Monthly Archives: February 2021

President Trump lost California by a margin of nearly 30 percentage points to Joe Biden last fall. But four Republicans not only won their congressional districts in California but also flipped their districts red. Among them, Representative Young Kim, one of the first Korean American women elected to the House. Shes a Korean immigrant, a mother of 4 and one of Yahoo Finances The Next: 21 to watch in 2021.

I believe I'm the future of the Republican Party, she told Yahoo Finance. I want to be able to use my common sense background and be able to stand up for what I believe is the right thing to do.

Kim still says she thinks Trump was "a great president" and credits him with "helping our economy," but she has also shown her willingness to break ranks with Republicans, including in her vote to remove Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committee assignments.

I am my own person. And I've always run on my own record, she said. President Trump is very unique, to say the least; he's very opinionated. I supported his policies, but not necessarily his rhetoric, or his attitude or the way that he delivers his remarks.

UNITED STATES - JANUARY 4: Rep. Young Kim, R-Calif., on the House steps of the Capitol. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Kim is particularly forceful in rebuking Trump for his inflammatory language about COVID-19 and Asians. "When he called it 'Kung Flu,' I said enough is enough. Leaders' words have consequences. And the leader has to be very sensitive about what they say. That comment was very insensitive and I called him out on that. And I wanted to make sure that, you know, we love immigrants, we love diversity. And this pandemic was not caused by any one ethnicity or any group of people. I wanted to make sure that my community knows that I'm with them; I understand. And that message had to be sent," she said.

While Trump continues to try to assert his grip on the GOP, Kim is striking a more moderate, common-sense approach that helped her win her seat, gaining fans on both sides of the political spectrum. Shes one of the more moderate Republican members of this freshmen class and one of the few to join The Problem Solvers Caucus, a bipartisan group in the United States House of Representatives that includes 50 members, equally divided between Democrats and Republicans.

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I am very focused on finding common ground, Kim said. When I was first running in 2018, I had learned about Problem Solvers Caucus. And so I had known about the work they did, how the Problem Solvers Caucus was able to negotiate a bipartisan relief efforts in December of last year. This is exactly what I went to Washington, D.C., to do. I came to Washington to get things done in a bipartisan way. So I kept my promise by hitting the ground running with my like-minded members on both sides of the aisle.

Kim is looking for areas of agreement in Bidens $1.9 trillion stimulus plan. She sees consensus for proposals on $160 billion for vaccine development and vaccine distribution.

We're not going to agree on everything, 100% of the time. ... Remember what President Ronald Reagan said You don't have to agree on everything. But if you agree with someone at least 80% of the time, that is a damn good thing. We can get a lot of things done. And I learned early on, if you don't care who takes the credit, you can get a lot of things done.

Check out more of Yahoo Finance's THE NEXT 21: 21 to watch in 2021.

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Rep. Young Kim: 'I'm the future of the Republican Party' - Yahoo Finance

Students were asked if they would choose being a Republican or Democrat in a civics class. The answers were publicized, with conservative students being bullied.

INDIAN TRAIL, N.C. A Union County mother is calling for change to the curriculum after her daughter was allegedly asked if she was a Republican or a Democrat in a civics class.

During the third week of February, students in a civics and economics course at Porter Ridge High School in Indian Trail were asked, "If you had to pick: are you a Democrat or a Republican? Why?'"

Students answered the question. The answers were then posted for the class to see, the mother said, and her daughter was bullied for being a Republican.

"My daughter was worried. She said, 'I just want to cry,'" the mother said. "'Everybody is being so mean to me.'"

The mother did not want to be identified, worried about further bullying or threats to her daughter.

"These threats that, 'we'll show them!' Or, 'I can't wait until I see her,'" she said as she explained some of the threats her daughter received after the answers quickly spread around the high school.

Students took pictures of the answers that had the names of the students next to them, according to the mom. It wasn't long before students in other classes began to bully her daughter.

"I think in this climate right now, people are too politically charged up," the mother said. "People's emotions are in this. It's just creating a toxic environment."

She claimed at least one other student received threatening comments after answering 'Republican' as well.

"That teacher put a target, he outed these children," she said.

Union County Public Schools responded Thursday afternoon, confirming the lesson did happen.

