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CHAIRMAN, Jay Kramer * 772-321-7724 * [email protected] VICE CHAIRMAN, Frank Sosta, Jr. * 772-713-6411 * [email protected] SECRETARY, Linda Anselmini * 609-577-5139 * [email protected] TREASURER, Steve Gagne * 772-480-6671 * [email protected] STATE COMMITTEEWOMAN Elly Manov 772-696-1665 [email protected] STATE COMMITTEEMAN Shawn Frost, 772-584-1454 [email protected] IRC REPUBLICAN PARTY CHAIRMAN Jay Kramer Gone Fishing Jay  ‌ ‌ Democrats' 'Working Man's Party' Image Shattered as IRS Data Reveals the Undeniable Truth Wall Street Journal Commentary by Ameer Benno There’s an old saw that blue-collar working-class voters are the bedrock of the Democratic Party. This may have been true a generation ago, but no longer. Political realignments over the last 20 years have caused the voter base of both major parties to flip. The Democrat Party is now undeniably the party of the wealthy. According to Bloomberg, IRS data from 2020 shows that Democrats represent 65 percent of taxpayers with a household income of $500,000. Meanwhile, the same data establishes that 74 percent of taxpayers in Republican districts have household incomes of less than $100,000. The Bloomberg report also references Census Bureau data that showed the typical congressional district represented by a Republican was 14 percent richer than the typical Democratic district in 1992. But nearly 30 years later, in 2020, Republican districts were 13 percent poorer than their Democratic counterparts. A somewhat less scientific analysis from 2020 reinforced that the GOP is the party of working Americans. According to the Cook Political Report, 85 percent of counties with a Whole Foods store voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump, while only 32 percent of counties with a Cracker Barrel Old Country store did so — a “culture gap” of 53 points. This demographic shift is part of a long-term trend that began well before the arrival of Trump and his MAGA policies on the political scene. A 2015 study revealed that families registered as Democrats have higher annual salaries than Republicans. And, according to a Vox report from 2016, top-end wealth in America over the past several decades “has increasingly concentrated in a handful of metropolises. … Most of these very prosperous cities (especially New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Los Angeles) have become very solidly Democratic.” “The places with the largest concentrations of wealth,” Vox said, “are now disproportionately represented by Democrats. In 2014, 17 of the 25 wealthiest congressional districts … were represented by Democrats. And overall, the median household income in Democratic-represented congressional districts was about $2,000 more than the median household income in Republican-represented districts.” Even the 2016 version of Joe Biden recognized the tectonic shift in party demography. During an interview with Joe Scarborough on MSNBC that year, Biden described his party as a bunch of “limousine liberals” who failed to connect with “working-class voters.” Despite these metrics, many cultural elitists on the left continue to perpetuate the canard that Republicans are country club snobs and that the Democrats are the party of the little guy, the underdog and the downtrodden. A Pew Research Center survey conducted during the Obama years revealed that more than 60 percent of Americans believed that Republicans were the party of the wealthy, but only 20 percent felt that way about the Democrats. Conversely, 67 percent of Americans believed that the Democratic Party favors the poor and middle-class, and only 26 percent felt that way about Republicans. But if the Democratic Party is home to so many high-earners, why does it support so many wealth-killing measures, such as Biden’s 43.4 percent capital gains tax and the steep hike in the corporate tax rate? The answer is that, generally speaking, its members view affluence — even their own — with scorn. Financial success does not inspire pride but shame. It is not something to be celebrated but punished. When the Pew Research Center measured how wealthy people are perceived by members of each party, a solid majority of Republicans expressed the view that the rich were hardworking, intelligent and honest. Only a bare fraction of Democrats endorsed that perspective, though — most of them described the well-off as “greedy.” That’s why, during the COVID-19 pandemic, blue states had no problem cannibalizing their economies by imposing draconian lockdowns that left millions of working-class Americans unemployed and unable to pay their bills. The party of the rich decimated small businesses through