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Trump Picks Matt Gaetz for Attorney General
Donald Trump wants a pliant attorney general who will follow his orders, with no regard for the law or the Constitution. He has found one in Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL). This might end up being Trump's most controversial nomination, not even considering the years the DoJ spent going after Gaetz for transporting underage girls across state lines for sex, which is a felony. (In the end, the DoJ did not charge Gaetz.)
If Trump really intends to follow through on having the DoJ indict his enemies, he would need an AG to do this, and the pool of potential AGs willing to indict people on totally bogus charges is very small. Even people like Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr would draw the line at that.
Gaetz has a J.D. from William & Mary Law School and practiced law in Florida before being elected to the Florida state House. He ran for the U.S. House in 2016 in FL-01, which has a PVI of R+22. Once he won the primary, the rest was easy.
In 2020, Gaetz was deeply involved in the events of Jan. 6. He is an election denier and voted to overturn Trump's defeat. He also tried to pressure Mike Pence into throwing out electoral votes of states that voted for Joe Biden. Trump likes to shake things up and having an AG who most likely transported minors over state lines for sex and tried to overturn an election certainly breaks with precedent.
Gaetz is one of the most polarizing members of Congress. He and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) make a great team, but Gaetz leaves even Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) in the dust. He is very Trumpy and a real bombthrower.
Gaetz' confirmation is by no means assured. A number of senators were shocked to hear the nomination. Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) has expressed concern. In this case, that almost certainly means a "no" vote. When Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) was asked about Gaetz, he dodged the question. He might also be a "no" vote. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) rolled his eyes when asked about Gaetz. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) declined to comment. When you've lost Tom Cotton, you have lost. The confirmation hearing will be extremely angry and fraught. Gaetz might well go down, which would be a huge embarrassment to Trump. Of course, Trump should have checked this out with Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and other friendly senators to get an idea in advance how the senators would react, but that's not his way.
Interestingly, Gaetz has already resigned his seat in the House. This is very unusual. Typically, a nominee keeps their current job as an insurance policy until they've been approved for the new job. That should hold doubly true for someone who might very well fail to be confirmed. Was the ethics investigation into Gaetz' behavior about to go public with something damning? Does he want to run for governor, unencumbered, but without his opponents saying he quit on his constituents for no reason? Something else? Only Matt Gaetz knows for sure. (V)
Trump Picks Tulsi Gabbard for DNI
While the choice of John Ratcliffe to lead the CIA was not controversial, the choice of his boss, the Director of National Intelligence, most definitely is. Donald Trump has picked former representative Tulsi Gabbard for that position. She would oversee 18 spy agencies. She would also prepare the President's Daily Brief, but that barely matters, since Trump never read them as president. He did ask the DNI to come over a few times a week and explain things in person, preferably with pictures.
Gabbard, an Army National Guard veteran, ran for president as a so-called Democrat in 2020, but acted more like a Republican than a Democrat. She got nowhere. In this cycle, she left the Democratic Party, became a Republican, and endorsed Trump. Her view on foreign policy is that America should pull up the drawbridge and withdraw from the world. If she fires all the intelligence agents and stops collecting information, then when a crisis happens somewhere, the U.S. will be totally unprepared for it. She also has a habit of parroting the Kremlin line on world affairs, including blaming Joe Biden for Vladimir Putin invading Ukraine. She also appears to have a friendly relationship with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is guilty of countless human rights violations.
Her confirmation may be slightly easier than Gaetz' but not much. This will be a real test for the Senate. (V)
Thune Will Be Senate Majority Leader
Yesterday, the Senate Republican Conference held their leadership vote and decided that Sen. John Thune (R-SD), who is a relative spring chicken at 63, will take over from the 82-year-old Mitch McConnell in January. As a bonus, his first name really is "John" (McConnell's first name is actually "Addison"). And no one will confuse the upbeat Thune with a turtle.
Thune beat Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL)—who is despised by senators of both parties for being fake and pretending to love Trump (when, in fact, he loves only himself)—and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who is well liked in his conference but is a decade older than Thune. Donald Trump didn't endorse anyone in the race, but his surrogates were openly for Scott. The problem is that the election is by secret ballot. After Scott was eliminated in the first round of voting, Thune won in the second round 29-24. Yes, they let senators-elect vote.
