RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thespectator.com/topic/thunderdome-2024-here-come-the-republican-hopefuls/?utm_

Over Presidents Day weekend, Donald J. Trump, our most beloved former president — according to him anyway — posted the following to his Truth Social account: “Ron DeSanctimonious wants to cut your Social Security and Medicare, closed up Florida & its beaches, loves RINOS Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush, and Karl Rove (disasters ALL!), is backed by Globalist’s Club for NO Growth, Lincoln Pervert Project, & ‘Uninspired’ Koch — And it only gets worse from there. He is a RINO in disguise!, whose Poll numbers are dropping like a rock. Good luck Ron!”

This is as good a point as any for the launch of Thunderdome 2024, a Republican presidential primary that has all the signs of being even bloodier and more acrimonious than the 2016 contest. Just look at the stakes, the positioning of donors and activists, and — after three cruel rounds of electoral failure — a former president turned red in tooth and claw.

For the dispassionate viewer, it presents a gladiator match for the prize of running against Joe Biden. The field is strikingly different than it was eight years ago, when the money and assumptions were behind the likes of Jeb Bush and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, and a bevy of senators and governors fought among themselves in an attempt to set up a mano-a-mano showdown with Trump — a strategy that totally backfired.

Smart Republicans have learned a lot since then. But they’re also taking on a former president who occupies a very different space than he once did: Trump and his supporters are the new GOP establishment, even as he maintains his position as its constant critic. This gives him enormous advantages, and makes Trump, despite what you may have heard, still the likeliest candidate for the Republican nomination. For those who aspire to replace him atop the ticket, it’s wise to remember that the same abiding rule that undid Hillary Clinton and aided Joe Biden is still in place: you can say anything you want about the candidates, but don’t speak poorly of their voters.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/vivek-ramaswamy-running-for-president-gop-donald-trump-primary-338c0737?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Donald Trump proved that you don’t need to hold elective office before you try for the Oval Office, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy is taking that as inspiration as he announced Tuesday that he’s running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. He has a chance to make a contribution to the race even if he is a long shot.

The 37-year-old Ohio native attended Harvard and earned a law degree from Yale, but don’t hold that against him. In 2014 he also founded a biotechnology firm, Roivant Sciences, and served as CEO until 2021. We’ve come to know him over the years through his contributions to these pages, which are provocative and well-wrought even if we disagree.

Mr. Ramaswamy has preternatural energy and can argue his brief with the best of them. He’ll be formidable if he can marshal the polling support to make it onto a debate stage. He was early in campaigning against the woke infection in American business with his 2021 book, “Woke, Inc.”

He’s also been a stalwart voice for free speech against the censorship of the tech giants. His enthusiasms sometimes get carried away, as with his proposal to make political beliefs a legally protected characteristic, like race or religion. If you think companies are woke now, wait until employees can’t be fired for attacking their employers.

Nikki Haley’s chances of becoming President are really very slim to zero. She knows it but wants to be the Veep. So she’s putting herself out there hoping to stay the course in the forthcoming debates.

Kamala Harris who never made it beyond December 3, 2019, was chosen because a woman was deemed critical for winning.

That may well be the case for the GOP in 2024, but there are many male contenders who are very qualified.  Stay tuned! rsk

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/haley-trump-and-a-gop-race-like-no-other

HALEY, TRUMP, AND A GOP RACE LIKE NO OTHER. Former Gov. Nikki Haley (R-SC) announced her candidacy for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination this morning. Word was she would jump in at an event in Charleston tomorrow, but Haley scooped herself with the release of a 3.5-minute video that constitutes an announcement. The event in Charleston will essentially be a live re-announcement.

Haley’s move makes the 2024 Republican presidential primary race a real multicandidate race, with Haley joining former President Donald Trump, who entered the contest last November and has had it to himself ever since. Haley will likely be followed by several other Republicans, among them, perhaps, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Vice President Mike Pence, Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R-VA), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Gov. Chris Sununu (R-NH), and others.

Each one of them will be something of a first, or at least the first in a long time. In this way: No one alive has ever run a primary race against an out-of-office president seeking the White House a second, nonconsecutive time.

