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Election 2024

The GOP Majority in the House is razor-thin

February 15, 2024

Mike Huckabee

Speaking of razor-thin House margins, the GOP majority in the House got even skinnier last night. In a special election in New York, the seat left open when Republicans voted to expel Republican Rep. George Santos was easily won by longtime Democratic Party insider Tom Suozzi. This will reduce Speaker Mike Johnston’s majority to an ever narrower 219-213.

https://www.westernjournal.com/house-republicans-desperately-wanted-expel-george-santos-now-paying-price/

Astoundingly, the top issue was immigration, and the Democrats vastly outspent the Republicans, painting “MAGA Republicans” as to blame for all the illegal aliens overrunning New York City. So now, they have another rubber stamp vote for Joe Biden. Yeah, that’ll seal the border! This wasn’t an election, it was an I.Q. test, and New Yorkers failed. Let that be a lesson to the GOP for November.

This is in no way a defense of Santos, who appears to be a serial fabulist and who is facing multiple fraud indictments. But Santos did plead not guilty and he was expelled before even going to trial. You’d think that people who make our laws would have heard of the presumption of innocence. Besides, he’d already promised not to run again, so he would have held the seat only through the end of this year. But the GOP stood on principle and expelled him anyway.

That’s good for their consciences, but it puts them at a distinct disadvantage. The House is filled with Democrats who are liars, benders of financial rules and defenders of anti-Semites and terrorists – even one who declared her loyalty to Somalia over the US – and you don’t see the Democrats rushing to expel them. Over on the Senate side, they don’t care if indicted New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez clanks when he walks from all the gold bars in his pockets, he’s not going anywhere.

There is no way the Democrats would ever let nonsense like ethics and principles convince them to give up an iota of power. Like the Biden “Justice” Department, this is a system with two completely different sets of standards, depending on whether there’s a (D) or an (R) after your name.

Side Note: Another lesson Republicans should learn from the George Santos special election is that they need to up their game in turning out early votes. Having expanded Election Day to weeks, Democrats spend that time gathering ballots from Hither & Yon (no, that’s not the name of a cemetery.) Republicans tend to wait until Election Day to vote, when they need massive one-day turnout just to catch up. And in New York, it was snowing on Tuesday.

Will they or won’t they leave Joe Biden and the Democrats behind?

February 8, 2024

Mike Huckabee

Last night, Sean Hannity asked me if I really believed that black and Hispanic voters who are abandoning Biden in polls would actually vote for Trump. He believes they’ll follow historic precedent and fall back in line by November, voting once again for Democrats who make big promises they never keep and scare them with lies about Republicans being racists who want to bring back slavery. Remember Biden telling a black audience, “They want to put y’all back in chains”? Rest assured, we have no interest in bringing back that cursed Democrat institution that Republican Abe Lincoln fought a Civil War to end.

My response is that, while I’m sure many disgruntled Democrat voters will ultimately yield to habit and mark the (D) box to keep letting the same party destroy their lives in perpetuity, I suspect that this year, things might be at least a little different. Some might actually switch parties, while other voters the Dems rely on might just stay home and not vote in big enough numbers to make a difference. Partly because Biden has been such a HORRENDOUS President, and partly because it hasn’t been so long since Trump's term (good jobs, rising wages, low inflation, secure borders, no wars) that people can make an A-B comparison (this is why they have to personally demonize Trump so hard and keep people from hearing what he has to say.) But mostly because of the illegal immigrant invasion Biden has set off.

When it was just the border states’ problem, it was easy for blue state voters to ignore. But the brilliant plan by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to bus just a fraction of the problem northward to “sanctuary cities” that claimed they welcomed them has created a black swan disruption event. Pious liberal city leaders are getting a taste of their own medicine, and it’s bitter stuff, indeed. Residents of these cities are sick of seeing their kids’ schools, parks and recreation facilities taken over by illegal aliens and their city services bankrupted. All while the Democrats they elected ignore their constituents and lavish the invaders with free food, debit cards and hotel rooms (that they trash.) Illegals can even beat up cops and get released on zero bail while flashing an obscene hand gesture to America.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/02/07/illegal-aliens-arrested-n2169763

