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Koch brothers make push to court Latinos, alarming many Democrats [Mary Jordan and Ed O'Keefe, April 30, 2015]



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Koch brothers make push to court Latinos, alarming many Democrats [Mary Jordan and Ed O'Keefe, April 30, 2015]
A group funded by the billionaire Koch brothers helps Latinos in Nevada — some of them undocumented immigrants — pass the Nevada driver’s test.
LAS VEGAS — For Republicans, the road to warming the hearts and winning the votes of Latinos may begin at a Las Vegas flea market.
On a recent morning, inside the Eastern Indoor Swapmeet Las Vegas, a group funded by the billionaire Koch brothers helped 250 Latinos — some of them undocumented immigrants — pass the Nevada driver’s test.
The LIBRE Initiative, an expanding grass-roots organization now operating in nine states, organized the four-hour test prep session to teach the rules of the road in Spanish — no tome y maneje (no drinking and driving), el límite de velocidad es sesenta y cinco millas por hora (the speed limit is 65 miles per hour).
Paula Hernandez, 46, an undocumented restaurant supervisor from Mexico, was one of those sitting on folded chairs, listening. She has worked in the United States for 25 years and gave birth to three children here. She has never heard of the Koch brothers or LIBRE but said the free classes were a “great help,” particularly because nobody else is lending her a hand. “President Obama promised to do more for us, and it just didn’t happen,” she said.
To Republicans, that sounds like an opportunity — even though the Koch brothers and their conservative allies spend a great deal of their money supporting Republican candidates who oppose citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
“Latino celebrities, unions and left-leaning community groups” for decades have done a far better job in courting the Hispanic vote and “engaging directly with the Latino community,” said Daniel Garza, executive director of LIBRE. Now, he said, his group aims to end what he calls the “deafening silence” from “libertarians and conservatives.”
In addition to driver’s license classes, LIBRE has started offering Latinos tax preparation help, wellness checkups, scholarships and food giveaways in Texas, Colorado, Florida and other states. It has bought ads touting the “free market,” smaller government and school choice, and its officials are a growing presence on Spanish-language news stations talking about the virtues of “self-reliance.”
By providing tax prep and driving classes, they are building goodwill in the Latino community and what they call a “platform for civic engagement.” LIBRE officials take pains to say they are advocating policies, not specific candidates.
Garza said his group is focused on explaining conservative views. For instance, they talk about how a higher minimum wage might not be in the best interest of Latinos, because they believe it will hurt businesses and that there are less expensive ways for young Latinos to get health insurance than Obama’s health plan. Garza also said LIBRE advocates are getting millions of undocumented workers “out of the shadows” and into the legal system.
Democrats sound alarm
The LIBRE effort, which backers plan to expand into more presidential battleground states over the next several months, has alarmed many Democrats.
“They are making friends and trying to convince you that the Democratic agenda is bad,” said Matt Barreto, co-founder of the research and polling firm Latino Decisions. He said the group hands out ideological material, collects names, e-mail addresses and phone numbers, and is “laying the foundation for Republican candidates to emphasize the same messages.”
Barreto says those behind LIBRE are “playing the long game” and don’t really have to win Republican votes, but rather raise doubts about Democrats to suppress support for them.
The Latino Victory Fund, which is backed by Democratic activists, including actress Eva Longoria, is so concerned about LIBRE that it is gathering Latino leaders in Washington next week to discuss how to counter the efforts, which they view as disingenuous.
Cristóbal Alex, president of the Victory Fund, said LIBRE offers handouts and “talks about immigration in a positive way” but “is really doing work on behalf of the Koch brothers, who put huge money behind candidates against immigration reform.” He said there is a long litany of conservative stances, including opposition to raising the minimum wage, that are unpopular with Latinos.
According to tax records, LIBRE has received $10 million since it began in 2011 from Freedom Partners, a nonprofit group backed by the Koch brothers and other conservative donors. Garza said the group has hundreds of donors.
At the drivers’ test prep class on Sunday, the crowd applauded a video touting the American Dream and showing the journey of Garza, the son of a migrant worker from Mexico who went on to work in the White House for President George W. Bush.
