Free Republic

With Doug Jones' victory in Alabama, Democrats now have at least a plausible path to winning control of the U.S. Senate in the 2018 elections. It's a difficult path to be sure, but it could happen. The first step will be for Democrats to successfully defend all of their Senate incumbents next November. That's not going to be easy because the list includes 10 running in states that voted for Donald Trump. But, the results from Alabama suggest that it could happen. If it does, all Democrats would need to win the Senate is to pick up a pair of...

While Democrats are crowing about their victory in the Alabama Senate race, now is the time for potential long-term gain for Republicans. The Alabama special election for senator was held this week, with Democratic candidate Doug Jones beating Republican Roy Moore. In the Republican primary, Moore had beaten a more moderate candidate, Sen. Luther Strange, who had been appointed by then-Gov. Robert Bentley. A few months later, Bentley pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of violating campaign finance law and resigned. Moore, a far-right conservative, was plagued with allegations of sexual impropriety during the campaign. His flair for the theatrical was...

A valid recount in Alabama is impossible because the paper ballots (evidence) is being destroyed as we speak. The Alabama Supreme Court stayed a lower court’s order to election officials that would have required the preservation of voting records in Tuesday’s Senate special election. A circuit judge on Monday ordered election officials to set voting machines to save all digital ballot images, which would preserve voting records in the event of a recount. Alabama’s AL.com said Tuesday morning that the state’s Supreme Court had blocked the order. A group of four Alabama voters filed a lawsuit last Thursday arguing that...

Now that the Alabama special election is over, it’s time to get real. Long before the creepy allegations against him, I didn’t care for Roy Moore. I’m just not a fan of politicians or judges who ignore the law because they don’t like it, and seek to impose their will. That’s what Moore did as a judge when he refused to remove the Ten Commandments from the courthouse and was ultimately removed from the bench for it. I didn’t like it when Barack Obama did it on countless issues, and I don’t like it when someone who is registered in...

Clinton told crowd she cheered when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appointed the country’s first gender-balanced cabinet. Hillary Clinton says she feels ”a tiny bit less” concerned about the United States following the Democratic party’s surprise win in Alabama’s senate race on Monday. The former presidential candidate is calling the electoral upset a turning point for Americans in pushing for accountability from President Donald Trump, who backed the unsuccessful Republican candidate. Clinton made the comments while in Vancouver promoting her new book. Geordon Omand ✔ @gwomand I’m told there are about 5,200 ppl attending @HillaryClinton book tour stop in #Vancouver. Sold-out...

Republican Roy Moore is still not conceding defeat in Alabama’s special election for a U.S. Senate seat -- 24 hours after Democrat Doug Jones claimed victory. In a video posted to YouTube on Wednesday evening, Moore says his campaign is still waiting for the election results to be certified by the Alabama secretary of state. Moore notes in the video that military and provisional ballots remained to be counted. Election results showed that Jones defeated Moore by 49.9 percent to 48.4 percent. In most of the remainder of the nearly five-minute-long video, Moore thanks supporters and then lists numerous ills...

Alabama's special election for U.S. Senate ended in an upset Tuesday night, as Democrat Doug Jones beat Republican Roy Moore in the deeply conservative state. Texas has a Senate race in 2018, and it will likely be a different story. Sen. Ted Cruz remains popular in the Lone Star State and has more than $6 million in his campaign coffers. Cruz was first elected in 2012, pulling off a major upset in defeating then-Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst in a Republican primary runoff. Now, Democratic U.S. Rep. Beto O'Rourke, of El Paso, is hoping to pull off an upset of his...

Why I think the Uniparty stole the 2017 Alabama Senate special election. Digital voting records were not saved. The Alabama Supreme Court overruled a lower court which would have forced digital records to be saved. The reason given was that many machine were not set up to do the recording and there was not time to set them up to do so. Since it’s the law requires that, how come they were not set up to record in the first place? The Uniparty was desperate to keep Moore out of the District of Corruption. Mitch’s boys spent 30 million alone...

Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon praised the Democratic National Committee (DNC) after it fought to defeat Roy Moore, Bannon's chosen candidate, in the Alabama Senate race on Tuesday: “You gotta give the devil its due,” Bannon told Breitbart News host Alex Marlow on Wednesday. The DNC, Bannon suggested, slipped into the race and performed well on the ground. ADVERTISING “The DNC came in here — slipped in here — underneath the radar and did an amazing job of organizing — what's my favorite word — ground game,” Bannon said. He suggested that Democrats outworked Republicans and were able...

My thoughts on the election from a teen...

