Kellyanne Conway: An insider’s look at the Republican Party

Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser to Donald Trump when he was president, expects him to announce “soon” that he’s running again for the White House. And while she demurred on whether she’d manage another Trump campaign, she acknowledged that she’d be willing to serve in another Trump White House.

Speaking to reporters Thursday at a Monitor Breakfast, Ms. Conway said she and the former president speak “often,” and that she had advised him not to launch a 2024 campaign before the midterm elections were over. 

“I give him a ton of credit for not announcing this year, for not stepping in the way of the midterm candidates,” said Ms. Conway, who made history in 2016 as the first woman to run a victorious presidential campaign in the United States.

Mr. Trump, she predicts, will come out a “big winner” in this election cycle, with many Trump endorsees – counted out by some political observers as unelectable – in fact ending up in office. 

And what about Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, who is expected to win reelection next Tuesday by a wide margin and then pivot toward a presidential campaign of his own? Only in his mid-40s and a one-time Trump protégé, Governor DeSantis is widely seen as a potential heir to the “America First” Trump legacy. The possibility of the two going head-to-head for the 2024 GOP nomination does not please party regulars.

Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis, once allies, are now on different wave lengths. On Sunday, Mr. Trump is holding a rally in Miami for Sen. Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican running for reelection to the Senate who lost to Mr. Trump in the 2016 GOP presidential primary. Mr. DeSantis was not invited to the Miami rally, and will campaign elsewhere that day. 

Ms. Conway suggests a way out. 

“If I’m Ron DeSantis, sure, I can think about running, but why not go be the best two-term governor of the third-largest state in modern history, if not ever, and then walk into the presidency in 2028?” she says. 

Ms. Conway speaks fondly of Mr. Trump. “Yes, he calls me honey. And I’ve been called much worse” by others, she says with a smile. 

But she also has a close relationship with Mr. Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, who is estranged from the former president over the Jan. 6, 2021, siege of the Capitol by Trump supporters – some of whom erected a gallows and chanted “Hang Mike Pence.” 

Ms. Conway pointed out that she still talks to former Vice President Pence, once a client of her polling firm when he was a member of Congress and then governor of Indiana. She also has a family connection to Mr. Pence: Her cousin is married to his nephew. 

But more consequentially, Mr. Pence has been behaving like a 2024 presidential candidate, giving speeches around the country and speaking out against what he calls “unprincipled populism,” a thinly veiled attack on Mr. Trump. Even if a Pence candidacy would be a long shot, the more evidently religious and mild-mannered former No. 2 could sow division within the GOP. 

“It was a nasty divorce in the end,” Ms. Conway says. “But they need to find a responsible way to co-parent the future of the party and the conservative movement.”

The C-SPAN video of our breakfast can be viewed here. Following are more excerpts from the breakfast with Ms. Conway, lightly edited for clarity.

As a pollster, what strikes you most about voter sentiment on issues? 

The most important polling number on a significant issue in the last year has been the migration of voters toward the Republican Party everywhere on the issue of education. This was an issue that for decades the Democrats dominated by 18 points, 20 points, sometimes 22 points. That has dissipated. On a good day, the Democrats are plus six, on a great day for my party, it’s tied, as some of these polls have shown, and that is a direct result of the last couple of years.

Last night, President Joe Biden gave a speech saying “Democracy is on the ballot” next Tuesday. How do you feel, specifically, about people who deny election results? To what degree do you feel that weakens democracy? 

Election denying is a bipartisan problem. You have Democratic members of the House of Representatives, as we sit here, who have never, ever legitimized a Republican presidential election this century.

When you talk about election deniers and you’re only talking about 2020, you’re losing a large swath of the country, because they are looking at the Democrats now, and saying, “You are inflation deniers. You are crime deniers. You are recession deniers. You are lost-learning and test-score-decline deniers. You are Putin-in-Ukraine deniers. You are, of course, open-border deniers.” And that’s a big problem for this party right now in this White House.

What’s it like working with Mr. Trump? 

Look, I wouldn’t have had that job – first the campaign manager, let alone senior counselor – and stayed there that long [until August 2020] if I weren’t listened to and respected by my boss. That is a situation that I think a number of people have with Donald Trump.

I think that the reason I do talk to him regularly and the reason that we have a good relationship, even though we disagree fundamentally on certain things, is because we disagree fundamentally on certain things. And he likes people who deliver news – good, bad, or ugly – respectfully, and in my case, deferentially.

I think one of the dumbest things ever said about him is that he only wants “yes men” around him, he wants people who are obsequious. No, he doesn’t, because then he doesn’t know where he stands.

If asked, would you be willing to manage another Trump presidential campaign?

I’ll let President Trump make his decisions on personnel. I certainly am with the majority of this country and a majority of Democrats in this country. I don’t want Joe Biden in 2024, either.