Here are just a couple of examples of how it’s better to be an illegal immigrant in a blue state than a taxpaying citizen:

New York’s Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul is relaxing requirements and loosening red tape to make it easier to get a state government job. That sounds good, except that it’s to make it easier for illegal immigrants to get government jobs instead of American workers.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2024/02/07/dem-gov-hochul-relaxes-requirements-for-illegals-to-get-government-jobs-n2634877

And in today’s MUST-READ, Howie Carr of the Boston Herald talked to people familiar with the illegal aliens enjoying free stays in local hotels and motels. These “undocumented Democrats,” as he calls them, have learned very quickly that in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, everything will be provided to them for free and only suckers work for a living. The biggest joke is calling them “migrants” because why would they ever migrate anywhere else?

https://www.bostonherald.com/2024/02/07/howie-carr-migrant-motels-morph-into-extended-stay/?

That’s why I think this might be different from previous elections. A struggling single mom working two jobs to pay the bills and who normally votes Democrat might just look at all of this and think, “I’m voting for Trump. No matter what they say, he’s GOT to be better than this.”

The Nevada Republican caucuses

February 8, 2024

Mike Huckabee

The Nevada Republican caucuses take place today. Because of a complicated series of events, the caucuses will award all the state's delegates while Tuesday’s primary election was purely symbolic. Trump is expected to win the caucuses in a landslide. 

Nikki Haley chose to run in the primary because she claimed that the caucuses were rigged for Trump. But after losing by more than 2-1 to “None of These Candidates,” Haley is now complaining that the primary was rigged, too, and was a “scam.” Not a good look. I wonder if she’ll say the same thing if polls are correct and she loses her home state of South Carolina.

https://www.westernjournal.com/nikki-haley-fumes-nevada-primary-loss-says-trump-rigged-election/

Why are Haley and her supporters so adamant that Trump shouldn’t be President again? Well, he claimed that the 2020 election was rigged! Not to knock them specifically; all the Democrats who are trying to prosecute and disqualify Trump also have a history of claiming elections they lost were rigged. One of my writers says he remembers his late father telling him 30 years ago that “According to the Democrats, none of them ever lost a ‘fair’ election.”

Some of us who don’t smoke crack like Hunter Biden can still recall 2016, when the same Hollywood liberals who want Trump imprisoned for trying to overturn an election made a video urging his electors to overturn the election by betraying their voters and choosing Hillary instead. Oddly enough, none of them faced prosecution (that is, if you don’t count sex crimes.) Remember Hillary herself declaring Trump to be an “illegitimate President”?

And here’s a leftist group that’s already attempting to convince us that it will somehow be a “coup” if Trump wins the next election by getting the most votes at the ballot box.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/02/08/why-is-the-left-suddenly-talking-about-a-coup-at-the-ballot-box/

Claiming that an election you lost was rigged is hardly new. The term “sour grapes” dates back to the fables of Aesop, who died in 564 B.C. There are only two proper responses to losing an election: Concede graciously and move on, or provide evidence that it was rigged. And the proper response to the latter is to look at the evidence objectively. 

Frankly, I’m not seeing a lot of open-minded objectivity, or even self-awareness, among the multitudes of election deniers who want to pillory Trump for being an election denier.

Dean Phillips challenges Joe Biden

January 25, 2024

Mike Huckabee

Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips, the one Democrat who dared to challenge Biden for the Presidency (and pulled over 20% of the vote in the New Hampshire primary), is running against him from the left on some issues and the right on others. And in one case, he’s just challenging Biden from the standpoint of common sense and basic human decency.

https://www.westernjournal.com/dem-congressman-calls-party-completely-delusional-live-cnn-experienced-trump-rally/

Having zero positive accomplishments to run on, Biden has made his entire reelection campaign about demonizing Trump and his supporters, painting about 72 million Trump voters as racist, extremist, terrorist, fascist enemies of “democracy.” But Phillips, I’m sure, shocked Biden’s sycophants on CNN by telling them, “My party is completely delusional right now.”

Phillips did something that none of Trump’s critics will do: he actually attended a Trump rally and met some MAGA voters.