Rosana Romero, a popular anchor at the local Spanish-language station in Las Vegas, Mundo­Fox, which joined in sponsoring the Sunday event, greeted people as they arrived. Spanish-language TV stations have been reporting on the free classes and interviewing LIBRE officials. Everyone who came was asked to leave their names and contact information under a big blue sign that read, ”Limited government, Unlimited opportunities.”
In Nevada, where more than 1 in 4 people are Hispanic, undocumented residents can get a “driver’s authorization card” if they pass the regular driver’s test, a measure designed to make the roads safer because drivers know the laws and get insurance.
But many have been flunking the test, and Romero said that nobody was helping them until LIBRE stepped up. “What they are doing here is a good thing,” the TV anchor said.
Salvador Garnica, 44, an electrician who is a permanent resident originally from Mexico, has flunked the test four times. He said that after listening to an instructor explain in Spanish for four hours everything from the right of way at roundabouts to lane ­changes, he finally felt ready to pass. He was grateful for the help and the festive atmosphere at the flea market, where a dozen people who took the class won gift certificates in a raffle.
But Garnica also raised the challenge for LIBRE and other Republican efforts to win over Hispanics. While he appreciated the help, he wasn’t about to support Republicans: “They are for the rich,” he said.
Will efforts pay off?
Left-leaning groups have been signing up voters outside naturalization services and mobilizing turnout in Hispanic communities for years. David Damore, a University of Nevada associate professor and fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that what LIBRE is doing “pales in comparison to what unions do” and just shows that those on the right “think they can get them in their camp.”
But the question remains, Damore said, whether their effort will pay off. The immigration stance of Republican candidates will be key, he said: “Very few people listen to you if you say you want to deport you and your family.”
LIBRE’s strategy, he said, is not necessarily winning the Latino vote, “just not losing it 3 to 1,” as Republicans did in 2012.
After the 2012 election, the Republican National Committee commissioned a report that urged the party to strike a more inclusive tone when engaging minorities and called on the party to embrace comprehensive immigration reform. The RNC has deployed about 40 Hispanic state directors, field staffers and volunteers to 10 states in 2014, including Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia — and that footprint is expected to grow.
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who is expected to announce a bid for president, is actively wooing Latino voters, as is Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).
Bush’s wife, Columba, is from Mexico, a fact he mentions at nearly every stop. On Tuesday, Bush traveled to Puerto Rico to hold two public events, and on Wednesday, he addressed the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference in Houston.
Even ahead of his official announcement, Bush has already hired a Spanish-speaking spokeswoman assigned to work with Univision, Telemundo and other Spanish-language media outlets, and he has posted his strategy on the Web site of his super PAC in both Spanish and English: “No vamos a ceder una pulgada de territorio – ni cuando se viene a problemas, grupos demográficos, o grupos de votantes.” “We will not cede an inch of territory — no issues, no demographic groups, no voters.”
Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, also speaks Spanish fluently and is one of the most familiar GOP faces on Spanish-language evening newscasts and Sunday-morning public affairs shows.
Donors and aides to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said they see Bush and Rubio and their familial ties to Hispanics as the biggest risks to their near-ironclad grip on the Latino vote.
Clinton’s political director, Amanda Renteria, is fluent in Spanish and is being aggressively wooed by Spanish-language media for interviews. Shortly after Clinton announced her campaign, Renteria headlined a conference call for Hispanic congressional aides and operatives. Clinton’s aides said she plans to place special emphasis on battleground states, including Nevada, with large Hispanic populations. Clinton will visit Nevada on Tuesday — Cinco de Mayo — a huge day of Mexican celebrations.
Jacqueline Sandoval, 22, a community college student in Las Vegas, said she will be listening to what all the candidates say and do. She was one of the U.S. citizens who attended the driver’s test prep class Sunday because it helped to hear it in Spanish. She’s not yet sure whom she will vote for in 2016 and says, so far, she thinks “each party has good ideas.”
How Rand Paul blew it on Baltimore [Eli Stokes, POLITICO, April 30, 2015]
The Kentucky senator tried to present himself as a different kind of Republican, but the events in Baltimore challenged his new image.
When Rand Paul launched his presidential bid in early April amid an array of diverse faces, he talked about focusing on the inner cities and the other America, a place where “people experience a daily ugliness that dashes hope and leaves only the fatigue of despair.”
