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ERICK ERICKSON FRONT PAGE WRITERS FEATURES E-LETTERS COFFEE & MARKETS GATHERING FRIENDS RedState Gathering Set For Atlanta in 2015! Click here for more information. « BACK | PRINT RS FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR 2014 and Republican Morale By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary) | November 24th, 2014 at 05:00 PM | 15 RESIZE: AAA Share on Facebook 12 57 SHARES Sexy Karl Rove 622 There’s been a lot written about the impact of the 2014 elections, but let’s not overlook one of the really crucial points: its effect on Republican morale. Republicans didn’t just need a win: we needed a win that met...

New England is beyond a doubt the most socialist section of the country. For all their talk about “Boston Strong” and “Hearty New Englanders,” they are the most committed supporters of Democrat liberals. Last Wednesday their loyalty to Barack Obama was rewarded with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) crushing blow to New England’s cod fishing industry. Obama’s henchmen at NOAA placed a, “six-month ban on most cod fishing off New England this week and are threatening to cut next year’s catch by up to 75 percent.” Given the extent of the damage this ban will do, observers have...

Five congressional seats in three states remain too close to call or undecided. They are: Arizona 2nd: GOP Challenger Martha McSally leads incumbent Ron Barber by 179 votes. California 7th: GOP Challenger Doug Ose leads incumbent Ami Bera by 530 votes. California 16th: GOP Challenger Johnny Tacherra leads incumbent Jim Costa by 741 votes. Louisiana 5th: Single Democrat candidate Jamie Mayo leads with 28% of the total, but has an uphill climb against a crowded GOP field who garnered 69%. The leader was Ralph Abraham with 23%, who seems all but certain to win the December 2nd run-off. Louisiana 6th:...

This month, two developments have shaken the conventional wisdom that repealing President Obama’s healthcare law is an impossibility. First, Republicans scored a historic election victory, not only taking control of the Senate but likely winning the most House seats since 1928 — the year before Ernest Hemingway published A Farewell to Arms. Second, the Supreme Court took up another case on Obamacare, and if the justices rule against the administration, it would force a re-opening of the law. This doesn’t even account for the recently released videos of one of Obamacare’s main architects, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, conceding that Democrats...

Countless politicos and media pundits have offered what each believes the real reason for the drubbing Democrats took on November 4th. A few mavericks even suggested the impossible–that Barack Obama’s policies were to blame for the carnage rather than his Blackness. But leave it to San Francisco’s brainy congresswoman, Nancy Pelosi, to provide the indisputable skinny on a midterm catastrophe which strengthened the GOP hold on the House and robbed Harry Reid of the Senate. As Nancy explains it, “to succeed, we must inspire, educate and remove obstacles to participation. Only by changing our political environment and broadening the universe...

New Gallup polling on party favorability ratings should be useful reading for leaders of the Democratic Party who are still in denial about the meaning of the Republican sweep in the recent elections. The percentage of Americans giving the Democratic Party a favorable rating is at an all time low – 36 percent. It now stands below the current 42 percent favorable rating of the Republican Party. Notable is that Democrats themselves are increasingly unhappy with their own party. Whereas now 81 percent of Democrats give a favorable rating to their own party, this is 14 points below the 95...

The day after the 2014 election, the president made one of his Olympian pronouncements: "To everyone who voted, I want you to know that I hear you," he declared. But, "to the two-thirds of Americans who chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you too." But what are non-voters saying, that they love the president so much that they couldn't bear to take part in an election where he'd be crushed? It's more likely non-voting is due to laziness, apathy or cynicism about a political process that offers Barack Obama and Mitt Romney as alternatives. In 2014,...

There is an idiom that parents and employers likely put in practice when an important task has to be completed correctly; “If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” President Obama certainly understands that sentiment with a slight variation; if the nation wants anything done at all, the President has to do it himself due to Republicans who have done nothing since January 2009. Sometime next week, after waiting patiently for Ted Cruz to order House Republicans to take up, and pass, the Senate’s bipartisan immigration reform, the President will take action on immigration reform. The...

If you're a political junkie -- or at least if you're a conservative political junkie -- you've probably seen the map. It's a map of the United States showing the congressional districts won by Republicans in red and those won by Democrats in blue. It looks almost entirely red, except for some pinpoints of blue in major metropolitan areas and a few blue blotches here and there -- in Minnesota, Northern New Mexico and Arizona, Western New England, along the Pacific Coast. Of course, it's misleading. Congressional districts are of basically equal population, and Democrats tend to roll up big...

