OXON HILL, Md. (AP) – The annual Conservative Political Action Conference is one of the main gatherings on the GOP campaign calendar – a must-stop for serious contenders testing the waters in the presidency.
Many of the party’s most prominent candidates — from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to former Vice President Mike Pence — skipped the marquee event that began Wednesday as the group grappled with controversy and questions about its place in a movement that remains divisive. loyal to former President Donald Trump.
Adding to the turmoil: A lawsuit filed by an unnamed Republican campaign staffer against Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, which organized the conference. The suit accuses Schlapp of groping her during a car ride in Georgia before the November election. Schlapp has denied the allegations.
“I don’t think people go there to meet the next generation of leaders. They go to celebrate the last one,” said Alex Conant, a longtime GOP strategist who remembers attending his first CPAC as a high school student in the 1990s and the meeting that’s great with Newt Gingrich, the Georgia congressman who just resigned as House. speaker.
Conant returned often as an aide, including when he worked for Florida Senator Marco Rubio, 2016 presidential candidate who is one of the long list of Republicans with moments of discovery on the CPAC stage over the years.
But this time, Rubio wasn’t there.
“I think CPAC used to be a place where you could be a star. Now it’s more of a Trump event,” Conant said.
Among those who are also skipping the year’s congressional leaders and governors, Republican National Committee Chairman Ronna McDaniel, and some potential presidential prospects, including Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who has built a buzz among some donors.
“He’s laser-focused on Virginia and had a good legislative session and now he’s focused on the budget,” said Jeff Roe, Youngkin’s political consultant.
Pence is a long-time CPAC speaker who has not appeared at the conference since angering some Trump supporters by rejecting Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. In explaining why Pence declined to attend this year, aides cited a full schedule of events this week, including a donor summit Club for Growth, traveling to South Carolina, where he will speak at the University of evangelical Bob Jones, speech at the event. the conservative Christian Hillsdale College in Michigan and the Students for Life of America event in Florida.
“We felt that the vice president spent the most time pressing multiple constituencies over the course of four days,” said one advisor, Devin O’Malley.
The cold shoulder marks a dramatic shift from 2015, the year before the last competitive GOP presidential primary, when the CPAC schedule included nearly every major candidate, Jeb Bush among them. The former Florida governor, now criticized by many on the right, received a warm welcome, although some activists staged a walkout.
This year, Trump has top billing, giving the conference’s headlining speech on Saturday afternoon. He is almost guaranteed to win the unscientific annual presidential preference poll of the participants.
Also on the schedule are two other announced Republican candidates: Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley and biotech investor Vivek Ramaswamy.
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who also weighed in on the White House plan, will speak. Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rick Scott of Florida will appear. Both have recently signaled their intention to run for re-election rather than compete for the nomination.
The conference schedule features a litany of election deniers who reject the findings of judges, election officials and Trump’s own attorney general that there was no widespread fraud during the 2020 campaign. They include Mike Lindell, the founder of MyPillow who continues to spread election conspiracy theories, and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, sing recently called the “national divorce” between blue and red states. Kari Lake, a news anchor who is running for governor of Arizona after refusing to concede after losing last year, will speak tonight.
Both Greene and Lake are considered potential Trump vice presidential candidates.
Activists will also hear from Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president, whose supporters stormed the country’s Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace after he refused to accept his defeat in October. The siege is very similar to the riots at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Schlapp said in a statement that CPAC is “grateful that all the announced candidates will be in attendance” as the conference returns to National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Maryland, outside Washington, for the first time since 2020.
“When it comes to the politics of the President, talk is cheap. When you officially announce your name, you are real,” he said. “We’ve never had such a strong lineup of speakers,. … CPAC will continue to highlight conservatives and not be a funnel for establishment conservative republicanism.”
The Club for Growth, an influential anti-tax group that has clashed with Trump, will hold a rival event, a donor summit in Florida, that has drawn DeSantis, Pence and others. Trump was not invited, underscoring bitter divisions in the conservative movement as some elements support him and others want to move in a new direction.
Since Trump became president, the conference has really been all about him. In 2021, a procession of speakers expressed their loyalty to the former president as some participants took selfies with the same golden statue.
That gives little incentive for other candidates to attend.
“If you’re Ron DeSantis, what’s your strategic reason for moving to a place that’s pretty good on the record as a Trump fan club?” said Ross Hemminger, former press secretary for the event and former deputy director of communications for ACU.
The group also increasingly welcomed fringe elements of the party, and this made some former staff and participants uncomfortable. And as CPAC has expanded overseas, it has begun to turn to autocratic leaders such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Hemminger said the conference used to stop for Republican presidential candidates, with so many senators on the program, some should be relegated to the secondary stage. Now, he says, the lineup looks like “a bunch of third-string radio talk show hosts.”
“You just look at it and you think, ‘Oh wow.’ CPAC used to be a big deal and it is now,” he said. “The goal is to set a conservative agenda. The goal now is: No matter how harsh you are, you just have to get Donald Trump’s attention and make him understand that you’re willing to make a fool of yourself so you can stay in his good graces.”