If the grassroots conservatives of the Turning Point Action Conference get their way, we’ll hear a whole lot about stolen elections next year.
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Do you want to hear more from Donald Trump about how the 2020 election was stolen from him? What about finding out all there is to know about the latest conspiracy theories that totally prove Kari Lake is, in fact, the governor of Arizona? Young conservatives apparently want both.
On Sunday, at the Turning Point Action Conference, they overwhelmingly chose Trump as their preferred presidential candidate, and they want to see him pick Lake as his running mate.
That was the result of a straw poll conducted at the event, which was held in West Palm Beach.
Trump, not surprisingly, crushed the opposition. A whopping 85 percent of attendees who participated in the poll chose the former president as their preferred 2024 nominee.
Businessman Perry Johnson came in second at just below 8 percent, while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who did not attend the conference, was third with 4.3 percent. The only other person getting any votes was Vivek Ramaswamy, another businessman, who was the top second choice of more than half of attendees.
But the 6,000 attendees of the conference apparently do not just want an election denier at the top of the ticket.
Lake, who has made a career out of propagating her own Little Lie after losing the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial race, was their preferred choice as vice presidential candidate.
She received over 30 percent of the vote, which put her ahead of Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) and Ramaswamy, who had a very good conference.
While Trump-Lake may be the dream ticket for grassroots conservatives who traveled to an event to listen to speakers like Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), it’s tough to see how an endless relitigation of the past two elections would help Republicans win over independents.
Therefore, it stands to reason that Democrats would not be too unhappy if that is the pairing they are up against next fall.
Perhaps the most interesting finding of the straw poll was that nearly 90 percent of participants said it is “time for the GOP to embrace early voting and vote banking.” The question also included the following disclaimer: “At least until the party has the political power to restrict certain low trust, insecure voting methods, such as ballot harvesting, universal mail-in, no excuse absentee, drop boxes, etc.”
In 2020, one of Trump’s big mistakes was to rail against early voting. However, he and other Republicans have since come around on this tactic.
The conservatives attending the conference also professed little trust in the Republican Party. Fewer than one-quarter of them said they planned on donating money to the Republican National Committee (RNC), and just slightly more than one-third of them said they were confident the party could get out the vote next year.
Finally, the straw poll participants also listed what they considered the most important issues facing the US.
Here, too, they were solidly on Team Trump. Among the top five were favorites of the former presidents, such as the situation at the southern border, voting integrity, and the weaponization of the Department of Justice.
Other prominent concerns were “racial gender ideology and kids,” “woke military,” and “erosion of patriotism and traditional values.”
Once again, it seems likely that Democrats will like their chances if the Trump-Lake ticket runs on those issues.
