On "Forbes Eye on Iowa," former 2024 Republican presidential candidate Larry Elder spoke about his endorsement for former President Trump, his campaign, the future of the Republican Party, and more.
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00:00 Hello and welcome back to Eye on Iowa. I'm Sarah Mueller, a reporter with Forbes, and
00:08 today I am joined by Larry Elder, who has since suspended his campaign for president
00:14 and you've endorsed Donald Trump. Tell me a little bit about what went into this decision.
00:19 Well, the campaign had issues from the very beginning, as you know, Sarah, because the
00:24 RNC would not allow me on that first debate. I met all their criteria, one of which was
00:30 I had to have 40,000 individual donors. I did. The other is I had to have at least three
00:35 polls where I was at 1% or better, and I did. I turned all that in before the deadline.
00:40 I get a phone call from Ronna McDaniel and Dave Bossie, the debate czar, and they tell
00:45 me, "I'm sorry, one of the polls you submitted, you can't use because it is quote affiliated
00:49 with Trump." It is true that the rules stipulate any poll affiliated with any candidate cannot
00:56 be used by any other candidate. However, after this Rasmussen puts out a statement and said,
01:00 "I'm sorry, we're not affiliated with Trump. There's no reason why Elder can't use us.
01:04 We submitted a fourth one and she said you submitted it too late," which is true. However,
01:09 I didn't realize I needed to submit another one, A and B. That poll had been concluded
01:14 before the deadline, so there was enough wiggle room that they could have put me up their
01:17 head if they wanted to, but I wasn't. We filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission.
01:22 That's going to take years to adjudicate. In the meantime, if you're not on the first
01:25 debate, how in the world can you get 3% to qualify for the second debate, let alone the
01:29 4% to qualify for the next debate coming up next week? Being realistic, it doesn't look
01:35 as if I'm going to be able to get the poll numbers and raise the kind of money it takes
01:40 to run an incredible campaign. I've always run as a mega guy, and when I was asked, "If
01:45 you're a mega guy, why is it you're running against Trump?" To which I'd always say, "As
01:49 you know, I'm not running against Trump. I'm running against Biden-Harris, and there's
01:53 some issues that nobody is talking about that we need to start talking about." If I can
01:56 get people talking about the epidemic of fatherlessness, the acute need for school choice in urban
02:02 America, where, for example, there were 13 public high schools in Baltimore, all located
02:06 in the inner city, where 0% of the kids can do math at grade level, and a much stronger
02:11 denunciation of the Democrat narrative that America remains systemically racist because
02:15 of getting people killed. Cops are pulling back all over the country because they're
02:18 intimidated, because they've been accused of being systemically racist, they're not
02:22 engaging in proactive policing, and the last several years there are thousands of people
02:25 who are dead, who otherwise would be alive, but for the police pulling back. So if I can
02:31 get people talking about those issues, I've done my job. Fast forward, I'm invited to
02:36 a private meeting with You Know Who at Mar-a-Lago, and this is a few days ago, Sarah, and I'm
02:42 in his office, and I'm telling him I'm going to suspend my campaign and I'm going to endorse
02:47 him. He says, "When are you going to make the announcement?" I said, "I don't know,
02:50 the next few days." He was having a fundraiser within a few hours. He said, "How about now,
02:54 when we go downstairs and you make the announcement at the fundraiser?" So I did, and that was
03:01 a reaction. So I'm very happy with what I did. I'm proud to have run credibly for president.
03:07 Not very many people can do that, and we've gotten a lot of issues that people are talking
03:11 about now that they weren't talking about before.
03:14 You said that you've talked to Donald Trump about endorsing him, and obviously he convinced
03:19 you to go and endorse him right then and there. Tell me a little bit about your guys' relationship
03:24 and how you plan on supporting him going forward.
03:26 Well, I've known him for a long time. I can't say I've known him closely, but I've known
03:30 him for a long time. I supported him in 2016. We campaigned together in Cleveland. I particularly
03:36 remember an instance where he campaigned at a Black church, and he talked about families
03:42 and the need for school choice. It was very, very powerful, and I knew he was going to
03:46 do better than the average Republican does as to the Black vote, and he did. He got around
03:51 8% in 2016. He got 12% in 2020, a 50% increase, and about 20% of Black males voted for him.
