"The Field" 2024 run thread

[Polds4OSU]

We already have threads for the GOP / Dem front runners for 2024 election talk. Starting one for "The Field" or the rest of the pack ​

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Ex-Texas congressman Will Hurd calls Trump a 'failed politician' as he launches GOP presidential run​

Ex-Texas congressman Will Hurd calls Trump a 'failed politician' as he launches GOP presidential run

Former Texas congressman Will Hurd, a onetime CIA officer and fierce critic of Donald Trump, announced Thursday that he's running for president, hoping to build momentum as a more moderate alternative to the Republican front-runner. Hurd, 45, served three terms in the House through January...

www.yahoo.com

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Texas congressman Will Hurd, a onetime CIA officer and fierce critic of Donald Trump, announced Thursday that he's running for president, hoping to build momentum as a more moderate alternative to the Republican front-runner.

Hurd, 45, served three terms in the House through January 2021, becoming the chamber’s only Black Republican during his final two years in office.

“We need common sense,” said Hurd, who made the announcement on “CBS Mornings,” adding, “I believe the Republican Party can be the party of the future, not the past.”

In a campaign video, the former congressman said that the “soul of our country is under attack," reminiscent of Democrat Joe Biden's slogan about the 2020 race being a "battle for the soul of the nation."

“Our enemies plot, create chaos, and threaten the American Dream. At home, illegal immigration and fentanyl stream into our country. Inflation, still out of control. Crime and homelessness growing in our cities,” Hurd says in the video. “President Biden can’t solve these problems — or won’t. And if we nominate a lawless, selfish, failed politician like Donald Trump — who lost the House, the Senate, and the White House — we all know Joe Biden will win again.”

Hurd says he's out to redefine the contours of the 2024 race and told NBC's “Meet the Press” in May that the prospect of another election pitting the current president against the former one would be “the rematch from hell.” On Thursday, he called himself a “dark horse candidate" and said that the only way to win is to “not be afraid of Donald Trump” and that “we also have to articulate a different vision.”

Hurd joins a crowded primary field with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, anti-woke activist Vivek Ramaswamy, radio host Larry Elder and Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, in addition to Trump.

The ex-congressman has visited Iowa and New Hampshire in recent months. Trump’s recent indictment on federal felony charges for mishandling classified documents could potentially open the way for critics like Hurd to gain traction in the primary.

Hurd said Thursday that he would not pardon Trump if the former president is convicted in the federal documents case, and he called many of the other Republican White House candidates who rushed to say they would “insane” to make that promise so early in the case.

Hurd said the classification of the documents Trump is accused of mishandling meant they included “information that, if it got into the wrong hands, would lead to a loss of life.”

“And the fact that Donald Trump willingly kept that material, and he wants to be leader of the free world, is unacceptable to me,” Hurd told the CBS early morning show. “It spits in the face of the thousands of men and women who, every single day and every single night, put themselves in harm's way in order to keep us safe.”

Most of the Republican candidates in the race are trying to run more against Biden than against Trump, who largely remains popular among GOP voters. But Hurd joins Christie and Hutchinson in his willingness to criticize Trump and the former president's continued hold on the national Republican Party.

Hurd opted not to seek reelection to the House in 2020, saying then that he preferred to “pursue opportunities outside the halls of Congress to solve problems at the nexus between technology and national security.” Last year, he traveled the country on a tour to promote his book, “American Reboot: An Idealist’s Guide to Getting Big Things Done.”

Hurd represented his state’s then-most competitive district, which was more than 70% Hispanic and stretched from the outskirts of San Antonio to El Paso and encompassed more than 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) of the 1,200-mile (1,900-kilometer) Texas-Mexico border.

Before serving in Congress, Hurd was a clandestine officer who worked in Pakistan. He speaks Urdu, that country’s national language.

Although he joins the packed GOP primary with little national profile, Hurd built a reputation in Congress as pro-business and pragmatic, unafraid to seek bipartisan consensus. When a snowstorm canceled flights to Washington in 2017, he rented a car and drove for two days from San Antonio to the nation's capital with Rep. Beto O'Rourke, a progressive Democrat from El Paso who ran unsuccessfully for president in 2020.

