Free Republic

As they look toward 2024, Democrats are unified in their conception of doom: the restoration of Trump, joined down-ballot by anti-democratic Republicans who will end fair elections and any hope of combating climate change. But Democratic divisions remain over how to prevent that dismal future. Many are preoccupied by the midterms, which are less predictable now that post-Roe fury may well send more pro-choice voters to the polls, and others are focused on the even more immediate threat of rampaging inflation. Hanging over it all is a genuine debate over whether Biden’s being on or off the ticket is the...

[conclusion]: For a party that has spent four years insisting that removing Trump from power is an absolute prerequisite to saving the republic and all things decent in the world, it is bizarre, to put it mildly, to watch them embark upon the one strategy that is most likely to most fracture their own party and drive huge numbers of voters away from their nominee. They have an episode in their not-so-distant past — one that their elders who are plotting all of this obviously remember — which should serve as a very vibrant and compelling warning against doing this....

(CNN) Some national and state Democratic party leaders concerned about Sen. Bernie Sanders' candidacy are willing to risk a messy, brokered national convention this summer, which could be potentially damaging to the party, to prevent the self-described Democratic socialist from becoming the nominee, The New York Times reported. Of the 93 superdelegates the Times interviewed, a majority expressed an "overwhelming opposition" to naming Sanders the party's nominee if he wins a plurality of pledged delegates before the Democratic National Convention in July. The vast majority also predicted that no candidate would secure the party's nomination during the primaries and that...

As I type this, the South Carolina debate is barely 12 hours old, and even more anxiety has stirred among the Democratic Party establishment. They are worried. The resilience of the Bernie Sanders movement and his supporters is clear. And everyone outside the Sanders circle is growing more in its chorus crying for relief and commonsense to reign. The "Anybody But Bernie!" movement is in full swing. The challenge now rests on what to do about it within the confines of party rules. Let's step back for a moment and see how we got here. Long before Hillary Clinton sealed...

Former Senate majority leader Harry M. Reid said Thursday that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) or any presidential candidate should not get the Democratic nomination if they end the primary process in first place but are shy of the requisite majority of delegates. Reid (D-Nev.) dismissed suggestions from Sanders and his supporters that he should become the nominee if he finishes with a plurality lead ahead of the rest of the candidates but short of the 1,991 delegates needed to secure the nomination outright. Reid even suggested that a group of moderate candidates, trailing Sanders overall, could assemble a coalition ahead...

LAS VEGAS — Mike Bloomberg is privately lobbying Democratic Party officials and donors allied with his moderate opponents to flip their allegiance to him — and block Bernie Sanders — in the event of a brokered national convention. The effort, largely executed by Bloomberg’s senior state-level advisers in recent weeks, attempts to prime Bloomberg for a second-ballot contest at the Democratic National Convention in July by poaching supporters of Joe Biden and other moderate Democrats, according to two Democratic strategists familiar with the talks and unaffiliated with Bloomberg. The outreach has involved meetings and telephone calls with supporters of Biden...

<p>LAS VEGAS (AP) — Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Wednesday said it was possible the crowded Democratic primary race was headed toward a contentious convention fight and downplayed the political dangers of a scenario many party leaders are dreading.</p>

A prolonged race may inspire voter hoopla but could floor the party's chances once a nominee is finally selected.What if the coronation that is the 2008 Democratic National Convention turns cutthroat? Could a presidential primary race so energizing that it has brought record numbers of voters to the polls and will result in the nomination of a historic candidate end in disillusionment, anger and feelings of betrayal? Top Democrats are beginning to resign themselves to the chance the party won't know who will win the presidential nomination until after delegates take the floor of the Pepsi Center in August. That...

Back in 2016, we speculated about a brokered convention.  Remember the stories about Trump failing in the first vote and Kasich taking it in the third round?    Well, it may happen this time, as Karl Rove is outlining:    There’s growing concern among Democrats that their July 2020 convention in Milwaukee could open without a candidate who receives a majority of the vote on the first ballot.  The last time that happened to the Democrats was 1952. There are now four candidates—Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—who have enough support and money to be competitive through...

Fox News’ Brit Hume spoke with Tucker Carlson tonight and said Biden’s made gaffes many times in the past, but things are getting worse now: “The stuff you see with him more recently, for example, not remembering that when he met with the students at Parkland High School that he wasn’t still in office. He had been out of office more than a year when that happened. The fact that he misremembered that, that’s not a gaffe. That’s the kind of memory problems that people his age and indeed my age have all the time. I think the thing that...