04:00 We've gone back for some time. I've always supported him on radio. As I said, I like
04:06 what he did on borders. I like what he did on judges. I like what he did on the economy,
04:09 on school choice, on enterprise zones. I thought he was and is an extraordinary man who will
04:16 be an extraordinary president once he gets back into office.
04:20 Now obviously he's been in and out of the courtroom the past couple of months. How do
04:24 you think that's going to impact his campaign?
04:26 Well, it's going to take time away from the campaign, obviously. You can't be in two places
04:31 at once, but will it hurt him in the nomination process? No, not at all. If anything, people
04:35 feel he's being victimized, being persecuted, so it's going to help him with the base. It
04:40 probably won't be helpful for independent voters, but when you look at the recent polls,
04:45 Biden has never been less popular, and Biden is down on the economy. He's down on borders.
04:52 He's down on gas, and people are paying hundreds of dollars a month more for what they paid
04:56 for just a few years ago. So all of a sudden now, Donald Trump's polling numbers in swing
05:00 states look better than they've looked in a long time. So I believe that if Biden is
05:04 a nominee, Trump wins handily, and if Biden is not the nominee, he beats Kamala Harris
05:09 handily because she will be the nominee if Biden is not.
05:14 Tell me what you think a ticket would look like for Donald Trump. Obviously, Pence has
05:19 suspended his campaign. Who do you think he should pick as his VP? Who do you think would
05:25 maybe make good nominations for the cabinet?
05:29 I wouldn't pretend to give the man advice. He keeps his own counsel. My suspicion, however,
05:34 it will be a female because his Achilles heel are females, college educated in the suburbs,
05:39 and I think he will perceive himself politically to be advantaged if he has a female running
05:43 mate. Beyond that, I have no idea. He said recently when somebody asked him if he saw
05:50 any vice presidential running mate on the debate stage, he said no. One of those up
05:54 there was Nikki Haley. So assuming he's going to stick to that, I guess she's not on the
05:59 list.
06:00 Maybe the governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, she's very attractive. She won a re-election
06:05 by 20 points, as did Ron DeSantis, but because it's Iowa, nobody paid that much attention
06:09 to it. But she's very, very popular there. She's cut taxes substantially. She put into
06:14 place statewide school choice. So it seemed to me she checks all the boxes for the kind
06:19 of conservative Republican that you want. But I really don't.
06:23 As an Iowan myself and as somebody who's followed Governor Reynolds' campaign for a long time,
06:28 I can also attest that she has an interesting track record for the GOP. Now, looking at
06:34 your future, will you ever consider looking at another office to run for, maybe in California?
06:43 Well, speaking of California, may I hold up my new book? It comes out November 7. As you
06:50 can see, it's called As Goes California, My Mission to Rescue the Golden State and Save
06:54 a Nation. And it's about what one party rule has done here in California. Democrats have
06:58 dominated both chambers of our legislature, the Senate and the Assembly for decades. People
07:03 like Gavin Newsom have been elected. And as a result, people are leaving California for
07:08 the very first time in 170 years. We've had a net population outflow of almost 500,000
07:13 people. And the primary reason that people leave, as they say, is the cost of living.
07:18 They can't afford a home. The average price of a home in California is about 175 percent
07:22 above national average, largely because Democrats are in bed with the environmentalists. And
07:27 the reasons that are all over the place, they don't want to allow any kind of construction.
07:33 So there are millions of housing units that would otherwise have been built had it not
07:37 been for the power that environmentalists have in stopping any kind of construction
07:41 here in California. Gavin Newsom has banned the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035.
07:47 He has supported soft on crime policies like Proposition 57 that says that no longer is
07:55 rape of an intoxicated victim a violent crime. It's now a nonviolent offense. I kid you not.
08:00 Serial assault on a police officer is now a nonviolent offense. Serial arson is now
08:04 a nonviolent offense. Gavin Newsom set up a panel for reparations. He set up a commission
08:09 to determine that a third party is going to determine the wages for fast food workers.
08:14 You name the brain-dead policy and he's back it. One recent one, Sarah, you like this one.
08:20 If I asked you what is the purpose behind an Amber Alert, you would say, well, it's
08:24 to let people know that a child is missing. What's the purpose behind an Ebony Alert?
08:30 Gavin Newsom just signed a bill for an Ebony Alert because obviously Amber Alerts are just
08:34 for white kids. And we want to make sure that when a black kid is missing, people know it's
08:38 a black kid. So therefore we now have Amber and Ebony Alerts. I kid you not. This is the
08:43 identity policy, race conscious, Democrat party that we've had here in California now
08:50 for decades.
