WASHINGTON

Where in the world is Sarah Palin? Her political star is fading

Eliza Collins
USA TODAY

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — As the Conservative Political Action Conference kicked off just outside of Washington this week, there was one name noticeably missing from the roster of speakers: Sarah Palin.

The former Alaska governor used to be a rock star at the annual conservative gathering. But this year she wasn’t invited to CPAC, put on by the American Conservative Union.

“I think conservatives might be trying to rebrand a little bit,” said Adrianna Conradson, a student from University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. “Maybe that’s why they didn’t invite people we typically see.”

“They have Kellyanne now,” Conradson said, referring to President Trump’s senior adviser and former campaign manager who spoke Thursday morning. Conway was the first woman to successfully run a presidential campaign. “She’s a strong female leader in the party, so I think they might be trying to switch it up and find new people, fresh people. And she has a big role in the current administration so she might be more relevant than Sarah Palin.”

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Corrie Lee was at CPAC as a member of Future Female Leaders, a conservative group trying to get young women involved in politics. She is also a student at Campbell University in North Carolina.

“I don’t think it means anything that she’s not here,"  Lee said. “She’s someone to look up to as a conservative woman, but maybe not someone who is going to be elected in the future. She’s probably just taking her sabbatical and moving on.”

But the CPAC stage isn't the only place Palin is missing from. The 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, who has been capitalizing on her brand for years following the failed White House bid, seems to have largely disappeared from the political scene.

"Politics is a game of timing and it certainly could be possible that her window has closed," Bruce Haynes, a Republican strategist and founding partner of the political consulting firm Purple Strategies, told USA TODAY. "She had the opportunity for the second highest office in the land and then rather than divert her energy to an elected office, she was more focused on being a political celebrity than a political candidate."

"At a certain point donors and activists transfer their energy to people who are in a position to help them achieve their political vision, their policy goals," Haynes continued.

In January, Palin shut down the super PAC she had been using to support like-minded candidates. When it was running, it was spending more on operating than political donations.

Michael Beckel, a reporter with Center for Public Integrity, went through the data and found that Sarah PAC spent about 10 times as much on consultants in 2015 and 2016 as it did on donations to other politicians.

Palin had been an enthusiastic supporter of Trump during his presidential campaign, but she appeared on the trail on his behalf just a handful of times. Following the election, Palin had pitched herself as a candidate to be Trump’s Veterans Affairs secretary. The job ultimately went to David Shulkin, who had been the undersecretary for health in the Obama administration.

Palin’s Facebook page — which used to be full of her political musings — is now almost entirely a stream of links to SarahPalin.com, a website where reporters aggregate coverage of current and political events with a conservative slant. Palin also posts “daily devotions” on the website. Her Twitter feed also almost entirely links back to the site.

And Palin herself has proved hard to reach. Multiple requests to the news site for more information went unanswered. A tweet at Palin and a call to her in-laws' house — the only phone number listed in the public record — did not get responses.

Craig Robinson, the founder and editor-in-chief of the blog The Iowa Republican, said Palin may simply have been upstaged. He pointed out that Palin made her name by being the outsider within the party, but then Trump came along and sucked up the oxygen.

"She made her mark by not being politically correct, saying things that other people wouldn’t say as candidates — or a high-profile individual," Robinson said. "Now you have a president of the United States that does that on a daily basis."