Michael Whatley Is In, Lara Trump Is Out

 

GOP Party Chair Michael Whatley has announced his candidacy for Thom Tillis's US Senate seat. That means, of course, that Lara Trump ain't running. In the not very distant past, Whatley had been chair of the NCGOP. When Trump forced Ronna McDaniel out as chair of the national Republican Party, he put Whatley in (along with Lara as co-chair). 

Whatley is the round-faced people-pleaser who's previously been most aligned with the country club Republican "establishment" and who, according to Brant Clifton at The Daily Haymaker, plays at being a Trumpist lickspittle while really secretly harboring fear bordering on resistance. "[Whatley] loves to talk about Donald Trump and post pictures of himself with Trump’s plane. But much of what he does and says aligns much more with Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger — the two former 'Republican' congressmen who colluded with Democrats on the farcical so-called 'January 6 committee'.”

In other words, Whatley is more in the mold of Thom Tillis, and MAGA doesn't entirely trust him. He's not going to ignite enthusiasm, which he's going to need in extra measure against Roy Cooper.

After taking over the NCGOP in 2019, Whatley oversaw Trump’s win here in 2020, two U.S. Senate victories in 2020 and 2022, recapturing a supermajority in the state Senate and flipping control of the N.C. Supreme Court from 6-1 Democrats to 5-2 Republicans. Despite that sparkling career in North Carolina (Wikipedia sez he's a native of Watauga County), and despite Whatley's signature affability, the most MAGA wing of the Party ran John Kane for party chair against him in 2023. John Kane was and is the number one son of an elder John Kane, a renown Raleigh mega-developer who was actually honored as Tar Heel of the Year in 2016. The elder Kane is also renown for raising big money for Republicans. The younger John Kane emphasized his MAGA bona fides, hitting especially "election integrity," because (check!) the election of 2020 was stolen from Trump. The conservatives who don't trust Whatley remember that he went weak after the "Stop the Steal" tourist romp at the Capitol, and condemned it all as a riot. Like a lot of other Republicans back on January 7th who later developed a twitch and then couldn't remember, Whatley never said another negative word in public about insurrection. Conservatives hate weakness, especially in their servants and allies.

Whatley easily won reelection to the NC chairmanship in 2023, with the endorsement of Trump, incidentally. "Mr. Trump likes Mr. Whatley for one overwhelming reason, according to people who have discussed him with the former president: He is a 'stop the steal guy,' as one of the people described him. He endorses Mr. Trump’s false claims about mass voter fraud and Mr. Trump believes he did a good job delivering North Carolina, a 2020 swing state, to him." [Zachary Roth]

Is Lara Trump House-Shopping in Wilmington?

 

Speculation is the oxygen of politics. So naturally I'm gonna breathe -- that is, read a list of potential Republican candidates for Thom Tillis's Senate seat. The NandO put Lara Trump in the first spot:

...the president’s daughter-in-law, a Fox News host, is “strongly considering jumping in the race,” NBC News reported. She is a native of Wilmington and formerly co-chaired the Republican National Committee. An unnamed source close to the Trump family told NBC News Sunday that if Lara Trump were to declare for Tillis’s seat, “The race will be over before it begins.”

My instinct is to agree with that. She would sweep the primary and could very possibly win the seat. Unless she turns out to run a bad campaign, a smug campaign, an inept campaign, or come across on the stump as all hat, no cattle. The whole Donald Jethro Trump extended family will descend on us, with lots of moolah.

Which Democrat could beat her? Roy Cooper? His silence over the last few months suggests disengagement, not the massive in-take of wind for bursting forth as a candidate for US Senate. Thomas Mills thinks he's out for 2026. Mills wants Jeff Jackson to step in.

Jeff Jackson could beat Lara Trump (though his strategists better start thinking out of the box!). I would hate like hell to lose Jackson as our Attorney General and would dread a Dan Bishop clone getting his hands on the reins of NC law (like that corrupted blond lawyer who took over the Department of Justice for Jethro). So losing Jackson carries both potential reward and consequential risk.

Lara Trump Bares a Shoulder

"We’ve been raising massive amounts of money for Donald Trump and the Republican Party.” 

--Lara Trump, addressing the 2024 NCGOP convention in Greensboro, May 25th

Exactly, and in that precise order.

Because he's already the dictator.

Lara Trump, This Budd's for You!

 

Ted Budd

With hopes and fantasies fading for a Lara Trump run in North Carolina for the US Senate seat currently held by Dick Burr, US Congressman Ted Budd (13th CD) appears ready to elbow all the other Republican hopefuls aside and claim the Trump mantle for himself. That's my takeaway from reporting in this morning's NewsAndObserver.

I could never take a Lara Trump campaign seriously. Her husband's entanglement in various criminal investigations into the Trump Org could be a major drag, although I know all those Trumpists were salivating for multiple rally appearances in the state by her daddy-in-law.

Budd is the conservatives' dream candidate, apparently (if Lara isn't in), 'cause as a gun store owner, he can pass out assault weapons as party favors at every event. He cuts a more extreme figure than does former Congressman Mark Walker, who's already been running for months but who doesn't seem destined to ignite the Republican bully gene.

Still waiting for the old toe-stepper Pat McCrory to announce his own campaign.

Democrats Plan a Postmortem

When Democrats conduct an autopsy of a bad election, there's every possibility that they'll open the chest cavity last.

News arrives this morning that some four Democratic "interest groups" -- Third Way, End Citizens United,  the Latino Victory Fund, and Collective PAC -- have "quietly launched" a review and numerical analysis of why Democrats did so poorly down-ballot in 2020. How poorly, you ask? In North Carolina, Democrats lost ground in the NC House and Senate, failing to take the majority in either chamber, and they couldn't take any Council of State seats they didn't already hold (though they came close across the board). Nationally, Democrats lost 14 seats in the US House, a dozen of which had only just been won in 2018. My eyes water at those statistics.

Third Way, a conservative Democratic interest group and a part of the quartet investigating these losses, wants the word "socialism" banned from the vocabulary and expunged from Democratic DNA. They'll also target the "Defund Police" motto as a culprit for causing the shakes among rural and exurban voters. Maybe they're right. I don't know, but I squint hard at solutions that seem philosophically allied most strongly with Wall Street self-interest.

The NYTimes article notes this: "The review is probing tactical and strategic choices across the map, including Democratic messaging on the economy and the coronavirus pandemic, as well as organizational decisions like eschewing in-person canvassing." I highlight that last phrase because I blame the absence of a ground game across much of North Carolina as a contributing factor to our losses. A major contributing factor. The excuse, naturally -- and it's a valid if convenient excuse -- was COVID fear, but some county parties managed canvassing anyway with masking and social distancing. (Not naming any counties, but I live in one of them.)

Maybe I believe too much in the "Trump effect," especially as it influenced the turnout in North Carolina, but the surge in Republican numbers in non-metropolitan counties last fall might focus the apocalyptic mind. I hate to say it, and I hope I'm wrong for the long run, but the man Trump is almost a supernatural force for disaffected citizens who often don't even vote but who hate pretty much everyone in government but especially Democrats who love "multiculturalism" more than them. The economic radicalism of Bernie Sanders gets to many of those folks in ways the Third Way Democrats might want to notice. In fact, for many white rural Trump voters, they thought Trump was going to bring that same economic radicalism to benefit them personally, but low-information voters never caught on to the fraud.

Trump intends to provide the magic going forward, you bet. But he himself won't be on the ballot again before 2024 -- if then -- and it remains to be seen if he can pump up the vote for others, including for his own unqualified carpet-bagging daughter-in-law.