inflexible, and often irrational, regulations of dubious public health value. Meanwhile, high-earning Democrats — such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos — thrived. Whether Democrats’ opprobrium toward wealth owes to socialist influences or to guilt based on misguided notions that any success is the result of “our history of slavery, genocide, dispossession, and discrimination,” as one liberal academic has claimed, the undeniable fact remains that the Democrat Party is now the silver spoon set. The American Spectator Florida: The Emerging Super State And the likely home of the 2024 GOP nominee. by Neal B. Freeman There are no sure things in American politics, but this one comes pretty close: The next GOP presidential nominee will be a Floridian. The lanes have filled up already. In the Trump lane, you have the Big Guy himself, Trump Classic. In the big-government conservative lane, you have Florida’s senior senator, Marco Rubio. In the traditional conservative lane, you have former governor, now junior senator Rick Scott. And in the post-Trump lane, you have first-term governor Ron DeSantis. The Florida primary, which may serve as a national nominating convention in 2024, is well underway. It says here that Trump won’t run again. Yes, I’m guessing, but in the previous five cycles I’ve gone with no-no-no-yes-and-yes, which is more than Melania can say. By the time spring turns to summer, the MAGA rallies will have resumed and Trump will have laid down two markers for the national political community: first, that he (alone) can draw a large crowd, and, second, that he can lay the wood to Joe Biden. As of this writing, Biden is highly popular in Florida, well above water in state polls at 54 for and 42 against. What does that say? Not much, in my view, other than that a genial fellow hobbling down the sidewalk tossing thousand-dollar bills at strangers can make a nice first impression. Beltway Republicans, for some reason, have been timid in their criticism of Biden and the manic leftism for which he is fronting. Trump won’t be. Along about Labor Day, it says here, when the Big Guy gets finished with Biden behind the school gym, those polls will have been turned on their head and Trump will have achieved his most important political objective — a restoration of political power. At that point, there will be no cogent argument for him to run. Which provides no guarantee, of course, that he won’t. Rubio must bide his time, which, for Rubio, will be a Biblical test of man’s will. Rubio is quick and intellectually omnivorous and thinks (rightly) that he’s smarter than most of his colleagues. He longs to be America’s first Cuban American president. He may be one day, but not this day. He spent the winter tiptoeing through the Palm Beach tulips, first to avoid a primary from Ivanka and then to secure Trump’s endorsement for reelection. Done and done. He now has a clear path to re-nomination, with two challengers in the general election named Whatshisname and Whatshername. Now comes the hard part. Rubio must feign a lack of interest in 2024, even as the debate continues to rage — does the senior senator have fire in the belly or just ants in the pants? Scott’s is the more interesting case. Across the national GOP, nobody takes him seriously. In Florida, everybody does. Floridians have seen his grit, his focus, his instinct to ignore the capillary on his straight-line path to the jugular. At 68, Scott knows that 2024 will be his only shot at the presidency, and he is doing the necessary to maximize his chances. First, he took on a job that nobody wants: He’s the new chairman of the GOP’s Senate campaign committee. Even in a normal year, that job goes begging. It entails lots of dreary afternoons dialing for dollars, lots of Friday nights in places like Boise, Bangor, and Biloxi, lots of small planes, lots of dicey weather. In this cycle, the playing field itself will be tilted against him. The GOP will be defending 20 seats with five retirements, the Democrats — with control of both Congress and the White House and the campaign leverage that goes with control — only 14 seats with no retirements. The second thing Scott did was to redefine the job he had just accepted. Ever since 2010, when the GOP blew at least two Senate seats by nominating unelectable candidates in winnable races, the campaign committee has tried to impose discipline on the process — by weeding out primary candidates who have no chance in the general. Not this time. Scott recently low-keyed the announcement that he will not be intervening in primaries but, rather, that he would be letting “the people” choose GOP nominees. How often does a political boss