Everyone finds a lesson in the Republican midterm tsunami. One message was that so-called comprehensive immigration reform and broad amnesty have little national public support. Polls have long shown that, but so do last week's election results. Candidates in swing states who promised amnesties got no edge from such opportunistic posturing. Candidates who pandered to identity groups and played the ethnic card lost in most cases. Voters in liberal Oregon overwhelmingly rejected driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants. In reaction, President Obama sulked, threatening to quickly push through an unpopular amnesty by executive order. Obama apparently knows that he enjoys neither...

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-Louisiana) took to the Senate floor this afternoon to push for the Keystone XL pipeline. "This has been a project that has lingered far too long," she said. "It is clearly supported by 60 or more members of this body. It is a piece of legislation that has been endorsed by the new Majority Leader, to-be Majority Leader, is a cosponsor and a leading cosponsor of the legislation." "I believe it is time to act," Landrieu said. "I believe that we should take the new Majority Leader at his word and stop blocking legislation that is broadly...

<p>Republican candidate Dan Sullivan defeated Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Begich in Alaska’s U.S. Senate race Wednesday.</p> <p>The win gives the GOP eight Senate pickups in the midterm elections. The party is also seeking a ninth seat in Louisiana’s runoff in December.</p>

The Washington Free Beacon strikes again: MSNBC's Fun Election Night Coverage | SUPERcuts! #123

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

Whether liberals would like to admit it or not; 2014 was a historic moment for women, especially Republican women. Besides it being a wave election, Republicans elected the first female senators from Iowa and West Virginia, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, and the first black Republican woman–Mia Love–in Utah. Yet, these were Republican women; they’re a horrid subset of the human species beholden to their patriarchal masters according to feminists. Well, it all comes down to abortion–again–and this super-secret conspiracy to make life for American women–and women around the world–miserable (via the Guardian) [emphasis mine]: In a way, female...

As Democrat postmortem sets in and gun control proponents grasp for ways to explain the political beating they took on November 4, the explanation is already evident to voters -- "It's the Second Amendment, stupid." In 1992 James Carville provided a singular focus for the Bill Clinton campaign by quipping, "It's the economy, stupid." The Harvard Institute of Politics reports that this went from being a statement to an "internal audience of campaign workers" to being the way Clinton packaged and sold his presidential campaign. Fast forward 22 years and "It's the Second Amendment, stupid." The Washington Post admitted that...

The first order of business for the U.S. Senate under Republican Mitch McConnell will be getting the Senate back in business. For most of the last four years, Democrat Harry Reid manipulated what was once the world’s greatest deliberative body for political purposes, not for the hard task of governing. The House passed more than 300 bills but they mostly died from neglect in the Senate. What little legislation that made it to the floor crashed as Reid manipulated Senate rules to ban amendments and debate. When Republicans refused to bow to his tin-pot dictatorial rule, he accused them of...

I think I can speak for nearly all the pundits in the right side blogosphere when I say that we’re going to miss Wendy Davis. Few candidates have offered more fun coverage and easy peasy headlines than the pink sneaker wonder delivered during the 2014 races. When the end came, it came down like a hammer, and even with all of the rosy pictures being drawn by Texas Democrats about shifting demographics and a new majority, Davis took home a brutal, 20 point drubbing for her efforts. (Prompting Salon to proclaim that White Women had let down the entire state.)...

Here we are: the end of the campaigns. We have likely seen our last polls. And yet, they seem unsatisfying. The mood in 2006 and 2010 was clear: the President’s party was going to suffer, and the only question was how much

Holder Sends 'Election Monitors' to Polls NOV 3, 2014 • BY DANIEL HALPER Attorney General, Eric Holder is dispatching "federal election monitors" to polls tomorrow for Election Day. http://weaselzippers.us/wp-content/uploads/BPP-500x281.jpg "As Americans across the country prepare to vote in tomorrow's midterm elections, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the Department of Justice has dispatched federal monitors to polling places around the country," reads the press release from the Department of Justice. "Just as they do during every election, these officials will gather information on numerous aspects of local election procedures, including whether voters are treated differently depending on their race or...