Hawley, whose Senate seat is eligible for election in 2024, has repeatedly said he is not eligible for president.
“All I can say is no,” Hawley said in an interview Wednesday, denying he has an overall plan to oppose Biden’s candidates. “What can I say? That is clearly not my focus.”
But apart from Hawley’s allies, no one familiar with presidential politics or the U.S. Senate takes the 41-year-old on his word – especially after several Democratic senators used their opposition to early Trump appointments as a springboard until 2020.
Hawley has always been a young man in a hurry. He ran for a lawyer-general on a plan he would serve for four years [almost] immediately ran for the U.S. Senate as soon as he took office, ” says Scott Reed, a veteran Republican strategist who last worked for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s political arm. He noticed that Hawley had established himself ‘by taking early photos at Big Tech and he really developed a taste for the wine, which means he really liked all the attention. And he built on that. ”
Reed said that ‘Hawley’ becomes an exotic to Republican primary voters’ because the Yale-trained lawyer has established a niche for himself as an early critic of social media ventures while trying to appeal to the working class to choose.
While the senator in Missouri “is a star in the early Republican polls I saw,” Reed said, “he is clearly laying the groundwork for his 2024 election as president. There is no way to explain this behavior. ‘
But it does come at a cost.
His eagerness to interfere with Trump supporters led to a now infamous January 6 photo of Hawley, outside the Capitol, pumping his fist. in support of a crowd of protesters who later stormed the building, vandalized it and temporarily delayed the vote.
Hawley’s role in opposing the vote on the Electoral College led to an ethical complaint in the Senate, which led to Simon & Schuster canceling his book deal, The Tyranny of Big Tech, last month. And former senator John Missforth, Missouri – who helped drive Hawley to the seat Danforth held decades ago – withdrew his support for the senator and said that his endorsement ‘was the biggest mistake I have ever made’.
Hawley dismissed the Capitol invasion as well as the president’s remarks on Jan. 6, but at the same time said Trump’s indictment is unconstitutional. And he made it clear in an interview that Biden was unpopular in his state and that part of his job was the ‘loyal opposition, as our British friends would like to say.’
It is also a lucrative endeavor in the biased world of online fundraising.
Hawley is appearing more frequently on Fox News, the most-watched cable channel for Republican primary voters, and his fundraising has kept pace with his growing national profile. Negative news media coverage and Democrats’ ethical inquiry into him and Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) for their roles in the run-up to the January 6 Capitol riots serve to sting his coffers: a memorandum given to donors this week sent, said he raised nearly $ 1 million in January, stating his popularity in the state and arguing that his electoral objections were popular in Missouri.
‘If the Democrats think you’re so powerful and influential that they should take you off a notch, it’s help fundraising, but you need to have substance, ” said David Carney, a leading Republican consultant who advised Rick Perry’s 2012 presidential campaign.
‘He’s definitely one of the two dozen guys for president. Why would anyone know a senator in Missouri, basically a first-year student? That’s what you have to do to break through the rubbish, ‘Carney said. ‘Now it’s a double-edged sword, because if you do too many crazy things, you’re not credible. So you should not do crazy things. You can not become a caricature. You can not be the class sausage. ”
Hawley defends his objections to the outcome of the election as a legitimate expression of voters’ concerns, saying he did not try to stop the election. According to him, his sharp opposition to Biden’s agenda comes from the same place. He maintains that he is not necessarily determined to oppose everyone.
‘I can only tell you in Missouri people are very shocked:’ What in the world? “He is so aggressive that they do not even want to work across the aisle,” said Hawley van Biden. “If it is not good for my state, then I will definitely do it.” No vote.
The youngest senator when he was elected in 2018, Hawley is a rising speaker with the sense of using Trump’s confrontational style of populism. politics. He often addresses the Senate floor in an unusual way, direct-to-camera mode, to apply or condemn greater stimulus controls the ruling of the Supreme Court that extended protection to employees of LGTBQ. He distinguished himself in the IDP by promoting costly solutions to the economic consequences of the pandemic, suing some judges backed by his own party and addressing technology companies.
The Senate’s Trump job so far has three top names: Hawley, Cruz and Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Who shares a consulting firm with the Missouri junior senator. Along with five other senators and 139 representatives, all three opposed the declaration of Biden’s Electoral College – even after the deadly uprising of the Capitol.
That vote had no equal in modern American politics, not even compared to 2017 when the democratic resistance against Trump grew hot and senators like Kirsten Gillibrand, New York, voted against almost everyone Trump nominated for her 2020 presidential bid.
“Hawley has decided that resistance is the way to Nirvana,” said Jef Pollock, an opinion pollster who advised Gillibrand’s campaign.
‘The idea of how early is too early – if you have decided that you must be resistant, then the resistance must be as pure as possible. And that means you have to take every stand on every vote, that means you have to vote against every nominee, from rational to irrational. It’s clean, it’s: ‘They’re not all good. They’re all bad because they stand for something I can not stand. ”
One of Hawley’s Republican allies in the Senate, North Dakota’s Kevin Cramer, pushed the thought back, saying, ‘I can not attribute the presidential candidacy as the motive for things.
“I have great respect for him. But it will be interesting four years from now, eight years from now, if we look at how he evolved or whether he changed one of the strategies and whether he is the gung-ho, a fire in the stomach warrior, ‘ Cramer said. ‘Clearly, he can do bigger things than that is what he wants to do. ”
Although Hawley forced his party to become much larger in response to the coronavirus, especially in 2020 – by directly pushing Trump to direct payments to Americans, he showed little interest in Biden’s $ 1.9 billion coronavirus relief plan, without encountering it directly because he did not see legal text.
“Josh Hawley is doing all the right things to politically capitalize on a significant portion of the Republican base, and is positioning himself as a future presidential candidate, absolutely,” said Terry Sullivan, a former presidential campaign manager for Senator Marco Rubio (R- ) said. Fla.). “What Hawley is doing with this, we’ll see. But it’s important to remember that when a US senator or governor looks in the mirror, he sees a future president. ”