Thune is an even-tempered conventional politician who is well liked by senators from both parties. Even though he has a decent majority, probably 53-47 although the Pennsylvania seat is not 100% certain, he does not have an easy job. The main problem will be when Trump wants him to do something that he knows is fundamentally illegal, against Senate rules, or bad for the country. Then what? As an early example, Presidents need Senate confirmation for about 4,000 positions. Trump wants to skip all that and just install them by fiat. But this would completely gut one of the Senate's key powers. Will Thune, an institutionalist, be willing to turn the Senate into a rubber stamp for a president he doesn't really like very much?
Thune has been in the Senate since 2004, when he defeated then-Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) after arguing that Daschle had forgotten his South Dakota roots and become part of DCworld. In 2028, will Thune go down to a Democrat who will argue that Thune has forgotten his South Dakota roots? Probably not. South Dakota used to be a prairie populist state, but it has become very Trumpy in the past decade.
Trump wants to get going quickly on Jan. 20, so Thune will not have much time to find his footing. McConnell is not retiring from the Senate, just from the leadership, so if Thune needs advice, McConnell will be there to provide it for the next 2 years. McConnell is expected to retire in 2026 and Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY) might run for the seat. On the other hand, Beshear may decide to skip the Senate and run for president in 2028 instead. Or maybe both. Demonstrating once again that he can win in red states would be a huge plus point for Beshear in 2028. He could claim to be the second coming of Bill Clinton—a southern governor who can win red states.
Thune will be jumping into the hot seat immediately, with the confirmation hearings of Matt Gaetz and Tulsi Gabbard. He knows very well that neither one is even vaguely qualified for the position for which they have been nominated. He also doesn't want to pick a fight with Donald Trump on Day 1 and also doesn't want to neuter the Senate on Day 1. By Jan. 21, he will probably be sorry he won the election as leader. (V)
The Misgivings about Hegseth Are Getting Louder
Last year's "Word of the Year" was "authentic". If we had to pick the word of the year for this year, we'd go with "weird." Among other things, having a campaign theme be about Haitians eating cats and dogs in Ohio was a good start on the weirdness. Donald Trump nominating a Fox News host as Secretary of Defense because Trump thinks he looks like a Secretary of Defense certainly carries the ball forward. To say that this pick came out of left field might qualify as Understatement of the Year, if Merriam-Webster had such a category. The reaction of many officials is, roughly: We are not amused.
Politico's headline for its story about Secretary-nominate Pete Hegseth is "Who the f--k is this guy?" The subhead is: "'Hegseth is undoubtedly the least qualified nominee for SecDef in American history,' one veterans' advocate said." The position is certainly one of the top four cabinet posts, along with Secretary of State, Secretary of the Treasury, and Attorney General, and is normally held by someone with serious military or defense experience. The most recent five secretaries of defense who were confirmed by the Senate (i.e., excluding acting secretaries) are:
| Secretary | Appointed by | Date started | Background |
| Lloyd Austin | Joe Biden | Jan. 22, 2021 | Four-star Army general |
| Mark Esper | Donald Trump | July 23, 2019 | West Point grad; fought with the "Screaming Eagles" in Gulf War; Secretary of the Army |
| Jim Mattis | Donald Trump | July 20, 2017 | Four-star Marine Corps general |
| Ash Carter | Barack Obama | Feb. 17, 2015 | Prof. of Int'l affairs at Harvard; Ass't. Secretary of Defense; Undersecretary of Defense |
| Chuck Hagel | Barack Obama | Feb. 27, 2013 | Veteran; Businessman; Two-term senator on Foreign Relations and Intel. committees |
Hegseth's background is that he was in the Minnesota National Guard, where he was a platoon leader at Guantanamo Bay, and later in Iraq and Afghanistan. He retired as a captain. He then led a conservative advocacy group funded by the Koch brothers before running for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota, losing, and getting a Fox News gig as a consolation prize.
Many people in the defense world are stunned by the pick and believe he was chosen largely due to his political views, which include getting rid of D.E.I. programs in the military, getting women out of combat roles in the armed forces, and pardoning soldiers accused of war crimes. Hegseth recently said that while white men and minority men can perform equally, the same isn't true of women. After all, it takes great physical strength to fly an attack drone, pilot an F-16, or command a destroyer.
