According to a report from Politico, conservative grassroots groups more interested in impacting policy instead of engaging in the culture wars are finding their messaging being ignored because the Republican Party is focused on Donald Trump's legal travails and impending presidential run in 2024.
Case in point, Politico's Meridith McGraw and Caitlan Oprysko wrote that the passage of the landmark Inflation Reduction Act that provides massive subsidies for climate change and health care initiatives normally would have been met with massive resistance but instead was sent to President Joe Biden with only token resistance.
That has conservative activists worrying that their voices are being sidelined because they can't get the attention of GOP lawmakers.
As the report notes, while the bill was pushed through the Democratically-controlled Senate, all eyes were focused on the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago and the former president's battles with the Justice Department.
RELATED: Extremism expert: How the far right is winning the 'information war'
According to the report, "Instead of mounting a massive grassroots opposition to tank or tar the Inflation Reduction Act, conservatives and right-wing news outlets spent the past week with their gaze elsewhere: the FBI’s search of Donald Trump’s Palm Beach mansion," adding, "conservative activists did rally against the bill and targeted vulnerable Democrats in ads. But even the main organizers conceded that they had little time to muster the opposition-party gusto of years past."
As Cesar Ybarra of FreedomWorks put it, "Everything was moving so fast, the tax provisions were being debated on the fly, so there was very little time for groups to do that in-depth grassroots pushback like we saw during Obamacare. To create buzz in this town and for it to penetrate across America, you need more time. So yeah, we got rolled.”
Politico reports, "...last week’s split-screen of the Mar-a-Lago search and the passage of the IRA provided a telling portrait of pistons that move modern Republican politics. Whereas conservative activism has, in past cycles, been driven by opposition to Democratic-authored policies or actions — from Obamacare to TARP— the modern version has been fed by culture-war issues and, more often than not, Trump himself."
Merissa Hamilton, an activist with FreedomWorks, lamented the loss of power, telling Politico, "We feel even more detached from our representation than we ever have before because there was no time to get any public input."
"But others in the party conceded that policy fights are no longer driving activism, at least to the degree they once did," Politico reports. "In a Twitter thread, Brian Riedl, an economist with the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, said the right’s more recent apathy on economic policy 'is partially a focus on culture & troll wars, partly a post-Trump identity crisis. And a lot of Democrats simply learning to avoid the economic policy prescriptions that most drive conservative rebellions.'"
You can read more here.
