How a New Class of Republicans Could Push America to the Right


Much of the attention focused on Donald Trump’s favorite candidates running in the midterm elections has focused – and rightly so! — on their support for reviving the 2020 election. (Which, for those still unsure, wasn’t stolen.)

But on a range of policy issues, including abortion, climate change, same-sex marriage and education, Trump’s MAGA warriors have taken positions that place them on the fringes of the Republican Party — let alone the nation in his outfit.

The usual caveats apply: Candidates often say things to win a primary that they then dismiss or downplay in front of general election voters.

But the nature of political partisanship in America has changed over the past decade, raising doubts about whether that conventional wisdom still holds. If elected in November, the Trump crowd could push American politics hard to the right.

Let’s take a look:

Nowhere is the harshness of these candidates’ positions more evident than on abortion, which has become a much more urgent litmus test for the right since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade.

Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, said she supports the enactment of a “carbon copy” of Texas abortion law in his condition. This law does not provide exceptions for incest or rape. It also contains an unusual layout that was meant to circumvent Roe v. Wade before the ruling was overturned in June: Anyone can report someone breaking the law and claim a $10,000 bounty from the state.

Blake Masters, who won the GOP nomination for the Arizona Senate, backed a federal “personality” law that would establish that fetuses are persons. It also raised questions about whether Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court’s decision giving couples the federal right to use birth control was correctly decided — but it doesn’t support a birth control ban.

The list goes on: In Georgia, Herschel Walker, the party’s Senate candidate, told reporters, “There is no national ban on abortion right now, and I think that’s a problem. Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano introduced a fetal heart rate bill as a state senator. Again, the bill contained no exception for incest or rape.

Skepticism about the human impact on the planet’s climate abounds, despite growing scientific evidence that severe flooding, rising global temperatures, droughts and volatile weather patterns have already happened.

Mastriano, for example, called climate change a “theory” based on “pop science”. Mehmet Oz, the Republican Senate candidate from Pennsylvania, relied on his background as a doctor to take a distinctly unscientific approach pro-carbon position.

“The ideology that carbon is bad” is “a lie,” Oz said at a forum among primary candidates in Erie in March. “Carbon dioxide, my friends, is 0.04% of our air. That’s not the problem.

Asked about the Green New Deal at a campaign event in Georgia in mid-July, Walker laid out his own theory about global wind currents that even Fox News found “head-scratching.”

“Since we don’t control the air, our good air decides to float towards the bad air of China,” Walker said. “So when China gets our good air, its bad air has to move. So it moves to our good airspace. Then, now, we have to clean up that backup.



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In Arizona, where temperatures hit 115 degrees Fahrenheit in July, Masters is still in questioning mode. During a February appearance on “Rising,” a webcast run by The Hill newspaper, he said: “We need to figure out if the Earth is warming, and why, and how much is caused by humans.”

No Republican, however, has expressed his contempt for established climate science more succinctly than Sen. Ron Johnson, who is seeking re-election in Wisconsin.

“I don’t know about you guys,” Johnson said in June 2021 at a Republican luncheon. Quoting a British climate denier, he continued: “But I think climate change is, as Lord Monckton said”, and he uttered a barnyard epithet.

Overall, Trump-aligned candidates support redirecting taxpayer dollars to vouchers, private religious schools or other forms of “school choice,” as some Democrats do.

But where many of them go further is to call for the total elimination of the federal Department of Education. It’s a position taken by none other than Ronald Reagan, so it’s well within the GOP mainstream. But Reagan, of course, failed to do so despite serving two terms as president – ​​the second after defeating his Democratic opponent in a landslide.

In this election, many Republicans have come up with new ways to deliver the same concept. For example, Eric Schmitt, the party’s candidate for the Missouri Senate, floated the idea of ​​getting rid of the Department of Education and reallocating the money as block grants to states instead.

Don Bolduc, who is seeking the nomination for a Senate seat in New Hampshire, called the Department of Education an “ugly thing” that “needs to go.”

At times, candidates blamed the Department of Education, a historically weak agency that has no real authority over state and local governments, for a variety of supposed ills.

As the conservative clash with Disney over LGBTQ issues escalated in February, Masters delivered a brief soliloquy at a campaign event on the virtues of marriage.

“It makes sense,” Masters said — procreation. He admitted to going to the same-sex wedding of Peter Thiel, his former boss and main donor to his campaign.

But Masters added that while he wished Thiel well, he accused the Supreme Court of ‘squinting and inventing so-called rights in the Constitution’ when it legalized same-sex marriage in the 2015 Obergefell decision. vs. Hodges. “Marriage”, he said, “is between a man and a woman”.

Several other Republican Senate candidates, including Adam Laxalt in Nevada, Ted Budd in North Carolina and Bolduc and Kevin Smith in New Hampshire, expressed their opposition to same-sex marriage in more muted terms.

One of the most surprising positions is that of Johnson, who has indicated that he plans to vote for a Democratic bill codifying Obergefell’s decision when it is introduced in the Senate next month – a decision that could have something to do with the fact that a solid majority of Wisconsin residents want same-sex marriage to be legal.

“The Respect for Marriage Act is another example of Democrats creating a state of fear over an issue in order to further divide Americans for their political advantage,” Johnson told reporters last month. “Even though I believe the Respect for Marriage Act is unnecessary, if it comes before the Senate, I see no reason to oppose it.”

  • Donald Trump declined to answer questions from the New York State Attorney General’s office, a surprising gamble in a high-stakes legal interview. Follow our live updates.

  • The FBI’s seizure of Rep. Scott Perry’s phone this week would be at least the third major action taken in recent months in a growing federal probe into efforts by several close Trump allies to void the 2020 election. Alan Feuer, Luke Broadwater and Katie Benner Report.

  • Arizonans trusted Kari Lake to come clean when she was a television news anchor. Now that she is the Republican candidate for governor, will they trust her to run the state? Michael Bender analyzes the political rise of the former journalist.

— Blake

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