Middleboro Review 2: POLITICO NIGHTLY: 2024 and the evangelical comeback

Thursday, June 16, 2022

POLITICO NIGHTLY: 2024 and the evangelical comeback

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Anti-abortion demonstrators march during the “Right To Life” rally on Jan. 15, 2022, in Dallas, Texas. | Brandon Bell/Getty Images

EVANGELICAL MIGHT — It’s been a punishing couple of years for religious conservatives.

First there was Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020. In recent months, the rise of Christian nationalism in the midterms has drawn unflattering attention . And this week thousands of Southern Baptists spent much of their annual meeting discussing — and apologizing for — a sexual abuse scandal that has roiled the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

All this as Americans appear to be growing less religious. Last year, Gallup reported church membership in the United States had fallen below a majority for the first time.

But the religious right’s fortunes may be about to change. Christian conservatives this summer will likely be running victory laps, with the Supreme Court poised to overturn Roe v. Wade . Separately, the earliest stage of Republicans’ 2024 presidential primary campaign is picking up. This means that party heavyweights’ attention is focused on a swath of the electorate that, regardless of its overall standing in America, remains very much at the heart of the GOP.

For the Christian right, it’s an uncommonly good confluence of timing, the force of which will be on display through Saturday at a Faith & Freedom Coalition gathering in Nashville — one of the more significant meetups of potential 2024 presidential candidates to date.

Trump, who is now widely expected to run again in 2024, is scheduled to speak at the conference. Among other potential 2024 candidates expected to appear are former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and Florida Sen. Rick Scott. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will receive the “Ronald Reagan Defender of Freedom Award.”

Ralph Reed, the longtime Republican strategist and founder of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, stands at the epicenter of the evangelical moment again. It was Reed who helped marshal support among skeptical evangelicals for Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, then literally wrote the book on the bargain many of them made for him.

The payoff for evangelicals? In a measure of vindication for Reed and like-minded conservatives, they got enough Supreme Court justice appointments to put Roe on the chopping block.

Today, said Jeff Roe, the Republican strategist who managed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign in 2016 and helped elect Glenn Youngkin governor of Virginia last year, “I’d be long on Ralph Reed stock if I was an aspiring presidential candidate.”

The reason to think Roe may be right is in large part geographic. While white evangelicals account for only about 15 percent of the overall population, their share of the Republican electorate in early nominating states is far higher.

In Iowa, the first-in-the-nation caucus state, more than 6 in 10 caucus-goers identified as evangelical or born-again Christians in the last competitive Republican nominating contest, in 2016. In the early primary state of South Carolina, that number exceeded 70 percent.

Reed, who tracks those numbers as closely as anyone, said, “The idea that [the] constituency is declining in political significance is laughable.”

He said, “In the Republican presidential nominating process, evangelical Christians today, in the Republican party, occupy a position of criticality and centrality that is analogous to the role that African Americans play in the Democratic Party.”

That leaves Reed and his organization in an especially important place in the run-up to 2024. Brett Doster, a Florida-based Republican strategist who served as the state’s executive director for the Bush-Cheney 2004 presidential reelection campaign, described conservative evangelicals as one of three wings of the Republican base, along with “blue-collar populists” and “anti-establishment libertarians.”

“The Faith and Freedom folks will be relevant for long beyond ’24,” he said, “and yes, any presidential candidate will need them.”

Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at dsiders@politico.com or on Twitter at @davidsiders.

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FIRST IN NIGHTLY

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell prepares to depart after participating in a swearing-in ceremony, Monday, May 23, 2022, in Washington. | Patrick Semansky/AP Photo

WALL STREET TURNS ON POWELL — POLITICO’s Ben White has a lead story publishing Friday that reveals how corporate CEOs are turning on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell when it comes to the souring economy. From Ben’s story:

While much of that anger has been directed at President Joe Biden for citing corporate greed as a trigger for inflation, there’s now another target for their frustration: Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

The complaints about Powell are not so much about Wednesday’s interest rate increase, the single biggest hike in three decades, which Wall Street investors initially cheered before sending stocks tanking again Thursday.