Phillips said, “I saw the line of people waiting in the cold for hours. And I thought, ‘What the heck?'” He watched Trump greet about 50 people in line, “every single one of them thoughtful, hospitable, friendly — all of them so frustrated that they feel nobody’s listening to them but Donald Trump.” As for the “white nationalist” smear, he said it was a diverse crowd, including people who’d never been to a Trump event before.

Phillips believes his party would do a lot better if it listened to the concerns of working Americans and showed them some respect instead of demonizing them. But good luck with that. They not only won’t attend a Trump rally, their housepet media outlets won’t even air his speeches. They really think that if they cover their eyes and ears (sadly, they never cover their mouths), they can make reality go away. It’s a basic tenet of leftism. They’ve now reached the “hermetically sealed echo chamber” stage. 

I hope that in November, Trump’s victory will leave them as shocked and traumatized as it did in 2016, when they also never saw it coming because they absolutely refused to look.

Aftermath

January 17, 2024

Mike Huckabee

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s historic record victory in the Iowa Caucuses (add another stat: he won 98 of 99 counties, losing the 99th by only one vote), the DeSantis and Haley campaigns are trudging on to New Hampshire, but they’re reminding me more and more of the movie, “Dead Man Walking.” Vivek Ramaswamy already dropped out and endorsed Trump. And as of Tuesday, Asa Hutchinson is officially out of the race. 

Ironically, one of the other big stories out of Iowa is the huge meltdown by media and Hollywood leftists over Trump’s win, and the shameful and hypocritical refusal to air his victory speech by fake news purveyors CNN and MSNBC. I guess they think they can spend from now until November claiming they’re protecting “the truth” by suppressing one of the two major candidates, the same way they suppressed the truth about Hunter’s laptop in 2020. Between the media refusing to air anything Trump says and playing along with the White House hiding Joe Biden in the basement, this could be the quietest presidential campaign in history!

Personally, I thought Trump gave an excellent speech. It was gracious, unifying and forward-looking. In fact, as I explained to Sean Hannity last night on Fox News, I believe that’s the real reason these DNC flunkies like Rachel Maddow and Jake Tapper are terrified of letting their viewers hear Trump: They’re not scared of their viewers being swayed by a crazy, ranting, racist, Nazi dictator. They’re scared to death that they’ll realize he’s nothing like that and they’ve been bamboozled.

https://www.foxnews.com/video/6345019096112

They’re afraid Americans will see Trump is a lot like them: he loves America, he likes working people and people of faith that they disdain and look down on, and he wants to fix the endless messes Biden and his ilk have created and “Make America Great Again.”

I also think the reason the media and the Democrats keep saying “Maga” as if it’s an obscene word instead of using the phrase it stands for is that it’s hard to scare people by telling them someone is too extreme about wanting to make America great again. Especially when we all now know that the alternative is to vote for Biden and the Democrats, the MASA extremists: “Make America Suck Already.”

Having dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy called on DeSantis and Haley to do the same. He said that at this point, they would “do this country and this party a service by stepping aside to make sure that we’re focused on not only nominating Donald Trump but getting this country back and reviving those founding revolutionary ideals."

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/vivek-ramaswamy-urges-desantis-haley-drop-race

He added, "Especially Ron DeSantis, of the two of them, will have an important role to play in the future of this country and leading this nation. I believe that." I’ll let you interpret that how you will.

Photo credit: Fox News

Trump Wins Iowa

January 17, 2024

Mike Huckabee

As expected, Donald Trump won a record victory in the Iowa Caucuses. He took 51% of the vote, smashing George Bush’s previous record of 41%. And his 29.8% margin of victory over second placer Ron DeSantis obliterated Bob Dole’s record winning margin of 12.8%. Nikki Haley came in third at 19.1% (she declared that this is now a “two-person race,” but it’s unclear who that second person is that she's referring to.) Vivek Ramaswamy was fourth with 7.7%, and as I predicted, he started the post-Iowa field-thinning by dropping out and endorsing Trump.

https://www.westernjournal.com/ap-republican-caucuses-live-updates-trump-wins-iowas-leadoff-voting-contest/

Interestingly, Texas pastor and little-known candidate Ryan Binkley won 774 votes for 0.7%. That's four times more support than the 191 votes and 0.2% taken by Asa Hutchinson.

