indeed, DeSantis’s appearance provided a sharp contrast to the trappings of the event. Before he spoke, the students joyfully sang a couple of “contemporary Christian” tunes and the old hymn “Holy, Holy, Holy.” The crowd seemed ready for some religiopolitical fire and brimstone. And then … DeSantis pretty much delivered the stock speech he’s been using in appearances all over the country, an extended series of boasts about how he’s made Florida a “refuge of sanity,” attracting hordes of blue-state escapees hungry for wealth and freedom. It was like going to church and, instead of a sermon, hearing a speech prepared for a Rotary Club. He said not a word about his personal faith (which is pretty much a mystery); Jesus’ name went unmentioned; the “unborn” received no loving tributes. Other than a pro forma word of thanks for the prayers various people had offered his wife during her recent battle with breast cancer and another pro forma shout-out to God for endowing the human race with the freedoms DeSantis is allegedly protecting, it was an entirely secular speech.

So the Liberty students left with pretty much the same impression of DeSantis that the more politically astute among them probably had going in: He’s the enemy of their enemies, a man happy to bully LGBTQ+ children, public-school teachers, corporate-diversity personnel, Mickey Mouse, and anyone who is “woke,” but not necessarily because he’s hearing voices from a higher authority than the GOP. If DeSantis’s listeners learned anything about him, it was probably his frequently repeated reminders that, after all this right-wing nastiness, the voters of his state rewarded him with a landslide reelection. This could happen in America in 2024, too, was his not-so-subtle message.

Maybe this soulless and firmly transactional approach is all DeSantis needs to do to strengthen his standing among conservative Evangelicals. But this seems like a lost opportunity for him to create real buzz in one of the leading forums of that very important segment of the Republican-primary electorate. After all, another transactional favorite of the Christian right, Donald Trump, has created an opening by blaming the extremism of anti-abortion activists and the candidates they backed for the GOP’s underperformance in the 2022 midterm elections. In Iowa, where DeSantis must begin his uphill challenge to Trump (assuming he doesn’t get cold feet at the last moment), there’s a palpable sense the evangelical voters who lifted Mike Huckabee in 2008, Rick Santorum in 2012, and Ted Cruz in 2016 to victory in the caucuses are up for grabs. It is very much in DeSantis’s interest to make sure he and not Mike Pence, Tim Scott, or anyone else is the beneficiary of any Christian-right estrangement from Trump.

Maybe the Floridian will display an overtly religious awakening somewhere on the road to Cedar Rapids. But at this point, he’s playing the same game as the master of manipulation from Mar-a-Lago, who will be happy to remind anti-abortion voters that DeSantis would never have had the opportunity to shut down Florida’s abortion clinics if Trump hadn’t stacked the Supreme Court and forced the reversal of Roe v. Wade. And if DeSantis is ultimately going to offer Republicans little more than a more electable version of what Trump has more entertainingly offered them since 2015, potential supporters will find excuses not to turn out for him on cold nights in Iowa and New Hampshire, where the flesh may be willing but the spirit may be weak.

This sure looked like the year when all the “parental rights” rhetoric might give Republicans the boost they needed to enact the private school subsidies they’ve pursued for decades. But as I explained at New York, the drive to dismantle public schools has run into trouble in Georgia and Texas:

For longtime conservative enthusiasts for diverting public-education dollars into private schools (or home schools), the “parental rights” movement being embraced by Republicans across the country has been a godsend. With residual heartburn over COVID-19 restrictions on in-school instruction and fresh outrage over alleged “woke” teachers and administrators teaching kids about sex, gender identity and racism, the hoary cause of school vouchers has received a new impetus in many Republican-controlled states. That’s despite growing evidence that vouchers don’t tend to produce good educational outcomes, while undermining funding for public schools (including charter public schools that provide significant school choice).

While many jurisdictions have approved small voucher experiments, often aimed at special-education students with few public options, Republicans are now taking vouchers to a new level. Since last year, five states have made the leap to universal vouchers, which enable parents to pay for private-school tuition and/or offset homeschooling costs: Arizona in 2022 (though the state voted for Biden and two Democratic senators, the GOP controlled all three branches of state government until this year), followed by Iowa, Utah, Arkansas, and most recently Florida in 2023.

