When conservatives gather at National Harbor on Thursday for their annual confab, there will be homages to Ronald Reagan everywhere. He’ll be mentioned in speeches, he’ll show up as a life-size cardboard cutout, and he’ll be on posters and buttons. The event’s big dinner is in his name.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference, Reagan is king. And the many Republicans vying to be president will work feverishly to align with him. But do they?
For the Loop, Crowdpac, a group that mines campaign and political data and assigns ideological scores, compared Reagan during his time in office with the many GOP presidential hopefuls speaking at CPAC over the four-day conference, to see who might be most like the Gipper.
Crowdpac analyzes donations to and from politicians during their campaigns and their time in office. For those in Congress, it also takes into account voting records. Crowdpac’s algorithm uses those variables to measure politicians against one another — it’s called cluster analysis.
As a presidential candidate, Reagan was considered the most conservative in the field. But that would not be true among today’s politicians.
One caveat to the data: When Reagan ran for president in 1980 and 1984, political giving was much different than it is today. There were no super PACs. There wasn’t nearly as much money. So there’s simply more data to analyze today.
Still, the above graph is an interesting way to illustrate where Reagan would fall on the 2015 political spectrum.
If CPAC-goers are looking for a Reagan replica, they may want to listen closely to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, former Texas governor Rick Perry, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and, at least by this analysis, Ben Carson.
Underscoring how divided the Republican Party is, several potential top-tier candidates are on the far edges of the conservative continuum. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Florida governor Jeb Bush are far less conservative than Reagan was, and Sens. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and Rand Paul (Ky.) are more conservative.
When CPAC was founded in 1973, it was essentially created for Reagan and conservatives like him. At the 1984 conference, then-Rep. Mickey Edwards (R-Okla.) said, “These are the troops of the Reagan revolution.”
Conservative Republicans today don’t have one Reagan type to coalesce around. But they long for one, which is why all the presidential hopefuls (even Christie and Bush) want face time in front of Reagan’s old foot soldiers.
Charlie Gerow, a Pennsylvania GOP consultant who has been attending CPAC since the Reagan era, said many will lay claim to Reagan’s legacy. But while many candidates have their own strengths (Gerow’s backing dark horse Carly Fiorina), he said, there’s no comparison to the Gipper.
“There was only one Ronald Reagan, and the eternal quest to try and clone him retrospectively is a failed mission,” Gerow said.
At the end of each conference, the attendees vote in a presidential poll. In 1980 and 1984, of course, they picked Reagan. They voted for George W. Bush in 2000 and Mitt Romney in 2012.
But for the past two years they voted for Rand Paul, who, according to Crowdpac calculations, is the most conservative choice.
A different kind of heat
Okay, so former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani got hammered in the media last week after he told GOP-leaning business execs Wednesday that he did not believe “that the president loves America,” and that President Obama “doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up, through love of this country.”
Giuliani later backed off, slightly. The Post’s Fact Checker, Glenn Kessler, gave him a whopping four Pinocchios, a rating that can be earned only by spouting some high-octane baloney.
So maybe it’s time for a break from the brutal weather in the Big Apple? Yes, Giuliani’s the keynote speaker Thursday at the 2015 Puerto Rico Investment Summit (PRIS) in beautiful San Juan. Temps there are expected to be in the mid-80s under partly cloudy skies.
And Giuliani won’t have to leave the country.
There was some speculation in the Puerto Rican press — Obama beat Romney by 75 percent to 23 percent in Puerto Rico in 2012 — that the ruckus over his comments might cause the conference, sponsored in part by the Puerto Rican government, to ask Hizzoner to back out. The island’s governor called the comments “very unfortunate” (“muy desacertadas”) but supported his attendance.
And Giuliani told the Loop on Tuesday night that he is indeed going to be speaking Thursday. (Did we mention the temps in the mid-80s?)
Something for the PAC rats
There’s no time to lose — hurry on down! “Flash Sale: Huge Savings on the entire store,” says the e-mail. Yes, it’s the Ready for Hillary super PAC’s giant (going-out-of-business?) sale featuring some of the best swag in town for Hillary Clinton devotees. We’re talking 40 percent off.
This is something campaigns — winning or losing — do when they close down, which the super PAC will do when Clinton announces something official in the next month or two.
The “store” features the usual campaign stuff: caps, T-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies, baby rompers, bumper stickers (free if you spend $30) and so on.
But the Ready for Hillary (RFH) folks know their key customer base. So there are RFH Old-Fashioned or champagne glasses (choose your poison, $29.99 for a set of four either way), RFH cat collars and dog hoodies (for those cold days), RFH pink water bottles and Mason jars. (No ties, but there are cufflinks.)
The site seems to be crashing with some regularity, though, so hurry — it’s a 48-hour sale.
— With Colby Itkowitz
Twitter: @KamenInTheLoop, @ColbyItkowitz
Al Kamen, an award-winning columnist on the national staff of The Washington Post, created the “In the Loop” column in 1993.
Colby Itkowitz is a national reporter for In The Loop.
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