ICYMI: GOP Candidates Can’t Stop Touching the Third Rail of Politics [The Daily Beast]

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

The Daily Beast: GOP Candidates Can’t Stop Touching the Third Rail of Politics
“Rick Scott’s plan may not be as unpopular within the Republican Party as it first seemed.”
By Sam Brodey
April 5, 2022

Key Points:

• Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) released an election-year platform that proposed raising taxes on millions and putting Social Security and Medicare up for negotiation every five years.

• GOP strategists said the plan was toxic for their party in the upcoming midterm elections.

• His ideas have quietly gotten some love from an important audience: prominent Republicans who are running for Senate.

• At least four GOP candidates in the most important battleground states this fall have either explicitly expressed support for Scott’s plan or have campaigned on the political views that form the foundation of his platform.

• Jim Lamon—a wealthy businessman running in Arizona’s contested GOP primary—said Scott’s plan was “pretty good stuff” and joked that the Florida senator had plagiarized his own platform.

• “I talked to him… I said, ‘Rick, have you been reading my website now?’” Lamon said at a campaign stop, according to the Associated Press. “We have a whole lot of similarities.”

• Lamon has said that cutting entitlements should be on the table. In a Jan. 29 interview on Tucson talk radio station, Lamon said “there are many things we can do” to reduce the debt, focusing on “entitlements.” “‘Oh, Jim, are you going to take those?’” Lamon said, recreating a question to himself. “You’re damn right, because that’s where the money is.’”

• By proposing that all federal programs, including Social Security and Medicare, should end every five years unless reauthorized, Scott’s plan effectively puts those entitlements on the chopping block.

• Democrats have run against Scott’s plan as if it were the official GOP platform, and have leveraged Scott’s relentless self-promotion by using the steady stream of headlines he generated to ask Republican candidates in varying races nationwide whether they support his ideas.

• The party and its affiliated campaigns have already run advertising campaigns focused on the plan and blasted out a seemingly endless stream of press releases highlighting it. When Scott delivered an address at the conservative Heritage Foundation to promote his plan, Democratic staffers camped outside the building with signs.

• Scott has struggled mightily to explain how he is not proposing a tax increase for the tens of millions of people who pay no income tax, given that he is proposing that “all Americans should pay income tax.”

• Gibbons, a wealthy businessman currently leading polls in the contentious GOP primary in Ohio…said that “everyone, to some degree, should share in the tax bill.”

• David McCormick, the former CEO of the powerful hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, is a leading Republican candidate in the critical battleground of Pennsylvania. At a meet-and-greet on March 25, he acknowledged that entitlements were a “third rail” but proceeded to touch it anyway…he argued entitlements “aren’t sustainable in their current form for the future of our country.”

• Meanwhile, Blake Masters—the GOP candidate in Arizona backed by Tucker Carlson and Peter Thiel—was asked at an event in January if he supported cutting entitlement spending. “Well, we have to do it,” Masters said.

• “I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of successful Republican candidates who win their races by talking about revisiting Medicare and Social Security every year,” [a GOP strategist] said.

See also: Grover Norquist in The Hill: Rick Scott’s tax gift to Democrats
###