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Hawley, whose Senate seat is to be elected in 2024, has repeatedly said he is not running for president.
“All I can say is no,” Hawley said in an interview on Wednesday, denying that he had a comprehensive plan to stand against the Biden nominees. “What can I say? This is clearly not my goal. “
But other than Hawley’s allies, no one familiar with presidential politics or the US Senate is taking the 41-year-old. at his word – especially after several Democratic senators used their opposition to the first ones appointed by Trump as a stepping stone towards 2020.
“Hawley has always been a young man in a hurry. He ran for Attorney General on a board he would serve every four years and [almost] immediately ran for the US Senate once he took office, “ said Scott Reed, a veteran Republican strategist who last worked for the political arm of the American Chamber of Commerce. He noted that Hawley established himself “by taking early photos at Big Tech and he really developed a taste for wine, which means he really liked all the attention.” And he built on that.
Reed said “Hawley is becoming an exotic for Republican primary voters” because the Yale-trained lawyer has established a niche as an early critic of social media companies while trying to appeal to working-class voters .
While the Missouri senator is “an asterisk in the first Republican polls I’ve seen,” Reed said, “he is clearly laying the groundwork for running for president in 2024. There is no other way. way to explain this behavior. “
But it comes at a cost.
His eagerness to have fun with Trump supporters led to a now infamous Jan.6 photo of Hawley outside the Capitol pumping his fist. in support of a crowd of demonstrators who then stormed the building, vandalizing it and temporarily delaying the vote.
Hawley’s role in his opposition to the Electoral College vote resulted in a Senate ethics complaint and led Simon & Schuster to cancel his book deal, The Tyranny of Big Tech, last month. And former Missouri Senator John Danforth – who helped propel Hawley to the seat Danforth held decades ago – withdrew his support for the senator, saying his approval was “the worst mistake I have ever made”.
Hawley denounced both the Capitol invasion and the president’s remarks on Jan.6, but at the same time said Trump’s impeachment trial was unconstitutional. And he made it clear in an interview that Biden is unpopular in his state and part of his job is to be “the loyal opposition, as our British friends like to say”.
It is also a profitable business in the Internet fundraising advocate world.
Hawley is increasingly becoming a regular at Fox News, the most-watched cable channel by Republican primary voters, and his fundraising has kept pace with his growing national profile. Negative media coverage and the Democrats’ ethical investigation of him and Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) for their roles leading to the Jan.6 riot on Capitol Hill served to fuel his coffers: a note sent to donors this week said he raised nearly $ 1 million in January, touted his popularity in the state and argued his election objections were popular in Missouri.
“If Democrats think you’re so powerful and influential they need to take you down a notch, it’ll help you fundraise, but you’ve got to have substance, ” said David Carney, a senior Republican consultant who advised Rick Perry’s 2012 presidential campaign.
“He’s definitely one of the two dozen guys in the mix for president. Why would anyone know a senator from Missouri, basically a freshman who is a first member? This is what you need to do to break the mess, ”Carney said. “Now that’s a double-edged sword because if you do too many crazy things, you’re not believable. So you have to do non-crazy things. You cannot become a caricature. You can’t be the class clown.
Hawley defends his objections to the election results as a legitimate expression of voters’ concerns and says he was not trying to annul the election. His sharp opposition to Biden’s agenda, he says, comes from the same place. He insists that he is not necessarily determined to oppose all of them.
“I can just tell you that in Missouri people are a little shocked, ‘What the hell? He’s so aggressive, they don’t even try to work across the aisle, ”Biden’s Hawley said. “If it’s not good for my condition, then yes, I will definitely vote no.
The youngest senator when he was elected in 2018, Hawley is a rising speaker with a sense of tapping into Trump’s populist confrontational style. Politics. He often addresses the Senate in an unusual setting, directly to the camera, pushing for greater stimulation controls or condemning the Supreme Court decision extending the protections to LGTBQ employees. He has distinguished himself within the GOP by promoting costly solutions to the economic effects of the pandemic, ousting some judges backed by his own party, and going after tech companies.
The Trump Senate lane so far has three big names: Hawley, Cruz and Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Who shares a consulting firm with the junior senator from Missouri. Along with five other Senators and 139 Representatives, all three opposed the certification of victory for the Biden Electoral College – even after the deadly riot on Capitol Hill.
This vote had no equivalent in modern American politics, even compared to 2017, when Democratic resistance to Trump was searing. and senators like Kirsten Gillibrand of New York voted against almost every Trump candidate ahead of her 2020 presidential bid.
“Hawley has decided that resistance is the path to Nirvana,” said Jef Pollock, a pollster who advised Gillibrand’s campaign.
“The notion of time is too early – if you have decided that you must be the resistance – then the resistance must be as pure as possible. And that means taking every position on every vote, it means voting against every candidate, from the rational to the irrational. It’s clean, it’s, “They’re not all good. They are all bad because they represent something that I cannot stand.
One of Hawley’s Republican allies in the Senate, Kevin Cramer of North Dakota, rebuffed the notion, saying, “I don’t attribute the presidential bid as his motivation.
“I have a lot of respect for him. But it’ll be interesting four years, eight years from now, when we see how he’s developed, whether he’s changed any of that strategy, or whether he’s the gung-ho, fire in the brawler. belly, ”Cramer said. “He can clearly do bigger things if that’s what he wants to do.
Although Hawley notably pushed his party to go much bigger in response to the coronavirus throughout 2020 – pressuring Trump directly to push for direct payments to Americans – he has shown little interest in the back-up plan. against Biden’s $ 1.9 trillion coronavirus, stopping short of outright opposition because he failed to see the legislation.
“Josh Hawley is doing whatever it takes to politically capitalize on a significant part of the Republican base, positioning himself to be a future presidential candidate, absolutely,” said Terry Sullivan, former presidential campaign manager for Senator Marco Rubio (R- Florida.). “What Hawley does with it, we’ll see. But it’s important to remember that every time a US senator or governor looks at himself in the mirror, he sees a future president.
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