Instead, executives are focused on what they see as Powell getting the persistence and scope of inflation so wrong that he and his Fed colleagues are now being forced to overcompensate on rate increases that could blow the economy into a sharp slump.

“He is obviously playing catch-up, 100 percent,” said Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs who served as a top economic adviser to Trump and is in regular contact with many of the world’s top executives. “He was clearly behind the curve and clearly late, and the runway for a ‘soft landing’ for the economy is now much shorter and narrower.”

You can read the rest Friday morning on POLITICO’s homepage.

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WHAT'D I MISS?

— Bidenworld won the Covid battle, lost the political war: Five months out from the midterms, administration health officials are increasingly confident they’ve blunted the worst of the virus’ effects. It’s the measurable progress Democrats once hoped would boost Biden’s popularity and his party’s midterm chances. The only problem: Voters long ago stopped caring.

— Covid doesn’t stop Anthony Fauci from taking on Rand Paul: The 81-year-old infectious disease expert testified by video today at a Senate HELP Committee hearing on the federal pandemic response after testing positive on Wednesday. Fauci and the senator got into their typical heated back-and-forth during Paul’s allotted time for questioning.

— Jan. 6 panel calls Ginni Thomas to testify: The Jan. 6 committee has invited Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to testify about her connections to Trump’s attempts to overturn the election, panel chair Rep. Bennie Thompson told reporters today. Thomas told the conservative-leaning Daily Caller later today she was open to testifying.

— DeSantis says Florida is ‘affirmatively against’ Covid vaccines for young kids: Gov. Ron Desantis said today Florida will not provide state programs to administer vaccinations for toddlers or infants . Covid-19 vaccines have not gone through enough testing and clinical trials to determine that they are effective, he said, adding that kids are least likely to suffer serious health consequences from Covid.

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AROUND THE WORLD

INTO THE FOLD? The leaders of Germany, France, Italy and Romania today threw their weight behind accepting Ukraine and Moldova as EU membership candidates, laying to rest doubts over their stance amid Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The EU will likely request strict requirements on democratic and institutional reforms, such as the fight against corruption, as part of the EU enlargement process. Ukraine will also probably have to first reach a peace agreement with Russia before any talks with the EU could begin.

The European Commission is expected to officially recommend granting Ukraine and Moldova the membership candidacy on Friday, but it is up to EU countries to make a final decision. EU leaders will meet in Brussels next week on Thursday and Friday to discuss the issue.

NIGHTLY NUMBER

$45 billion

The increase to Biden’s military spending plans endorsed by the Senate Armed Services Committee this week. The boost brings the National Defense Authorization Act’s top-line number to $847 billion and marks the second straight year that the panel has blown past the administration’s Pentagon budget.

STEP INSIDE THE WEST WING: What's really happening in West Wing offices? Find out who's up, who's down, and who really has the president’s ear in our West Wing Playbook newsletter, the insider's guide to the Biden White House and Cabinet. For buzzy nuggets and details that you won't find anywhere else, subscribe today.

PARTING WORDS

‘IT WAS ILLEGAL’ — The Jan. 6 select committee made its most forceful case today that Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election was more than an affront to the democratic process — it was a crime.

For all the panel’s public quibbling over whether to vote on referring Trump to the Justice Department for a possible criminal case, members did it their own way. They used today’s public hearing to present what they see as some of their most compelling evidence and thereby mount a case, with Attorney General Merrick Garland watching, that Trump broke the law in his effort to make former Vice President Mike Pence single-handedly overturn the election.

“It was clear that the president was upset with the vice president not agreeing to do something that was clearly illegal, and so he wanted to put as much pressure on Mike Pence as he could,” panel chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) told reporters today.

“What the president wanted the vice president to do was not just wrong. It was illegal and unconstitutional,” panel Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said.

Read more from Kyle Cheney and Nicholas Wu on how the panel presented its evidence against Trump.

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