There was some controversy early on that drew complaints from the DeSantis campaign after the AP called the race for Trump with less than 1% of the vote in and people still caucusing. They’re right to complain about that, but it didn’t seem to make much difference in the long run.

DeSantis and Haley say they’re moving on to New Hampshire and South Carolina, although Haley announced that she won’t participate in any more GOP debates.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2024/01/16/haley-wont-participate-in-next-debates-n2633686

But Newt Gingrich says it’s already time to stick a fork in it. He told Fox News that despite all the lawfare, slander and censorship thrown at Trump, "He's the nominee. Get over it – He is the nominee. He's going to win the nomination. The news media doesn't want to say that because they need to somehow hype ‘please watch us while we go through this charade’."

He said there is no viable path for a second-place candidate to come from behind and win: "[Y]ou get to be the leading ‘irrelevant’ or the second ‘irrelevant’ or the third ‘irrelevant’, but nobody is going to be number two because he is going to dominate totally if you look at the country at-large."

https://www.foxnews.com/media/trump-stuns-pundits-defying-political-gravity-iowa-win-nominee-get-over-it

Despite claims that Trump will alienate women voters, an AP poll found that he actually got more support from GOP women in Iowa (54%) than from men (53%.) One red flag that the campaign will need to address is that his support was much higher among rural women than suburban women (59% to 40%), who are an important factor in the November vote. He’ll need to work hard to dispel the phony Boogey-man image that the Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) have created, and convince suburban women that it’s not in their best interests to keep voting for high crime, open borders, endless wars, eroded Constitutional rights and a terrible economy.

The media reacted to Trump’s crushing victory exactly the way you’d expect: by having a full-scale tantrum worthy of a two-year-old in the Walmart candy aisle.

Trump’s victory speech was actually rather moderate and mature. He called for unity, praised his rivals for their efforts, and talked about how he planned to begin making America great again by ending the rising threats abroad, fixing the economy and rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. He even said he wasn’t going to go too hard on Joe Biden, although he then referred to him as the worst President in history. But by Trump’s standards (and considering the evidence), I’d say that IS going easy on him.

https://redstate.com/smoosieq/2024/01/15/donald-trump-addresses-supporters-following-iowa-caucus-win-n2168778

But if you were trying to watch the speech on CNN or MSNBC (and why would anyone do that?), you couldn’t, because they cut away from it. Instead, they filled the time with their far-left talking heads ranting against Trump and his supporters. Like Joy Reid complaining that there are too many white Christians in Iowa. Or CNN’s Jake Tapper, who claimed that Iowans “believed the lie” (what, that CNN is a news channel?) and that Trump was spouting “anti-immigrant rhetoric” when he said he would start deporting the millions of illegal aliens Biden has allowed to cross our open border.

This is a good example of how liberals only win arguments by changing the definitions of words. An illegal alien is not an “immigrant.” Immigrants respect America’s laws and follow the system to become US citizens, and are among our best and most patriotic citizens. Literally anybody can cross an open border illegally, which is the problem. By the way, polls show that a majority of Americans agree with those Trump policies they’re demonizing, including securing the border and deporting illegal aliens.

Even more hilariously, MSNBC’s tiny viewing pool was treated to Rachel Maddow piously intoning about how they made the painful decision not to show Trump’s speech because they’re so devoted to airing the truth. She then went into a weird diatribe about how Trump is a dangerous fascist but his supporters are even worse. You might recall that fascism is a political doctrine in which the government dictates which views are allowed to be expressed. You might also recall Ms. Maddow as the professional fabulist who misled her viewers for years, feeding them ever-wilder “Russian collusion” conspiracy theories that all turned out to be horse manure.

So why is this lying hypocrite still employed by MSNBC? I like my writers, but if they’d tainted my reputation by pushing a lot of patent rubbish for two years, I would have fired them. Whenever I see Maddow now, it’s like seeing a flashing neon sign reminding me not to believe a word I hear on MSNBC.

As laughable as these histrionics are, they do offer a serious lesson in how this campaign is going to play out, and it shows that Trump and the GOP will have to be clever and diligent in cutting through the attempts to silence and censor their message. These people are terrified, but not that Trump will be a fascist dictator (he was already President for four years, and I notice none of them ended up in a gulag.)

