September 2023

“I think that would backfire on people, if they try to run for something that is not there yet,” the House minority leader told POLITICO. McCarthy didn’t speak specifically about Ferguson, currently the GOP deputy whip, but took a subtle jab when asked about the only whip contender actively seeking backers: “I think what people want to see is people who are doing their job.”

Vying privately for a leadership role before a midterm election amounts to the trickiest of tightrope walks in Congress. Members of both parties often do try to make early noise about leadership bids in private, but the appearance of premature campaigning — if too overt — risks attracting scrutiny or even blowback from colleagues.

“Look, I’m a former whip. And that job opened up after we won the election,” McCarthy recalled. “And I think one of the reasons why I was able to win the job as whip, only in my third term, was because we focused on winning the majority. And I think that is a greater attribute that people would look at.”

Scalise offered a different view, citing various members who are “already having conversations with people about what they would go for” if Republicans win the majority this fall, as polling and historical trends indicate is highly likely. The Louisianan summed up his view as all about priorities: Winning the majority has to be the top of the list.

When asked about Ferguson, Scalise cited his ally’s fundraising and travel on behalf of House Republicans before adding that “the people that are putting in the work to help us win the majority are what our members are most concerned about. Drew’s been one of those leaders helping work hard to get us in the majority — so that we can then worry about who’s going to have which titles.”

Scalise declined to say whether he’s supporting Ferguson for whip in the next Congress, noting that he’s going to wait until after the election to make a “determination.” But many House Republicans have read a series of recent developments as Scalise all but publicly throwing his support behind his chief deputy for the role.

Those moves include Ferguson hiring on two key staffers from Scalise’s office, which coincided with the Georgian taking over sending vote wrap-up emails to the conference that Scalise’s office previously handled. POLITICO first reported that Ferguson was the only candidate in the race asking colleagues for their support, including hosting dinners where he has laid out his vision for the role.

Ferguson, for his part, echoed Scalise that the conference’s key focus is winning the majority.

“We’re going to stay focused on putting candidates and members in the best possible position to win so that we can have the largest majority possible going into the next session,” said Ferguson. “That is the prize that we’re fighting for. And we don’t take our eyes off the prize.”

Meanwhile, some House GOP hands recall that McCarthy and Scalise both followed a similar playbook to Ferguson’s. One former senior leadership aide, speaking candidly on condition of anonymity, said the current GOP leader and whip both positioned themselves before Election Day while running for whip.

“There is precedent for what Drew is doing,” the aide added.

But behind the scenes, Ferguson already has formidable potential competition.

Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), chair of the Republican Study Committee, is having exploratory conversations with members about the potential of jumping into the race. Asked if he is running for the whip role, Banks replied: “Right now, we ought to be focused on winning back the majority and I’ll be looking at where I fit in.”

National Republican Committee Chair Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) is also viewed as a likely candidate for whip after a GOP takeover, even though he has not started to have such conversations. Doing so would break from the core message the House GOP’s campaign chief sent to members: that their attention should stay on winning in November.

And Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the current conference chair, could still pursue the whip’s spot, though it’s unclear whether she has redirected her future ambitions to another senior position. Despite some colleagues previously seeing signs of her gearing up for a run for the No. 3 role, the Washington Examiner has reported that she’s preparing to step back from a whip run.

Other Republicans now forecast a return to her earlier interest in the Education and Labor Committee chairmanship, which would keep Stefanik’s options open if a top contender stumbles after the midterms in other higher-ranked leadership races.

Stefanik’s office has repeatedly dismissed questions about her future ambitions, saying she is solely focused on her role as the House GOP messaging chief.

Broadly speaking, the dynamics of the whip race changed significantly after Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) announced earlier this year that he plans not to seek the role in the next Congress, choosing to instead remain on the Financial Services Committee. And despite McCarthy’s views on early campaigning, Ferguson and potentially Banks will be able to spend months building support in the leadup to the election while Emmer will be hamstrung by November.

But if the two-term NRCC chair can take credit for a sizable majority heading into the new Congress, he could earn a heap of member goodwill and cash in with a run.

That would mark a turnabout from 2010, when then-NRCC chair Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) was interested in becoming whip after leading Republicans back into the majority but ended up losing to McCarthy — who had started campaigning earlier.

Sessions said he recalled McCarthy asking members for support, an easier feat for the Californian since, unlike Sessions, he wasn’t hamstrung by a different leadership position at the time.

“I needed to keep my focus instead of asking people, which puts them in a difficult position. So I chose to wait,” Sessions recalled.

