Free Republic

Former Sen. Bob Bennett says even though Republicans are set to take over Congress come January, don't expect Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee to set the agenda. Bennett, speaking at a conference in Washington, says Sen. Mitch McConnell, who will be majority leader in the next Congress, has done a masterful job of "isolating" Ted Cruz. "There is no cannier politician in Washington than Mitch McConnell," said Bennett. "Yes, Ted Cruz is an unsettling factor within the Republican conference. My sense of things is Mitch has very carefully, very methodically, very much under the radar isolated Ted Cruz. He's...

Were the polls wrong? It’s a question asked after every election. Sometimes, as in 1948, the answer seems as obvious as the answer to the question, “Why did Custer lose at Little Bighorn?” Sometimes the answer is less obvious, as it is this year. “The polls were skewed toward the Democrats,” writes Nate Silver, who as proprietor of FiveThirtyEight has earned the distinction of being the nation’s most assiduous polling analyst. Silver gives short shrift to partisans — Democrats this year, Republicans in 2012 — who complained that polls were systematically biased against their side. The skew varies unpredictably, he...

ANCHORAGE — First-term Democratic Sen. Mark Begich has conceded his race against Republican challenger Dan Sullivan, the former Alaska natural resources commissioner who has led in his first run at elected office since Election Day on Nov. 4. According to a Division of Elections update Monday afternoon, Begich trailed Sullivan by more than 6,200 votes, about 2.2 percent. Spokespersons for the Begich campaign had said repeatedly since Election Day that every vote deserved to be counted and hinted that uncounted votes from rural Alaska might put Begich ahead. The Associated Press called the election for Sullivan on Nov. 11. Nearly...

Former President Bill Clinton said Saturday that Democrats lacked a "national advertising campaign" in the recent midterm elections and that he's surprised many Senate races were not closer. Clinton said in an interview with Politico that Republicans were helped by a larger bloc of voters who felt more strongly about the elections than members of his party. Democrats could have benefited from a national message that reinforced the party's positions on refinancing student loans and promoting equal pay for women, he said. "The people who were against us felt more strongly than the people who were for us. The people...

It has not escaped the notice of political analysts that 72 percent of whites without college degrees — a rough proxy for what we used to call the white working class — believe that “the U.S. economic system generally favors the wealthy.” Or that on Nov. 4, these same men and women voted for Republican House candidates 64-34. Similarly, the overwhelmingly white electorates of Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota voted decisively in referendums to raise the minimum wage while simultaneously voting for Republicans, whose party has adamantly rejected legislation to raise the minimum wage. There is an ongoing debate...

Republican Sen.-elect Joni Ernst easily won her race in Iowa last Tuesday, beating Democrat Bruce Braley by 8.5 percentage points. Her victory wasn’t shocking, but its size was (to everyone except pollster Ann Selzer, that is). The final FiveThirtyEight projection had Ernst winning by just 1.5 percentage points. What the heck happened? Here’s one explanation: White voters in Iowa without a college degree have shifted away from the Democratic Party. And if that shift persists, it could have a big effect on the presidential race in 2016, altering the White House math by eliminating the Democratic edge in the electoral...

THR pays tribute to Hollywood figures who died this year. Slideshow at link. We lost a lot of old-time stars this year, and some I hadn't heard about...................

In the early 3rd century B.C., after King Pyrrhus of Epirus again took brutal casualties in defeating the Romans, he told one person who offered congratulations, “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.” In his more sober moments, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), about to achieve his lifelong ambition of becoming Senate majority leader, may wonder whether he, too, has achieved a pyrrhic victory. Republicans are still crowing about the sweeping victories in 2014 that give them control of both houses of Congress. They will set the agenda, deciding what gets considered, investigated...

The first estimate of the costs of bringing in the Clintons to campaign. The final total will likely top $1 million by the time more filings become available.... ....Supporters estimate that, together, the Clintons headlined 75 rallies and fundraisers — and logged roughly 50,000 miles jetting from state to state.....

The ink was barely dry on Scott Walker’s ballots in his third statewide win in four years when Chuck Todd asked him about his pledge to serve out four more years. That’s understandable; everyone assumes the two-term Governor of Wisconsin has national aspirations, and his invitation to Meet the Press was not offered to discuss Badger State water policy, after all. Walker didn’t give much away about his own plans, of course, but he offered the GOP some advice on 2016 that may well be self-serving eventually:CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) is staying...