"Union County Public Schools staff is aware of the parents concerns," a spokeswoman for the district said. "The discussion was a part of a Civics and Economics class in which students are learning about political parties. School administrators have addressed this matter with teachers and they will continue to have conversations about best practices for instruction."

This mother spoke with the teacher who apologized multiple times. She said she accepted his apology but she hoped there are lessons to be learned.

"He's in the best position to create peace between people who have different opinions and to kind of bridge the gap, as opposed to creating more division," she said.

She believes party affiliation is a private matter and maintains it should have never been asked in the first place.

"Most of us know that not even adults can get along about this," she added. "I don't know why we would think that teenagers would be more mature about this than we are."

The school district said the school's principal spoke with students about respecting each other and each other's opinions, but did not say if any disciplinary action was taken.

The district maintains that politics is an important lesson to teach high school students and will continue to have it in the curriculum.

The mother of the student who was bullied hopes future lesson plans in civics will start with civility.

"It doesn't have to be a hateful or dangerous environment because someone thinks differently than you," she said.

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Union Co. teacher asked students if they're Republican or Democrat in class, mom says - WCNC.com

Although the University of Iowa and the University of Northern Iowa already announced their upcoming commencement ceremonies will be virtual and are well into planning them a Republican lawmaker is sponsoring a bill requiring Iowas public universities to hold in-person spring graduations.

House Study Bill 246, proposed this week by Rep. Bobby Kaufmann, R-Wilton, would force the regent universities to hold traditional in-person spring commencement ceremonies during the regularly scheduled times in May and June two and three months from now.

The bill requires the campuses allow at least two guests per graduate which could mean many thousands at some of the larger ceremonies, like for undergraduates of the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

The universities may establish protocols for the control and prevention of COVID-19, as deemed necessary, according to the proposal.

While the UI and UNI at the start of the spring semester announced their plans, Iowa State University has said it wont announce a decision until Monday.

The campuses have reported thousands of positive COVID-19 cases this academic year and have offered a blend of virtual and face-to-face classes.

COVID-19 case numbers have been lower this semester across the campuses, which also have canceled their spring breaks to prevent high-risk travel.

All three regent universities held their spring and fall 2020 graduations online, and UI officials acknowledged the disappointment in losing the in-person experience when they announced plans to nix it again in May and June.

We know how much these ceremonies mean to our students and their families, the earlier UI announcement said. While May seems a long way off, we feel it is the right decision to make now to maintain the health and safety of the entire campus community.

ISU has reported its Commencement Advisory Committee is evaluating multiple options for commencement with a focus on safety for students, faculty, staff and guests that appropriately honor graduating students achievements.

When the campuses last year canceled the in-person spring ceremonies and far less was known about how the COVID pandemic would play out officials projected it would be a one-time change. Promising to honor graduates just the same this spring albeit virtually UI administrators recognized many of last springs graduates had planned to participate in-person this year instead.

We acknowledge the disappointment of our graduates who were unable to attend an in-person commencement ceremony in spring or fall 2020 due to the pandemic and planned to participate in May 2021, UI officials said earlier. The university will reach out to these graduates regarding opportunities to be recognized at future in-person programs to celebrate their accomplishments.

The UI graduated 5,473 undergraduate, graduate and professional students last spring; ISU graduated 5,094; and UNI graduated 1,422.

On large gatherings, the Iowa Department of Public Health references recently-updated Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance urging against events and gatherings. However, in a Feb. 5 health order, Gov. Kim Reynolds lifted restrictions on the size of gatherings but said I strongly encourage organizers to take reasonable measures under the circumstances to mitigate spread of the disease.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com

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Republican bill would force Iowa universities to hold in-person graduation - The Gazette

As youve undoubtedly noticed, the current political environment is super partisan and polarized. We are in the midst of an unprecedented run of close, competitive elections, and Democrats and Republicans are about as far apart ideologically as theyve ever been. Many of them also feel a strong antipathy toward each other, to the point that most believe the other side fundamentally differs not just in its priorities but in its core values, too.

As a result, few voters split their tickets in November. That is, if you voted for one party for president, you probably voted for the same party up and down the ballot. Take how voters cast their ballots in the U.S. House elections, the only other national election in 2020 aside from the presidential election (the presidential race is on the ballot everywhere, as are all 435 House seats). Just 16 out of 435 districts backed a presidential nominee from one party and a House candidate from the other party, according to district-level voting data compiled by Daily Kos Elections. That translates to just 4 percent of districts splitting their tickets in 2020, the smallest share in the past 70 years.