08:51 Now, if I understand correctly, Ebony Alert also has a different age range attached to
08:57 it as well. And it does include young adults over the age of 18. So it is slightly different
09:04 from an Amber Alert. We've had lots of coverage of that in the last couple of weeks.
09:10 Now I want to-
09:11 Why in the world, Sarah, why in the world do we have to have a special alert for black
09:15 people? Why? You're implying that you don't care about black people. So therefore you're
09:22 going to have the racist authorities focus on black people when these racist authorities
09:27 otherwise would not, as opposed to firing the racist authorities if in fact they're
09:31 racist. It's just ridiculous. It's as ridiculous as reparations. California wasn't even a slave
09:37 state and reparations is the extraction of money from people who were never slave owners
09:42 to be given to people who were never slaves. It's the same deal. Gavin Newsom also signed
09:47 a bill that requires publicly held corporations to have at least one member of the LGB2QIA+
09:55 community on their board of directors. It's clearly a violation of the 14th amendment,
09:59 yet he did it anyway.
10:00 Now, you clearly still have strong feelings about how Governor Newsom has run the state
10:06 of California. Does this mean you would consider trying to run against him again?
10:10 Boy, Sarah, you always ask the question. If you don't get the answer, you're going to
10:13 ask it another way. I love that. I don't know. I'm 71 years old. I guess that's young now
10:20 for politicians these days. I'm still energetic. But it's ruling in California. A Republican
10:27 has not won statewide in 20 years. Now, we did have a recall of a Democrat governor back
10:35 in 2003 when Arnold Schwarzenegger took over. But since then, there are now 5% more registered
10:41 Democrats. There are 50% more registered independents. And in California, even the New York Times
10:47 said independents vote Democrat. There were 33% fewer registered Republicans. So the battlefield
10:53 is daunting to run a statewide campaign and win. So I'm not at all sure that I feel I
10:59 have the energy and desire to put my hand in a garbage disposal like that and suffer
11:05 the adverse effects.
11:08 What about a smaller garbage disposal? I hate using that analogy. But I mean, what about
11:13 a House seat? Maybe even a state seat?
11:16 Well, for now, I'm going to be pushing a political action committee called Enforce the Law to
11:23 get rid of the assault on Prime George Soros' back DAs. They're all over the place in San
11:27 Francisco, in Chicago, in New York, even in Des Moines. And as a result, people are
11:32 not being prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. There are bad people out in the
11:35 streets who otherwise shouldn't be out there. And so I'm going to be doing that in the short
11:40 term. It's called Enforce the Law Act. And I'll be raising money to do that, hoping to
11:44 get some of the other candidates, including President Trump, to back that. And then, of
11:48 course, I'll be promoting my book, as I said, called As Goes California. It comes out on
11:52 November the 7th.
11:54 You've got a lot coming up. You've got, obviously, your support for Donald Trump. You've got
11:58 your upcoming book. You've got maybe another opportunity to run again in California and
12:05 this action committee as well. I've got to know, though, before I let you go. You've
12:10 been on the campaign trail with all of these candidates. You've gone up against them. What
12:17 do you think Donald Trump needs to do to essentially make sure he gets those moderate voters, make
12:24 sure that he's appealing to them as a lot of these other candidates are trying to as
12:28 well?
12:29 I'm not sure there's anything more that Donald Trump can do that he hasn't already done.
12:34 He has 100 percent name recognition. Everybody's got an opinion on him. The handful of so-called
12:40 swing voters have probably already decided what they want to do. And no matter what you
12:44 say, it still comes down to the economy. The economy is stupid. And people do not feel
12:48 better off than they felt a few years ago on gas prices, on their wages that are being
12:54 eaten away by inflation, on interest rates now for houses. So I think that all Donald
13:00 Trump has to do is say, weren't you better off when I was president? Weren't you better
13:04 off when there weren't eight to 10 million illegal aliens in this country? Weren't you
13:07 better off when we were energy independent? Weren't you better off when I delivered the
13:11 best economy ever? I think if Donald Trump simply says that, he's going to be just fine.
13:16 Larry Elder, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.
13:19 Thank you, Sarah. I appreciate it. God bless.
13:21 God bless.
13:22 God bless.
13:22 God bless.