But three weeks into a campaign where he’s promised to broaden the GOP’s base of support in some of those places, he’s missed critical opportunities to change the party’s dialogue with minority communities.
On Tuesday, as Baltimore burned in the wake of the latest episode surrounding the alleged use of deadly excessive force, Paul’s response was notably off-key.
“I came through the train on Baltimore last night,” Paul told host Laura Ingraham. “I’m glad the train didn’t stop.”
The senator’s breezy response came just before he blamed the violent uprising there on “the breakdown of the family structure, the lack of fathers, the lack of sort of a moral code in our society.” He also expressed his sympathy for “the plight of police,” all without speaking to the circumstances surrounding the troubling death of Freddie Gray in the custody of Baltimore Police.
His camp now acknowledges the lost chance.
“We recognize how it may have sounded to some people,” said Elroy Sailor, a senior adviser to Paul who has helped orchestrate more than two years of sustained outreach by Paul to the African-American community. “We’re listening and learning every day and we learned from this. We’re also leading this conversation.”
But Paul’s mixed messaging marked the second time in his first month as an official candidate that he missed a moment to give fuller definition to his claim that he is the Republican presidential candidate whose understanding of inner-city issues can broaden the GOP’s appeal to African-American voters.
“You can say you’re concerned about our issues but when this is happening and you make a snide, demeaning remark, it shows that he doesn’t understand the frustration in our community,” said John Bailey, director of the non-partisan Colorado Black Roundtable. “If he was really concerned, he wouldn’t be relieved his train didn’t stop [in Baltimore]; he’d have gotten that train to stop and gotten off to see what’s happening.”
The Baltimore stumble came after another failure to put rhetoric into practice. The day after his early April campaign launch, as attention focused on South Carolina — where a video showed a local police officer shoot an unarmed black man as he tried to flee — Paul took the stage in New Hampshire and said, “Today we sit atop a powder keg.”
He was talking, though, about the national debt.
Asked later that day about the shooting of Walter Scott — after he didn’t weigh in on his own — Paul steered clear of addressing the outrage from many African-Americans, instead noting that “98, 99 percent of police are are doing their job on a day-to-day basis and aren’t doing things like this.” The following day, at a campaign event just 20 miles from where Scott has been killed, Paul didn’t mention it at all.
“It just reinforces my opinion that he still doesn’t understand the plight or circumstances of our community,” said Raoul Cunningham, the head of the NAACP branch in Paul’s hometown of Louisville.
On Tuesday, almost as soon as he lamented the breakdown of the family structure, Paul corrected course and said it wasn’t the time to talk about the root causes of the violence in Baltimore. But by then it was too late, and his scattershot approach suggested a surprising level of uncertainty in his approach.
“All of these candidates are going to have to reckon with these issues,” said former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, who has also advised Paul about his African-American outreach. “I don’t mind if they take their time figuring out how to approach it, but they won’t be able to avoid it when it’s always in the news.”
While Paul’s reluctance to wrestle with the root causes of the underlying anger in many black communities may be a missed opportunity, it’s also evidence of the difficulty in reconciling his views with a predominantly white Republican base that’s more attuned to law and order issues.
Some African-American Republicans who are impressed by Paul’s efforts to understand and address inner-city issues worry that his recent comments didn’t reflect that work — and fear it could set back what they see as a sincere initiative.
“I do feel that he’s genuinely concerned about criminal justice reform and bringing solutions to minority communities,” said Glenn McCall, an RNC committeeman from South Carolina who is African-American. “But we don’t want to come across as being patronizing.”
If Paul’s comments are being scrutinized closer than most, it’s because the Kentucky senator has focused so much energy on outreach to minority communities. Over the last three years, Paul has met with civic leaders in Detroit, Atlanta and Chicago; he’s sought out the counsel of J.C. Watts, Steele and other African-American Republicans. He’s spoken at historically black colleges about revitalizing inner cities and sponsored legislation with Democratic Sen. Cory Booker aimed at reforming the criminal justice system.
Last summer, following the police-involved shooting of a black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, Paul traveled there to meet with local leaders and penned a provocative op-ed for Time magazine calling for the demilitarization of police and acknowledging that many African-Americans legitimately feel as if they are being targeted by police officers.