Hegseth also foresees a purge at the Pentagon. He recently said: "First of all, you've got to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Any general that was involved, any general, admiral, whatever, that was involved in any of the D.E.I./woke s**t has got to go."
The ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, Adam Smith (D-WA), said of Hegseth: "There is reason for concern that this is not a person who is a serious enough policymaker, serious enough policy implementer, to do a successful job." One senior military officer, who spoke on background, said Hegseth's selection "is raising concerns about whether he has the practical experience to manage a large department with an enormous budget." The DoD has an annual budget of over $800 billion, 1.3 million active-duty troops, and another 1.4 million in the National Guard, Reserves, and civilian employees. Hegseth has never ever even run a lemonade stand. When Trump picked Rex Tillerson as secretary of state last time, there was some grumbling, but at least Tillerson had run ExxonMobil, a massive worldwide corporation with operations in 60 countries, and he personally knew the leader of every country in the world that had substantial oil in the ground. Hegseth pales in comparison to Tillerson and also to all the previously confirmed secretaries of defense.
Of course, what Trump values most is loyalty. What he does not want is anything resembling the last days of the Richard Nixon administration, when then-Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger (who had previously served on the Atomic Energy Commission and as Director of the CIA) told top Pentagon brass that if Nixon wanted to launch nuclear missiles, they should ignore the order and call him. Trump wants someone who will follow his orders no matter what they are, legal or not.
Veterans' groups are already starting to lobby to defeat Hegseth's confirmation. So are lobbyists. It is virtually certain that no Democratic senator will vote to confirm him, so it would take four Republican senators to torpedo his confirmation. Many senators actually care about the military and might refuse to confirm him. While seven members of the new Senate are veterans, the only Republican among them is Sen.-elect Tim Sheehy (R-MT). Hegseth's confirmation hearing should be interesting, to say the least. The confirmation hearings of Gaetz, Gabbard, and Hegseth will be a three-ring circus. (V)
Which Way Will the Democrats Go?
The Democrats are at a crossroads now. They don't have a clear leader or a clear direction, and different groups are trying to pull them in opposite directions. One advantage of losing all seven swing states, the popular vote for president, their former base, and control of the Senate (and probably the House) is that they can't pin their loss on the peculiarities of the Electoral College (as they did in 2016). If they want to ever take over again, they are going to have to do some serious thinking.
To start with, it is not unheard of for a party that takes a shellacking to come back next time. Here are the electoral college maps for 1964 and 1968:
In 1964, Lyndon Johnson crushed Barry Goldwater and Republicans despaired of ever winning a presidential election again. But in 1968, they reached into the dustbin of history, pulled out Richard Nixon, dusted him off, and won against Johnson's veep, Hubert Humphrey.
More recently, in 1988, George H.W. Bush ran for "Ronald Reagan's third term" and won easily. Then his reelection in 1992 against a womanizing small-state governor nobody had ever heard of until the primaries should have been a slam dunk. It wasn't. Bill Clinton won that one. Here are the maps.
Jonathan Martin, Politico's long-time politics bureau chief, makes the case that the Democrats, who used to be the party of the working man, have been taken over by college-educated voters whose concerns are future-oriented, including climate change, D.E.I., abortion, and voting rights. In contrast, Republican voters now are largely working-class people who are having to decide whether to pay the rent or buy medicine their kids need. Martin makes the case that the majority of voters are still white working-class people and they have come to believe that the Democrats have moved so far left that the blue team doesn't care about their pocketbook issues. In reality, they sort of do, but their care is drowned out by the (mostly Republican-generated) noise about transgender surgeries and pronoun usage.
In contrast, the Republicans don't care at all about working-class people, but at least none of them spew views that many traditional people find absolutely abhorrent. Former senator Henry Clay once famously said: "I'd rather be right than be president." He was right, but he was never president (despite trying four times). Many Democrats know in their hearts that they are right. Unfortunately, becoming president often requires supporting views they know are "wrong" (or at least hiding the views that are "right") because that's what the voters want.