Hurd has focused much of his career on cybersecurity issues but was removed from a keynote speaking slot at a 2019 cybersecurity conference because of his past votes in support of Republican positions on abortion restrictions and against a bill that would financially support women in science, technology, engineering and math fields.

He nonetheless has long been critical of many of the hot-button social issues promoted by other Republicans, tweeting back in 2019 that “Our culture wars have grown to every facet of American life.” Hurd is now pledging to overcome political divides that he says are holding the county back.

“America is better together," he said Thursday. "And way more unites us than divides us.”

Hurd's entering the race keeps alive Texas' longest-in-the-nation streak of having at least one presidential major candidate who rose to public prominence in the state or lived there while running for or holding office. The last time Texas didn't have a major presidential hopeful was 1972.

 

[Polds4OSU]

Republican Sen. Rick Scott is reportedly considering a presidential bid as fellow Floridian Ron DeSantis struggles​

• Republican Sen. Rick Scott is reportedly considering a presidential run.
• According to The New York Times, Scott is eyeing a late entry into the field.
• Scott's consideration comes as fellow Floridian Ron DeSantis struggles.

Republican Sen. Rick Scott is again considering a possible 2024 presidential campaign amid Gov. Ron DeSantis' struggles thus far, according to The New York Times.

The Times reports that Scott, who was also governor of Florida, is considering a late entry into the growing 2024 Republican field. Former President Donald Trump continues to hold a wide lead over a swath of challengers, including DeSantis. If Scott were to enter, there would then be four Floridians in a field that already has Trump, DeSantis, and Miami Mayor Francis X. Suarez.

Scott and DeSantis have a frosty relationship, though Scott often demurs when asked about his successor. Scott would also have to oppose Trump, despite going out of his way to praise the former president when the Floridian led the Senate Republicans' campaign arm.

In a statement to the Times, a senior Scott advisor emphasized that senator's focus is on winning reelection to the Senate.

"It's flattering that some have mentioned the possibility of Senator Scott running for President, but as he's said many times, he's running for re-election to the Senate," Chris Hartline said in a statement.

President Joe Biden trolled Scott for months over pre-midterm policy proposals that included a provision calling for the sunset of every federal program every five years. Biden argued that it would put unnecessarily put the widely popular Social Security and Medicare in jeopardy. After months of back and forth, Scott later amended his plan to say it would not include Social Security and Medicare.

Scott is enormously wealthy, having already spent well over $100 million on his gubernatorial and Senate races, meaning he could easily cover the significant upfront costs of staffing up a presidential campaign.

That said, the Republican National Committee is imposing requirements for the first debate in August that sheer wealth won't cover, especially the requirement that each candidate must generate donations from at least 40,000 national contributors. Scott has sought to build a national profile in the Senate, but the timing of his potential entry could complicate his ability to qualify for the stage. Candidates must also meet a polling threshold of at least 1% in three national polls or two national polls and a state poll.

Republican Sen. Rick Scott is reportedly considering a presidential bid as fellow Floridian Ron DeSantis struggles

Scott and DeSantis have a notably frosty relationship, but a presidential run would also pit the Trump ally against the former president.

news.yahoo.com

 

[jobob85]

Man, if only Ted Nugent was running for president.

 

[Duke Silver]

There is so many @the field” that nobody is going to get enough to beat trump

 

[Polds4OSU]

The reason I post this in this thread...Multiple outlets and sources have reported this week that Kari Lake is currently living at Mar A Lago in a suit and is with Trump every day and is trying to convince him to make her his 2024 VP candidate.​

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Arizona Republican election official sues Kari Lake for defamation​

Arizona Republican election official sues Kari Lake for defamation

A top Republican election official in Arizona filed a defamation lawsuit Thursday against Kari Lake, who falsely claims she lost the 2022 race for governor because of fraud. Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer said he's faced “violent vitriol and other dire consequences” because of lies...

news.yahoo.com

PHOENIX (AP) — A top Republican election official in Arizona filed a defamation lawsuit Thursday against Kari Lake, who falsely claims she lost the 2022 race for governor because of fraud.

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer said he's faced “violent vitriol and other dire consequences” because of lies spread by Lake, including death threats and the loss of friendships.