“Anyone who thinks that race does not still, even if inadvertently, skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention,” Paul wrote last August.
But that was then — before he was a presidential candidate and had to work out the hard math of constituency politics.
“He’s trying to win a Republican primary, so it’s business as usual,” said Bailey.
McCall believes there’s still time for Paul to distinguish himself among the GOP field, and thinks there’s more of an opening than he may realize. “This is a great opportunity for these candidates to go in and engage with some of these community members, the black pastors saying they want to rebuild,” McCall said. “It’s a great opportunity to start building that rapport, that trust.”
Ted Cruz Explains Why he Missed Final Vote on Loretta Lynch [Frank Thorp, NBC News, April 30, 2015]
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz says that one of the reasons why he missed Attorney General Loretta Lynch's confirmation vote last week was because "absence is the equivalent to a 'no' vote."
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz says that one of the reasons why he missed Attorney General Loretta Lynch's confirmation vote last week was because "absence is the equivalent to a 'no' vote."
"I voted twice against Loretta Lynch being confirmed," Cruz told reporters on Thursday. "There was no significance to the final vote, and I had a scheduling conflict."
Cruz, who led GOP efforts to oppose Lynch's nomination, came under fire after he missed the final confirmation vote last Thursday. He had left the Capitol before the last vote to catch a flight back to Texas where he was holding a fundraiser for his presidential campaign.
Cruz voted against Lynch's nomination in the Judiciary Committee, spoke against her nomination on the Senate floor on Thursday morning, and voted against moving forward with her nomination in a procedural vote, called "cloture," that same day before leaving for Dallas.
"The cloture vote was the vote that mattered, I voted 'no,' and she was confirmed because Republican leadership chose to confirm her," Cruz told reporters today, "I disagree with that decision."
The assertion by Cruz and his office that the Republicans who voted for cloture were responsible for Lynch's confirmation has perturbed those in Republican leadership who voted for the procedural motion, but voted against Lynch in her confirmation vote.
While 10 Republicans voted to confirm Lynch, 20 Republicans voted on the procedural cloture motion to stop debate and move to a final vote, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. R-Ky., and Senate Republican Conference Chair John Thune, R-SD.
Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-TX, who also voted for cloture but against Lynch's nomination, tweeted Saturday, "FYI: Cloture ends debate only. It does not confirm a nominee. Otherwise a subsequent vote on whether to confirm a nominee is meaningless."
Cornyn later told reporters that the tweet "wasn't responding to anybody in particular, but just to clear the air and state the fact."
"I know everybody wants me and Sen. Cruz in a public fight, and I'm not going to take the bait," Cornyn said. "But I stand by what I tweeted, it's true. Sometimes it's important not to just acquiesce when people say things that are misleading, but to actually correct, which is what I was trying to do."
Cruz also reiterated today that "cloture was the vote that mattered, it required 60 votes," before being corrected by reporters. In the Senate the cloture motion on Lynch's nomination only required a simple majority under the new rules established after Democrats used the so-called "nuclear option" in 2013.
Cruz then paused, before saying, "Fair point, sorry, I actually thought of the rules as they were written."
Lynch's nomination passed in the Senate last Thursday by a vote of 56-43, 56 days after her nomination was reported out of the Judiciary Committee.
Cruz was the only Senator to miss the vote.
Ted Cruz on Baltimore riots: 'President Obama has turned us against each other' [Elizabeth Llorente, Fox News Latino, April 30, 2015]
Sen. Ted Cruz called the unrest in Baltimore heartbreaking and called on President Barack Obama and African-American community leaders to lead efforts to unify people and stress common values.
Washington D.C. –  Sen. Ted Cruz called the unrest in Baltimore heartbreaking and called on President Barack Obama and African-American community leaders to lead efforts to unify people and stress common values.
“To see a great American city torn apart by violence is fundamentally wrong,” Cruz, who is running for president, said in an interview with Fox News Latino on Wednesday. “Our prayers need to be with the families of those who’ve been injured, those who’ve been murdered.”
Cruz said he understands the frustrations among African Americans, who, the Texas Republican said, are “understandably concerned about whether law enforcement policies are being applied fairly.”
