Lara Trump says she's ready to run in 2024, but can she win?
The idea of Lara Trump as the future of the Republican Party has left many appalled
When Lara Yunaska walked down the aisle from Mar-a-Lago to marry Eric Trump, it was the wedding officiant who summed it up best.
"You're not just gaining a family," Jared Kushner told his new sister-in-law. "You're getting six million followers on Twitter."
Seven years later, Trump, now 38, is weighing what to do with her influential last name and the power of that support.
It seems that she, like her famous father-in-law, can use them to forge a political career.
"It's something I've certainly considered," she said to a question immediately after the election.
"A lot of people's hunch is that she would be the favorite," said Dr. Michael Bitzer, professor of political science at Catawba College in Salisbury, North Carolina.
And, even though she had never run for office before, Dr. Bitzer told The Independent that she should not be dismissed. Her experience in her father-in-law's campaign, she said, "gave her as good a training as any other." Whether she wants to get involved in the details of actual governance is a whole other matter, he added.
The glowing object that catches Trump's eye is a soon-to-be-vacant Senate seat in her home state of North Carolina. Richard Burr, the 65-year-old incumbent, announced in 2016 that this term, his fourth, would be his last.
Adding fuel to the fire, Burr voted to impeach Trump, becoming one of only seven Republican senators to do so.
His vote angered hardline conservatives in the state and appeared to give Trump's potential candidacy a boost among those seeking to punish Burr for turning against Trump.
"The biggest winner in this entire impeachment is Lara Trump," said Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina senator and one of Trump's closest allies.
“My dear friend Richard Burr, who I like and have been friends with for a long time, just made Lara Trump the almost certain candidate for the Senate seat in North Carolina to replace him if he runs, and I will certainly support her because it represents the future of the Republican Party. "
The idea of Trump as the future of the Republican Party has left many "anti Trump" appalled.
"They're all selfish maniacs that if they come up with the idea of success, they'll get it," said Meghan Milloy, co-founder of Republican Women for Progress.
"But really, the only real qualification of her is that she is married to the less impressive son of the former president."
However, she can become the standard bearer of the family.
Donald Trump Jr., long said to enjoy the red-blooded political battle, has been ruled out, for now, from running for a Senate seat in Wyoming.
Ivanka Trump's move to Florida has intrigued people with the idea of a possible challenge for Marco Rubio in 2022, but many think it is unlikely. So is Lara Trump interested? And, more importantly, can she do it herself?
Rob Goldstone, a public relations expert who has worked with the Trump family for several years, was the one who organized the 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer, telling The Independent that Trump was in fact someone to who to observe.
"On November 3, the vote did not mean the end of Trumpism," he said. “Trump said she took North Carolina for him. I wouldn't be at all surprised if she ran for office too. She has been so invested in this, I don't see her walk away from her. "
He spoke at the Stop The Steal rally the morning of the Jan. 6 riot on Capitol Hill, which ignited the crowd but later issued a diplomatic condemnation of the violence.
"Yesterday's event in Washington D.C. was supposed to be about patriotism, love and freedom," he wrote on Instagram. "I was proud to share with a crowd of hundreds of thousands that our family would continue to fight alongside other Americans who share our conservative values going forward: that while Donald Trump may not be in the White House for the next 4 years, he still I backed them ”.
"It was really sad and embarrassing to see that things ended yesterday so differently than they started."
Some reports said that the deadly insurrection, whipped by her father-in-law, gave her pause.
But rumors persist that she is determined to do politics, and sources within the coastal state confirm that consultants have been "poking around" for her to test the waters.
"She would be formidable," said Kellyanne Conway, a former White House official and Trump's campaign manager in 2016.
She told The New York Times: “She has the trifecta - she can raise money, raise awareness on key issues, and draw attention to her race. Unlike many typical politicians, she connects with people and is a compelling messenger. "
Others point out that she has never been elected to any public office and, despite being born and raised in North Carolina, she does not even live in the state.
"There is nothing against the law for someone moving from New York State to North Carolina to run," scoffed Mark Walker, a North Carolina congressman who has already started campaigning for the 2022 seat. , in an interview with CNN.