let “the people” make their own decisions? I don’t know, but the answer has to be somewhere between not often and never. Why, you might reasonably ask, would Scott shrink the mandate of his own committee? Consider the race in Ohio. Rob Portman is retiring, the state is trending red, and the seat in normal circumstance would be a relatively easy retention. But the growing GOP field already includes a hyper-Trumper endorsed by Kellyanne Conway — Bernie Moreno. Nobody I speak to regards Moreno as a particularly strong candidate, but ask yourself this question: If you’re Rick “Last Chance” Scott, do you want to be seen muscling the Trumpiest candidate out of the Ohio race? And do you want to spend the next year playing the same role in North Carolina, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and perhaps elsewhere? What’s in this new job for Scott? In the best scenario, he flips the Senate, spares the nation further 51-50 Kamala Harris craziness, and becomes a GOP hero. In the worst case, he gets to know all the key players in places like Boise, Bangor, and Biloxi. Rick Scott is doing the necessary. The high flyer at this writing is DeSantis. The most recent state poll shows his favorable-unfavorable numbers at 56-42. Those are Biden-type numbers, which prompts the obvious question: How could Florida voters be simultaneously enthusiastic about America’s left-wing president and America’s most conservative governor? The answer, it seems, is that neither man has made the sale. Neither man has established himself as a defined political presence. That’s not all that surprising. Biden’s brand new in his job. And remember how DeSantis won his in 2018. Running as Ron DeSantis, he was headed for a primary drubbing at the hand of an establishment Republican. Mid-campaign, DeSantis reintroduced himself as Trump’s Guy: a bio spot, looped endlessly on cable, showed DeSantis sprawled on a living room rug teaching his young children how to build a block wall. The DeSantis campaign caught fire, and he won the nomination by a whisker. (God then intervened and produced as the Democratic nominee an obscure mayor who managed to excite an FBI investigation into his allegedly criminal activity. DeSantis won again by a whisker.) Next year, DeSantis will, perforce, run as Ron DeSantis, and the record is mostly good. He opened the schools before the Whitmer–Newsom crowd. (He opened the restaurants, too, which in Florida are almost as politically talismanic as the schools.) He gave shots to old people first, which millions of old voters considered to be sound public policy. He muted opposition from the teachers’ and environmental lobbies without giving away the store. He raised serious taxes only on out-of-state retailers (which in-state retailers considered to be sound public policy). He tossed red meat to the Trump pack with an “anti-riot” bill. And he kept the books roughly in balance during a public health crisis, holding unemployment to a current level of 4.7 percent. It is a thoroughly defensible record for a scandal-free, storm-free administration. The proximate challenge for DeSantis will be to manage the transition from being Trump’s Guy to being My Own Guy. The governor cannot be seen to be hustling Trump off stage before he’s ready to leave. But then again, DeSantis can’t wait too long, either, lest he provide daylight to which Rubio or Scott might run. Mar-a-Lago seems to be the kind of club from which you can withdraw in only one way: carefully, very carefully. I conclude by committing an unnatural journalistic act. On March 21, 2019, I wrote the following: “Answer me this: As of this moment, who is more likely to be the Republican nominee in 2024 than the accidental governor of Florida?” I still own that question, and I pose it anew. For those of you who for whatever reason have not yet moved to Florida, state Republicans have a message for you, and for the rest of the nation: Thanks for your input on the 2024 race, America. But we’ll take it from here. Florida Update DeSantis Calls Systemic Racism ‘Horse Manure,’ Blasts ‘Very Harmful’ Critical Race Theory As ‘Race-Based’ Marxism Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Thursday blasted accusations that the United States is systemically racist as “horse manure” and further said critical race theory is a race-based form of Marxism. Asked to respond to the claim that America is “a systemically racist country,” DeSantis told Fox News host Laura Ingraham during a town hall that such a proposition is “a bunch of horse manure.” “I mean, give me a break. This country has had more opportunity for more people than any country in the history of the world, and it doesn’t matter where you