They’re terrified that if Americans see Trump unfiltered by them, it will undo three years’ worth of their efforts at creating a straw man and standing between him and the public to keep people from seeing who he really is: a man who was once the most popular celebrity on NBC before he announced for President as a Republican, and overnight, magically transformed into a racist, Nazi monster. They’ll also use the “We can’t let Hitler speak!” dodge as an excuse for Biden not to “lower himself” to debate Trump, as if he possibly could.

To quote Newt Gingrich: “Get over it!”

To save you (and me) the annoyance of having to watch this bilge, Nick Arama at Redstate.com did it for us and recapped it, and he has my eternal gratitude. He also makes the correct observation that despite all the claims that the Republicans are “extremists,” there are only a handful of extremists on the fringe of the rightwing, while they are the animating force of the modern Democratic Party.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/01/16/cnn-and-msnbc-flip-their-lids-after-trump-wins-censor-trumps-victory-speech-n2168783

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The Iowa Caucuses

January 15, 2024

Mike Huckabee

 We are just hours away from the Iowa Caucuses which will be the first real test of the 2024 Presidential Election.  Having won the caucuses in 2008, I do understand some things about them and their importance.  You will hear some of the know-it-all news commentators talk about how irrelevant the caucuses are and how that the winner of the caucuses don’t often end up being the nominee.  That may be, but the Iowa caucuses do a couple of things that the know-it-alls forget:  First, it’s not that the caucuses always pick the winner.  It’s that the caucuses eliminate some of the candidates that the media had picked to be the winners.  It’s not as much about winning them as it is about not LOSING.  In 2008, my victory there was the undoing of Mitt Romney, Rudy Guiliani, and Fred Thompson.  In 2012, when Rick Santorum had a surprise victory, it was the beginning of the end for Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, and Michelle Bachman.  In 2016, it was the night that put Ted Cruz and Donald Trump in virtually a 2 man race and forecast the demise of Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Rand Paul, and me.

So yes, it will be important to see who comes out of Iowa with momentum, but the real story will be who crashes against the rocks and will never seriously sail again.  Perhaps some will limp forward to New Hampshire or South Carolina, but the race will become populated with fewer candidates soon after Iowa.

And the caucuses are not like any election process.  There is no early voting.  No machine tabulations.  No late night boxes suddenly discovered.  On what is often one of the coldest nights of the winter, people have to leave their homes and assemble in public places like a school, church, city hall, community center, or gymnasium.  Once there, candidates or their representatives make final pitches for the votes.  People are asked to physically indicate who they support by going to a section of the facility.  They will vote on a ballot, but the numbers are known and reported immediately.  There is none of the drama of waiting 2 weeks after the election to determine who won.

And because the first in the nation primary in New Hampshire is just a week and a day later, most of the candidates who believe they still have a shot will get on airplanes that very night and arrive in New Hampshire in the early morning hours of the next day.  In 2008, when I won the caucuses, we enjoyed a wild celebration of our supporters by shocking the world with the victory and then around midnight boarded a chartered plane filled with our campaign workers, press (many of whom hadn’t bothered to pay attention to me before) and supporters like Chuck Norris and his wife who campaigned with me for several months in the race.  People asked me where Chuck sat on the plane and I told them, “Wherever he wanted to.”  We arrived in New Hampshire around 4am, went to a hotel to freshen up, and then I started nonstop back to back press interviews with media from all over the world that lasted for almost 4 straight uninterrupted hours.  There is no “day off” or resting.  If you are still in the hunt, you continue the grueling pace of a campaign.  Our team went months without eating a meal at a table with silverware or ordering from menus.  We ate every meal from a paper sack in a car or bus while traveling to the next event.  The best way to describe a campaign is to live off cold pizza and hot Cokes.  If there is glamour in it, most of us never experienced it.

But this insane process is how we start the process to pick the leader of the free world.  It’s messy, at times disgusting, and beyond exhausting for most of us who engage in it.  But it’s better than having a gunfight or a military coup d’état to pick a President.

Hey, if you’re a political junkie, or even if you’re not, pay attention to the events of the next 10 days.  You might not yet know who will be President, but you will probably know some folks who most certainly will NOT be President.  And that’s the part of this that the know-it-alls in the media mob never really understand.

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