“When it comes to Mr. Freddy Gray,” he said, referring to the young black man who died while in police custody, “there needs to be a fair and impartial investigation into what happened.” “But the answer is not violence and mayhem,” he said. “The people who have been paying the biggest price have been the minority communities.”
The same happened during the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri last year, after the death of a black man at the hands of a white police officer, Cruz said.
“In Ferguson, it was African-American small business owners having their businesses burned to the ground.”
Community leaders need to step up and show constructive, positive paths to take to address the problems, the senator said.
“We need more leaders who call out for racial unity, to bring us together, in support of shared values,” he said.
Cruz denounced the backlash against police officers, saying they should not be generally maligned because most of them are professional and risk their lives every day.
“There are always bad actors in every community,” Cruz said. “But one of the most damaging and destructive aspects of these recent incidents has been the rush to condemn law enforcement, to attack police officers.”
Asked about President Barack Obama’s comments about how the lack of opportunities and jobs helps fuel dysfunction and frustration in minority communities, Cruz quickly turned the criticism on the president.
“We have seen the [economic] opportunities dry up under the Obama economy,” he said. “The people who’ve been hurt the most in the Obama economy are the most vulnerable; it’s young people, it’s Latinos, it’s African-Americans, it’s single moms. But at the same time, let’s be clear that the lack of opportunities is not an excuse for murder and violence.”
Finally, Cruz said that Obama has failed his opportunity, as the first African American president in the U.S., to be a force for racial healing and unity.
“President Obama had the opportunity to be a unifying president, to try to bring people together,” Cruz said. “Rather, his administration it seems constantly seeks to divide, to turn us against each other, based on race, based on sex, based on wealth, based on geography.”
“It’s just not what a president should be doing. A president should be appealing to us based on shared values as Americans, not trying to divide and conquer.”
In early horse race, Marco Rubio threatens Scott Walker [James Hohmann, POLITICO, May 1, 2015]
Republican insiders in early-voting states say a crucial battle is emerging in the 2016 presidential race between Marco Rubio and Scott Walker, competing to establish themselves as the party’s “bridge” candidate who can appeal to both the establishment and grass-roots activists.
ANKENY, Iowa— Republican insiders in early-voting states say a crucial battle is emerging in the 2016 presidential race between Marco Rubio and Scott Walker, competing to establish themselves as the party’s “bridge” candidate who can appeal to both the establishment and grass-roots activists.
As it has become increasingly apparent that they are key rivals, the men have started taking regular, subtle but unmistakable, shots at one another. Walker talks about the need to nominate someone who is not from Washington and implicitly compares Rubio to Barack Obama. Rubio suggests that there is “no way” a governor like Walker is prepared to deal with global crises facing the United States.
Dozens of interviews on the ground in the early states, backed up by recent polling, find many Republicans torn between Walker and Rubio.
A Public Policy Polling survey this week shows Walker and Rubio in first and second place in Iowa. “The key to Walker’s success is that he’s winning both among voters who are most concerned about electability in the general election and among voters who are most concerned with having the most conservative candidate,” the Democratic firm said in a release explaining the numbers. Rubio and Walker tied in the poll for being the most frequent second choice of voters.
“That’s a really interesting matchup,” said Jack Whitver, an uncommitted state senator who hosted Rubio at his home here for an ice cream social this weekend.
Rubio and Walker differ in many ways—a blue-collar Midwesterner who shops at Kohl’s; the son of Cuban immigrants who is married to a former Miami Dolphins cheerleader – but they are trying to woo an overlapping group of voters. There is a large bloc of establishment-minded activists who do not want to support Jeb Bush for the nomination out of dynasty and electability concerns, and there is a swath of deeply-conservative voters who love guys like Ted Cruz or Mike Huckabee but won’t support them because they want a nominee who they believe can win the general election.
“I don’t know how we characterize our opponent as a relic of the 20th century and then nominate a relic of the 20th century,” said Bob Brownell, a county supervisor in Iowa’s Polk County, which includes Des Moines. “It’s got to be Rubio or Walker in my mind. Walker has that executive experience; Marco doesn’t have that, but what he does have is a 21st century perspective.”
Walker, 47, and Rubio, 43, are also each presenting themselves as next-generation candidates.
“Of the leftovers from last time, I still like Huckabee and Santorum. Of the new faces, I like Walker and Rubio,” said Doug Brown, 69, a retired product engineer who spent his career at John Deere in Iowa.
