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ANKENY, Iowa Pete Buttigieg isnt a Republican. But hes thinking like one as his presidential campaign tries to engineer a strong finish next week in the first Democratic caucuses.

His closing schedule is heavy on Iowa counties that four years ago flipped from Barack Obama to Donald Trump. His closing argument is an assurance that Bernie Sanders is too liberal for his taste, combined with a pitch for future former Republicans. His team on the ground counts at least 45 precinct captains as recent Republican converts and is quick to brag with a bit of Trumpian flair about the big crowds Buttigieg is drawing in small Republican towns.

Its a demonstrable example of the general election candidate Pete would be, Michael Halle, a senior adviser to Buttigiegs campaign, told BuzzFeed News in an interview. The notion that we have a candidate who could go to and be at home in the Des Moines suburbs the same way hes at home in Tama or Vinton or Keokuk is required to beat Trump in the fall.

Were seeing real results, Halle added. At every single event we go to there is at least one interaction where someone goes up to our organizers and says they were a Republican.

A core part of Sanders argument is that the Vermont senator can expand the Democratic electorate pull in nonvoters or people who may have fallen for Trumps anti-establishment promises. Buttigieg is taking a different tack and suggesting that his candidacy and platform could expand out the partys electorate on the right.

Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is also trying to win back voters who may have fled to Trump in 2016 and is not alone in advocating a more moderate course. Former vice president Joe Biden and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar his two closest ideological rivals in the race emphasize their crossover appeal and bipartisan backgrounds in Washington.

And Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, whos been more ideologically aligned with Sanders, is making a new electability case by highlighting Trump voters who now back her.

But Buttigieg has been most explicit with the strategy. At a town hall forum Thursday night in Ankeny the Des Moines suburb that Republican Marco Rubio memorably made the base of his Iowa operation four years ago questions from the audience, as they often are, were submitted in writing before disappearing in a fishbowl. When the fishbowl appeared on stage later in the hands of a volunteer, the questions tied neatly into Buttigiegs message and the audience he hopes will hear it. One allowed him to talk about his military experience, another to discuss his plans to appeal to evangelical voters.

I think theres a historic opportunity to engage voters of faith, Buttigieg said on the latter. We should reach out, because I think theres a lot of folks sitting in the pews right now looking around wondering, Wait a minute, is my faith supposed to mean that I support this? What about, I was hungry and you fed me? What about, I was a stranger and you welcomed me?

As for the future former Republicans, Buttigieg has been testing variations on that theme since at least last fall, when he offered the line during the Democratic debate in Atlanta. He sharpened the message this week, first by returning to Fox News the cable network partial to Trump and the Republican Party for a town hall forum televised from Iowa. Both Sanders and Klobuchar have participated in a Fox News town hall, but Buttigieg is the only Democratic candidate to do one twice. And by scheduling one in the final days before the caucuses, he signaled how important the networks conservative viewers and moderates who just may like the idea that hes trying to reach those viewers are to his campaign in the state.

I am convinced, Buttigieg said in a closing argument that conveyed an everything-to-everyone pragmatism, that we are going to beginning right here in Iowa change what people think is possible. That we can send a message to people who are telling us that we have to choose between our head and our heart, that we have to choose between what it takes to govern and what it takes to win, or that we have to choose between unity and boldness in this country. I dont think we have to choose. I don't think we can choose, because I don't think we can get any one of those things unless we get all of them, and this is our chance to turn the page.

That line has since been a staple in Buttigiegs stump speech. And Thursday brought a new escalation meant to paint Biden and Sanders, for different reasons, as poor choices to take on Trump in the fall. After weeks of issuing subtle, no-names rebukes of an older generation of politicians, including during his Fox News appearance, Buttigieg graduated to a pointed critique of Bidens play-it-safe style and Sanders doctrinaire brand of democratic socialism.

Weve got some respectful but serious differences about what its going to take, Buttigieg said in Decorah. I hear Vice President Biden saying that this is no time to take a risk on someone new. But history has shown us that the biggest risk we could take with a very important election coming up is to look to the same Washington playbook and recycle the same arguments and expect that to work against a president like Donald Trump who is new in kind.