“Rather than accept political defeat, rather than get a new job, she has sought to undermine confidence in our elections and has mobilized millions of her followers against me,” Richer wrote in an op-ed in The Arizona Republic.

Lake is a former Phoenix television news anchor who quickly built an enthusiastic political following as a loyal supporter of former President Donald Trump and his lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. She went on to narrowly lose her own race for Arizona governor last year along with a lawsuit challenging the results.

Despite her losses in court, she continues to claim that Richer and other Maricopa County officials interfered in the election to prevent her from winning.

A spokesperson for Lake did not immediately respond to a request for comment. She is openly considering a run for U.S. Senate and is a leading contender to be Trump's running mate in his 2024 presidential campaign.

The suit, filed in Maricopa County Superior Court, names Lake, her campaign and her political fundraising group as defendants. In addition to unspecified monetary damages, Richer is seeking a court order declaring Lake's statements false and requiring her to delete them from social media.

U.S. Supreme Court precedent sets a high bar for defamation cases brought by public officials like Richer. But Dominion Voting Systems' lawsuit against Fox News Channel over false claims about its vote-counting equipment resulted in damaging disclosures of internal Fox messages and a $787.5 million settlement.

Richer's lawyers wrote in their complaint that Lake has the right to criticize Richer but not to spread lies that bring him harm.

The suit takes issue with two claims in particular — that Richer intentionally had 19-inch ballot images printed on 20-inch paper, causing counting problems, and that he injected 300,000 bogus ballots. It details nearly three dozen times she made the claims publicly on social media or at rallies and news conferences.

The suit says Richer has faced death threats, including one that was prosecuted by the U.S. Justice Department, and has spent thousands of dollars on home security. He said he and his wife have altered their routines and law enforcement has stepped up patrols around their home and workplaces.

“She has gone far outside of the bounds of protected free speech as guaranteed under the First Amendment and the Arizona Constitution,” Richer wrote in The Republic.

 

[Polds4OSU]

RNC Chair Stands By GOP Loyalty Pledge Amid Pushback From 2024 Candidates​

Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel declared that the party loyalty pledge is here to stay after some 2024 GOP presidential candidates have called it into question.

The pushback comes after the RNC announced that candidates would have to sign a pledge to support the party’s eventual nominee in order to qualify for the first GOP primary debate, set to take place in August.

“It’s the Republican Party nomination and the pledge is staying,” McDaniel said in an interview with Fox News’ Kayleigh McEnany on Thursday.

“Anybody who wants to seek the nomination of our party should pledge to support the voters. If you go through this process and you take time on the debate stage and you’re going to be there, the number one pledge should be, beat Biden. It’s called the ‘Beat Biden Pledge’ for a reason, because at the end of the day, we all have to be united in one thing.”

The loyalty pledge has faced criticism from GOP presidential candidates, including former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

“I think the pledge is just a useless idea ... And by the way, in all my life, we never had to have Republican primary candidates take a pledge,” Christie on Sunday told CNN’s Jake Tapper, who asked if he’d pledge to support GOP front-runner Donald Trump “even if he’s a convicted felon.”

“You know, we were Republicans,” Christie said. “And the idea is you’d support the Republican whether you won or whether you lost. You didn’t have to ask somebody to sign something.”


Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson earlier called for a meeting with RNC officials to discuss amending the loyalty pledge in the wake of Trump’s federal indictment on Espionage Act charges, Politico reported.

“We need to concentrate on supporting the principles of the party, which is the rule of law, support of law enforcement and law and order versus simply trying to circle the wagons around Donald Trump and making sure he’s protected going into next year.” Hutchinson told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.


Trump, too, has also yet to commit to signing the loyalty pledge and has considered skipping debates, NBC News reported.

Christie name-dropped Trump on Sunday with a mention of Trump’s back-and-forth on a loyalty pledge ahead of the 2016 election.

“I’m going to take the pledge just as seriously as Donald Trump took it in 2016,” Christie said.

 

[Polds4OSU]

Evangelical leader hopes conference is 'testosterone booster shot' for anti-abortion 2024 candidates​

WASHINGTON (AP) — A year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, some of the Republican Party's most powerful evangelical Christian voices are gathering to celebrate a ruling that sent shockwaves through American politics and stripped away a constitutional protection that stood for almost a half century.