That will present a special problem: As all candidates do, they will talk about what they will do if they become president. Trump will talk about what he did as president. Some of them worked for Trump, and all were loyal to him. That will make for some interesting exchanges. Trump is already taking all sorts of shots at Haley.

But Trump has historical problems, too. In all of U.S. history, six presidents have left office and then made an effort to win their old job back. Five of them failed. The odds are not great.

The success is President Grover Cleveland, the only president ever to serve nonconsecutive terms. Cleveland was first elected in 1884, then lost his bid for reelection in 1888, then came back after four years out of office to win the White House in 1892.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/voter-id-laws-pnas-study-democrats-republicans-joe-biden-11675811901?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

This ought to be old news, but someone please inform President Biden and the Democratic Party that another academic study has found voter-ID laws don’t have real partisan consequences. How long until this is conventional wisdom? A 2021 study detected “no negative effect on registration or turnout, overall or for any group defined by race, gender, age, or party affiliation.”

The new analysis, posted Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, comes at the question from a slightly different angle. “Existing research focuses on how voter ID laws affect voter turnout and fraud,” write the two authors, who are political scientists at Notre Dame. “But the extent to which they produce observable electoral benefits for Republican candidates and/or penalize Democrats remains an open question.”

So what’s the answer, after examining state and federal elections from 2003 to 2020? “The first laws implemented produced a Democratic advantage, which weakened to near zero after 2012,” the study says. “We conclude that voter ID requirements motivate and mobilize supporters of both parties, ultimately mitigating their anticipated effects on election results.” The lack of suppressive outcome explains why requiring photo ID to vote is “favored by 77% of people of color and 80% of White adults,” to quote Gallup’s poll last year.

For that matter, have a gander at the University of Georgia’s 2022 postelection survey. Asked to rate their personal experience voting in the Peach State, 72.6% of black residents said excellent, 23.6% said good, 3.3% said fair, and 0% said poor. The figures for whites were 72.7% excellent, 23.3% good, 3% fair and 0.9% poor. Those who had a “self-reported problem with voting” included 0.5% of blacks and 1.3% of whites.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/02/01/desantis-keeps-things-classy-as-trump-goes-on-offense-n1667001

Donald Trump is not known for pulling punches, and his recent criticisms of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have not gone unnoticed. Between calling him “Ron DeSanctimonious” last year to more recently attacking DeSantis’s handling of COVID, Trump has been sending a very clear message to his former protégé: don’t even think about running for president in 2024.

While most polls show Trump with a clear advantage in the 2024 GOP primary, polls also show DeSantis as being the most-favored Trump alternative, and some even show him defeating the former president in some state-level matchups.

DeSantis, for his part, has kept things classy and has declined to return fire on Trump. In fact, he recently dismissed Trump’s latest criticisms when he was asked about them. “What I would just say is this: I roll out of bed. I have people attacking me from all angles,” he said.

“It’s been happening for many, many years and if you look at the good thing about it though is like if you take a crisis situation like COVID, you know, the good thing about it is when you’re an elected executive, you have to make all kinds of decisions,” DeSantis continued. “And the good thing is, is that the people are able to render a judgment on that whether they reelect you or not.”

DeSantis won reelection in November in a landslide, defeating Democrat Charlie Crist by nearly 20 points. In 2018, DeSantis barely defeated Democrat Andrew Gillum by less than 33,000 votes.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/01/desantis-builds-lead-over-trump-in-latest-new-hampshire-poll/?utm_

In the first independent poll of the Granite State since the midterms, the Florida governor’s support grew while the former president’s declined.

With twelve months to go until New Hampshire’s 2024 Republican presidential primary, Florida governor Ron DeSantis leads Donald Trump by twelve points — 42 percent to 30 percent — in a new Granite State poll.

The survey, conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center from January 19 to 23 and released on Thursday, is the first independent poll of the first-in-the-nation 2024 GOP primary conducted since the 2022 midterm elections, in which DeSantis scored a resounding 19-point reelection victory in Florida while Trump-backed Senate candidates underperformed and cost the GOP control of the upper chamber.