The president talked about the hours he spent with victims’ families in Uvalde, and the fear he believes is keeping some Republicans from moving forward with gun legislation.

“This is not your father’s Republican Party. This is a MAGA party. It’s a very different Republican Party. And so you find people who are worried, I believe, that if they vote for rational gun policy, they’re gonna be primaried and they’re gonna lose in a hard-right Republican primary,” Biden said.

Kimmel kicked off his segment with a series of clips of Fox News personalities talking about Biden coming on to his show. The clips featured Fox hosts claiming that it wasn’t a real interview and that Kimmel would toss the president “softball” questions. The talk show host then played a round-up of interviews from Fox News, Newsmax and others, with former President Donald Trump. In one clip, Trump was asked about his golf game.

But Kimmel’s interview wasn’t as light as one may have expected, focusing extensively on policy issues. He asked the president why he couldn’t issue more executive orders on guns, in which Biden took a swing at his predecessor.

“What I don’t want to do — and I’m not being facetious — I don’t want to emulate Trump’s abuse of the Constitution and constitutional authority,” Biden said.

“Look, I often get asked, well the Republicans don’t play it square. Why do you play it square? Well guess, what? Well if we do the same thing they do, our democracy will literally be in jeopardy.”

The wide-ranging conversation also addressed inflation, what Biden called the “bane of our existence.” And Kimmel touched on the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision on whether it will overturn Roe v. Wade.

“Boy these things just keep coming at you, don’t they?” Kimmel said. “What a terrible job you had.”

Biden laughed before diving into a serious answer, which was in line with message on guns. He called for legislation codifying the the right to abortion, but he said it’s another issue voters need to take to the polls.

“You’ve got to make sure that you vote,” Biden said. “You got to vote, let people know exactly what the devil you think.”

NATO is to blame for provoking the “special military operation”, as Vladimir Putin called his invasion of Ukraine. Washington helped Kyiv build secret biological weapons labs. Ukraine is defended by Nazis and the world supports Moscow’s efforts to liberate the country from a fascist regime. 

These false narratives and conspiracy theories — designed to bolster support for Putin’s war — are to be expected inside Russia and from pro-Kremlin trolls online. 

But while the threat from fake news is global, Bulgaria has become ground zero for how such disinformation continues to proliferate largely unchecked inside the European Union. 

A steady flow of pro-Russian views floods Bulgaria’s debate about the war. The Kremlin’s talking points are echoed by politicians, mainstream media, and pundits alike. As a result, the invasion has split public opinion, fuelling fears that democratic values are under threat in the EU’s poorest country. 

“Bulgaria has been a target of systematic disinformation campaigns for years – and those efforts are paying off now,” said Goran Georgiev an analyst with the Sofia-based Center for Study of Democracy. “Some Bulgarians unequivocally believe conspiracy theories and have lost trust in traditional media.” 

It is a concern not just to democracy campaigners but also to Bulgaria’s new government, formed last year under Kiril Petkov, whose campaign focused on cleaning up politics and fighting corruption. 

To western European eyes, the examples of cascading conspiracy stories and the penetration of pro-Putin views are shocking. Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, Petkov had to sack his own defense minister who kept referring to the illegal invasion as a “special operation,” adopting Putin’s favored euphemism.

Popular public figures and media in Bulgaria disseminate pro-Russian stories from elsewhere, too. Take the case of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, where a small band of Ukrainian soldiers held out against the Russian siege for weeks until they eventually surrendered. 

The pro-Kremlin Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda carried a version of events that portrayed the Ukrainian troops as Nazis. The article was then translated and reprinted in the Bulgarian tabloid Trud, a popular paper sympathetic to Moscow. It asserted the surrendering Ukrainian soldiers were found covered with tattoos of swastikas and quotes by Hitler — and offered this as proof that Putin was justified in invading Ukraine — parroting debunked claims that Ukraine’s military are made up of fascists.

Swastika tattoos

The story itself was bad enough. But the article came to the attention of Bulgarian journalist and television host Martin Karbovski, who shared it with his 530,000 followers on Facebook. In a nation of 7 million people, he is one of the most popular personalities on the social platform. 

In April, one of Petkov’s coalition government partners nominated Karbovski for a role with Bulgaria’s media regulator overseeing public broadcasters and media pluralism. Karbovski’s candidacy sparked outrage among the journalistic community in Bulgaria and within hours he withdrew his bid.

Karbovski portrayed himself as ultimately not wanting to become a civil servant, accepting a job from those in power who had been his enemies.