Martin writes: "So the more Trump targeted vulnerable constituencies, the more Democrats sounded like campus faculty members attempting to placate radicalized students for whom identity is central." Put in somewhat different terms, many Democrats are convinced that the road to success is winning various identity groups: Black voters, Latinos, women, etc. That may not be true anymore. Republicans don't play that game. Their pitch is: "We will help YOU personally," as in "We will protect YOU from criminals and we will give YOU a tax cut." Democrats focus on identity groups; Republicans focus on individuals. The identity group thingie is not working so well anymore because many group members don't identify primarily with "their" group anymore (e.g., young Black men voting for Trump).
Martin's suggestion to the Democrats is to drop all the left-wing stuff, pronouns and all. Some Democrats back him up. Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel agrees with this view. He said: "Identity politics did not work electorally and it failed miserably strategically." Sen.-elect Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), a Latino himself, has denounced the use of "Latinx" as not English and not Spanish. Gov. Janet Mills (D-ME) said: "We've got to talk about pocketbook issues and get over the identity politics—that's in the past, I think—and get rid of the buzzwords."
However, other Democrats want to move further to the left. They note that Kamala Harris campaigned as a centrist and lost, so centrism doesn't work. They want to campaign on economic populism. They want a positive vision of what Democrats can do for people and reject Trump's fear-based campaign. They want to raise the minimum wage and focus on reducing the costs of gas, food, and housing. Of course, reducing the cost of gas will encourage more driving, and those Democrats who care mostly about climate change don't want more driving, at least not with gasoline-powered cars.
The cheerleader for these people is Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), one of the most popular politicians in the country. He says that the Democrats now care more about corporations and big banks than about ordinary working folks. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) is on the same page as Sanders: "The left has never fully grappled with the wreckage of 50 years of neoliberalism, which has left legions of Americans adrift as local places are hollowed out, rapacious profit seeking cannibalizes the common good, and unchecked new technology separates and isolates us." Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, has called for rebuilding the entire party from scratch.
This debate is going to rage within the Democratic Party for months, maybe years, as it always does when a party gets its ears pinned back. Maybe some currently unknown but enormously charismatic person will emerge and lead them out of the wilderness in 2026 and 2028. (V)
Why Did Latinos Vote for Trump?
Very crudely: Class trumps race. The problem of Latinos deserting the Democrats can be seen clearly in Starr County, on the Rio Grande in South Texas. It is 97% Latino. It was Democratic for a century. In 2012, Barack Obama won it with 86% of the vote. In 2016, Hillary Clinton got 79%. In 2020, Joe Biden got 53%. Although it shouldn't have been, it was a big shock when Donald Trump won 58% of the vote on Election Day this year. Trump also gained with Latinos all over the country. What's going on here?
For decades, Democrats talked about immigration and how racist Republicans are. They still are, but younger Latinos, born in the U.S., don't identify primarily as Latino. They see themselves as working-class and see the same problems as white working-class people. The Democrats' views on immigrants (good) don't work the old magic anymore. Instead, they are attracted to the Republicans' views on immigrants (bad) because they see new immigrants as competitors for the work they are trying to get. Unless the Democrats can reverse this trend, they will be the minority party for a while.
Maybe the Democrats did spend too much time chasing suburban women, but it wouldn't be impossible to return to their own roots and pay more attention to issues like jobs and the minimum wage. This would help with both working-class whites, but also Latinos, 80% of whom are working class. Many do manual labor. Climate change and pronouns don't do it for them. They believe that Democrats are elites out of touch with the concerns of real people. To a considerable extent, that is probably true.
Another problem is overpromising. Barack Obama promised a path to citizenship for the Dreamers, but the votes in Congress weren't there and he couldn't do it. Many Latinos do not understand that presidents can't do much on their own and getting anything the least bit controversial through Congress is extremely difficult. But to them, Obama made a promise and didn't deliver. Time to try the other side.
Sen.-elect Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) just won in a state in which 25% of the voters are Latino. He has some thoughts on why so many Latino men voted for Trump and what the Democrats need to do to get them back. As famed philosopher Woody Allen said, 90% of success is just showing up. Democrats didn't show up. They were too busy wooing college-educated suburban women. Gallego said Democrats have to go where the Latino men are. He hosted rodeos, boxing-match watch parties, and carne asada cookouts. He visited construction sites. He showed up. He also didn't fall into the trap that Latinos want open borders. His first Spanish-language TV ad was about border security. He wanted to beef it up. Many Latinos like that.