That number is stark, and speaks to how deeply entrenched partisanship is in our elections, but as the chart above shows, this cycle isnt the first time this has been the case. Over the past 20 years, the share of districts splitting their House and presidential results between the two major parties has consistently fallen below 20 percent, and 2020 was the third consecutive cycle it fell below 10 percent. This represents a sea change from much of the latter half of the 20th century, when all but one cycle (1952) topped 20 percent. In fact, wed have to go back to the start of the 20th century to find a similar period with such a small share of crossover seats between 1900 and 1908.

[Related: Where Did All The Bellwether Counties Go?]

What is fueling this bevy of straight-ticket outcomes is a sharp increase in the one-to-one relationship between presidential and House voting. Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll, recently observed that the correlation between the presidential and House vote margin in each district was far greater in 2020 than in 2000, just two decades prior. Based on Franklins calculations, the 2020 presidential vote explained more than 85 percent of the variation in the House vote last November, whereas it explained only about 30 percent of the variation in 2000.

Now, this doesnt mean that the few districts that did split their outcomes in 2020 werent important; rather, they were illustrative of why the Democrats ended up with a narrow majority in the House. Thats because in these 16 districts, the GOP did slightly better than the Democrats overall, and not just because Republicans won nine of these districts compared with the Democrats seven. The GOP also notably won the four closest races in these districts and carried six of the seven seats with the largest gap between the House and presidential vote. In fact, of the 14 House seats that the GOP flipped in 2020, four of them were from these 16 crossover districts.

Districts carried by a presidential candidate of one major party and a House candidate of the other party in 2020

i Incumbent in November 2020

Sources: The Cook Political Report, Daily Kos Elections

The GOPs slight edge in these crossover seats is significant, as it continues a recent pattern in presidential contests of Republicans winning more districts with split outcomes. (Democrats previously held this advantage, from 2000 to 2008, but in 2010 they lost many seats in the South that had long been in their hands despite voters leaning toward the GOP at the presidential level.) However, while the GOP may have done somewhat better in the crossover seats in 2020, they still proved to be pivotal to the Democrats majority: The Democrats now hold 222 seats overall, and thats in large part thanks to these seats. If theyd lost five or more of these split-ticket seats, Republicans would have gained control. In total, the average gap between the presidential and House margins in the 16 crossover seats was about 9.2 points, while the average difference in the remaining House seats was 4.4 points, indicative of just how close the presidential and House races ran together.

And that close alignment will likely be the reality moving forward. Even if the number of crossover seats increases in 2024, it would take a dramatic shift in our politics for enough voters to split their tickets to produce a lot of Democratic House members in seats carried by the GOP presidential nominee or vice versa. Now more than ever, these split-ticket outcomes are the exception, not the rule.

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Why Only 16 Districts Voted For A Republican And A Democrat In 2020 - FiveThirtyEight

David Graham: Trump thinks hes found a new defense

The party itself was not a party in any Western sense, but a vehicle for a cabal of elites, with a cult of personality at its center. The Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was an utterly mediocre man, but by the late 1970s he had cemented his grip on the Communist Party by elevating opportunists and cronies around him who insisted, publicly and privately, that Brezhnev was a heroic genius. Factories and streets and even a city were named for him, and he promoted himself to the top military rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union. He awarded himself so many honors and medals that, in a common Soviet joke of the time, a small earthquake in Moscow was said to have been caused by Brezhnevs medal-festooned military overcoat falling off its hanger.

The elite leaders of this supposedly classless society were corrupt plutocrats, a mafia dressed in Marxism. The party was infested by careerists, and its grip on power was defended by propagandists who used rote phrases such as real socialism and Western imperialism so often that almost anyone could write an editorial in Pravda or Red Star merely by playing a kind of Soviet version of Mad Libs. News was tightly controlled. Soviet radio, television, and newspaper figures plowed on through stories that were utterly detached from reality, regularly extolling the successes of Soviet agriculture even as the country was forced to buy food from the capitalists (including the hated Americans).

