The 39-year-old former White House press secretary enjoyed the support of former President Donald Trump and easily sent his only Republican opponent long after clearing the way for other serious GOP candidates. .
Returning to the governor’s mansion would be a return home for Sanders after she spent her teenage years in that residence as the daughter of former governor Mike Huckabee, a pastor who ran the state for more than 10 years. . Sanders would be the first daughter in U.S. history to serve as governor of the same state as her father.
“The only thing that could stop Sarah Sanders from being governor of Arkansas is a Martian invasion,” Arkansas Republican strategist Bill Vickery said before Tuesday’s primaries.
Trump won Arkansas by nearly 28 points in 2020.
Sanders left the White House in 2019 as a controversial figure on the national stage after two and a half years serving as one of Trump’s most trusted and unwavering advocates. During the campaign, he pointed to this mandate as a testament to his unwillingness to back down, posing as a firewall against the “radical left” as he unleashed national media.
With her deep political connections in Arkansas, her experience as an experienced political agent and the national follow-up she built as a press secretary and later as a Fox collaborator, she quickly established herself as the candidate to win after. to enter the race in January 2021.
But the core of his connection to voters, Vickery said, was the fact that he has been in the public eye since his preadolescent years, beginning with his father’s candidacy for the U.S. Senate in 1992, followed by his time as lieutenant governor, then tenure as governor.
“She grew up in front of everyone in Arkansas. Then, as President Trump’s spokeswoman,” Vickery said, “the vast majority of Arkansas voters, who are Republicans, saw what they felt was significant abuse against her. on the part of the national press and pop culture figures, they saw her resist that. “
At the time of her departure from the White House, when Trump considered her a “warrior” and turned her into a gubernatorial candidate, her critics called her a liar, arguing that her credibility and legacy they had deteriorated irrevocably. Sanders was personally criticized when the report of then-special counsel Robert Mueller was published. She revealed that, as undersecretary of press, she had provided baseless information to reporters when she claimed in May 2017, after the president had fired FBI Director James Comey, that “countless” FBI agents had lost confidence in Comey. Sanders acknowledged to investigators that his comments “were not based on anything,” the Mueller report said.
But back home, many Arkansans considered his treatment in Washington harsh.
“Stories of personal assaults, being kicked out of restaurants,” Vickery said, referring to a 2018 incident when Sanders told Lexington Red Hen owner Virginia to ask him to leave. because he worked for Trump. “There’s a bit of an element of Arkansas people who take it personally, because of their favorite daughter status. A big part of their public personality here is the strength, the heart and the determination that they showed. in retrospect, “he said. Critics of Sanders in Washington would offer a different account of his years navigating the nadir of White House relations with the press. For mockery, Sanders at one point used his time on the podium to read a letter of praise from a 9-year-old boy nicknamed “Pickle” to the president. She was often criticized for being evasive, for valuing Trump’s loyalty above all else, and for gradually ending the White House’s briefing. Although he entered the White House with warm relations with many journalists, tensions rose rapidly. In a notable example of how tense the relationship had become, Sanders defended Trump’s statement that the press was an “enemy of the people” during a 2018 exchange with CNN’s Jim Acosta. In January 2019, Trump tweeted that the reason Sanders didn’t get on the podium “is that the press covers it so thickly and imprecisely,” and added, “I told him not to bother.” .
Consolidation of GOP support
But his popularity in the red state of Arkansas has shown how voters have been receptive to both his combativeness and his unabashed defense of Trump in this role.
GOP Lieutenant Governor Tim Griffin left the governor’s career to run for attorney general weeks after Sanders announced his offer. State Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, who had served as Mike Huckabee’s legal adviser both when he was governor and when he ran for president in 2008, left the race in November to take part in the already crowded career. for lieutenant governor.
Trump’s endorsement gave Sanders more revenue to thousands of his small dollar donors and also had the backing of Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson.
“She’s been an unstoppable force all along,” said Janine Parry, a political science professor at the University of Arkansas. the Arkansas transition from a predominantly democratic state. to a solid Republican since 2010.
“She’s a master activist. We don’t really know much about her positions in public policy, at least at the state level, but of course, in this climate it really doesn’t matter.”
The Sanders campaign did not respond to requests for CNN interviews.
Democrats are likely to end up with a charismatic and formidable candidate of their own in Chris Jones, an ordained minister and nuclear engineer who earned a doctorate in urban planning at MIT. But Parry, who is also the director of the Arkansas University poll, said it will be difficult for any Democrat to break the “38% at best” in November given GOP dominance in the state. .
Sanders focused his campaign on some of the most polarizing national issues in politics: denouncing the closure of public schools during the pandemic and pointing to the critical theory of race, an academic framework that is rarely used below the university level. . She has stated that as a governor she would “educate children, not indoctrinate them”. It was defined as “the last line of defense against the dangerous and radical leftist policies coming out of Washington.” And she often reminded her audience of her relationship as a mother, highlighting her three children in her ads. In one, where she argues that her role as a mother was the best preparation for a senior position, her children try to cut their hair and build a wine glass tower in the kitchen, portrayed as examples of Sanders. training to say “no” (including journalists from the White House press corps). “As governor, I will say no to Biden and the radical left’s agenda, but to good schools, lower taxes and better paid jobs,” he said in the announcement.
As voters struggle with rising gasoline and grocery prices, Sanders also campaigned to begin phasing out the state income tax, though he did not specify a timeline or describe the specific cuts it would make to existing programs. In the sharp, television-sounding notes that became his hallmark, he suggested that he would create a “salary increase” for Arkans residents that would offset the “pay cut” they are experiencing through inflation, adopting the GOP’s argument that the Biden administration’s policies have worsened inflation.
Democratic nominee Jones told CNN he doesn’t oppose income tax cuts, but that as a mathematician, he still “has to see the work” of Sanders’ campaign on what cuts would be needed to make complete removal possible.
Competing against four other Democrats in the primary, Jones argues that the Arkansans will eventually reject what he has described as a Sanders campaign message based on fear, lies and divisive politics and adopt what he calls his “PB&J” agenda. “: preschool. broadband and jobs.
Opponents of Sanders, left and right, accused her of avoiding difficult questions and of not providing clarity on her positions on controversial issues from the January 6, 2021 uprising to the series of approved bills. by the Arkansas legislature targeting trans rights and the LGBTQ community. In a recent interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Sanders, an evangelical Christian, said she would “not ask for an exception” to abortion, even when asked about cases to save her mother’s life or rape and rape cases. incest. When asked if the 2020 election was stolen for Trump, as he has falsely claimed, Sanders was opaque during this recent interview. “I don’t think we’ll ever know the depths of how much fraud existed,” he said, though there is no widespread evidence of election fraud.
“We know there is fraud in every election,” he told the newspaper. “No matter how far it went, I don’t think that’s going to be determined.”
A political tactician makes the leap to a candidate
Sanders ’ease in diverting questions in a way that leaves them open to a broad interpretation is a political skill that has been helpful in his rise. Several Arkansas political strategists said one of the most overlooked aspects of his campaign was the depth of his knowledge of the state as a political tactic.
In his memoirs “Speaking for Myself: Faith, Freedom, and the Fight of Our Lives Inside the Trump White House,” Sanders notes that he spent most of his childhood on the Arkansas Festival Circuit campaigning with his pare. It was a rotation that included chariot, toad and turtle races, and the Gillett Coon dinner where he said raccoons should be eaten to avoid offending the hosts, “and I loved it,” he wrote. When he was a sophomore at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, he was spending the summer crossing the state as a field clerk for his father’s re-election campaign in 2002 and organizing his RV all over the world. ‘state …