CNN anchor Jake Tapper and chief political correspondent Dana Bash will moderate a Town Hall Debate with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Texas Senator Ted Cruz on the future of Obamacare at 9 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 7. President Donald Trump has made repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act one of his top priorities while Congressional Democrats are opposed. Sanders, an opponent of repealing Obamacare, and Cruz, a supporter of the President’s healthcare agenda, will join Tapper and Bash to debate the fate of former President Barack Obama's signature legislation and the GOP’s approach to healthcare....

In an extraordinary display of discord, the chairman of the Republican Party’s rules committee accused top GOP officials Saturday of “a breach of our trust” by improperly trying to derail a proposed change in bylaws that would make it harder for party leaders to nominate a fresh candidate for president. Bruce Ash, RNC committeeman from Arizona, wrote the harshly worded email to the other 55 members of the GOP rules committee that he chairs. The confidential email was obtained by The Associated Press. Ash wrote that the incident shows that top GOP officials “could use their power to attempt to...

So, why not just change the rule to avoid this problem? According to the GOP rule book, the rule cannot be changed until the Republican National Committee holds its convention meeting in 2016. Unlike 2012 when Governor Romney had sufficient delegate strength to stack the rules committee, absent a candidate emerging with the capability to achieve majority wins in states throughout the nation, the 2016 rules committee gathering will bear representatives from the many candidates still in the game—meaning anything can happen.

Okay, we know that Ted Cruz needs to win 84% of the remaining delegates to reach the magic 1237 to win the nomination. Since that won't be happening, his ONLY hope is to win after the first ballot at an open (brokered) convention. For him to win you need to believe that the GOPe would be cool with a Cruz nomination. Sooooo... On a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being a complete impossibility of a Cruz nomination and 10 being an absolute certainty that Cruz will be nominated, numerically rate Cruz's chances of a nomination after the first...

Caddell said he believes the GOP Establishment is “using Cruz as a catspaw.” “Look, you don’t really think that Jeb Bush, and Lindsay Graham, and some of those who have endorsed Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)… you don’t really think they want Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), do you?” Caddell asked. “They’re using him to stop Trump.” ... If Trump can’t recover and get the delegates he needs, Caddell thought Senator Cruz would likely find himself discarded after the first ballot at the convention, his usefulness to the Party bosses at an end. “If they can stop Trump, then Cruz will pick...

When news outlets, pundits, and candidates start making a big deal out of the "broken pledges," remember; it's not much more than political noise. Earlier today, Dan discussed the fact that each of the GOP’s 2016 candidates have abandoned their pledges to support the eventual nominee. It’s making headlines virtually everywhere and, if you believe the media, it portends doom in November. ...Except it really doesn’t. You can tell by the circular firing squad that it’s pretty clear the GOP establishment is hell-bent on choosing a course of action that guarantees failure. However, if the party collapses in the general...

Mitt Romney's reemergence this election cycle as a harsh critic of Donald Trump has been crippling for his favorability among Republican voters, a new poll shows. Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, is seen as favorable by just 28 percent of Republican primary voters, according to a Public Policy Polling survey released Tuesday. A startling 62 percent of Republican primary voters view him unfavorably, the poll found, and 10 percent said they were not sure. That net favorability of minus-34 percentage points is a dramatic drop from polling conducted prior to 2016. In January 2015, for example, Romney was seen...

'When you come to the fork in the road, take it!' – Yogi BerraNormally in a presidential campaign year the real invective doesn’t begin until both teams have picked their talisman.This year however the Republican powers that be have fired up the snatching-defeat-from-the-jaws-of-victory machine™ extra-early.The interlopers must be driven off, at all costsBecause both of the remaining people’s choice candidates will leave the GOPe Masters of Whiz in their dust. The nomination of either Trump or Cruz is a complete rejection and repudiation of the party’s leadership. It will be the end of Karl Rove, Bill Kristol, Mitt Romney, the...

...“Donald Trump beat Sen. Ted Cruz earlier this month in Louisiana’s Republican presidential primary by 3.6 percentage points, but the Texan may wind up with as many as 10 more delegates from the state than the businessman,” WSJ reported. In Louisiana, Cruz and Trump each won 18 delegates. However, Cruz may now be able to gain 10 more delegates because there are five unbound delegates who can vote for whichever candidate they want. Additionally, five delegates are now up for grabs after Sen. Marco Rubio left the race. Louisiana also released the names for delegates on the Rules Committee, Credentials...

But where there are three or more candidates with significant support among the delegates, and none with a majority, the question of who has the most delegates is subordinated to the question of who will best represent the party in November. Indeed, since its first convention in 1856, the Republican Party has had ten presidential elections in which no candidate coming into the convention had a majority of delegates. In seven of those conventions, the GOP did not nominate the person who came in with the most delegates.