A group of New Hampshire Republicans welcomed Mark Sanford to their early-voting state this week as he mulls challenging President Trump for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination.
Sanford, a former South Carolina governor and congressman representing the coastal region around Charleston, wrapped up a three-day swing of the Granite State Thursday morning to talk with advisers about a long-shot White House bid focusing on fiscal conservatism.
GOP political consultant Jim Merrill said Republicans generally supported a discussion about the mounting national debt, the growing deficit, and continued federal spending to put pressure on the Trump administration and to counter 2020 Democratic presidential candidates pushing policies such as “Medicare for All,” the Green New Deal, and student loan forgiveness.
An advantage for Sanford is that people in New Hampshire actually listen, Merrill told the Washington Examiner.
“Even if your candidacy isn’t successful, sometimes your issues survive your candidacy,” he said, citing Paul Tsongas, who won the state’s 1992 Democratic primary election on a fiscal responsibility platform.
A fiscal-centric campaign would also provide Sanford with the opportunity to press Trump “from the right,” according to Merrill.
“He’s not going to win. I see no scenario where he finds a way to hit lightning and win New Hampshire where the party is right now, but I do think there’s an argument to be made on his part that these issues aren’t being talked about,” he said. “If he comes up here and fails to do very well, but the issues catch fire and someone grabs them then he’s contributed to the process.”
The conversation Sanford wants would be “healthy” for the party as long as it doesn’t devolve into personal attacks against Trump, Republican strategist Michael Dennehy added. That seems an iffy proposition considering Sanford’s infamous 2009 declaration that he was “hiking the Appalachian Trail” to cover up an extramarital affair he was conducting with a woman in Argentina, disappearing from the South Carolina governor’s office for days at a time.
When asked whether Sanford was the best messenger, Dennehy conceded “probably not. “But there are no others,” he said.
University of New Hampshire political science professor Dante Scala, however, has his doubts.
“New Hampshire Republicans are a long way from the days of Warren Rudman,” Scala said in an email, referring to the Granite State senator from 1981-1993 and early fiscal constraint advocate. “Trump-era deficits do not seem to be turning off New Hampshire Republicans, who mostly approve of the job the president is doing.”
Sanford’s trip to New Hampshire follows the release this week of another video warning of the coming financial “storm.”
“Seemingly no one in Washington is talking about it. I just got through watching two Democratic debates that offered little more than a long laundry list of new political promises that we can’t afford. I listen to the president, who rules out action on the very things that drive our debt and spending,” he said in the two-minute spot.
The former lawmaker has given himself until Labor Day to decide whether he’s willing to take on a sitting president. He’s spending the intervening time also speaking to people in Iowa, California, and his home state of South Carolina, appearing this month at the state Republican Party’s annual fundraising Silver Elephant Dinner.
The Trump critic could join former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld as a 2020 opponent for the president, while Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan has already opted out of the primary race. However, Sanford and Weld’s efforts may be in vain if state party-run nominating contests aren’t held. Iowa and New Hampshire host open caucus and primary elections, but Drew McKissick, chairman of the South Carolina GOP, hasn’t ruled out scrapping a “first in the South” event.
Sanford lost his own House Republican primary against Kate Arrington during of the 2018 midterm cycle. Trump went after Sanford over Twitter on Election Day, after having criticized him for months for the lawmaker’s jabs at the administration. Arrington, a Trump supporter, was in turn defeated by Rep. Joe Cunningham, who notched up the surprise win for the Democrats in the conservative-leaning state.