Every party in opposition goes a little crazy. For Republicans in the early Obama era, insanity took the form of the Sarah Palin spasm. Veteran politicos took the former Alaska governor seriously as a national figure. Republican primary voters nominated the likes of Todd Akin, Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle. Glenn Beck seemed important enough to hold a big rally at the Lincoln Memorial. Fortunately, serious parties eventually pull back from the fever swamps. That’s what’s happening to the Republican Party. It has re-established itself as the nation’s dominant governing party. Republicans now control 69 of 99 state legislative bodies....

With the walloping Republicans gave Democrats in the midterm elections, the GOP stands one Louisiana Senate runoff away from completely controlling Southern politics from the Carolinas to Texas. Only a handful of Democrats hold statewide office in the rest of the Old Confederacy. The results put Southern Republicans at the forefront in Washington — from Senate Majority Leader-in-waiting Mitch McConnell of Kentucky to a host of new committee chairmen. Those leaders and the rank-and-file behind them will set the Capitol Hill agenda and continue molding the GOP’s identity heading into 2016....

John Cornyn is the even-keeled insider. Ted Cruz is the brash, ambitious bomb-thrower. The GOP takeover of the Senate last week puts the two Texas Republicans in a white-hot spotlight — and potentially a collision course. As deputy majority leader, Cornyn’s main task will be to keep the party unified behind an agenda and strategy set by the incoming majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Cruz, by contrast, wouldn’t even pledge to support McConnell for the leadership post, before or after Tuesday night’s sweeping victory. “Ted’s going to be a leader. He’s not just going to be an agitator,” said...

Nice maps and colors at the site. http://uselectionatlas.org/2014.php

Let the soul-searching begin. “Our party has a problem,” says Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Broward County congresswoman and Democratic National Committee chairwoman, in a new video responding to her party’s midterm shellacking by the GOP. **SNIP** “We know we’re right on the issues. The American people believe in the causes we’re fighting for. But the electoral success we have when our presidential nominee is able to make the case to the country as a whole doesn’t translate in other elections. That’s why we lost in 2010. And it’s why we lost on Tuesday. We’ve got to do better.”

Hadn't watched the McLaughlin Group in quite some time as they had lost or jettisoned some of the more interesting panelists (and no, Jay Carney wasn't one of them!). The lineup seems to have stabilized although these poor folks are looking O-L-D...perhaps because they are. Felt bad for McLaughlin who apparently was wearing someone else's suit, so baggy was it on his frame. I'm not condemning anyone for aging or illness but it was a bit alarming. In the days before cable news and the internet, the McLaughlin Group were one of the few doses of political candor and a...

WASHINGTON — As most Republicans were taking a victory lap the morning after the elections, a group of conservatives huddled anxiously in a conference room not far from Capitol Hill and agreed that now is the time for confrontation, not compromise and conciliation. Despite Republicans’ ascension to Senate control and an expanded House majority, many conservatives from the party’s activist wing fear that congressional leaders are already being too timid with President Obama. They do not want to hear that government shutdowns are off the table or that repealing the Affordable Care Act is impossible — two things Republican leaders...

For the first time, the number of women in Congress has hit triple digits. Alma Adams, a Democrat from North Carolina, was elected representative for the 12th Congressional District on Tuesday. Because it was a special election, she will be sworn in immediately and join the 113th Congress. Before Adams’s election, there were 20 female senators and 79 female representatives in Congress, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

**SNIP** At that point, the liberal host held little back in showing her disapproval for Democrats falling remarkably short at the state level: Complete Republican legislative control in 30 states and we've only got 50 states. Elections, consequences. Democrats, do you guys have a catch-up plan for the states here or what? Because the trend here is obliterating. Earlier, Maddow erroneously put the measly number of state legislatures run by Democrats at eight – “Oregon, California, Hawaii, Illinois, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware” when it’s really nine as Maryland’s legislatures remains controlled by Democrats (but will have a Republican Governor...

As his presidency once again teeters on the brink, it's time to look seriously at how it became undone. For reasons largely beyond his control, Barack Obama has experienced more adversity and upheaval during his five-plus years as president than most of his predecessors. (In fact, when it comes to governing during crisis, you could argue that only a few others, like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, had it worse.) Still, even though the president has already had more than his fair share of bad weeks, the past seven days or so have to rank among the administration’s very worst....