Sen. Lindsey Graham’s formal exit from the 2016 race exposes the unpopularity of the GOP establishment’s enthusiasm for overseas entanglements and inward migration, says conservatives.
Lindsey Graham “is a whinier version of [Sen.] John McCain — and there is just not a market for that” in 2016, said Steve Deace, an influential radio host in Iowa. “Whatever little support Graham had would go to [Sen. Marco] Rubio… there’s not a lot of it,” he added.
Graham said he joined the race to promote an interventionist foreign policy in the GOP debates — yet he never got more than 1 percent in the many pols. Even in his home state of South Carolina, his support was miniscule. He also ran to as a foreign-policy attack-dog in support of establishment favorite Gov. Jeb Bush, who is getting below 5 percent in some polls.
Graham’s policy of getting “involved in every Islamic sectarian civil war half way around the globe, often empowering the Muslim Brotherhood and other enemies, and then bring[ing] the Islamic world to our shores through immigration” is extremely unpopular, says Daniel Horowitz, senior editor at Conservative Review.
While it is popular among the conservative smart set in Washington, it garnered far less than one percent among the voters, he told Breitbart News.
But now Graham’s few GOP backers, such as Sen. John McCain, can switch their support to Sen. Rubio, he said.
“Graham’s foreign policy juxtaposed to his immigration policy is essentially identical to Marco Rubio… It’s just that Graham was more open and pugnacious about promoting this view,” Horowitz told Breitbart.
The only people who ever cared about Lindsey were media types. There were more stories written on him than number of people supporting him in the entire country,” Horowitz said.
Graham is one of the GOP’s leading advocate for increasing the annual inflow of foreign migrant labor. Currently, 54 million Americans turn 18 each year, and are forced to compete for jobs against 1 million new immigrants and 700,000 foreign temporary workers.
But he has sought to shift the voters’ focus away from his unpopular migration policy by dramatically advocating for a hard-line interventionist foreign policy. That policy is also favored by GOP consultants, who prefer to woo voters by promising greater security against jihadis, instead of angering voters by publicly backing their donors’ demand for cheap foreign labor.
In 2012, the day after GOP candidate GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney was defeated, Graham called up his Democratic allies to restart the push for amnesty and cheap labor. The two Senators helped recruit new Sen. Marco Rubio to front the amnesty push — dubbed “comprehensive immigration reform — which has crippled Rubio’s dash for the presidency in 2015.
On Feb. 2, 2013, the L.A. Times reported on Graham’s role in starting the 2013 immigration debate, which has now split the party between the business wing and the party’s voters — many of whom are backing Donald Trump.
WASHINGTON — On the Saturday morning after 7 in 10 Latino voters helped return President Obama to the White House and deliver a crushing defeat to Mitt Romney, Charles E. Schumer, the Democratic senator from New York, scanned his daily list of phone messages and saw that Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, had called.
Schumer dialed his number. “I saw your name on my call list, and my heart skipped a beat,” he said.
“We’re getting the band back together,” Graham replied. “Let’s do immigration.”
Graham sounded buoyant, Schumer said, recalling the conversation. And Graham had more news: “McCain wants in.”
Schumer said his “heart went pitter-patter” when he heard Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican, wanted to help broker a deal. “That meant we could get something done,” he said.
McCain is expected to shift his 2016 endorsement from Graham to Rubio.
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