But now, rural Republican opposition to vouchers has stopped voucher proposals being backed vocally by two of the country’s most powerful GOP governors.

In Georgia, a major expansion of vouchers that Governor Brian Kemp put his considerable political heft behind unexpectedly lost when 16 mostly rural House Republicans voted against it; the bill lost by four votes and died for this session of the legislature. For one thing, many rural communities without private schools would be on the losing end of the funding shift. For another, past efforts by voucher fans to threaten Republican lawmakers with primary opposition appear to have backfired.

And now in Texas, another private-school subsidy initiative that Governor Greg Abbott has made his signature proposal for 2023 has encountered similar Republican opposition. Last week, the Texas House approved a budget amendment prohibiting use of public funds for private schools. Twenty-four Republicans — again, mostly from rural areas — voted with Democrats to give the funding amendment an 86-52 win. While the House has not yet dealt with a Senate-passed version of Abbott’s proposal, there’s no obvious path for overcoming bipartisan opposition.

These developments reinforce two big problems with vouchers aside from their poor record of improving educational results. First, as my colleague Jonathan Chait recently pointed out, most of the beneficiaries of voucher proposals have already abandoned public schools and are simply grasping for tax money to subsidize decisions they’ve already made, undermining the very idea of educational reform via school choice: “Providing vouchers didn’t give children choices; it simply sent checks to parents who were already privately educating their children.”

But second, voucher plans, and indeed the underlying philosophy that education is simply a publicly provided service for parents, ignores the civic role that public schools often play for parents and nonparents alike, particularly in rural areas. What urban and suburban conservatives may deplore as “government schools” are the glue in many small communities, as NBC News recently explained in a report from the small and intensely conservative West Texas town of Robert Lee during a track meet that drew fans to the public high school from around the area:

“It’s not just sporting events that make the school the center of the town’s identity. It’s where residents host potluck fundraisers to help pay a loved one’s medical bills, or gather for the annual Robert Lee BBQ Cookoff. There’s no gym or YMCA in Robert Lee, but the school weight room is open to the public in the evenings and on weekends. So is the playground. Lupe Torres, the school district’s head of maintenance and facilities, said he doubts many folks in Austin understand the indelible connection that rural Texans have to their public schools.”

Resident of towns like these also laugh at the idea their public schools are sinister transmission belts for “wokeness.”

Without question, Republicans won’t give up on vouchers anytime soon; too many big GOP donors and conservative Evangelical activists (who are often deeply committed to homeschooling) sincerely want to destroy traditional public schools. And again, there’s a built-in constituency of people already educating their kids privately for whom vouchers are simply a redistribution of taxpayer dollars in their favor. But it’s becoming clear that reframing the education debate as a battle between parents and unionized teachers and bureaucratic administrators hasn’t gotten rid of the idea that there’s something in public schools that the public values enough to preserve.

For southern Democrats in particular, the North Carolina legislator whose change of party handed Republicans a super-majority brought back lots of bad memories. But the defector in question didn’t fit any of the major precedents, as I explained at New York:

Party switching has a long if not entirely honorable history, especially in the South. So on its face, North Carolina Democratic legislator Tricia Cotham’s defection to the GOP on Wednesday is mostly shocking because of its impact. Her flip gives Republicans a supermajority in both branches of the state legislature, thus neutralizing Democratic governor Roy Cooper’s veto power for the next two years.

But Cotham’s reasons for switching parties are a bit of a mystery. She served in the legislature for five terms, from 2007 to 2016, and was a standard-brand moderate-to-liberal Democrat. She turned her attention to the U.S. House in 2016, but lost the Democratic primary. Cotham returned to the North Carolina House this year after successfully campaigning on a “platform of raising the minimum wage, protecting voting rights and bolstering L.B.G.T.Q. rights,” according to the New York Times. While legislators sometimes change parties because their district has become more competitive due to redistricting or demographic change, that isn’t the case here. The Charlotte Observer describes North Carolina’s 12th House District as a “Democrat stronghold,” with 60 percent of voters backing Cotham’s former party.

So why did Cotham flip so soon after being elected as a Democrat from a Democratic district? Like most party switchers, she’s adopted the posture that the party actually left her, as the Times reported:

“[Cotham said] she had been bullied by her fellow Democrats and had grown alienated from the party on issues like school choice.