Members of the Communist Party who questioned anything, or expressed any sign of unorthodoxy, could be denounced by name, or more likely, simply fired. They would not be executedthis was not Stalinism, after allbut some were left to rot in obscurity in some make-work exile job, eventually retiring as a forgotten Comrade Pensioner. The deal was clear: Pump the partys nonsense and enjoy the good life, or squawk and be sent to manage a library in Kazakhstan.

This should all sound familiar.

The Republican Party has, for years, ignored the ideas and principles it once espoused, to the point where the 2020 GOP convention simply dispensed with the fiction of a platform and instead declared the party to be whatever Comradeexcuse me, PresidentDonald Trump said it was.

Read: The hole where Donald Trump was

Like Brezhnev, Trump has grown in status to become a heroic figure among his supporters. If the Republicans could create the rank of Marshal of the American Republic and strike a medal for a Hero of American Culture, Trump would have them both by now.

A GOP that once prided itself on its intellectual debates is now ruled by the turgid formulations of what the Soviets would have called their leading cadres, including ideological watchdogs such as Tucker Carlson and Mark Levin. Like their Soviet predecessors, a host of dull and dogmatic cable outlets, screechy radio talkers, and poorly written magazines crank out the same kind of fill-in-the-blanks screeds full of delusional accusations, replacing NATO and revanchism with antifa and radicalism.

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The Republican Party Is Now in Its End Stages - The Atlantic

Then-candidate Donald Trump holds a campaign rally in Mobile, Ala., in August 2015. Mark Wallheiser/Getty Images hide caption

Then-candidate Donald Trump holds a campaign rally in Mobile, Ala., in August 2015.

In the last 28 months, the Republican Party has lost the White House and lost control of both chambers of Congress.

With the shock of those setbacks still sinking in, the party has been rocked and riven by former President Donald Trump's refusal to concede, a pro-Trump riot in the U.S. Capitol and an impeachment effort that even some Republicans backed.

As happens at such moments, some editorialists and on-air voices are saying the Grand Old Party is over. But premature obituaries of this kind are neither new nor convincing. The latest batch of them might just set the stage for the next remarkable Republican comeback.

Where will the party turn in its hour of crisis? If the past is any guide, it will turn in two directions: to the right, and to the South. These have been the wellsprings of strength and support that have brought the party back from the brink in recent decades.

That was the strategy that led to Richard Nixon's elections as president in 1968 and 1972, and it was still working for Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

Solidifying the South and energizing conservatives were also crucial factors in the Republican tsunami of 1994, when the GOP surged to majorities in Congress and in statehouses. That hamstrung the remainder of Bill Clinton's presidency and presaged the election of Republican George W. Bush in 2000.

It was a lesson not lost on Trump. While not even a Republican until late in life, he started his primary campaign billboarding the party's most conservative positions on taxes, trade, immigration and abortion. And the first of his rallies to draw a crowd in the tens of thousands was in a football stadium in Mobile, Ala., two months after he declared his candidacy in the summer of 2015.

Whether the next standard-bearer for the GOP is Trump himself or someone else, there is little doubt the playbook will be the same.

Low points, then turnarounds

Before the present moment, Republican electoral fortunes had hit three particularly low points in the previous 70 years. The first came after the Lyndon Johnson landslide election in 1964, the second after the Watergate scandals a decade later and the third after the election of Clinton with a big Democratic majority in the Senate in 1992.

Perhaps the most discouraging of these for the GOP was Johnson's tidal wave, which carried in the biggest majorities Democrats in Congress had enjoyed since the heyday of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.

Johnson, a Texas Democrat, had assumed the presidency a year earlier when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Despite his own Southern roots, he pushed through the landmark Civil Rights Act outlawing segregation in public facilities. But as he signed it, he was reported to have said he feared his party had "lost the South for a generation."

The first sign that he was right came that fall. Even as Johnson got 60% of the nationwide popular vote and carried 44 states, he lost five in the "Deep South" (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina). This bloc voted for Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater, an Arizonan who had opposed the Civil Rights Act as an affront to state's rights.

When this fistful of five states defected, it was a stunner. They had resisted Republicans even when the Democrats nominated Northern liberals like Illinois' Adlai Stevenson (1952 and 1956) and Kennedy (1960), who was not only a New Englander but a Catholic.