Then I hear Sen. Sanders calling for a kind of politics that says you've got to go all the way here and nothing else counts. And it's coming at the very moment when we actually have a historic majority, not just aligned around what it is we're against, but agreeing on what it is we're for. A majority ready to make sure that the public sector steps up and delivers health care just not so sure about the idea of forcing everybody onto that public plan. A majority that's ready for a game-changing transformation in the affordability of college, but not so sure about the idea of covering every last penny for the tuition of the children of millionaires and billionaires.

Later, in Ankeny, Buttigieg urged voters to leave the politics of the past in the past.

Kurt Meyer, who chairs the Mitchell County Democratic Party and recently announced his plan to caucus for Warren, questioned a strategy that relies on Republican defectors.

Many [a] campaign has theorized that success would be brought about by all the new, previously unheard-from people who would show up at the right time and do the right thing, Meyer wrote in an email. Very, very few people have ridden such a strategy successfully into office. Knowing that the Super Bowl is on Sunday, its a bit akin to saying my team doesnt have to block or tacklewe have a NEW strategy that will make those old essentials obsolete.

To which I say, oh really?!?

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Pete Buttigieg Wants To Win Iowa By Winning Republicans - BuzzFeed News

Not three weeks after his op-ed published, Mr. Tillis reversed course and voted for the national emergency. In June, Mr. Walker announced he would not pursue a primary.

Tillis was a wake-up call for everyone, said Tyler Sandberg, a Republican strategist. If you disagreed with something the president did, it was like, Be careful; you saw what happened to Tillis.

The result is that the National Republican Congressional Committee is no longer consumed by the once inevitable task of neutralizing serious challenges to its members from the right. According to a G.O.P. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share private discussions, apart from Mr. Fitzpatricks race, only a few primaries this cycle have been deemed cause for concern.

The presidents monopoly on Republican voters is more powerful than any ideological or stylistic divide, said Nathan Gonzales, editor of Inside Elections and an elections analyst for CQ Roll Call. There might be interest in challenging an incumbent from the right or as an outsider, but as long as that member stays close to Trump, there just isnt enough oxygen to get the job done.

But then theres Representative Kay Granger, the 12-term incumbent of Texass 12th District. As ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, shes one of the lower chambers most powerful Republicans. Yet she finds herself confronting her most and arguably only competitive primary in her two-plus decades in Congress, a challenge driven by charges of a lackluster allegiance to Mr. Trump.

On Sept. 24, a technology company executive named Chris Putnam, who promoted himself as an outsider just like President Trump, declared his candidacy. As The Texas Tribune reported, in the six days before the close of the quarter on Sept. 30, Mr. Putnam boasted a haul of $456,000, trouncing Ms. Grangers quarter-long effort of $284,000.

Ms. Granger is certainly no Brian Fitzpatrick unlike her House colleague, she votes with Mr. Trump roughly 97 percent of the time. But flashes of dissent, including her call for Mr. Trump to remove himself from consideration as commander in chief after the release of the Access Hollywood tape in 2016, have been enough to buoy her opponent. In an interview, Mr. Putnam accused Ms. Granger of being a full-on Never Trumper during the last three years. We have to get people who are running for the right reasons, he said.

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A Primary From the Right? Not in Trumps G.O.P. - The New York Times

The libertarian-minded Massie has broken with Trump on an array of key issues, which McMurtry has highlighted repeatedly since launching his campaign earlier this month. But Massies new commercial aims to turn the tables on McMurtry, who is branding himself as a staunch Trump ally in lockstep with the president ahead of the May 19 primary.

Hes even worse than a Never Trumper. Todd McMurtry is a Trump hater, says the ad, which opens with a photograph of Massie and Trump flashing grins and thumbs-ups.

Massies commercial then highlights a handful of critical comments McMurtry made about Trump on Facebook, mostly in 2017, the first year of Trump's presidency.

Sad but true. Trump is the epitome of a weak male, said one McMurtry post, read in classic attack-ad fashion by the narrator.

Trump is an idiot, says another.

Hillary is right, McMurtry writes in another comment. He is temperamentally unqualified to be president.

