Free Republic

Only the most vicious partisans on either side of the aisle care a whit for the party platform. The outdated practice of defining a political party’s ideals in writing so that they can be ignored by the institution’s elected officials serves only the opposition’s purposes. For Republicans, the platform’s codification of the GOP’s support for banning of all legal abortion practices and legally defining marriage as an institution that exists only between a man and a woman have provided their Democratic opponents ample opportunity to frame the party as “extreme.” The Democrats, too, stumbled into a public relations nightmare...

Late last summer, with midterms consuming the attention of the political class, a group of GOP activists spent two days in Des Moines trying to convince their fellow Republicans that change was coming to their party. With eyes on 2016, they attended the Iowa State Fair, talked with newspaper editorial boards, and even ventured onto conservative talk radio. To cap it off, on the last evening, supporters gathered at 801 Chophouse, the upscale watering hole of the city's political elite, as if to announce their movement had gone mainstream. That it couldn't be dismissed as fringe any longer. Their issue,...

From the first day of 2011, Mitt Romney was the favorite to win the 2012 Republican presidential primary campaign. No one else was even close. The 2016 outlook could not be more different. Offered the choice to bet on one single candidate to win the nomination versus the rest of the field, the choice would have to be "the field." For the first time in years, there is no one next in line. And without a former vice president or powerhouse former candidate looking likely to run, Republicans are shaping up to spend the next year and a half fighting...