Free Republic

Political prognostication is an uncertain art, never more so than in the New Hampshire primaries of 2016. On the eve of the elections, equipped as I am with all the most scientific polling and profoundest opinions of the professional pundits, I still wouldn't place a bet on the electoral outcome of the race. On other hand, I'd be willing to put a few dollars on the proposition that, when the history of the 2016 presidential race is written, the past week in New Hampshire will go down as the place where the Clinton campaign lost its way. Bernie Sanders didn't...

Sunday, Feb 7, 2016 08:01 PM +0900 It’s almost over for Hillary: This election is a mass insurrection against a rigged system Sanders has ended the coronation and fired up the grass roots. Now Clinton's electability argument is crumbling too Bill Curry It would be hard to overstate what Bernie Sanders has already achieved in his campaign for president, or the obstacles he’s had to surmount in order to achieve it. Not only has he turned a planned Hillary Clinton coronation into an exercise in grass-roots democracy, he’s reset the terms of the debate. We are edging closer to the...

Donald Trump still leads the GOP presidential pack among Republican voters nationwide, with 31 percent, followed by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas with 22 percent and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida with 19 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University National poll released today. Dr. Ben Carson has 6 percent, with 9 percent undecided and no other candidate above 3 percent. In the Democratic race nationwide, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has 44 percent, with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont at 42 percent, and 11 percent undecided

Sen. Ted Cruz holds a narrow lead over Sen. Marco Rubio and Donald Trump among Republican voters in a new Talk Business/Hendrix College poll. Here's the breakdown: 11% Ben Carson 27% Ted Cruz 4% John Kasich 23% Marco Rubio 23% Donald Trump 1% Jeb Bush 1% Gov. Chris Christie 4% Carly Fiorina 6% Don't Know Meanwhile, not surprisingly, Hillary Clinton holds a broad lead over Sen. Bernie Sanders. 57% Hillary Clinton 25% Bernie Sanders 18% Don't Know The poll also asked Republican voters how they felt about Mike Huckabee and Gov. Hutchinson. Both were pretty well liked. Their endorsement of...

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) made a cameo appearance on Saturday Night Live last night, playing a character named "Bernie Sanderswitzky" who was upset at a passenger on a sinking ship was attempting to hop the line for a lifeboat due to his higher economic status. "Sanderswitzky" said that he was not a socialist, rather that the policy was "democratic socialism," and that the difference between the two was "yuge."

Donald Trump still has a commanding lead in New Hampshire two days ahead of the primary, according to a new Monmouth University poll released Sunday, but there's a four-way race for second place. Trump commands 30 percent support from likely Republican primary voters in New Hampshire, the poll found. John Kasich, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz were virtually tied for second place, with 14 percent support for Kasich, 13 percent each for Rubio and Bush and 12 percent for Cruz. Other candidates were far behind. Chris Christie had 6 percent support, Carly Fiorina had 5 percent and Ben...

The chart above plots the popularity of the baby name "Hillary" between 1970 and 2014. What you'll notice right away is that the frequency of the name falls of a cliff starting in 1993, the year Hillary Clinton became first lady. Francis Smart of the Econometrics by Simulation blog first pointed this out the other day. He notes that the drop is especially striking, given that the popularity of "Hillary" was rising sharply upward until 1992 or so, the year the Clintons first came on to the national stage.

PPP’s newest national poll finds the race on the Republican side tightening considerably in the wake of Donald Trump’s surprise loss in Iowa on Monday night. Trump’s lead has fallen to just 4 points- he’s at 25% to 21% each for Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, 11% for Ben Carson, 5% each for Jeb Bush, John Kasich, and the now departed Rand Paul, 3% each for Chris Christie and Carly Fiorina, and 1% for Jim Gilmore. Rick Santorum had literally zero supporters on our final poll including him.

In a strongly worded editorial on Thursday, The Des Moines Register called on the Iowa Democratic Party to move quickly to prove that Monday's results are correct. The piece titled "Editorial: Something smells in the Democratic Party," starts out: "Once again the world is laughing at Iowa." It gets sharper from there.

February 4, 2016 Trump: Politicians are 'full of s---' by Bradford Richardson Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump says he doesn't want to be politically incorrect, but he can't stop himself from saying politicians are "full of sh*t." "These people - I'd like to use really foul language," Trump said at a rally in Exeter, N.H. "I won't do it. I was going to say they're really full of sh*t. But I won't say that." "No, it's true. It's true. I won't say it. I won't say it. But they are," he added. "But I won't say that because it's too...