The new poll shows DeSantis’s vote share improving by three points since the University of New Hampshire last conducted a survey in the summer of 2022, while Trump’s vote share dropped seven points from 37 percent to 30 percent. Trump’s vote share has declined in each of the four polls conducted by the pollster since June of 2021.

Not only is DeSantis leading in the early poll, he also appears to have the most room to grow his support. “When asked for their second choice, 30% of likely Republican primary voters support DeSantis, 19% support Sununu, 14% support Trump, 7% support Texas Senator Ted Cruz, 6% support former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and 5% support Haley,” reports the UNH Survey Center.

As calls intensify for the disgraced Republican George Santos to resign from the US Congress, Mazi Melesa Pilip an Ethiopian-Israeli Shabbat-observant 43-year-old Jewish mother of seven, has emerged as a prime candidate to replace him, according to Politico.

Pilip was airlifted to Israel as a child as part of the Operation Solomon rescue of refugee Ethiopian Jews to Israel.

She served in the paratroop division of the Israel Defense Forces (one of her greatest achievements, she says) and then took a first degree at the University of Haifa followed by a degree in diplomacy and security at Tel Aviv University.

She met her husband, an American medical student at the Technion in Haifa, while she was at the University of Haifa. She later accompanied him to finish his medical studies back in New York, where they married.

She says that one of the reasons that motivated her to enter politics was witnessing the antisemitic abuse directed towards her children in the Great Neck Public Schools system, including comments from other kids such as “I wish Hitler would kill you all.”

Santos is being pressed to step down because of the multiple lies he told while running, including untruths about his education, job experience, charitable giving and family background.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/26/u-s-voters-overwhelmingly-want-their-old-election-system-back-ii-tipp-poll/

As 2022 nears an end, another election season has also come to a close. Time for second thoughts, and ideas about what to do to fix an election system that many Americans believe is irretrievably broken. As it turns out, voters have some very strong opinions about that very topic, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

The recent midterm elections were once again marked by claims of voter fraud and possible ballot manipulation behind the scenes by partisan actors, including even election officials. So we asked Americans of all political stripes and demographic backgrounds what rules and practices would they support to make our electoral system more fair?

More specifically, in our online I&I/TIPP Poll, taken from Dec. 7-9, we asked 1,094 registered voters to select among three possible reforms or rule changes: “Requiring voters to show a photo I.D. to vote,” “Stricter mail-in voting,” and “Banning ballot harvesting.”

The answers showed an overwhelming sentiment in favor of change.

But by far the strongest response was for “Requiring voters to show a photo I.D. to vote.” It garnered 83% support from registered voters, with 60% saying they would support it “strongly” and 22% saying they would support it “somewhat.” Just 12% said they would not support a move, with just 6% saying they would oppose it “strongly,” about the same as those who said they would oppose it somewhat (7%).

The numbers may not add to 100% due to rounding. But the point is clear. Americans are hungry to have their elections once again based on solid identification of the voters with official I.D.s.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/dec/26/2022-year-of-victories-for-election-integrity/

The 2022 elections are over, and we can all breathe a sigh of relief that they largely followed the rule of law. Compared with the COVID-19-infected 2020 elections, 2022 was a breeze. Americans woke up to the vulnerabilities in election administration and sought improvements.

After 2020, smart states passed reforms to strengthen election security. Court victories also bolstered the rule of law in elections.

A big win for the rule of law occurred in Delaware. The Public Interest Legal Foundation, of which I am president, blocked the Department of Elections from enforcing mail voting and same-day voter registration.

Mail-in voting and same-day registration conflicted with the Delaware Constitution. The state constitution allows absentee voting only in certain enumerated circumstances, such as being ill. The Delaware Constitution also provides reasonable registration procedures, not walk-up no-verification voting on Election Day.

In legislative debate, Delaware Speaker of the House Peter Schwartzkopf quipped, “I don’t know whether [the law’s] constitutional or not constitutional, and neither do you guys or anybody else in here.” No kidding.

He went further: “The best way to get this thing done is to hear this bill, move forward, and let a challenge go to the courts and let them decide it.”

Decide they did.

Days before ballots were mailed, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled that both laws were unconstitutional. This ruling effectively stopped a lawless election in Delaware.