According to Bozhidar Bozhanov, Bulgaria’s minister of e-government, the problem is hard to fix. Bulgaria had a systemic weakness to Russian propaganda long before the start of the war, he said. 

“The Kremlin uses troll factories, anonymous sites, and local media which they control in one way or another,” Bozhanov told POLITICO. “Like in other Eastern European countries, we can’t simply shut several Russia-controlled media outlets and solve the disinformation problem.” 

The government’s repeated efforts to force Facebook and other social media companies to take more steps to scrub Russian propaganda from their platforms have also largely fallen on deaf ears, Bozhanov told POLITICO.

Poland and Hungary have also struggled to deal with pro-Russia propaganda. But why is Bulgaria apparently so vulnerable? The answer is partly cultural. 

Historical ties between Bulgaria and Russia run deep. Many Bulgarians speak Russian and therefore find it easy to access the Kremlin version of events. Prior to the invasion of Ukraine, Moscow was seen as an ally by many. 

During the 1877-1878 Russo-Turkish war, Russia defeated the Turks and brought an end to Ottoman rule in Bulgaria. Ever since, there has been a strain of thinking in Bulgaria that sees Russia as a liberator. 

Media freedom in the country has been undermined for years. Bulgaria ended on the 91st place in the most recent Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index, coming from the 112th place last year, and the NGO still describes the state of media freedom in the country as “fragile and unstable.” The few remaining independent publications are struggling to survive.

‘Fragile and unstable’

Only 10 percent of Bulgarians think that media in their country is independent but many are apparently still willing to believe what they read. “One of the big problems in Bulgarian society is the lack of critical thinking,” said Velislava Popova, editor in chief of the news site Dnevnik.bg. “Bulgarians are more likely to trust false news and manipulations because we don’t know to distinguish disinformation.”

During the pandemic, conspiracy theorists sowed falsehoods around the world and found a particularly receptive audience in Bulgaria, where vaccine hesitancy rates were high. 

Revival, an extreme nationalist party, capitalized on the COVID-19 conspiracies during last autumn’s election and transformed itself from a marginal voice to a political force represented in parliament. Now, the party is turning its attention to the war. 

It has organized “peace” rallies where Kremlin views on the war were aired and Russian flags waved. Footage of Revival’s events has been picked up by Russian media and presented as evidence of Bulgarian support for the invasion of Ukraine. 

Revival’s party leader Kostadin Kostadinov has around 270,000 followers on Facebook and he dominates political debate on the network. Facebook is still the most popular social media in Bulgaria, which is important because, according to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2021, close to 70 percent of Bulgarians get their news from social media. 

In March a petition was launched calling for more transparency about how Facebook moderates its content content. “We noticed an interesting trend – profiles which said nothing wrong were blocked while those which were aggressive and supporting the war in Ukraine could not even be removed,” said Martin Ossikovski, lecturer in media history at New Bulgarian University, behind the petition.

One possible explanation, Ossikovski said, is that Russian trolls are targeting specific profiles, reporting them in scores for allegedly breaking the social media’s rules, and Facebook algorithms are automatically blocking them.

Facebook said it is fighting propaganda in consultation with authorities in Bulgaria. “We are taking extensive steps to fight the spread of misinformation on our services in the region and are continuing to consult with outside experts and public administrations including in Bulgaria,” a spokesperson for Facebook’s parent company Meta said. 

“We’re removing content that violates our policies, and working with third-party fact checkers in the region to debunk false claims. When they rate something as false, we move this content lower in Feed so fewer people see it. We’re also giving people more information to decide what to read, trust, and share by adding warning labels on content rated false.”

But the rot may be too deeply set-in. According to Ossikovski, the Bulgarian academic, Facebook’s content moderation subcontractors could be working with “young, unqualified, inexperienced employees who don’t really know much about media ethics and are likely to be influenced by pro-Russian propaganda themselves.” Even when posts that spread Moscow’s lies are reported to these moderators, “they don’t actually see them as problematic.”

There’s one thing that could change all this: the war itself. Despite the profusion of propaganda, there are signs Bulgarian public opinion has shifted since the invasion began. Putin’s approval rating in Bulgaria was 32 percent in February, according to a poll of 1,000 people. By April, it had fallen to 25 percent. 

“Once Russia started shelling Ukrainian cities,” said Georgiev, “people instinctively started doubting the lies.”

Mark Scott contributed reporting.

This article is part of POLITICO Pro

The one-stop-shop solution for policy professionals fusing the depth of POLITICO journalism with the power of technology

---

Exclusive, breaking scoops and insights

---

Customized policy intelligence platform

---

A high-level public affairs network