“’The modern-day Democratic Party has become unrecognizable to me and to so many others throughout this state and this country,’ she said in a brief speech. She said both she and her young children had been subjected to personal attacks by Democrats in the state, and denounced what she called attempts to ‘control’ her. ‘They have pushed me out,’ she said.”

Local political reporter Steve Harrison told WFAE that Cotham had raised eyebrows by voting with Republicans a few times since returning to Raleigh this year:

“One of the first [defections] came in December when she was the only Democrat to vote for a constitutional amendment that would make members of the state Board of Election elected rather than appointed. And there were others, a bill requiring sheriffs to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

But the moment her voting record really got hostile attention from Democrats came a week ago when she (along with two other Democrats) missed a vote that overrode Cooper’s veto of a bill repealing the state’s pistol permitting law. She reportedly was absent due to a medical appointment related to long-COVID symptoms, and was publicly opposed to the veto override. But at least one local progressive group hinted at “accountability measures” against the absentees, including Cotham.

Was that enough to convince Cotham to turn her coat so soon after being sent by Democratic voters to the legislature? It’s unclear. In her statement defending her decision, she offered a sort of Twitter-made-her-do-it explanation, as the Washington Post noted:

“Cotham, wearing red and standing in front of NCGOP signs, said the turning point in her decision was when she faced backlash for using the American flag and a prayer-hands emoji in her social media handles and on her vehicles.”

Regardless of whether she was pushed or jumped, Cotham now faces certain opposition in 2024 if she runs for reelection; indeed, Democrats are demanding she resign her seat immediately, arguing that it was won under false pretenses. It’s unclear what her new friends in the GOP will do to protect her. “Republicans can redraw the House map and perhaps draw a …seat that leans red, or maybe Cotham just runs for statewide office,” Steve Harrison reported.

This, however, raises even more questions. Will Republican voters really embrace a candidate who just ran on standard Democratic issues? Is her pro-LGBTQ record really compatible with the state party that gave us the first anti-transgender “bathroom bill”? What will GOP voters make of Cotham co-sponsoring a bill codifying abortion protections in January? And will they embrace a woman who once took to the floor of the North Carolina House to talk about her own abortion, calling it a “deeply personal decision” and claiming that GOP lawmakers just want to “play doctor”?

Local TV station WBTV, which interviewed Cotham on Tuesday night, said she “would not commit to positions on specific legislation but indicated she was open to supporting new abortion restrictions.” So anyone anxious to know what kind of consequences this very strange political move will have for abortion rights in North Carolina will have to keep guessing for now.

 

Amidst all the speculation involving Trump’s Manhattan indictment and his presidential campaign, I decided to issue a warning for those who think the two things can be separated, and wrote it up at New York:

Many have observed that Donald Trump’s felony indictment in Manhattan this week is already boosting his standing among GOP primary voters, at least temporarily, while prospectively depressing his standing among swing voters in the general election. Trump’s Republican rivals for the 2024 presidential nomination desperately need to make his hypothetical “electability” problem an issue in the primaries. But as my colleague Eric Levitz points out, it’s tough to make that argument while Trump is in court, ostensibly fighting the good fight against liberal “persecution” as the vast majority of the Republican Party cheers him on:

“[I]n the eyes of the conservative base, to attack Trump is to aid and abet the president’s persecution at the hands of Soros and his minions. To question his electability, meanwhile, is tantamount to calling on Republicans to let the terrorists win.”

For Trump’s GOP foes, the shift from a political landscape dominated by his legal battles to a normal primary season can’t happen fast enough. Unfortunately, that’s very unlikely to happen anytime soon. He still faces possible criminal indictments in Atlanta (for Team Trump’s alleged election interference) and Washington (for Trump’s alleged responsibility for the January 6 insurrection and mishandling of classified documents). There is also potentially noisy civil litigation pending in New York (E. Jean Carroll is suing Trump for defamation because he accused her of making up her rape allegation against him).

But even if Trump somehow avoids additional indictments and high-stakes encounters with the federal and state justice systems, the Manhattan case that is already proceeding could drag on and on, ensuring that Trump’s legal woes will dominate headlines throughout the 2024 election cycle. Per the Washington Post:

“Trump’s lawyers have until August to file challenges to the case accusing him of hiding a payment to an adult-film actress before the 2016 presidential election to keep her quiet about a sexual relationship she says she had with Trump years earlier. Those filings may coincide with the first Republican debate of the primary season, which is also scheduled for August.”

