Mitch Perry
Happy Friday to you all, and what a weekend it will be as virtually the entire Republican presidential field (including Jim Gilmore!) makes its way to Orlando for the next two days for the Republican Party of Florida’s Sunshine Summit.
We’re off to the event shortly ourselves, so let’s be succinct: Will we hear more about who’s the toughest of them all when it comes to immigration?
Let’s face it, none of the candidates are going to go as extreme as Donald Trump with his call to revive Dwight Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback” and deport millions of undocumented immigrants.
According to an Economist Group/You Gov poll published in Roll Call on Wednesday, GOP voters prefer Trump’s stance to the tune of 49 percent support.
The second place finisher? That would be “not sure” at 13 percent. Then you have Marco Rubio at 10 percent, Ted Cruz at 7 percent and Jeb Bush at 5 percent.
Cruz and Rubio got into it Thursday about who was tougher on the issue and who really was more “pro-amnesty,” and that’s where this campaign is now. Since the conventional wisdom has been pounded down during the past couple of weeks that this race will ultimately come down to Cruz and Rubio (we remain skeptical about that), the news media was all over the back-and-forth between the two 44-year-old Cuban-American freshmen senators.
Thursday night the Rubio camp sent several news releases denouncing Cruz for his 2013 amendment that instead of offering citizenship, would offer permanent residence and a green card. That’s because Marco remains extremely vulnerable to seemingly everybody on this issue, since he was one of the original Gang of 8 who fostered the comprehensive immigration reform bill of 2013.
I attended a Tea Party led protest in front of Rubio’s Tampa district office a few weeks after that went down, and those folks apparently haven’t forgotten (if you don’t believe that, just read Breitbart.com).
Going back to Bush for a moment, for all of the various analyses about why Jeb’s struggling, some of it goes back to what people criticized when he began this campaign: his moderate stance on immigration. Some Republicans won’t ever get behind him because of that stance (as well as on Common Core). It’s a different GOP, and I just don’t see how Bush’s stance on this important issue is going to jibe with the GOP primary base.
Needless to say, this doesn’t portend well for Republicans in the general election. But who cares about that now? Getting the nomination is what this is all about right now, and you can’t get far enough to the right on immigration, seemingly. Unless you’re Bush or John Kasich, and need we repeat how much they’re struggling right now?
Here’s to more interesting news coming out of Orlando during the next two days.
In other news …
David Jolly continues to hammer away at Hillary Clinton for her comments last month regarding the Department of Veterans Affairs (comments that Clinton appears to have walked away from), and he’s trying to bring Alan Grayson into the fight.
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Speaking of Grayson, his top Democratic Senate opponent, Patrick Murphy, won another major endorsement Thursday when he received the official support from AFSCME and its 15,000 members.
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An official with the Florida Department of Transportation told the Tampa City Council on Thursday that the community meetings being held to collect feedback from the community about the controversial Tampa Bay Express project are very meaningful. The official said people need to attend the meetings, because there’s a good chance their participation could effectively mitigate the potentially worse damage the project could wreak on the local neighborhoods.