Gallego grew up in a family headed by a single mother struggling to feed her kids. He knows what that is like and how humiliating it is for Latino men not to be able to provide for their families. They can't eat pronouns. He says the way to get Latinos back is to address their economic concerns: jobs and wages. Es la economía, estúpido. (V)
Voters Love Trump More Than They Love Republicans
While Donald Trump won all seven swing states, mostly by fairly small margins, his coat didn't have much of a tail. Yes, Republicans flipped Senate seats in Montana, Ohio and West Virginia, but these are deep-red states and it was inevitable that both senators would eventually be Republicans. What is surprising is how long the Democrats held out there in hostile territory.
Yet despite Trump's wins in all the swing states, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona are sending Democrats to the Senate. The only swing state where a Republican was probably elected to Senate is Pennsylvania, and it is so close there that the race hasn't been called yet. Four states splitting their presidential and Senate tickets is the most since 2012.
The message here is that despite Trump's wins in the seven swing states, they are still very much purple swing states, and there is certainly no guarantee a different Republican could win them next time, or even that Republicans will do well in the next round of gubernatorial or senatorial races. Trump personally won those states, the Republican party did not. He outperformed the Republican Senate candidates in every swing state. This confirms what we have seen before because this is the fourth straight cycle in which Republicans have struggled in Senate races in purple states.
In 2026, Trump will not be on the ballot and, historically, the first midterm is tough for a president, in no small part because every presidential candidate overpromises and underdelivers and part of his base is disappointed and doesn't show up. The 2026 Senate map is favorable to the Republicans but the entire House is up. In 1994, Bill Clinton's first midterm, the results were disastrous for the Democrats and again in 2010, Barack Obama's first midterm. If Trump fails to deliver on his many promises, or if he succeeds in imposing heavy tariffs and that ruins the economy, Republicans are likely to pay the price.
One thing the Republicans learned from previous losses is that candidate quality matters. Consequently, they actively denounced candidates who couldn't win a general election and boosted those who could. They did it very effectively, for example, keeping Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-MT) from running in Montana and Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke from running in Wisconsin, although the guy who did win the primary in the latter, Eric Hovde, lost anyway.
The vote totals in some of the states are interesting. The Democratic Senate candidates in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada ran even with Kamala Harris, but their Republican opponents ran tens of thousands of votes behind Trump. That means that many people marked the ballot for Trump and then went home. These are clearly not dyed-in-the-wool Republicans. In Arizona, Ruben Gallego ran 90,000 votes ahead of Harris and Kari Lake ran 165,000 votes behind Donald Trump. (V)
The Polls Were Accurate, But Biased
Yesterday, we had an item about the polls and how well they did. Siena College, the #1 rated pollster on 538, nailed Kamala Harris' vote share very accurately in the swing states, but underestimated Donald Trump's vote share by about 3.5%. How did other pollsters do? Let's look.
At FiveThirtyEight, they looked at two things: statistical error and statistical bias. The error is how far off the polls were and bias is whether the errors were usually in the same direction. They also looked at different ways of getting respondents. It turns out that the most accurate polls ran ads on web pages and cell phone apps, giving people a link to click on. Theoretically, letting people self-select being a respondent is terrible, but imbalances in the sample were corrected mathematically and the results were quite good, with an average error of 1.4 points. Live phone polls and opt-in online panels were quite poor, with errors of 3.3 points and 3.6 points respectively.
Here are the results of polls during the final 3 weeks of the campaigns for elections from 2000 to 2024:
In 2024, the statistical error (how far off the polls were) was better than in previous years, but the poll results were better for the Democrat than the actual results. The same thing was true in 2020 and 2016. This could be due to "shy" Trump voters or undecided voters breaking for Trump very late in the campaign. This is a real phenomenon. (V) once couldn't make up his mind in a primary until he had the ballot in his hand, and even then he couldn't decide for 5 minutes. In any event, 538's result agrees with ours: the polls were fairly accurate but had a noticeable bias for Harris. Ideally, the errors would be random in both directions, but that wasn't the case in either our study or theirs.