And don’t hold your breath for the actual trial to get underway:

“On Tuesday, prosecutors floated a trial date in January, right before the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses on Feb. 5. But Trump’s legal team suggested a spring 2024 date would be more “realistic,” which the judge sounded open to.”

These preliminary timetables do not fully take into account Trump’s long history as a legal guerrilla who is willing and able to manipulate court proceedings via constant motions, appeals, collateral lawsuits, and delay tactics. As the New York Times recently reported, if Trump thinks it’s in his interest to slow things down in court, he definitely knows how:

“Attack. Attack. Attack.

“Delay. Delay. Delay.

“Those two tactics have been at the center of Donald J. Trump’s favored strategy in court cases for much of his adult life, and will likely be the former president’s approach to fighting the criminal charges now leveled against him if he sticks to his well-worn legal playbook …

“Mr. Trump’s intensely litigious nature has made his strategy more visible over the years than it might otherwise be. He has long used delay tactics in legal matters that emerged from business disputes, and since becoming a politician he has repeatedly tried to throw sand in the gears of the legal system, using the resulting slow pace of litigation to run out the clock until seismic events shifted the playing field.”

Team Trump’s power to dictate the pace of the proceedings against him will likely be enhanced by prosecutors fearful of being perceived as unfair to the former president. Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis has to be aware of a new Georgia bill (which Governor Brian Kemp will almost certainly sign) allowing a state commission to supervise or even remove local prosecutors accused of malfeasance. And in Washington, Joe Biden’s Justice Department will be sensitive to claims that the president is trying to legally harass, if not imprison, his most likely 2024 opponent.

So Trump-haters fantasizing about the former president being frog-marched to prison in leg-irons before he can reach for the White House again should get over it. Between the lengthy New York legal process and the possibility that Trump could prevail in court, not to mention the endless appeals if he is found guilty, there won’t be some deus ex machina that suddenly shuts down his campaign.

That also means Republican 2024 candidates aren’t going to be able to wait until the indictment circus ends to make a case against Trump’s renomination. His legal status will remain uncertain throughout the presidential race, and warnings that his liberal persecutors may eventually triumph won’t go over well with GOP primary voters. And it’s unlikely that any objective indicators will make the point for Trump’s GOP rivals: Polls taken after the indictment show him not only enjoying a surge in the 2024 nomination contest but improving his position slightly against Biden in trial general-election heats (and doing just as well as Ron DeSantis). Add in the fact that most Republican primary voters are aware of how much Trump underperformed expectations in both 2016 and 2020 and you have an “electability” case against the 45th president that could wind up being feeble and yet all that Trump’s rivals can muster. The bottom line is that time is emphatically not on their side.

If you are feeling a sense of deja vu about where the current budget debate in Congress is headed, you aren’t alone, and I offered an explanation at New York:

In the partisan messaging battle over the federal budget, Joe Biden seems to have Republicans right where he wants them. Beginning with his State of the Union Address in early February, the president has hammered away at GOP lawmakers for plotting to gut wildly popular Social Security and Medicare benefits. This has driven Republicans into a defensive crouch; they can either pretend their proposed cuts aren’t really cuts or forswear them altogether. It’s a message that Democrats would love to highlight every day until the next election, or at least until Republicans figure out a better response than lies, evasions, and blustery denials.

But as Ron Brownstein points out in The Atlantic, there is a logical path Republicans could take to counter Democrats’ claims that GOP policies threaten popular retirement programs. It’s based on pitting every other form of federal domestic spending against Social Security and Medicare, and on making Democratic support for Big Government and its beneficiaries a political problem among seniors:

“Republicans hope that exempting Social Security and Medicare [from cutbacks they are demanding for raising the federal debt limit] will dampen any backlash to their deficit-reduction plans in economically vulnerable districts. But protecting those programs, as well as defense, from cuts—while also precluding tax increases—will force the House Republicans to propose severe reductions in other domestic programs … potentially including Medicaid, the ACA, and food and housing assistance.