Republican Rep. Peter King called Steve Bannon a “disheveled drunk” who is “not the type of person” the Republicans need in politics during a Wednesday interview. On CNN, King responded to Doug Jones’ win in the Alabama Senate race by trashing Bannon, who campaigned heavily for Republican Roy Moore. “You know, I raised this not so much as a political issue but as a moral issue,” King explained. “This guy does not belong on the national stage–he looks like some disheveled drunk that wandered onto the political stage.”

Credit six-term Republican Sen. Richard Shelby for Democrat Doug Jones’ shocking win in Alabama, senators from both parties said Wednesday. Shelby, Alabama’s senior senator and the state’s most influential official, publicly opposed GOP nominee Roy Moore and declared before the election that ”the state of Alabama deserves better” than a former judge accused of sexual contact with teenage girls decades ago. A former Democrat, Shelby, 83, announced weeks before the election that he had already cast an absentee ballot for another, unspecified Republican, even as President Donald Trump and other prominent state Republicans stood up for Moore. “I give the...

Conservative commentator Tammy Bruce, in a discussion about Alabama Republican candidate for Senate Roy Moore, said the Republican establishment want the party to lose the majority in the Senate so the Trump agenda fails. Bruce cited Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), who announced he did not vote for Moore, and Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who donated to the Democratic candidate Doug Jones, as examples. "This is a test for the president," Bruce said Tuesday on FOX News' Hannity. "I think what you've seen with Shelby going against it. Jeff Flake, giving money to this guy. I think the Republicans in the...

Democratic National Committee chief Tom Perez on Wednesday hailed black women voters as being the "backbone" of the party.

Doug Jones, the Democrat who pulled off a stunning upset victory in Alabama's nail-biter Senate contest on Tuesday, is considered a champion for civil rights in a state that played a seminal role in the 1960s movement for racial equality. Jones' supporters erupted in cheers and jubilation as it became clear their portly, balding candidate had become the first Alabama Democrat to win a US Senate seat in 25 years. It came at the bitter end of a vitriolic campaign centered on Jones's Republican rival, Roy Moore, a Christian conservative accused of preying on teenage girls years before. Moore was...

I’m going to keep this short and to the point. Pundits and political scientists will be dissecting the Jones/Moore election for years to come but there are three critical lessons for conservatives that we must recognize now. First, that the takedown of Judge Moore was decidedly not about vindicating newly-minted and highly suspect accusations of decades-old alleged sexual misconduct, it was about keeping a genuinely independent Bible-believing Christian conservative from joining President Donald Trump in the essential mission of draining the swamp in Washington D.C.. Judge Roy Moore would have been to the US Senate and to President Trump what...

RUSH: We have a deal. It looks like we have a compromise here between the… (sigh) I’m not sure what I’ve been told is the right thing. The House and Senate are meeting on the tax bill, and if this is the conference committee…? Is that what’s been going…? (interruption) Okay, we have a deal in the conference committee. That’s a big deal. That means the House and Senate have agreed on one form of the bill. You know, the House passed their bill and the Senate passed theirs. And after that you have to go to conference between the...

In a shocking political earthquake, the Republican Party has lost a Senate election in Alabama.  For perspective on how difficult that feat was, the closest previous Senate contest in that state over the last two decades was a...19-point GOP victory.  Just three years ago, Jeff Sessions ran unopposed.  Donald Trump carried 'Bama by 28 points last fall.  In my election preview post yesterday, I wrote that an upset by liberal Doug Jones was improbably plausible, due exclusively to the disastrously awful candidate Republicans had nominated.  Apologies for quoting myself, but here you go:

A special election to fill Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ former seat in the U.S. Senate until 2021 unexpectedly went to the Democrats, to the joy of those seeking stronger gun laws. Former federal prosecutor Doug Jones, the Democrat running against longtime Alabama Chief Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, bested the Republican in a very tight election Tuesday. When Jones takes office, providing outstanding votes don’t tip the final tally in Moore’s favor, the GOP will control 51 of 100 seats in the Senate. This means Republicans will have that much more pressure to both unite their party as a block...

Democrats warned Wednesday that Republican plans to speed ahead with plans to revamp the nation’s tax code could spell more electoral trouble for President Trump and his party next year — especially with young people and suburban families. Just hours after Republicans suffered a humiliating defeat in a special U.S. Senate election in the GOP stronghold of Alabama, party leaders unveiled a compromise on a sweeping $1.5 trillion tax plan that will significantly lower corporate interest rates and slash taxes for upper-income households. But Democrats — now able to tout recent electoral victories in deep-blue New Jersey, swing state Virginia...