Another site,
Split Ticket,
did a similar analysis. Here are the results:
The results here are similar to ours and FiveThirtyEight's except the difference column is done the other way, so Rep +1.0 means Trump did better than the poll by 1 point, which is the same as the poll overestimating Harris. So basically, all three studies are the same: the polls were not far off but they systematically underestimated Trump by a couple of points. (V)
Durbin: Replacing Sotomayor Is Not Realistic
Various people, ourselves included, have thrown out the idea of Justice Sonia Sotomayor resigning from the Supreme Court so she can be replaced before Jan. 3. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) has said: "Whoever makes those calls [for a retirement] can't count." He didn't mean "can't count votes." He meant "can't count days."
The problem is that the lame-duck session of the Senate has to deal with the budget and defense authorization bills, so there isn't enough time left for a lot of other business. The Democrats are planning to ram through a number of judges, but Republicans won't go to the mattresses to delay these as they would for a Supreme Court nomination. If Sotomayor were to resign now, it is possible that the Democrats wouldn't be able to get her replacement through before Jan. 3, allowing Donald Trump to nominate someone else that the new Republican Senate would quickly confirm. Basically, it is too late.
Oh, and one minor detail: Sotomayor has said she has no intention of resigning, just as Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn't. If she wanted to resign, she could have done it in June, but she likes her job and plans on living forever. (V)
What Will DeSantis Do If Rubio Becomes SoS?
Donald Trump has now officially nominated Sen. Mario Rubio (R-FL) as secretary of state. We are slightly surprised that Rubio is interested. He is known to be fairly lazy and flying around the world constantly and trying to convince various belligerents to make peace is hard work. Senators have an easy life. They can work hard writing bills and dealing with constituent problems, but they don't have to if they don't want to. Rubio is one of the "cruise control" types.
In any event, Rubio will be confirmed easily. He is an easy-going guy and doesn't have any enemies in the Senate. Every Republican and many Democrats will vote for him. The big question now is what happens to his Senate seat. Whoever Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) picks will have to stand for a special election in 2026.
Various names have been floated. Depending on who DeSantis picks, there could be a chain reaction in Florida Republican politics. One name that Ron DeSantis undoubtedly has on his short list is Ron DeSantis. His term as governor ends in January 2027 and he can't run again in 2026. He still thinks of himself as presidential material, so he has to take that into consideration. In fact, it is factor #1.
If he appoints himself to the Senate, he will lose all his power immediately. Being governor of a big state is a lot more powerful than being at the very bottom of the Senate totem pole. On the other hand, 4 years of Senate experience would be helpful in a 2028 run. The problem is the 2026 special election. Every reporter in the state would ask him: "Are you willing to promise to stay in the Senate indefinitely so you can acquire seniority and do things for Florida?" An answer of "Nah, I'm going to bail and run for president in 2028" may not play well in the 2026 primary against other Republican candidates who pledge to stay in the Senate as long as the voters want them. It would be a risky bet. Of the nine times in the past that a governor has appointed himself to the Senate and had to face a special election, only one of them won the special election. The voters don't like that trick.
One way around that is to appoint a placeholder to serve until the special election, and then for DeSantis to enter the primary and try to get the seat under his own power. That would be more acceptable to many voters. The placeholder could be his chief of staff.
Yet another option would be to name his wife, Casey DeSantis, to the seat. She is not as ambitious as Lady Macbeth, but they are in the same league. She could promise to stay in the Senate indefinitely. However, there are other potential candidates who might challenge Lady DeSantis in 2026 and beat her, especially Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nunez (R) and AG Ashley Moody (R). And there are various members of the House as well.
Another wrinkle is that Donald Trump may push for his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. Trump has no love for DeSantis and if there is anything he could do to foil DeSantis, that might be worth a try. Of course, Lara was born and raised in North Carolina and went to college there. She has no real connection with Florida. She would be regarded as a carpetbagger in the special election, despite being an incumbent.
So far, DeSantis hasn't tipped his hand, but in some ways, appointing a placeholder who promises not to run in 2026 might be good strategy since it would allow DeSantis to remain governor for 2 years, then run in 2026 to fill out Rubio's term, which ends Jan. 3, 2029. Then DeSantis could run for president as a sitting senator. (V)
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