Massies commercial concludes by tying his primary opponent to Hillary Clinton: Siding with Crooked Hillary. Thats Todd McMurtry, the Trump hater.

The race in Kentuckys deeply conservative 4th Congressional District, which spans the northernmost part of the state, underscores how GOP primaries are becoming litmus tests for fealty to Trump. Republican contests in areas from the Philadelphia suburbs to Fort Worth, Texas, are hinging on a simple factor: whether an incumbent House Republican has been sufficiently supportive of the president.

The significance of this test became clear during the 2018 primary season. Former Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) lost reelection to a challenger who highlighted his denunciations of the president. Two other Trump critics, Sens. Jeff Flake of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee, retired rather than face primary challenges from Trump-aligned opponents when their poll numbers sagged after blowups with Trump.

That has led a small group of Republicans, which now includes Massie, to go to great and unusual lengths to dissuade the president from endorsing a primary opponent. Alabama Rep. Martha Roby withdrew her support for Trump after the release of the lewd Access Hollywood tape just prior to the 2016 election, prompting a furious response from local Republicans. So once Trump took office, Roby became a frequent visitor at the White House in hopes of smoothing over her relationship with the president. At the time, Roby was trying to fend off a primary threat from a pro-Trump opponent. She won reelection in 2018 but is retiring in 2020.

Massies ad cuts into the main point of his opponents campaign. McMurtry, one of the attorneys who represented Covington Catholic student Nicholas Sandmann in his defamation lawsuit against several media outlets, has pointed out that Massies voting record is less aligned with Trump less than any other member of the Kentucky congressional delegation, saying that Trump cant rely on our congressmans support.

Running in a district that Trump won by more than 35 percentage points, McMurtry has vowed there will be no daylight between him and the president. Earlier this month, he tweeted out a picture of the Trump Hotel in Washington.

Hoping to see my favorite President, McMurtry wrote.

Its not the first time a candidate has bought advertising time in South Florida hoping to get the presidents attention. Shortly after launching his Democratic presidential campaign last fall, former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg ran TV commercials in the area, coinciding with the presidents holiday travel to Mar-a-Lago.

And Massies campaign is making no secret of its intended audience.

We know the president will be in Florida this weekend, and we want him to know that our primary opponent has not been a supporter of his, said Massie campaign manager Jonathan Van Norman.

The Massie campaign is spending around $3,000 to air the commercial during Fox News programs this weekend in the West Palm Beach area, including Fox News Sunday. The spot is expected to air more than 50 times on Fox News over a 36-hour period.

The campaign will also spend $13,000 to run the ad on Fox News in Kentucky from Feb. 1 through Feb. 10.

The McMurtry campaign responded to the ad by pointing to several pieces of legislation and recent votes on which Massie broke with Trump, including a resolution aimed at curtailing the presidents ability to wage war with Iran.

Every time President Trump needs him, Massie stabs him in the back, McMurty campaign manager Jake Monssen said. It would be great if Thomas Massies problem was limited to old Facebook posts. Its not. His problem is his anti-Trump voting record in the House.

While Trump has endorsed several House Republicans who are trying to fight off primaries, aides to the president say he is unlikely to intervene in the Kentucky contest either for or against Massie. While they acknowledge Massie has sometimes opposed the president, they also note that he voted against impeachment in the House.

That has not kept Massie, who is facing the most serious reelection threat of his congressional career, from pursuing a presidential endorsement. Van Norman said the reelection campaign had been seeking Trumps support.

Certainly, Van Norman said, Congressman Massie would welcome an endorsement from President Trump in his race.

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The extreme measure one House Republican is taking to win over Donald Trump - POLITICO

The sponsor of a bill in the Iowa legislature that would have removed transgender people from the states Civil Rights Act has announced that the proposal wont move forward.

Nine GOP state representatives introduced HF 2164, which proposed removing gender identity as a protected class under theIowa Civil Rights Act. Now, Republican Rep. Steven Holt who chairs the Iowa House Judicial Committee presiding over the hearings for the bill has announced that the bill wont be considered any further.

