Politics
Pandemic politics fuel long-shot Republican challenges to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott – NBC News
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has $55 million banked for his re-election campaign, a 73 percent approval rating among Republicans, and an endorsement from former President Donald Trump.
And, thanks to restrictive abortion and voting bills Abbott has signed in recent months, Texas has become an epicenter of the national conservative causes that rally the GOP base.
None of that, though, has stopped a crop of critics — including Allen West, a former Florida congressman with a right-wing following who briefly served as the Texas GOP chairman — from announcing plans to challenge Abbott in next year’s primary.
Their complaint isn’t so much that Abbott is not a conservative. It’s that he’s not the hard-line conservative they believe that Texans crave — particularly when compared with some Republican peers and their hands-off approach to the coronavirus pandemic.
“He’s not Ron DeSantis, and he’s not Kristi Noem,” one veteran of Texas GOP politics said, referencing the governors of Florida and South Dakota who’ve upped their national profiles by resisting extended lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates and other restrictions to limit the spread of Covid.
Pandemic politics are likely to play out in GOP gubernatorial primaries elsewhere, most notably in Ohio, where Republican Gov. Mike DeWine already has two challengers on his right who disapprove of the cautious approach he took early in the crisis. In Texas, West is one of at least four Republicans who are already campaigning against Abbott. Also in the race are Don Huffines, a businessman and former state senator from the Dallas area who has endorsements from former Trump aide Katrina Pierson and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.; Chad Prather, a conservative comedian and commentator for BlazeTV; and Paul Belew, a criminal defense attorney running with a television-inspired “Better Call Paul” slogan.
Abbott’s allies are unfazed by the early moves against him. The governor won primaries in 2014 and 2018 with more than 90 percent of the vote and comfortably won his first two terms. In a huge state with expensive media markets, he has a cash advantage that even the independently wealthy Huffines, who already has loaned his campaign $5 million, is unlikely to match.
“They don’t have any money, they don’t have any fundraising ability,” said John Wittman, Abbott’s former communications director who now runs a public affairs firm in Austin. “They are all fighting over the same 10 to 12 percent of Republican primary voters.”
Dave Carney, Abbott’s political strategist, said he takes nothing for granted but is “not worried at all” about challenges from the right.
“We’re really focused on the general election,” he added. “The primary is a great opportunity for us to do a dress rehearsal.”
Abbott’s rivals could be a nuisance nevertheless in his bid for a third term. They repeatedly hammer him for business closures and mask mandates during the early months of the pandemic. And they don’t give him credit for being among the first governors to ease off such orders, using strikingly similar rhetoric to dismiss his decisions as an affront to liberty.
Said West: “I mean, you can’t give back something that you really had no right to take.”
Said Huffines: “That would be like thanking a thief for bringing some of your stolen goods back.”
Said Prather: “When you play arsonist and firefighter, the hypocrisy bleeds through pretty fast.”
Abbott was careful not to call public health measures he took in April 2020 a “stay-at-home order,” though he subsequently clarified in a video message that he was requiring “all Texans to stay at home except to provide essential services or do essential things like going to the grocery store.” He began reopening, with limitations, in May 2020 only to pause those efforts the next month because of a surge in coronavirus cases. A mask mandate quickly followed and stayed in place until March this year, when Abbott fully reopened the state.
Even so, using the pandemic as a wedge against Abbott, who last month tested positive for Covid, is not a slam-dunk primary message. More than two-thirds of Republican voters approved of his response to the crisis when surveyed in an August poll by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. Other critics, particularly Democrats, have argued his pandemic response has been too lax, pointing in particular to his July order barring mask and vaccine mandates in the state despite the highly-contagious delta variant surge.
As of Thursday, confirmed coronavirus cases in Texas were up 11 percent over the last two weeks. Deaths were up 38 percent.
The primary challengers have other grievances.
West, Huffines and Prather all accused Abbott of not doing enough to secure the U.S. border with Mexico, even after the governor pledged to deploy more state police and free up state funds to continue building a border wall.
Huffines wishes Abbott would have called for what he termed as a “full forensic audit” of the 2020 election — a calling card for right-wing candidates eager to please Trump. (The former president won the state of Texas.)
Prather mockingly calls Abbott a “campaign conservative” who is all talk, no action.
“The media gives him a lot of credit because he uses a lot of conservative rhetoric,” Prather said. “But there’s a difference between saying and doing. And, you know, Ron DeSantis does. Kristi Noem does. And Greg Abbott, a politician who lives off his polls, is good at saying.”
Several experienced Texas GOP operatives downplayed these ideological differences.
“Allen West has a history of pandering to the never-happy crowd,” said Chad Wilbanks, a former executive director of the state party who supports Abbott’s re-election. “Then you have … Don Huffines, who’s also pandering to the never-happy crowd.”
“You know, you’re never going to make everybody happy,” he added, in defense of Abbott. “And a leader who tries to make everybody happy is not very successful.”
