Sarah Palin on Potential ’16 Endorsement: Immigration ‘Huge on My List’

Associated Press
Associated Press

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin said where GOP candidates stand on amnesty and immigration will be “huge” in determining which candidate she potentially endorses in this election cycle if she decides to make an endorsement that may well determine who will win the GOP presidential nomination.

In a “Breitbart News Daily special” interview that aired on Sirius XM Patriot channel 125 this past weekend, Palin sat down with Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon in what was her first live interview on her Sweet Freedom book tour.

Palin praised Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)—who is the top champion of American workers in Congress—saying that he is “so good on immigration.” She added that it is probably “his number one issue that he thinks is most impacting on the future of America.”

“He’s going to pick one candidate who’s strongest on that issue and that is probably the person he’ll give the most attention to,” Palin said. “And immigration is huge on my list.”

But Palin added that so is the “understanding of what the federal government’s role is to be in our lives and… protecting our Constitution in order to rein in our government.”

She also said that “character counts” and any person she endorses has to “have good character in order to understand and receive what it is our Constitution intended for us.”

“They can’t be so selfish as to interpret the Constitution as some living, breathing document that they—because they are so smart and elite and have some kind of degree with their name hanging up on the wall—[are] going to change… in order to meet their own selfish priorities,” Palin said. “No, our Founding Fathers knew what they were talking about… they documented those elements of freedom… that keep us free there in the Constitution, so I’m going to find somebody with good character who knows how to protect the Constitution and get us on the right track.”

In one of the most significant and earth-shattering op-eds of the 2014 midterm election cycle that rocked the established order in politics and the mainstream media, Palin, writing in Breitbart News on “behalf of American workers and legal immigrants of all backgrounds,” called for President Barack Obama to be impeached for his amnesty agenda that undermined the rule of law.  Nearly two years before a Reuters poll found that a majority of Americans feel like strangers in their own land, Palin wrote then that many Americans “now feel like strangers in their own land” and “it’s the American worker who is forced to deal with Obama’s latest crisis with our hard-earned tax dollars while middle class wages decrease, sustainable jobs get more scarce, and communities become unrecognizable and bankrupted due to Obama’s flood of illegal immigration.”

There is no denying the significance of a potential Palin endorsement, especially in an election cycle in which the conventional rule books have been shredded.

As Breitbart News has reported and documented, Palin’s influence was proven during the 2012 cycle – as candidates Palin praised before Iowa and South Carolina voted won:

She praised Rick Santorum in December in 2011 when Iowans seemed lukewarm about the field of Republican primary candidates. After Palin made her remarks on December 2 on Fox News’s Hannity, Santorum, who was at four percent in the polls in Iowa – barely above Jon Huntsman, who was not even competing in the state – started getting momentum and eventually won the caucus a month later. Though Santorum had gone “all-in” in Iowa and planted his campaign exclusively in the state, voters were persuaded to consider his candidacy more seriously after Palin spoke kindly of him.

Palin also has a significant amount of influence in South Carolina. As Breitbart News has noted, “her support of Nikki Haley in the 2010 primary ensured she won the Palmetto State’s gubernatorial election – and her positive comments about Newt Gingrich enabled him to win South Carolina’s presidential primary in 2012.”

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