At the Faith & Freedom Coalition's annual conference in Washington, GOP presidential candidates will be urged to keep pushing for stronger abortion restrictions, even as Democrats insist the issue will buoy them ahead of the 2024 election.

Former President Donald Trump, whose three nominees to the high court allowed for the reversal of nationwide abortion rights, will give the keynote address Saturday night, the anniversary of the court's Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision. Many of his Republican rivals are set to speak Friday, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

Ralph Reed, founder and chairman of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, said the conference's dates were negotiated years ago, so the fact that it's falling on the Dobbs anniversary is a "serendipitous coincidence.”

“But we're certainly going to do everything that we can, as an organization and as a pro-life and pro-family movement, to give our candidates a little bit of a testosterone booster shot and explain to them that they should not be on the defensive,” Reed said. “Those who are afraid of it need to, candidly, grow a backbone.”

Such a political pep talk may be necessary since Democrats say fighting to preserve abortion rights can energize their base and help the party hold the Senate, flip the House and reelect President Joe Biden. Despite unfavorable historical precedent, Democrats managed a stronger-than-expected showing during last year's midterm elections and continue to point to abortion as a key reason why.

Even Trump has suggested that strict abortion restrictions were a weakness for Republicans, posting on his social media site in January that the party’s underwhelming midterm performance “wasn’t my fault” and instead blaming “’the ’abortion issue,’ poorly handled by many Republicans, especially those that firmly insisted on No Exceptions, even in the case of Rape, Incest, or Life of the Mother."

Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison said this week, “Every 2024 Republican presidential candidate — every single one — is running on an extreme anti-choice record." The DNC announced a six-figure ad campaign, including billboards from Tallahassee, Florida, to Phoenix, that will trumpet GOP support for a nationwide abortion ban.

The Supreme Court ruling paved the way for near-total bans in some Republican-led states, though voters in others rejected state constitutional referendums that would have removed virtually any abortion right protections. Democrats have vowed to codify the right to an abortion in federal law, but don’t have the votes in Congress to do so.

Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, head of the Democrats' Senate campaign arm, said top Republican presidential candidates will back a nationwide abortion ban to win support in their GOP primaries, then shift to a more moderate position for the general election.

“They will try to juice up their base with the issue and then pretend that that’s not their position," Peters said. "They’re not going to get away with that.”

An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll last July found that a majority of Americans say Congress should pass a law guaranteeing access to legal abortion nationwide. But the same poll showed that many Americans back some restrictions on abortion, especially after the first trimester of pregnancy.

Among the GOP candidates, DeSantis and Pence support bans after six weeks of pregnancy. Scott has backed a 15-week ban, and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, who is speaking to the conference on Saturday, has said she supports a federal ban but has not said at what point in pregnancy she would seek to ban abortions.

Trump, meanwhile, has avoided specifying what national limits, if any, he would support on abortion.

One major anti-abortion group, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, has said it would not support any White House candidate who did not, at a minimum, support passing a nationwide ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

Those attending the gathering will encourage the presidential candidates to “shift the focus and shift the language” around abortion, Reed said, so as to “frame the narrative, not around stages of gestation — whether weeks or months or trimesters, which I think is falling into the trap of the left — but talking about the unborn child.”

Pence, an evangelical Christian, will be speaking at the Faith & Freedom Coalition event for the first time since 2021, when he was booed by some and faced shouts of “traitor.” That event, held in Florida, came months after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, when Pence defied Trump's unprecedented demands to overturn Biden's victory in the 2020 election.

The former vice president is also expected to speak Saturday at the National Celebrate Life Rally at the Lincoln Memorial.

Despite evangelicals' initial reluctance to back Trump in 2016, Reed said the former president's administration had a strong abortion record to point to. He said Trump also impressed evangelicals by moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2018, which the evangelical movement supported because of the deep religious significance of the area.

“I think the bar has been raised and I think the ceiling is going to keep moving up," Reed said of evangelicals' expectations for pro-Israel, anti-abortion presidential primary candidates.

That's because, he said, the candidates understand “there is no path to the Republican nomination for president that doesn’t go through the evangelical vote.”