trace your ancestry from,” DeSantis said to applause from the audience. “We’ve had people that have been able to succeed.” “And here’s the problem with things like critical race theory that they’re peddling,” DeSantis continued, pivoting to the controversial academic movement that some states such as Florida and Idaho have taken measures to ban from their public schools. “They’re basically saying all our institutions are bankrupt, and they’re illegitimate.” “Okay, so how do you have a society if everything in your society is illegitimate?” asked DeSantis. “So it’s a very harmful ideology, and I would say, really, a race-based version of a Marxist-type ideology. So we’ve banned it in our schools here in Florida. We’re not going to put any taxpayer dollars to critical race theory, and we want to treat people as individuals, not as members of groups.” Florida Bans Transgenders in Women’s Sports Florida becomes the latest state to advance a measure that would ban transgender girls from competing in high school sports. A standalone Senate transgender bill, SB 2012, appeared to have died earlier in the session when the Senate failed to pass it out of its final committee hearing, preventing it from getting to the floor in that chamber. The measure was passed by the state’s Republican-led legislature last Wednesday and is set to become law when signed by GOP Gov. DeSantis. The bill was reportedly passed mostly along party lines after the stalled measure was amended into a charter school bill. After a nearly two-hour, emotional debate, the Senate approved the measure by a 23-16 vote shortly before 9 p.m. Similar bills have been passed in recent months by Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee, after Idaho approved a transgender-sports ban last year. A federal judge issued a temporary injunction against the law in Idaho. More than two dozen other statehouses are considering a ban at this time. Proponents claim the legislation is required because transgender female athletes have greater strength, bone mass and muscle volume than their peers. LGBT advocacy groups and civil rights advocates point out that the measures are discriminatory and don’t address any real problem, as most lawmakers sponsoring the bills haven’t cited problematic instances in their states. “We don’t need to wait until there’s a problem in Florida for us to act,” Republican Rep. Kaylee Tuck, the sponsor of the original bill, reportedly fended off criticisms from Democrats that high school and college sports in Florida haven’t had an issue with transgender women in sports, and some transgender girls already playing sports would be kicked off their teams. The revised measure removed a clause that would allow schools to examine the genitals of athletes suspected of being born male. Under the new law, a student’s birth certificate will reportedly be sufficient. ATTORNEY GENERAL ASHLEY MOODY ANNOUNCES PASSAGE OF HISTORIC SENIOR PROTECTION ACT Attorney General Ashley Moody announced the passage of historic senior protection legislation. Attorney General Moody worked closely with the Elder Law Section of the Florida Bar, Senator Danny Burgess and Representative Colleen Burton in crafting HB 1041 to provide greater protection to seniors statewide. The bill today passed off the Senate floor and will head to Governor Ron DeSantis for his signature. Attorney General Ashley Moody said, “It’s no secret that Florida is a great place to retire. With more than five million seniors calling Florida home, it is our duty to ensure we provide a safe environment for older citizens to enjoy their golden years free from fraud and exploitation. Unfortunately, scammers recognize our booming senior population and often seek to turn their dream retirement into a financial nightmare. “Our seniors deserve peace of mind and the ability to enjoy their retirement, free of worry from deceitful scammers looking to exploit their trust. I’m proud to work with Senator Danny Burgess and Representative Colleen Burton to strengthen our state laws and the authority of my Statewide Prosecutors to help ensure criminals targeting Florida’s older population are brought to justice.” CLUB EVENTS DONATE TO RE-ELECT GOVERNOR DESANTIS [link removed] Next REC Meeting: May 12, 2021 Be sure to visit our website: www.ircgop.com Linda Anselmini Secretary Indian River County Republican Executive Committee Indian River County Republican Executive Committee | www.ircgop.com ‌ Indian River County Republican Executive Committee | P.O. Box 6569, Vero Beach, FL 32961-6569 Unsubscribe [email protected] Update Profile | Constant Contact Data Notice Sent by [email protected] powered by Try email marketing for free today!