Hillary Clinton agrees there is still a "vast right-wing conspiracy" and if anything it has only become more richly financed. During the New Hampshire town hall debate on Wednesday night, CNN host Anderson Cooper asked Clinton if she still believes there is a "vast right-wing conspiracy" as she said there was during the late 90s to initially explain the Monica Lewinksy scandal. "Don't you?" Clinton replied, as the audience laughed. "Yeah. It's gotten even better funded." "They brought in some new multibillionaires to pump the money in. Look, these guys play for keeps. "They want to control our country." "I've...

Iowa, Donald Trump told a crowd in Little Rock, Ark., last night, is a great place. A great state, amazing people. Trump remains a big fan of Iowa, despite the results of the caucuses that took place there on Monday. Or, perhaps, because of those results. After all, Trump thinks Trump came in first.

Bernie Sanders is 74. He grew up playing stickball in the streets of Brooklyn and watching a black-and-white television. Yet this child of the 1940s, who says Franklin D. Roosevelt is his favorite president, has inspired a potent political movement among young people today. Young voters' support for Mr. Sanders has created a quandary in Hillary Clinton's campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, where millennial staff members have tried to persuade their peers to back the former first lady. The discomfort, and, in some cases hostility, toward Mrs. Clinton among young voters is striking. Some of them, feeling the pinch of economic...

Speaker Paul Ryan and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy met privately with Rep. Jason Chaffetz Wednesday evening to reiterate that he cannot proceed with any investigation that involves Hillary Clinton, according to multiple sources familiar with the meeting. The impetus for the gathering was a POLITICO story where Chaffetz, the chairman, of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, was quoted as saying that a pending probe into government record keeping practices would not be "specifically trying to target the secretary, but when she creates her own private email system, she's ensnarled herself.” Presented with the quote before publication, House...

Libya is embroiled in a civil war in which various militias are too busy fighting each other to worry much about fighting ISIS, and teams of U.S. Special Operations Forces working to change that have had little success. The ongoing chaos has allowed ISIS to continue growing and solidifying its presence along the coast. Senior ISIS commanders are taking advantage of the territory to escape U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Syria. ... Obama gathered his national security advisers last Thursday to talk about the fight against ISIS and asked them to prepare options to address the group's presence in Libya...

There's a reason why Donald Trump is taking his loss in Iowa so hard - it's been devastating to his national standing. His standing in the polls might already be falling like a rock, and now it appears that the rolling concert tour that was his national campaign might be coming to an end. Now comes pretty convincing evidence that his crowds are shrinking, and he's trying to hide it (poorly). Trump was in Little Rock last night, and he tweeted a picture that seemed to show a typical Trump full house, and that specifically claimed that the crowd was...

Cruz’s numbers here aren’t a shock — he’s been in the high teens and low twenties for awhile — but Trump hasn’t dipped as low as 25 percent in a national poll since November and Rubio hasn’t seen a number as high as 21 percent since … ever. That makes some righty poll-watchers nervous since PPP’s credibility has been attacked in the past. Not only are they liberal, they were the subject of a famous critique of their methodology by Nate Cohn in TNR a few years ago. If you’re looking to throw out this result, which no other...

Watch her crowing about how she won and how she plans to continue onto New Hampshire standing on her record. In horse racing, the Stewards would have posted the photo sign for two horses that reached the wire together. They would not have tossed a coin. Thoroughbred racing is serious business. Money is on the line. Politics is different, especially the way Democrats play the game. Only our lives are on the line and only Hillary must win. Cheating in racing can get you suspended. Cheating in Democrat Politics can get you elected. So when six counties in Iowa finished...

I want to start with a few key facts, because they'll be important in a moment: 1. Among left-leaning female voters under the age of 45, Bernie Sanders holds a significant lead in the polls. 2. He's received far more donations from females than Hillary Clinton. 3. The results in Iowa showed that he won handily in the under-45 category, regardless of whether the voter was male or female. As it happens, there is absolutely a gap in support when it comes to Sanders and Clinton. But it's not a gender gap-it's an age gap. ....It's simple: Older people vote...

Hillary Clinton wants to makes something very clear about her and Donald Trump: "We were not friends." "We knew each other, obviously, in New York," she told People magazine in an interview released on Wednesday. "I knew a lot of people." With daughter Chelsea by her side, the former secretary of state dismissed Trump's recent comments about her husband's infidelity. Trump has said that former President Bill Clinton is "one of the great abusers" of women. Clinton shrugged off Trump's comments as "politics," though not "the brand I approve of."