Before that they had stuck with the Democrats even in the party's worst drubbings of the century, although some had left the fold for third-party attractions such as segregationist Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who left the Democrats for a time to form the States Rights Party in 1948.

This shift in Southern sensibilities in the 1960s was linked to the national Democrats' embrace of the civil rights movement, the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and then to the creation of Medicare and other "Great Society" programs in 1965.

To be sure, there were other factors buoying what had been the "party of Lincoln" in Dixie, including the arrival of affluent Northern retirees and of industries lured by the lower cost of (non-unionized) labor.

But the salient issue was race. As Republican strategist Kevin Phillips expressed it to New York Times reporter James Boyd in 1970: "The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are."

"The Southern Strategy"

Working for Republican candidate Nixon in 1968, Phillips popularized the label of "Southern Strategy" for the overall approach his candidate took to the electorate that year. But Nixon tapped into Republican local organizations already growing in the South, largely by emphasizing states' rights and the "law and order" theme. The latter gained popular traction nationwide as riots ravaged many major cities in 1967 and 1968 (especially after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that year).

That strategy proved crucial for Nixon. He carried South Carolina (where Thurmond, still a senator, was now a Republican and a Nixon man), plus Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky. It turned out to be enough, even though five other Southern states' electoral votes went to George Wallace, the segregationist former governor of Alabama who ran that year as the nominee of the American Independent Party.

Nixon worried about another Wallace bid costing him Southern states again in 1972, and he worked hard to maneuver Wallace in another direction. In the end, Wallace sought the Democratic nomination for president in 1972 (a campaign cut short when he was paralyzed by an assassination attempt). Nixon swept the South that year en route to winning 49 states overall.

The wilderness after Watergate

After such a resounding reelection, it seemed unimaginable that Nixon or his party could be in political trouble so soon after his second inauguration. But a 1972 burglary at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee (in the Watergate hotel), was traced to Nixon's campaign. His efforts to cover up that connection were then exposed, leading to impeachment proceedings. When audio tapes of his conspiratorial meetings with aides were made public, he resigned and was pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford.

Republicans once again found themselves in the wilderness. Midterm elections arrived right after the resignation and pardon. Republicans nationwide paid the price, with the party losing seats in Congress it had held for generations.

Two years later, Democrat Jimmy Carter was elected president, largely because as a former governor of Georgia he could call his home region back to its Democratic roots. Indeed, in 1976 he carried every Southern state but Virginia.

But even in that year, the Southern tilt of the new GOP was apparent in the primaries. Ford, seeking a term of his own, was cruising through the early party events up until North Carolina in late March. There he was ambushed by the conservative, onetime Goldwater spokesman who was challenging him for the party's nomination, Reagan.

Reagan also won primaries in Texas, Georgia and Arkansas and virtually tied Ford in Tennessee and Kentucky. Combined with his wins in the West, these late breakthroughs almost brought him the nomination.

Another Southern-bred comeback

Four years later, with Carter vulnerable, Reagan and the South were both front and center. Reagan backers had created a new early primary in South Carolina, which he won easily. That sent a signal across the region, and the following week Reagan won Florida, Georgia and Alabama. He went on to win every Southern primary, including the knockout in Texas over that state's favorite son George H.W. Bush, whom he later made his running mate.

How had a son of the Midwest by way of California (and Hollywood) come to be such a champion of the South? One answer was suggested by the eager support of Thurmond, still a powerbroker in his eighth decade. Another answer was manifest in the campaign's first big rally after Reagan was nominated in the summer of 1980.

That kickoff for the fall campaign was held in Neshoba County, Miss., near the site of a notorious 1964 murder of three civil rights workers. Reagan's campaign chose that location for him to proclaim his belief in states' rights, his opposition to the "welfare state" and his devotion to "law and order."

In that November, Reagan beat Carter everywhere in the old Confederacy but in the incumbent president's own home state. In 1984, storming to reelection, Reagan swept the region with landslide margins.

The Southern Strategy kept rolling in 1988, when the GOP nominated Bush, Reagan's loyal vice president, who had forsaken his New England roots to go all-in as a transplanted Texan. He was Southern enough, and conservative enough, to win every state the Census Bureau defines as Southern with the lone exception of West Virginia.