“Will a Republican push for severe reductions in those programs provide Democrats with an opening in such places? Robert J. Blendon, a professor emeritus at the Harvard School of Public Health, is dubious. Although these areas have extensive needs, he told me, the residents voting Republican in them are generally skeptical of social-welfare spending apart from Social Security and Medicare. ‘We are dealing with a set of values here, which has a distrust of government and a sense that anyone should have to work to get any sort of low-income benefit,’ Blendon said. ‘The people voting Republican in those districts don’t see it as important [that] government provides those benefits.’”

And so Republicans will very likely return to the messaging they embraced during the Obama administration. Back then, self-identified Tea Party conservatives constantly tried to convince elderly voters that the real threat to their retirement programs stemmed not from GOP budget cutting, but from Democratic-backed Big Government spending on younger people and minorities, with whom many conservative voters did not identify. Then as now, a partisan budget fight — and the threat of a debt default of government shutdown — let Republicans frame funding decisions as a competition between groups of beneficiaries, rather than a debate over abstract levels of taxing or spending.

The big opening shot in the anti-Obama campaign was Sarah Palin’s wildly mendacious but highly effective September 2009 Facebook post claiming that the Affordable Care Act would create “death panels” that would eliminate Medicare coverage for seniors or disabled children deemed socially superfluous (the barely legitimate basis for the attack was an Affordable Care Act provision to allow Medicare payments to physicians discussing end-of-life treatments with patients).

Soon Republicans would come up with slightly more substantive claims that Obamacare threatened Medicare. In 2011, House GOP budget maven Paul Ryan, whom Democrats hammered for his proposals to partially privatize both Social Security and Medicare, claimed that Obama administration projections of health cost savings in Medicare represented a shift of resources from Medicare to Obamacare. By 2012, when Ryan became Mitt Romney’s running mate, Ryan was campaigning with his mother in tow, claiming that Republicans wanted to protect her from raids on her retirement benefits by the redistributionist Democrats.

Romney and Ryan didn’t win, of course, but they did win the over-65 vote by a robust 56-44 margin, a better performance in that demographic than Trump registered in 2016 or 2020. As Thomas Edsall explained in The New Republic in 2010, the Tea Party–era Republicans understood they had to mobilize their federal spending constituents against alleged competitors:

“Republicans understand that one axis of the resource war will be generational. All of their vows to defend Medicare are coupled with attacks on Obama’s health care reform. They implicitly portray Democrats as waging an age war—creating a massive new government program that transfers dollars to the young at the expense of the elderly. Republicans have cleverly stoked the fear that Obama is rewarding all his exuberant, youthful, idealistic supporters by redistributing resources that are badly needed by the old.”

In a 2024 campaign in which Democrats are going for the jugular with seniors, a reprise of the GOP’s 2012 Medicare counterattack, dishonest as it was, might make sense.

During this year’s budget skirmish in Congress, House Republicans are expected to take a claw hammer to domestic spending outside Social Security and Medicare, as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities reports:

“This spring, House Republicans are expected to release an annual budget resolution that calls for large health care cuts, and Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) marketplace coverage are likely to be prime targets. House Republican leaders are calling for cutting the deficit and making the Trump tax cuts permanent, while saying they will shield certain areas of the budget (Medicare, Social Security, and military spending) from cuts. To do all these things at once, it is highly likely they will propose cuts in health programs that provide coverage to millions of people.”

The House GOP has also already called for deep cuts in nondefense discretionary spending, including food stamp and nutrition programs. It’s likely the GOP’s state-based crusade against “woke” public education will lead to a renewal of ancient conservative demands to deeply cut or kill the U.S. Department of Education. Maybe those representing energy-producing areas will go hard after EPA or the Department of the Interior’s programs. Almost certainly, the GOP as a whole will embrace across-the-board cuts in federal employment or federal employee benefits under the guise of “draining the swamp.” Any and all such cuts can also be rationalized as necessary to avoid reductions in spending for Social Security, Medicare, and national defense, not to mention tax increases.

Whatever formula they adopt, there’s little doubt Republicans will find ways to present themselves the true defenders of Social Security and Medicare, just as many of them will always keep scheming for ways to damage or destroy these vestiges of the New Deal and Great Society. Biden seems committed to his effort to make seniors fear the GOP, and this is the only way Republicans can counter-punch.