What Sarah Huckabee Sanders' SOTU response meant for the GOP

(Image credit: Photo by Al Drago-Pool/Getty Images)

published 8 February 2023

Being tapped to deliver your party's official response to a president's State of the Union address is something of a mixed blessing. On one hand, it's a heartening vote of confidence from one's peers that you are the person best suited to represent them and their interests to a broad national audience. On the other, a look at the recent slate of SOTU respondees is as much an exercise in just trying to remember who some of these people even are, as it is a list of major power players in present-day American politics. The tightrope act between "impactful" and "irrelevance," between "future of the party" and "forgotten remnant of the past," is a tough one to manage for even the most adept political practitioners, making the responses to the State of the Union in many ways a more interesting, more high risk/high reward occasion than the main event. Here's everything you need to know about this year's rebuttal:

What were the main takeaways?

Speaking Tuesday evening, newly-inaugurated Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) offered her rebuttal to President Biden's second State of the Union, pushing back on his calls for bipartisan cooperation in a full-throated rallying cry for the conservative culture war, she claimed Republicans "didn't start, and never wanted to fight." Sanders' speech — full of invocations against "critical race theory," "woke mobs" and other right-wing bugbears — largely kept with her following of the political roadmap set forth by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), whose efforts to control the ideological tenor of his state's educational system has been taken as a model for other Republican governors and legislatures. But Sanders' SOTU response was not simply a rebuttal to the Biden administration, and Democrats as a whole — it was in many ways a challenge for her own party, as it struggles in the wake of a lackluster 2022 midterms showing, and amidst former President Donald Trump's second bid for re-election.

Over the course of over 14 minutes, Sanders repeatedly called for a "new generation" of conservatives to lead with "passion and new ideas" while holding up Biden as "the oldest president in American history." In mentioning Biden's age, however, Sanders made an implicit argument against 76-year-old Trump as well, and kept with a broader trend among some Republicans who hope to maintain the support of the former president's base without the baggage of Trump himself, whom they are increasingly encouraging to simply "move on" as they do the same. For Sanders, a woman whose national profile is a direct result of working for Trump, this is a tricky needle to thread — particularly as she positions herself at the forefront of Republican politics in such speeches.

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For Politico, columnist Nick Niedzwiadek pointed out that same dynamic tension in Sanders' speech, calling her attacks on Biden "not far apart" from those made by Trump himself, "underscoring the lasting impression he has made on the Republican party — albeit with the former president's sharpest edges shaved off." The result, Niedzwiadek said, was a speech delivered "in a way that Republicans have at times sought for in hopes of modulating the former president's agenda into an enduring coalition."

Consider that modulation in how Sanders addressed her career in the Trump administration through an anecdote about joining the former president on a secret Christmas visit to surprise U.S. servicemembers stationed in Iraq; over the course of the story, Sanders never once mentioned Trump by name. Save for a single quip from the former president in response to a shouted affirmation from one of the soldiers stationed in Iraq, Trump — a man who was, and for a large portion of the GOP remains, the embodiment of the party — was essentially relegated to a background character in service of Sanders' larger moral of freedom and conservatism.

Indeed, Sanders' attempt to have it both ways — invoking Trump while leaving him conspicuously absent by from her remarks at the same time — has placed her in a similar bind as other GOP politicians in the past. Her speech, heavy on the culture war grievances that have come to animate the party beyond Trump's influence "would have fit right in with Republicans' message heading into the 2022 midterms," MSNBC 's James Downie wrote. "As we now know, Republicans greatly underperformed, in part because swing-state voters rejected the most extreme GOP candidates." Coming from a conservative political dynasty in a deep red state, however, Sanders remains notably less burdened by that precedent than her other, unsuccessful predecessors.

For Republicans hoping to extricate their party from Trump while still enjoying the benefits of his political clout and populist energy, Sanders' rebuttal to Biden's State of the Union was both a response to the Democratic administration and a potential path toward a Trump-less future for the GOP. While SOTU responses can be the place where political aspirations go to die, Sanders' address may end up as consequential for her career in the party as it is for the party itself.

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Rafi Schwartz has worked as a politics writer at The Week since 2022, where he covers elections, Congress and the White House. He was previously a contributing writer with Mic focusing largely on politics, a senior writer with Splinter News, a staff writer for Fusion's news lab, and the managing editor of Heeb Magazine, a Jewish life and culture publication. Rafi's work has appeared in Rolling Stone, GOOD and The Forward, among others.