Zach Kessel here, filling in for Brittany Bernstein.
GOP primary candidates want voters to know that they do not approve of their fellow Republicans in Washington.
As GOP infighting, egged on by House Democrats, brought down Kevin McCarthy’s speakership in a historic vote Tuesday afternoon, nearly every Republican on the campaign trail reacted with weary bewilderment — save for Vivek Ramaswamy, who, in keeping with his upstart persona, applauded Representative Matt Gaetz’s rebellion.
Even President Trump, a stalwart McCarthy ally, and his chief rival Ron DeSantis agreed: McCarthy’s ouster was an unproductive distraction from the business at hand.
DeSantis, who was a founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, clashed with McCarthy in September. DeSantis reportedly called Republicans opposing McCarthy’s negotiations with House Democrats, urging them to “keep fighting” against a deal that ultimately succeeded in forestalling a government shutdown. At the time, his campaign said the governor wanted “congressional Republicans to hold the line in this current spending standoff and end days of rubber stamping multi-trillion dollar spending bills that harm the American people.”
McCarthy, for his part, said DeSantis was “not at the same level” as former president Donald Trump and “would not have gotten elected” in Florida’s 2018 gubernatorial race without Trump’s endorsement. The governor agreed that he and Trump are very different leaders: “In Florida, we run budget surpluses. We’ve paid down our debt. I’ve kept every one of my promises. Meanwhile, McCarthy and Trump worked together to add $7 trillion — more debt than our country racked up in its first 200 years — to the debt in just four years.”
Yesterday, hours before the House voted on Gaetz’s motion, DeSantis addressed the chaos in the lower chamber, continuing to tie Trump to the former speaker. The Florida governor said he “opposed McCarthy when it wasn’t cool years ago, and he’s really somebody that Donald Trump has backed and put into that position.” While he made clear he’s no McCarthy fan, DeSantis also argued that the motion to vacate was “performative,” calling it “the typical theatrics that we’re used to seeing.”
Trump, for his part, admonished Republicans for fighting among themselves when they have the Left to contend with, but stayed above the fray by refusing to express support for Gaetz or McCarthy.
“Why is it that Republicans are always fighting among themselves, why aren’t they fighting the Radical Left Democrats who are destroying our country,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial.
The attempt by DeSantis and Trump to thread the needle on the speakership issue reflects an interesting dynamic within the Republican Party. While McCarthy’s detractors certainly were loud, those who went so far as to support his removal represent not just a minority of the House GOP conference but a decidedly small slice of the Republican electorate.
The last poll to track the former speaker’s popularity within the party, a survey conducted by The Economist and YouGov between September 23 and 26, found a +15 approval rating for McCarthy among registered Republicans and +17 among self-described conservatives. As Congressional Leadership Fund and American Action Network president Dan Conston pointed out in a post on X, the former speaker was “the single most popular congressional leader” in the country while in office.
Perhaps it is McCarthy’s popularity with Republican voters that has prompted GOP presidential candidates to condemn yesterday’s coup d’état, but, according to some of those running for the party’s nomination, their opposition to the vote comes from a belief that it stands to hurt the Republican cause.
DeSantis is not the only 2024 hopeful to have spoken out against the Gaetz-led rebellion.
Former vice president Mike Pence, who was onstage at a national-security-focused event at Georgetown University when news of the motion’s success broke, criticized the parliamentary maneuver. Pence was “deeply disappointed that a handful of Republicans would partner with all the Democrats in the House of Representatives to oust the Speaker of the House,” he told the audience.
After an event in Dallas yesterday hours before the House began voting on the motion to vacate, Senator Tim Scott (R., S.C.) expressed his disapproval of both the rebellion and its ringleader in a statement provided to National Review.
“Gaetz is really a polarizing figure in the party and does a lot of damage with his comments,” Scott said. “Frankly, this vote is just going to further the divide within the Republican conference in the House. It’s not helpful. It certainly doesn’t help us focus on the issues that everyday voters care about. . . . Instead of focusing on those issues, we’re having yet another show in the House run by Congressman Gaetz.”
Scott added that the infighting “certainly doesn’t help” the party’s image nationwide.
“The challenge with a very slim majority is that the path forward to governing requires a unified party,” he said, “or you pivot more to the left to get things done.”
Scott’s fellow South Carolinian, former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley has not addressed McCarthy’s ouster, but did voice her displeasure with the stopgap spending deal McCarthy negotiated over the weekend to forestall a government shutdown. She used the opportunity to argue that the funding bill should have included aid for Ukraine and should have cut the federal budget in other areas, saying “the reality is Republicans and Democrats, all of them, have been spending taxpayer dollars in a ridiculous way. They just take a budget from last year, add more to it, and keep going. So the false narrative of ‘we can either pay for certain things or Ukraine’ is wrong.”
So far, the only Republican presidential candidate who has approved of McCarthy’s forced exit has been Vivek Ramaswamy. In a video message posted on X after the vote, the biotech-executive-turned-politico argued that Gaetz and the seven other GOP representatives who ousted the former speaker should “own” the chaos that Ramaswamy concedes was “the point of removing the House speaker.” He said, though, that chaos is “not necessarily a bad thing.”
A Ramaswamy campaign adviser told NR that the candidate does not believe the individuals in power matter nearly as much as the will to solve the problems Ramaswamy feels are most pressing.
