Our forthcoming book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties.
Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) has a message for her party: “I am a brown girl from the ‘hood, who is a Republican, who is coming to tell my party that it’s time to wake up and smell the votes.”
“It's time for us to be sending the right message to the largest minority in the country. We are 20 percent of the population. We are 60 million people ...We are 30 million votes available,” Salazar told your Huddle host in an exclusive interview Thursday.
This is also the message she delivered behind closed doors to former Trump aide Stephen Miller during the Republican Study Committee’s weekly lunch meeting on Wednesday, which was focused on immigration. Salazar attended the event, but she is not a member of the RSC.
“I told him that the GOP needs to attract the browns,” said Salazar, a Cuban American. “We, for the last 30 years since Ronald Reagan, have not sent the right message to the browns,” she added. “Reagan was the last guy who gave a path to citizenship to 3 million people … 35 years ago. It’s time for us to do the same thing that Reagan did.”
When a handful of potential Republican presidential hopefuls convene on Thursday for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), there will be one notable absence from the speaking lineup: Nikki Haley.
Haley, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and a potential 2024 White House contender, has found herself isolated from former President Trump and the populist wing of the GOP that he commands after a scathing interview with Politico in which she denounced her former boss and wrote off his future influence in Republican politics.