Related: State legislatures are filled with anti-LGBTQ measures, thanks to a religious right playbook

Its dead, Holt said. It just would have had a lot of unintended consequences.

Rep. Dean Fisher (R) sponsored the proposal to address a whole host of issues that he claims transgender people cause the state. He cited examples such as ensuring trans women inmates in the state are housed in womens facilities and trans women athletes competing with fellow women, although neither of those have widely reported issues in Iowa.

Fisher also expressed hope that removing trans people would pave a way to allow Iowa medical providers to remove gender affirming surgery as a Medicaid-approved procedure.

Gender identity had been included in the states civil rights act by amendment since 2007. Several civil rights groups, including the ACLU, were highly critical of the proposal, saying it would set the clock back in Iowa.

Discriminating against transgender people or any Iowans will not make them, or us, go away or stop being who they are, Mark Stringer, ACLU Iowa executive director, told NBC News. Well continue to remind legislators of the obvious: Transgender people already do exist; they arent going anywhere; and they have large communities of Iowans fighting for equality and dignity right alongside them.

While Holt does not disagree with his fellow Republicans proposal, but knows it would not get the support to pass in the Iowa House of Representatives. The only group known to support the proposal was the evangelical Christian group The Christian Leader, which also opposes same-sex marriage.

In 2018, Iowa Republicans filed a bathroom bill that would have amended the states civil rights act to allow employers and business owners to ban transgender people from bathrooms and other facilities. That bill also did not pass.

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Iowa Republicans give up on removing transgender people from state's civil rights protections - LGBTQ Nation

House Republicans have convinced their most conservative members to support a forthcoming plan for the federal government to address climate change.

Republicans have long been skeptical of federal efforts to curb climate change. But now, even conservative Republicans are embracing a clean energy innovation legislative agenda, primed for release this spring and advanced by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and his top energy and climate lieutenants.

Climate denial is a bad political strategy, said Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, a 37-year-old member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus and an ally of President Trump. At some point, you have to be for something to fix it.

Republicans, alarmed by polling showing vulnerability among young and suburban voters, sidelined the most strident and skeptical conservative outside groups to recognize climate change as an urgent problem requiring a response to the liberal "Green New Deal," according to more than a dozen Republican representatives and others familiar with congressional GOP plans.

The major themes of the pending agenda are capturing carbon dioxide (through technology and planting trees), curbing plastic waste, exporting natural gas, and promoting resilience or adaptation to sea-level rise and other effects of climate change.

You can call it political calculus or representing the people you represent, said Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a 35-year-old freshman Republican from Texas. It's absolutely true a lot of people have concerns about the environment, and we do need a message for them."

To land on a message that appealed to everybody, Republicans had to navigate potential fault lines among themselves by setting aside difficult questions and sticking broadly to a free market approach.

What we are asking our members to do is to double down on what's actually worked to reduce emissions, and those are, by the way, conservative solutions, said Rep. Garret Graves of Louisiana, the top Republican on the select climate committee created last year by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. So its not that weve gone out there to the Freedom Caucus to say, 'We are asking you to take a hard left turn.'"

That stay-in-the-lines strategy meant rejecting carbon taxes and regulations in favor of repackaging support for tax subsidies and funding of new science and technologies into a low-risk (and to critics, low-reward) proposal for limiting climate change. It also meant clearing the way for using more fossil fuels, the biggest contributor to climate change.

Fossil fuels aren't the enemy, Graves said. Its emissions. So lets devise strategies that are based on emissions strategies, not based on eliminating fossil fuels.

The concession to fossil fuels means the Republican agenda wont be able to match the ambition of Democratic plans that call for decarbonizing the economy by 2050, a timeline suggested by U.N. scientists. Republicans have no plans to set a target for reducing emissions, arguing renewables and energy storage arent advanced enough and that carbon capture technologies for fossil fuels arent widespread enough.

Its refreshing to hear that some Republicans are finally acknowledging that climate change is real and an emergency, but we simply cannot innovate our way out of this existential threat, said Democratic Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee.

Nonetheless, to longtime observers of climate politics, the unified Republican acceptance of a federal role in combating global warming represents a significant step that could open the door for bigger bipartisan action in the future.