“We have a $33 trillion national debt problem,” the adviser said. “We need to stop focusing on the who and start focusing on actual solutions.” Given his oft-repeated argument that he as an outsider is the only candidate who can address the debt issue, his siding with the House insurgents against McCarthy does logically track.
Trump, meanwhile, stayed uncharacteristically quiet throughout the whole affair. As DeSantis alluded to in his comments, the former president was instrumental in helping McCarthy secure the speakership during a contentious fight in January, with voting lasting 15 rounds before the California Republican won out. The two have seemingly maintained a connection since, with McCarthy saying he believes Trump “will be the nominee” and that he is “stronger today than he was in 2016 or 2020.” Trump reciprocated by saying he has “always had a great relationship” with McCarthy, who has “said very nice things about” Trump. Despite that relationship, though, Trump refused to weigh in on Tuesday’s proceedings, offering only an admonition against Republican infighting without mentioning McCarthy or Gaetz by name.
Representative Troy Nehls (R., Texas) was the first member of Congress to put Trump’s name forward as a McCarthy replacement, with Representatives Greg Steube (R., Fla.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) following suit. Ramaswamy echoed the sentiment, posting on X that the idea “isn’t crazy.” When asked Wednesday morning whether he would throw his hat into the speakership ring, Trump tamped down expectations. “We’re leading by like 50 points for president,” he said. “My focus is totally on that.”
Around NR
• Nikki Haley surged past Ron DeSantis in New Hampshire after her performance at the second GOP debate last week, Caroline Downey reports:
The former South Carolina governor has surged ahead of DeSantis, capturing 19 percent support among GOP primary voters in the Granite State compared to DeSantis’s 10 percent, according to a Suffolk University/Boston Globe/USA TODAY poll released Wednesday.
However, former president Trump is still dominating the field, racking up 49 percent support in the poll. Of the 500 likely New Hampshire Republican presidential primary voters polled, 48.4 percent believe that Trump’s nomination is now inevitable.
• Michael Brendan Dougherty laments the state of American democracy given the probable choice in the 2024 general election:
How can the United States claim to be a functioning democracy when it now regularly produces elections where the candidates are so loathed by such large numbers of the population? Nearly 60 percent of the country said that Donald Trump should not hold office again, but in a head-to-head matchup with Biden, he’s currently leading. Nearly three-quarters of the country believes Biden is too old to be president at all. But, again, matched against Trump, many Democrats are concluding that he’s their best and only realistic hope.
• Madeleine Kearns exhorts Republicans not to underestimate Gavin Newsom’s chances in a presidential race:
Gavin Newsom’s presidential shadow campaign is no joke. With Biden-Harris, conservatives have gotten used to political enemies being scandal-ridden, gaffe-prone, and unable to speak coherently even when on-script. But that is a low threshold that Newsom easily clears. He is a highly presentable, smooth-talking, skilled political operative peddling the same dangerous ideas in a far more effective way.
• Andy McCarthy argues that the Democratic Party’s plan — helping prod Republican voters toward nominating Donald Trump once again — is working, and it’ll hand them the White House in 2024:
Right now, Democrats are holding their fire because they want Trump to be nominated. Once that’s in the bag, however, the onslaught will begin, exacerbated by evidence that will become fully public in one or more criminal trials. By this time next year, Trump may be convicted of one or more felonies. (I may not like Jack Smith’s January 6 case, but I sure like his chances with a Washington, D.C., jury and Judge Tanya Chutkan presiding.) Critically, when this all falls into place, the Democrats’ target audience will no longer be GOP primary voters; it will be the general public that is already decisively predisposed against Trump.
• Dan McLaughlin, analyzing team Biden’s latest ad campaign, concludes that the president and his party are concerned about the cost-of-living issue:
Did you know Joe Biden was from Scranton? Can you buy eggs with that news? Literally half the ad is talking about Biden’s upbringing in the 1950s. Outside of some arguments about health insurance and the cost that prescription drugs can charge to the government, the cost-of-living message is limited to showing pictures of windmills and solar panels and promising that this will reduce energy bills. There’s nothing in here about the price of food, housing, gas, or clothing. It’s a weak message, and a sign of how Biden’s reelection campaign will depend entirely on the personality and legal troubles of Donald Trump. But if voters decide that Trump is a problem for Washington and Biden is a problem for them, even that might not work.
• Dominic Pino makes the case against presidential primaries:
The internal processes of political parties should not be democratic exercises. Democracy is for the general election. To nominate a candidate on behalf of a political party, you should have to demonstrate more commitment to the party as an organization than simply being a registered voter. And if the restoration of proper nominating conventions leads to parties selecting candidates who aren’t despised by a majority of the electorate, as the incentives suggest would happen, it will strengthen democracy by increasing overall satisfaction with the candidates that voters get to choose between on Election Day.
• Noah Rothman asks what effect, if any, a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaign may have on the 2024 presidential election:
If Kennedy pulls the trigger on an independent bid in time to secure ballot access (and he has time to do that yet), it presents the GOP with a conundrum. If Trump is the nominee, he will be compelled to spend most of his time and the GOP’s resources on his legal defense against allegations of criminal misconduct. But when he’s actually out on the trail, he’ll have to devote at least a portion of the time he would otherwise dedicate to campaigning against the incumbent Democratic president to keeping Kennedy’s share of the Republican vote down. A non-Trump Republican presidential nominee would likely encounter a similar headache, but Trump’s brand of politics aligns more closely with Kennedy’s than with anyone else’s in the GOP field.