Brown caucused for Santorum in 2012 and is now uncommitted. He praised Walker’s “accomplishments” and “proven record.” In the next breath, he praised Rubio’s rhetorical abilities. “He seems to have a good understanding of what’s wrong with the country and how to fix it,” Brown said, stressing that he’s undecided.
Attendees at a Manchester, New Hampshire, house party for Rubio the weekend before echoed the some points. “I’m probably between Scott Walker and Marco Rubio,” said John Cebrowski, a former state representative from Bedford. “We need fresh ideas and both have them … This is not a dynasty. We’re not talking about the Romanovs or the Windsors. We need some freshness.”
Rick Kimberley, a corn and soybean farmer from north of Des Moines who caucused for Romney in 2012, floated the idea that Rubio and Walker would be great running mates — sort of like in 1992, when Bill Clinton and Al Gore together offered a youthful contrast to George H.W. Bush.
“I’m not predicting right now which one’s going to come out on top,” said Kimberley, 60.
Many point to stylistic similarities.
“They’re conservative, but reasonable and measured in tone for the most part,” said Jamie Burnett, an uncommitted GOP strategist in New Hampshire.
The two candidates rarely take each other on directly in public, but their comments seem closely tailored to emphasize their relative strengths and the other’s weaknesses.
Rubio constantly invokes his seats on the Senate Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees to argue that he would be ready on his first day as president to tackle ISIS and other global threats. He told the Des Moines Register editorial board on Saturday there is “no way” a governor could be equipped with the world as tumultuous as it is.
“Governors can certainly read about foreign policy, and take briefings and meet with experts, but there is no way they’ll be ready on Day One to manage U.S. foreign policy,” Rubio said.
A few hours later, Walker fired back. “I think he’s questioning how Ronald Reagan was ready,” he told reporters after an appearance at the Machine Shed restaurant. “Governors innately have the ability to lead. We are required every day to use our cabinet to make decisions, not just give speeches; not to just travel to foreign places, but to ultimately make decisions.”
On Hugh Hewitt’s radio show recently, Walker noted explicitly that Obama also sat on the Foreign Affairs committee before he was elected president.
The posturing is breaking through and sparking discussion at the activist level.
“There’s some discussion as to which of those two categories of experience is best suited to take on the presidency and more particularly to take on Hillary Clinton,” said New Hampshire Republican Ray Chadwick, who previously chaired the Hillsborough County GOP.
On the issues front, the biggest dividing line between the two candidates is immigration. Rubio co-sponsored the 2013 Senate bill that included a pathway to citizenship. Walker has changed his position to take a hard line against immigration.
At a five-hour cattle call for social conservatives at a church in Waukee Saturday night, Rubio went first and Walker went last. Rubio did not mention immigration during his speech. Walker made a point of criticizing even lawful immigration on the grounds that it drives down the wages of workers who are already here. This puts him to the right of even someone like Cruz.
The further to the right that Walker continues to tack in order to compete for the Religious Right and to win over people who might otherwise support Huckabee, Santorum or Cruz in the low-turnout caucuses, the bigger the opening he leaves for Rubio to establish himself as the bridge candidate.
“They’re both trying to pitch themselves as candidates who will be agreeable to all factions of the party,” said University of New Hampshire political scientist Dante Scala. “They’re both trying to pull off the same trick.”
It’s a tricky balancing act. Brownell, the Polk County supervisor, said he’s leaning to Rubio over Walker, partly because “he’s in the right place completely when it comes to immigration,” a reminder that not every Republican is against reform.
The two candidates heavily emphasize that they are electable, but their pitch is quite different.
Rubio leans on his Hispanic roots and his allies argue that he could more easily carry Sun Belt states like Florida and Nevada. He says his family epitomizes the American Dream. “I didn’t read about it in a book,” he says.
Walker also employs his own strain of identity politics, arguing during his latest swing through Iowa that he could carry the state in a general election. “For a Republican to win the presidency, the pathway is through the Midwest,” he said. “You need states like Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio … Having a good, common-sense reform-minded governor from the Midwest wouldn’t be a bad thing.”
Cate Martel contributed to this report from Manchester, N.H.


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