While its true that eight House Republicans voted for a Democratic cap-and-trade bill in 2009, only one, Rep. Chris Smith of New Jersey, is still in Congress. (2008 GOP presidential nominee John McCain also backed cap and trade). After Democrats lost the House in 2010, Republicans spent most of the next decade running away from climate change mitigation proposals such as carbon taxes.

People on the far-left, for political reasons, want to mock this and diminish it, but put in context, it's undeniable this is a historical and positive development, said Carlos Curbelo, a centrist former House Republican who co-founded the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus in 2016 before losing his Florida seat in 2018.

McCarthy, who represents an agricultural district in California, recognized the politics were changing when House Republicans became the minority party in 2019.

He quickly tasked Graves and the Republican staff of the climate committee, along with Rep. Greg Walden of Oregon, the GOP leader of the Energy and Commerce Committee, to develop a strategy for combating climate change.

The three led a Republican caucuswide meeting this month, attended by more than 100 members.

House Republican aides said there was little opposition to the plans in the meeting, during which 50 or so members spoke.

Its encouraging to see some of these ideas gaining momentum on Capitol Hill, said Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona, a Freedom Caucus member who was a skeptic of federal government action to combat climate change. Gosar said he now supported commonsense solutions to combating our changing climate.

The conference meeting was the culmination of individual interactions Graves said he held throughout the past year with members ranging from Freedom Caucus to the centrist Tuesday Group.

Separately, Walden engaged in a similar exercise, hosting two dozen Republican members of the energy committee in his office shortly after Democrats took control of the House. He said that all agreed, when polled, that climate change was a problem that requires a GOP-led response.

There wasn't a science denier among us, said Walden, a former chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee who is retiring in 2020.

In December, Energy and Commerce Republicans unveiled a package of a dozen short-term bills to address climate change, some new but most old, including measures to boost carbon capture, advanced nuclear technology, and energy storage.

Some of those bills could be a part of the broader Republican caucuswide climate package.

There is an enormous comfort level when you say you are doing what's working, Graves said.

Another conservative, Rep. David Schweikert of Arizona, said its been natural for Freedom Caucus members to support the climate agenda, given the emergence of solar in Sunbelt states such as his and wind in rural conservative states. He denied conservatives were shifting their views at all, blaming Democrats for dominating the discourse related to climate change and defining Republicans as skeptics.

I am one of the founding members of the Freedom Caucus, and yet for years now, Ive been doing presentations talking about the disruptive clean energy technology that is rolling out, Schweikert said. That is a revolution that our brothers and sisters on the Left don't want to know about because it blows up their control-freak agenda.

Outside conservative groups and more liberal GOP members left out of negotiations, however, promise to test House Republicans projection of unity.

Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, dismissed McCarthys effort as a toothless messaging agenda of wasting taxpayer dollars to pay off special interests and nutty plans to plant a trillion trees.

I would have to be convinced that global warming is a crisis and that carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced before supporting such a package, Ebell said.

Rep. Francis Rooney of Florida, one of only two House Republicans who support a carbon tax, says he, too, has not been consulted by McCarthy, Graves, or Walden.

"They are not ready to talk about the things I am ready to talk about, so they probably didn't ask me," Rooney said.

Gaetz, meanwhile, met with Graves as recently as this week to discuss the climate agenda, which he wishes did more to confront fossil fuel use.

"Of course, we need to use less fossil fuels," Gaetz said. "For those who don't believe we should use less fossil fuels, what are we innovating toward?"

The White House is also unlikely to endorse the House Republican plan and has not been consulted on it, according to a Trump administration official. Despite modifying his rhetoric when asked about climate change, Trump has not proposed addressing it.

These are Kevin McCarthys bills, the Trump administration official said. "They are messaging bills and all about the next election, and thats great. But the president has been pretty clear he cares about affordable energy, energy independence, and clean air and clean water. He is not particularly obsessed about climate change.

Walden insists House Republicans have struck the right chord.

"We have found harmony between good policy and good politics," he said.

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How House Republicans won over conservatives to gain consensus on a climate agenda - Washington Examiner