Clinton-Gore could compete

Bush's term in office featured a short and highly successful war in the Persian Gulf and a budget deal with Democrats that would eventually reduce the federal deficit and slow the growth of the national debt. But a brief recession cost him in the polls, and a rebellion broke out on the party's right.

Bush got a primary challenge from Pat Buchanan, a media personality who served as an adviser to Reagan and Nixon. Buchanan assailed the budget deal because it raised taxes. He conjured the spirits of Reagan and Goldwater and questioned Bush's conservative bona fides. So did Ross Perot, an eccentric billionaire Texan who was running as a self-financing independent.

On top of that, Bush was confronted with the Democrats' choice of an all-Southern ticket in Clinton of Arkansas and Al Gore of Tennessee. The young Democrats who could talk Southern carried their home states plus Louisiana and Georgia and all the Civil War "border states" (Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia and Maryland). The region was back in play.

Clinton and Gore threw a chill into Republicans. What if Clinton served two terms and gave way to a still-vital, still-Southern Gore who could serve two more? That would be a roadblock in the White House equivalent to Roosevelt's four wins.

If that seems far-fetched now, consider that Clinton did win the popular vote twice and Gore won it in 2000 (losing by the barest of margins in the Electoral College). They initiated the current stretch in which Democrats have won the popular vote seven times in the last eight presidential elections.

Democrats in 1992 were also able to hold on to seven of the nine Senate seats they had won in Southern and border states in 1986. That kept their overall Democratic majority at 57-43, providing the muscle to take on the health care reform issue in 1993.

For a time, the momentum behind that issue seemed so strong that more than a few Republicans were looking for ways to be part of it. They did not want to be left out of what appeared then to be the national direction. It was not the last time Republicans contemplated a move toward the center in the wake of a daunting defeat.

GOP goes South again

But as it turned out, the road to redemption would be quite different. Republicans decided to close ranks and oppose the Clinton health proposals, and they succeeded in blocking them.

In the midterm campaign of 1994, Republicans in the House united behind their party's No. 2 leader, Newt Gingrich of Georgia, and his "Contract with America" a list of popular, often populist ideas such as a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget.

Democrats in the House were also dealing with new maps dividing the electoral districts within each state. The creation of more minority-friendly districts in the metropolitan areas had siphoned off likely Democratic voters from adjacent suburban and exurban districts. That weakened Democratic incumbents in the latter districts, especially in the South, where the remapping was most dramatic.

All these factors combined to produce a windfall for Republicans all over the country in the midterms of 1994, but it was a watershed election in the South. For more than a century after Reconstruction, Democrats had held a majority of the governorships and of the Senate and House seats in the South. Even as the region became accustomed to voting Republican for president, this pattern had held at the statewide and congressional levels.

But in November 1994, in a single day, the majority of Southern governorships, Senate seats and House seats shifted to the Republicans. That majority has held ever since, with more legislative seats and local offices shifting to the GOP as well. The South is now the home base of the Republican Party.

The 2020 aftermath

No wonder that in contesting the results in six swing states he lost, Trump seems to have worked hardest on Georgia. If he had won there, he still would have lost the Electoral College decisively. But as the third most populous Southern state, and the only Southern state to change its choice from 2016, it clearly held special significance.

It's worth noting that, even without Georgia, Trump won 13 states where slavery had once been legal (including Oklahoma, which was still a territory during the Civil War, and West Virginia, which was then a part of Virginia) and these states provided nearly 70% of his Electoral College votes.

The move to the right, and the focus on the South, have been the route to renewed success for Republicans again and again.

It was there Trump began his big rally strategy nearly six years ago. It was there he would emerge as the clear front-runner for the nomination in 2016 by winning South Carolina's primary, dominating among the staunchest conservatives in that legendary bastion of Southern independence.

So it seemed more than appropriate that South Carolina's Lindsey Graham would be the first Republican senator summoned to confer with Trump about the party's plans after the impeachment trial ended. And appropriate that the meeting took place at Mar-a-Lago, in Florida, where Trump has relocated his legal residence and political operation.

If Trump is to rise again, it will once again be as a born-again conservative and an adopted son of the South. And if the next Republican is not Trump, nearly all the top contenders to succeed him are from states with at least one college football team in the Southeastern Conference.

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With Or Without Trump, Republicans Will Likely Keep Right And Head South - NPR