Sanyord mulls run a!ainst Trump in primary
Ex-governor heads to N.H. for GOP meetings
COLUMBIA, S.C. — Mark Sanford, the former South Carolina governor and congressman, is heading to another early voting state as he considers mounting a challenge to President Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination.
A spokeswoman confirmed that Sanford would travel Tuesday night to New Hampshire for meetings. Fergus Cullen, a former New Hampshire Republican Party chairman, and Tom Rath, a longtime Republican National Convention delegate and former New Hampshire attorney general, told The Associated Press they planned to meet with Sanford during his trip this week.
Rath also backed then-ohio Gov. John Kasich’s 2016 presidential bid.
Last month, Sanford — known during his Capitol Hill years as a deficit hawk mindful of federal spending — said he would take 30 days to decide if he would run against Trump or possibly start a think tank devoted to fiscal conservatism. He said he is determined to bring debt and fiscal restraint into the national conversation.
“There’s plenty of discussion on that front,” Sanford said last month on CNN. “The place where there’s no discussion is the way in which interest is the largest growing expense in the federal government. We will spend more on interest than we do on our national defense bill in just three years. Nobody’s talking about it.”
In a video released Tuesday, Sanford said he had a “unique perspective” for trying to find solutions to what he portrayed as a mounting fiscal crisis.
Although unlikely to have had a significant impact on the results, Trump endorsed Sanford’s primary opponent just hours before the polls closed last year.
He tweeted that Sanford “has been very unhelpful to me in my campaign” and “is better off in Argentina” — a reference to Sanford’s secret 2009 rendezvous to South America for an extramarital affair while his in-the-dark gubernatorial staff told reporters he was hiking the Appalachian Trail.
Elsewhere on the campaign trail:
Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii is taking two weeks off from her 2020 Democratic presidential campaign to participate in Army National Guard training. She will return to the campaign trail on Aug. 25.
Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg said Tuesday that anti-immigrant sentiment in rural America declines when residents know and appreciate the role of those moving into their communities. It’s the thinking behind a provision in a rural economic plan introduced by the South Bend, Indiana, mayor that would enable local towns and counties to seek work visas for immigrants to fill the many empty positions in labor-hungry rural America.
Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren will visit Minnesota to host a town hall on Monday. Warren will appear at the Leonard Center Fieldhouse at Macalester College in St. Paul. Minnesota’s presidential primary is March 3.
Democratic presidential candidate Kirsten Gillibrand is planning to hold a reproductive rights town hall in St. Louis, home of Missouri’s last remaining abortion clinic. A new state law bans most abortions at the eighth week of pregnancy. But the restrictions have yet to take effect and have been challenged in federal court.