The presence of several anti-Abbott candidates could split whatever anti-Abbott vote exists. Huffines and Prather see strength in numbers, predicting that a crowded field could keep Abbott below 50 percent in a primary and trigger a one-on-one runoff in which anti-Abbott voters can consolidate around one candidate. (“I’m not doing the wolf pack thing,” West, who dismissed such a strategy, said.)
The problem with that thinking is in the poll numbers. Abbott’s 73 percent job approval rating within his party, as measured by last month’s Texas Politics Project survey, has fallen 8 points over the last year, but it’s still high enough to leave little room for a successful primary challenger.
“They’re presuming that 5 or 10 percent of the electorate that may wish our governor was more conservative,” is a path to victory, said Matt Mackowiak, who chairs the Travis County GOP in Austin and personally supports Abbott. “But that defies third-grade math.”
There’s also the Trump factor. The former president endorsed Abbott in early June, then joined him at the border to raise alarm about immigration. Huffines believes Trump’s endorsement, like others that have gone wrong, including one earlier this year in a special Texas congressional election, is a mistake.
“The president has supported a lot of losers, and this is just going to be another one in that column,” Huffines said. “And it’s sad — for Trump, it’s going to be sad.”
Prather suggested Trump could change his mind “as this thing really heats up.”
That won’t happen, a senior political adviser to Trump said.
“President Trump has always respected Gov. Abbott and maintained a strong relationship. He was always inclined to support his re-election, but it was Abbott’s leadership on securing the border that sealed the deal,” the adviser said. “Trump loves Texas and loves fighters — Abbott is definitely a fighter for Texas.”
As for Democrats, they so far lack a well-known challenger, with former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who lost a close race against Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018 before launching an unsuccessful presidential campaign, a top recruiting target.
“If Abbott were weak,” Mackowiak said, “we’d have a Democratic candidate for governor already.”
Politics
BOJ's Rate Hike May Have Ripple Effect on Bonds, Businesses and Politics – Bloomberg
The Bank of Japan finally ended an eight-year experiment with negative interest rates that has left more than $4 trillion in funds hunting for higher returns abroad. What comes next threatens to shake up money flows in Japan and across the world.
One of the biggest questions is what happens to that big ball of money stashed overseas in assets including US government bonds, European power stations and Singapore equities. So far, markets have taken Japan’s first interest-rate hike since 2007 in stride, as the yield differential still remains wide with other major economies. The yen even weakened slightly, with traders citing the BOJ’s promise to keep conditions accommodative as a sign there won’t be rapid tightening ahead. But the longer term effect is less certain.
Politics
Former PQ minister turns back on politics, records jazz album
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A former minister with the Parti Québécois (PQ) says his time in politics is over, and he’s ready to focus on his first love: the arts.
“People have to remember that I was dealing with the arts for 30 years before I went into politics,” Maka Kotto tells CTV News a day before boarding a flight to his native Cameroon for a music festival. “After 14 years in politics, I felt that I did what I had to do. And so, I decided to get back to my old practices.”
Kotto represented the PQ in the riding of Bourget from 2008 to 2018 and was also the culture minister in Pauline Marois’ short-lived government.
In addition to his time in provincial politics, Kotto represented the Bloc Québécois from 2004 to 2008 in the Canadian House of Commons — the party’s first Black member of Parliament.
“It drained my energy and I lost contact with my family, with my friends. When I was inside, I didn’t realize that,” he said. “My mother went to the other side in 2018 and I couldn’t say good-bye… I wrote a song about that.”
Kotto says his mother’s death was a moment that notably marked him.
“This was very awful. Until now, I still suffer for that,” he said. “You see, when you’re investing in politics, you have many, many sacrifices that you’re facing.”
Closing the political door and turning his attention back to music and acting was an effortless decision for the 62-year-old.
“This was much, much more, easier than politics,” he said.
Kotto says he remembers his father not liking the idea of him getting involved in the arts as a child — he wanted him to “be a good student.”
“The last time I sang, I was between 16 or 17 years old,” he recalls. “That was in college, at the boarding school church. It was a French Jesuit boarding school in Cameroon.”
When asked what’s scarier: putting out a jazz album or working in politics, Kotto doesn’t miss a beat.
“Oh, politics is scary because you don’t have fun in politics. You have problems every day, every night, every morning and you have to solve real problems,” he said. “When you’re singing, it’s a passion…The only goal you have to reach is to share what you feel.”
Kotto says he worked for about six months on his album, collaborating with the likes of Antoine Gratton, Taurey Butler and the Orchestre national de jazz de Montréal (ONJ).
“We have a lot of fun. That was the goal, and I hope that everybody listening to this album will have the same fun as the one we had in studio,” he said.
A few words he uses to describe his music: fun, love and friendship.
The release of Kotto’s first album is scheduled for the winter of 2024.
Politics
Trump campaign defends his ‘bloodbath’ warning. Hear what political strategists think
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Trump campaign defends his ‘bloodbath’ warning. Hear what political strategists think
The Trump campaign is saying that presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump was referring only to the US auto industry when he warned of a “bloodbath” if he wasn’t elected. Republican strategist Alice Stewart and Democratic strategist Maria Cardona debate what he meant.
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