The conservatives were pretty ruthless once they took control, but they had learned their lesson. If you don’t fight to win, you fight to lose, and this was political warfare. Successful insurgents can’t waste time playing patty-cake.
Tony “Gator” McCoy (Chief Advisor to President Carrie Marlowe)
Marlowe, advised by McCoy, first came to prominence in her fights with the Clinton administration over federal gun laws. The Anti-Violence Control Act sought to limit private ownership of weapons following the newly majority liberal Supreme Court’s ruling that there was no individual right to keep and bear arms. This decision, Bloomberg v. NRA, was overturned by the Thirtieth Amendment in 2028, reaffirming the fundamental right of mentally competent, law-abiding citizens to carry weapons for the defense of themselves, their family, their community, and the Constitution.
As Florida’s governor, Carrie Marlowe stunned the political world by snagging the GOP nomination in 2024. She made no bones about her constitutional conservatism. None, and that was something new. No more establishment losers getting the GOP nomination. We constitutional conservatives had finally reached the big game.
As governor, she slashed the Florida state budget while other states teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, and she slashed taxes as well. Just chopped it. We called Florida “an island of commonsense prosperity in a sea of liberal despair” in our ads. Drove the libs nuts. She also built a coalition of citizens concerned about personal liberty by suing the feds over the Obamacare health info leaks against Clinton opponents in Florida.
And she royally pissed off Hillary by refusing to allow any Florida agency to cooperate with the feds in enforcing the Anti-Violence Control Act. It didn’t get as bad as it did in Texas, thank God, but it was a defining moment. Yeah, Hillary hated her, so Carrie knew she was doing all right!
Sandy Crawford (Conservative Activist)
Say you lived in California, and you’re being taxed to support a dependent class while prices are going up because of regulations and your dreams for you and your family are denied. Then, you look across the border at Arizona and it is everything California is not—prosperous, free, a place of opportunity—and, moreover, conservatives are constantly pointing that out.
Eventually, the contradictions get heightened, and combined with a real effort at grassroots organization to take back the GOP, suddenly conservatism became viable again even in the bluest states.
Roberta Klein (Conservative Activist/Attorney)
We tied Obamacare up in knots, and with help from conservative state governments that refused to cooperate, we set the stage for repeal.
State governments were key, creating state laws that allowed us to litigate for conservative change at the state level. New university diversity and free speech laws allowed faculty and students to go to court more effectively to challenge progressive campus speech codes, unfair disciplinary codes, and discrimination against conservatives. These spurred huge changes.
Before, that kind of petty progressive tyranny was cost-free. Now, a winning student or aspiring faculty member could go to state court and win not only an injunction but substantial money damages and attorney’s fees. With the states giving us these tools, we could start the larger cultural fight.
Darcy Mizuhara McCullough (Former Missouri Governor)
That I was the first Asian-American governor of Missouri, and a woman, just made the liberals crazy. They were offended that I wasn’t buying into what they were selling. Why would I? I could see the results. California used to be the Golden State, but companies were leaving there as fast as they could pack. The only folks left were people on welfare and super rich liberals.
Oh, they were furious when I’d run ads in Los Angeles and Chicago and in the Bay Area telling companies to come to Missouri. Our slogan was, “Missouri: We Appreciate You.” They hated it. I loved it! And we never let up on them.
When I was running, I told Missourians to look around, that they had a choice. They could make this a booming red state like Texas or Louisiana, or go down the drain like blue California and Illinois. They looked, and they chose red and me!
We used the Republican Governors Association as a way to exchange ideas about new policies and reforms, and we worked with think tanks and grassroots groups to develop them and share them. You saw liberal Washington trying to increase taxes, and blue states too, while we cut them. We pushed right-to-work laws and reformed government employment practices in our states, and things improved.
The voters in the blue states started wondering why they were falling behind, and then they started to see that in blue states the governments were by, for, and about public employee unions and entitlement recipients. And they started to get tired of it. Who wants to slave away at a job to make sure some DMV clerk who retired at 42 gets another $200 a month in his pension?
We also gerrymandered—hell, we redistricted mercilessly in 2020. We learned from liberals that this game was for keeps, and that’s how we played. See, at first we could only play defense in DC, but in the states we could grow and learn and prove ourselves and conservatism to the American people, who had frankly started to doubt us. Having safe havens in the states was critical to our comeback.
What was most important about having the states was the comparison it provided, our success through conservatism versus their blue failure. Sure, the media tried to poke holes in what we were doing—60 Minutes must have done a dozen sob stories on how mean we were to poor people. Except it backfired on them.
They thought they had me when I was interviewed about ‘hungry people without jobs” in St. Louis and I said, “If you won’t work, you should be hungry. You need to go out and support yourself.” My ratings went up eight points the week after that aired!
Chapter Eight: Big Money
Much of the heavy lifting of the conservative insurgency was done by regular people acting in their own communities, but the contributions of a number of wealthy businessmen—not only in terms of cash but in business savvy and contacts—helped the movement tremendously. Liberals fixated on these “suspicious donors,” and many found themselves targeted by activists, the media, and even government bureaucrats for daring to confront the establishment.
Dan Stringer (Billionaire CEO/Activist)
The vilified tycoon is outspoken about his views and how he went for the throat against the liberal establishment that hated him.
The leftists used to say that our dad, and then me and my brother, bought and paid for the entire conservative revival. But I think our contribution was less in quantity than quality. We used a rigorous cost-benefit approach—where could we send money to maximize our return? We sought the most bang for the buck, as it were.
Some of the big conservative institutions—think tanks, magazines, and other groups—had gotten fat and lazy on easy money from big donors. We demanded measurable results. I remember one bunch of consultants wanted a zillion bucks for some technological get-out-the-vote program. The guy had a wonderful presentation using the latest software—holograms and everything. My brother Dave vectored in a couple of software guys to analyze the plan. It was shit. We passed. Some other rich guy funded it. A great presentation and then a million bucks, down the toilet.