Independent could be the ticket for Flake if he runs for president in 2020
Mar 16, 2018, 9:53 AM | Updated: 3:49 pm
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PHOENIX — If Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake decides to run for president in 2020 after all, he could very well enter the race as an independent.
The outgoing Republican lawmaker said he wouldn’t rule out that idea. “There are going to be a lot of other people in the party looking for something else,” he said in an interview this week.
Flake has verbally roughed up his party and President Donald Trump over the past year-plus for its direction away from what he said was traditional conservatism.
“If you end up with Trump on one side, (Bernie) Sanders or (Elizabeth) Warren on the other, there’s a huge swath of voters in the middle that make an independent run by somebody a lot more realistic,” he said Thursday, ahead of a speech the next morning at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire.
The 55-year-old has said repeatedly that he had no plans to run for the GOP nomination in 2020. But he also has said “never say never.”
The party has come to resemble “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” he said to the Saint Anselm College crowd, and that worries him.
“What have we done with all the conservatives?”
He’d like to see “Somebody needs to challenge the president in a Republican primary, if only to remind Republicans what being conservative really means: limited government, economic freedom, individual responsibility, free trade, welcoming immigration.”
Flake’s visit to the state that holds the nation’s first primary came a few days before a presidential appearance. Vice President Mike Pence was also scheduled to be in New Hampshire next week for a fundraiser.
The fifth-generation cattle rancher is leaving the Senate when his term expires in January. He announced his decision to not run for re-election last fall.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.