The fact that she does not currently live in the state is not prohibitive. Elizabeth Dole, wife of 1996 Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole and a member of the cabinets of Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, was born in North Carolina and returned after a 40-year absence to win the Senate seat in 2003.
But Morgan Jackson, a Democratic strategist based in North Carolina, was slashing her chances: "There are a lot of people ahead of Lara Trump in line," she told The New York Times.
"Given how rare it is to have a vacant seat, I don't think any of the people who actually live in North Carolina and have been here will go out of the way for someone else."
A big question must be if she is willing to abandon her beautiful life in New York. Born in Wilmington, she grew up in the affluent outdoor community of Wrightsville Beach with her younger brother Kyle, who was parachuted into government by the Trumps and is now deputy chief of staff at NASA.
Lara Trump attended high school in Wilmington and North Carolina State University in Raleigh, graduating with a degree in communications. She began working on local television earlier, to the dismay of her parents, and she moved to New York City in 2007 to pursue a tangential passion for the arts of baking at The French Culinary Institute. After graduation, she sold cakes in her apartment before rediscovering the news.
In 2011 she began working on Inside Edition, a news program owned by CBS. She had met Eric Trump in a bar around 2004, and the couple married in Mar-a-Lago in 2014. They have two children: Luke, three, and Carolina, a year old.
She resigned from Inside Edition during the 2016 campaign, but the couple did not move to Washington when Trump was elected. Instead, they continued to divide their time between the three-bedroom condo at Trump Parc East that Eric bought in 2007 for $ 2 million, and a mansion at Briarcliff Manor, a hamlet in Westchester County that is historically known for its famous estate ownership. . families, including the Vanderbilts, Astors, and Rockefellers.
There, Trump indulges in her sporting passions: riding and running with her dogs Charlie and Ben. In winter, she skis with her sister-in-law Ivanka and her husband, Kushner.
Her entry into the political arena was simple and perhaps predictable. She lobbied Trump to be allowed to campaign in her home state.
“When my father-in-law decided that he was running for president, I said, 'Look, this is my house. I know the people of North Carolina and I want to go there. You can send me anytime you want, '”she said.
Tall, slender, and blonde, with a perfect life on social media, she was a perfect fit for the family brand.
"I'm a girl from North Carolina who really has nothing to do with being involved with this family," she said. "But I fell in love with a guy, we clicked and it worked."
Polished and poised, she was soon dispatched to rally Trump's troops. "It's great to be back home," she said in September 2016, campaigning for her father-in-law in North Carolina. "I feel like I'm cheating to be back here."
In March she spoke on a local political podcast, Tying It Together, and was effusive about her in-laws.
"I was so nervous! Because everyone is nervous about meeting his partner's family. But he is a family man and he loves his children so much. He loves his country so much that he literally gave his life for this job," she said. effusively. "He did it because he knew it was the last hope of making a change in this country that he knew had to happen, before it was too late."
However, there were problems. Speaking at the Republican National Convention in August, he misquoted Abraham Lincoln.
“Abraham Lincoln once said, 'America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroy ourselves, '”he said.
Fact-checkers were quick to point out that while the line was often attributed to Lincoln in Facebook memes, he never said it.
More damaging still, shortly before Christmas it emerged that she had served on the board of a limited liability company (LLC) through which Trump's political operation has spent more than $ 700 million since 2019.
The LLC has been criticized for deliberately hiding the final destination of hundreds of millions of dollars of spending. Initially, Trump intended to be the president of the entity, and Mike Pence's nephew, John, was his vice president, documents show.
Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for Trump's team, said that neither Lara Trump nor Pence were compensated by American Made Media Consultants for their service as board members, and they resigned in October 2019. However, their mere existence attracted attention.
And the question remains how effective he has been on Trump's team. North Carolina has increasingly become an indecisive state, with Trump winning in November by just over 1 percentage point, considerably closer than in 2016.
