Media Mention
Published January 20, 2025 at 9:55 am

Heath Mayo: “Why this time is different”

The Sydney Morning Herald spoke to President & Founder Heath Mayo about Principles First’s grassroots movement and its plans for the second Trump term. Reporter Farrah Tomazin writes:

As Trump prepares for his second inauguration, the mood in Washington, where almost 93 per cent of people voted for Vice President Kamala Harris, feels less like resistance and more like resignation.

“I’m sure we’ll see some agitation in the streets, but there’s nothing like the shock and emotional visceral reaction that we saw when he was elected the first time,” says Heath Mayo, the founder of Principles First, a grassroots conservative group that serves as an alternative to the MAGA movement …

While Mayo believes the GOP he once knew and loved is gone for good, “we’ve got to figure out something that compels Americans to take a different tack”.

“Everyone from the Nikki Haley voters to the suburban Democratic voters now has to go back to the drawing board to figure out: ‘what vision can we propose to bring us back from the ledge here’ because clearly, there’s something about Trumpism that has gripped the electorate in a way that a lot of us find very concerning and dangerous,” he says.

“But it can’t just be a regurgitation of the last three or four cycles. You’re going to have to come up with an affirmative agenda for the country that is different, that is new, and that activates voters in a way that the Harris campaign obviously wasn’t able to. The mistake in 2024 was just sort of hoping that the ‘Not Trump’ message would be enough.”

Read the piece here (paywalled).

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