Free Republic

With all the numbers tallied, out of 251 races, NRA-backed candidates won in 229, over 91 percent of Congressional races in which they endorsed a candidate. According to the Washington Examiner, NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam explained that the Second Amendment group was able to win at this level because individual NRA members were motivated to vote for freedom. He said: "Our members came out in droves and voted for their rights and their freedom. This was one of the most successful election cycles in a decade."

We’ve talked in the past about John Diez, the Prairieville-based polling guru of Magellan Strategies Baton Rouge, and the solid reputation his firm has put togther among politicos around the state. What our readers might not know is that Diez, who did the internal polling for the Garret Graves campaign, had a frighteningly-accurate forecast of the 6th District race a week before election night. Diez had that race as follows: Edwards 29 (finished with 30) Graves 24 (finished with 27) Dietzel 13 (finished with 14) Claitor 10 (finished with 10) Whitney 6 (finished with 7) That’s what’s known as one...

(CNN) -- As Rep. Bill Cassidy wages a runoff campaign against Louisiana Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu, he'll get some in-person support this weekend from Sarah Palin and "Duck Dynasty" star Phil Robertson.

...[I]t's immediately apparent that Senate Republicans did an outstanding job of recruiting this cycle. Capito ran one of the best campaigns in a non-competitive race in the country. McConnell was, as usual, outstanding. Gillespie came from nowhere to almost upset the single most popular politician in Virginia. And Ernst is a rising national star. But, when you look at the totality of the campaign, it's clear that Cory Gardner was the single best candidate of the 2014 election.

Sarah Palin did not support Rep. Bill Cassidy during Louisiana’s Senate jungle primary last week. But now that it’s between Cassidy and Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu, the former Alaska governor is changing her tune. The 2008 vice-presidential nominee plans to appear alongside Cassidy, “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson and defeated conservative Senate candidate Rob Maness at a GOP unity rally on Saturday afternoon in Monroe, according to a source familiar with the event. The Palin visit follows a Monday event with Maness, Cassidy and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in Baton Rouge. Palin supported Maness in the primary and predicted that...

They counted the newly discovered 213 ballots from the school in Green Valley, AZ, and Martha McSally gained 32 net votes to now lead by 165. The fate of the 200 provisional ballots which were supposed to be verified by the affected voters by 5 pm MST (7 pm EST) is unknown.

Six days ago, it was reported the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee wouldn’t be lending any more support to Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) leading up to her December 6 runoff election against Republican opponent Bill Cassidy, as the DSCC has canceled its advertising reservations in the state. However, it appears that her problems extend well beyond them, as even more outside groups have appeared to jump ship — at least for the time being. FEC filings from the past week show that the sitting senator hasn’t received one independent donation from any outside group either in support of her re-election or...

Nancy Pelosi does not believe the midterm results were a Republican wave; she says they were more of a Democratic ebb. And in a new interview, the House Minority Leader says that it didn’t help that voters were distracted during the final leg of the campaign by various international crises. In an interview with Politico out today, Pelosi continued to insist there was “no wave of approval for the Republicans” and even admitted that Democrats need to do a better job mobilizing voter turnout on their side the next time around. But when pressed on whether the Democrats lost because...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- After the midterm elections that saw the Democratic Party suffer significant losses in Congress, a record-low 36% of Americans say they have a favorable opinion of the party, down six percentage points from before the elections. The Republican Party's favorable rating, at 42%, is essentially unchanged from 40%. This marks the first time since September 2011 that the Republican Party has had a higher favorability rating than the Democratic Party.

The Senate floor was a display of mixed emotions on Wednesday as Democratic senators who lost their reelection bids last week returned to vote on two nominees.Sens. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) embraced a wan-looking Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.), who Democrats thought would pull out a win last week.Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska), another losing incumbent, kept his arms firmly folded across his chest as he immersed himself in serious conversation with sympathetic Democratic colleagues.The Associated Press declared his GOP opponent Dan Sullivan the victor just this morning, though the Alaska Democrat has yet to concede. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.)...

I'm sorry to have to tell you this, America, but Andrew Cotto is done defending you to his European friends at dinner parties. There's no use begging. You brought this on yourself -- as Cotto explains in his Salon.com article, "My American exceptionalism fantasy is over: How these midterms sealed the deal." You may not be aware, but Cotto is a novelist no one has heard of and also teaches creative writing at CUNY, so he's very big. More bad news from Salon.com: "O'Reilly is losing, and he knows it." That's why Republicans swept everything from U.S. senator to substitute-part-time-dog...