Trump was heavily involved in movements to increase support among women. But that too failed: The 2020 numbers were roughly the same as 2016. Trump had a modest advantage among white women and a much larger proportion of white women without college degrees, according to the AP VoteCast, a poll by more than 110,000. voters. Biden dominated with women in the suburbs frequently referenced by Trump, winning 59 percent to Trump's 40 percent of a group that makes up about a quarter of the electorate nationwide.
Milloy of Republican Women for Progress told The Independent: "She had a major role in Women for Trump, and it turned out not to be as successful as they hoped."
"Sure, she could speak in a complete sentence, raise a ton of money, and have name recognition, but she is a low bar."
And she won't be an easy seat to claim. Doug Heye, a former Republican National Committee spokesman who used to work for Burr, told The New York Times that he questioned whether Trump was willing to put up with the fight and the tedium of running or serving.
"A lot of people love speculation and attention, but being a senator is a lot of work," he said.
Walker, the only Republican to come forward so far, presents himself in the purple state as "a conservative warrior and a bridge builder," and has already received the endorsement of Republican Senators Tim Scott of South Carolina and James Lankford of South Carolina. Oklahoma. plus former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee.
64-year-old Pat McCrory, who was governor from 2013 to 2017, is expected to run and present a major challenge.
There will likely be more contenders, including Tim Moore, the Speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives, and Dan Forest, who just lost a gubernatorial race to Democratic incumbent Roy Cooper. And there may be another contender from the president's inner circle: Mark Meadows, a former North Carolina representative and Trump's chief of staff in the White House, is expected to return home and run for the seat.
A BUSR / UNLV Lee Business School poll released in December found that Trump leads McCrory 24 percent to 23 percent, although this is within the poll's seven-point margin of error.
The question remains how valuable his last name really is.
Trump left the White House with the lowest job approval of his presidency at 29 percent.
His highest point, in January 2020, was 49 percent - he never broke the 50 percent approval rating during his tenure.
According to Pew, which surveyed 5,360 American adults from January 8-12, Trump's voters, in particular, have become more critical of the post-election behavior of his candidates.
The proportion of his supporters who describe his behavior as deficient has doubled in the past two months, from 10% to 20%.
Even more damning, about two-thirds (68 percent) of all those surveyed said Trump should not remain a major national political figure for many years.
His acquittal from the Senate gave him a significant boost. Days later, three in four Republicans (75 to 21 percent) told Quinnipiac that they would like the former president to play a prominent role in the party. Quinnipiac's findings were echoed in a Morning Consult poll published Feb. 16, which showed that nearly 60 percent of Republican voters said Trump should play a "major role" in the party in the future. Later this week, Trump himself will take the stage of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
It will work?
"There is a myth that Trump voters will speak out for Trump's candidates or his relatives," said John Anzalone, a Democratic pollster and veteran of campaigns in the South.
"The members of the sect only manifest in full force for the leader of the sect."
John Hood, president of the conservative John William Pope Foundation and a weekly panelist on a North Carolina political talk show, warned it would not be easy for her.
"This is a tough elementary school," he told The Independent. And it is difficult to predict. Unlike New York and California, each year we import new voters, which means that old alliances do not necessarily resonate.
“A not insignificant number of voters were not in the state when McCrory was governor. He still has support, but she has name recognition. "
He also pointed out that, to win the primaries, the threshold is only 30 percent, which means that the more Republicans who dive into the race, the better Trump's chances will be, as establishment candidates split their vote.
And winning the primaries is no guarantee of a Senate seat.
"The Democrats could win the Burr seat and I wouldn't consider it a surprise," he said. “Georgia and South Carolina have been less competitive than North Carolina for decades. And if there is someone with the Trump name running, he can guarantee that the Democrats will throw out everything they have. "
Mr. Hood finally thinks that she won't run.
It's a great question. And does she really want to be a senator? With all the quorum calls and the fundraising and the boredom? But then if we've learned anything, it's that sometimes in politics, if you talk enough about something, it becomes real.
"And the more people ask the question, the more likely it is."
Trump herself remains silent. But, when she was asked before Christmas, she admitted, "We all know in this family, she's bigger than just you."