Chuck Todd, NBC News Political Director and moderator of Meet the Press, appeared on NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show on Tuesday November 11, to promote his new book "The Stranger: Barack Obama in the White House." During his appearance, the NBC host defended Obama’s 2008 speech in which then-candidate Obama claimed “bitter Americans” “cling to guns or religion.” Todd argued that Obama’s “just observing the way an anthropologist would observe a society.” Todd’s defense of Obama came in response to a caller to the show who argued: One asks why Obama is so aloof, so cool, so withdrawn,

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...

Stock Rally Stalls with Republican Win; Investment & Finance Thread Nov. 9, 2014 Whoa, the past week was decisive in more ways than one! A week ago we took inventory of then-current trends and considered which scenarios would lead where.  All we knew for sure was that either things would stay their courses or we'd change direction.  What happened is we dumped 'business as usual' --as far as trend-lines went-- and we now got signals pointing at "something new".   That 'something new' might even be a basing/stage prep for a continued price surge (Stock Indexes In Pause Mode, But That...

The 2014 election is over! And, before the 2016 presidential race begins in earnest -- oh, who are we kidding, that's already happened -- we wanted to give out some Fix superlatives for the best (and worst) of the 2014 campaign. Today kicks off the Fix's award season with our pick for the best candidate of the cycle. Tomorrow, we "award" the worst candidate. First, the nominees (in alphabetical order by last name): * Shelley Moore Capito (West Virginia Senate) * Joni Ernst (Iowa Senate) * Al Franken (Minnesota Senate) * Cory Gardner (Colorado Senate) * Ed Gillespie (Virginia Senate)...

In the wake of a 2014 midterm election cycle that saw Republicans re-take control of the U.S. Senate and pad their already sizable majority in the House, a majority of Americans now want congressional Republicans, not President Obama, to have more influence over the direction of the nation in the next year. Fifty-three percent want Republicans to have more influence over the direction of the country compared to 36 percent who want Mr. Obama to have more, according to Gallup. The 17-point gap is even greater than the eight-point, 49 percent-to-41 percent advantage the GOP held after the 2010 midterm...

White Catholic voters have gone through many transformations over the last half century, from died-in-the wool Democrats to ticket-splitting Reagan Democrats to dependable Republicans. In the elections last Tuesday, they went through a change less political than demographic: They were the fastest growing segment not only among those who identify with a religious denomination but also those who don’t. ... Overall, at 19 percent, white Catholics made up nearly as large a slice of the religious and non-religious electorate as secular and religious minorities combined at 20 percent. Catholic voters overall made up a larger part of the electorate Tuesday,...

Looking back on the 2014 election cycle, I see two largely unnoticed turning points that worked against Democrats and in Republicans' favor. The first came in response to the October 2013 government shutdown. This was blamed, as shutdowns usually are, on Republicans, partly because of their skepticism about big government, and partly because media professionals tend to fault the GOP in any partisan fight. The shutdown occurred because about 40 Republican House members refused to support a continuing resolution funding the government without a proviso defunding Obamacare. Texas freshman Sen. Ted Cruz had been barnstorming the country arguing that this...

After five days of ballot counting, it’s official – neither of the two openly homosexual Republican candidates for U.S. House won their races last Tuesday. They lost despite strong public backing from Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-OH, and other high-profile GOP leaders, who aggressively promoted the two men as part of their “Young Guns” recruitment program after concluding in a post-2012 election report that the party’s position against same-sex “marriage” was hurting them with millennial voters. In Massachusetts, former state senator Richard Tisei was defeated by 14 percentage points by Democrat Seth Moulton, a former Marine and combat...

Republican Dan Sullivan is expected to defeat Democratic Sen. Mark Begich in the final vote count in the Alaska Senate race, according to an analysis by a reporter for Alaska Public Radio Network. Reporter Alexandra Gutierrez’s analysis arrived at the same conclusion as an analysis conducted by Alaska News-Miner. Begich would reportedly need to win more than 56 percent of the uncounted votes to overtake Sullivan. Sullivan led Begich by 8,149 votes after Election Day last week, but Begich refused to concede. The Democrat is waiting on more than 21,000 uncounted absentee ballots, allegedly from rural areas where the mail...