Free Republic

With his stunning Super Tuesday wins, Joe Biden is now the odds-on favorite to become the Democratic nominee. Bernie Sanders, the last man in Biden’s way, now finds himself as he did in 2016: one-on-one against a former member of the last Democratic administration. Several candidates dropped out this week, and one joined the race. His name is Barack Obama. Now that the campaign has settled into a two-man contest, the central issue, which was not inevitable, has emerged. Do Democrats want a return to the less radical era of private health-care options and free trade? Or do they want...

The pundits and newspapers pushed Warren, Klobuchar, and Buttigieg, but Super Tuesday voters just wanted boring old Biden and Bernie As Super Tuesday finally transfigures the Democratic presidential nomination process into a binary choice between two old, occasionally problematic white men whose enduring popularity is consistently underrated by a baffled mainstream press, it's worth reflecting on just how poorly the media's preferred candidates performed in the 2020 race.In the end, The New York Times' dual Democratic presidential endorsements—bestowed upon both Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.)—were like the points on Whose Line Is It Anyway?: They just didn't...

Ad spending on the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries has surpassed $1 billion — a record-shattering number with four months to go before the Democratic Party convention, a new analysis released Thursday reveals. Billionaire former three-term New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has already spent $539 million on ads, the report by Advertising Analytics found. It had been previously reported that Bloomberg broke the record for TV and radio ad spending for a presidential campaign. “Michael Bloomberg is the $500M+ elephant at the center of the Democratic primary and has fundamentally changed the election with his billions,” the study said.

For former Vice President Joe Biden's sinking campaign, a win in South Carolina might be too little, too late just days before the Super Tuesday primaries. Former Vice President Joe Biden has hinged the fate of his campaign on a blow-out win in South Carolina Saturday after losing his frontrunner status with three straight losses in the first Democratic primaries.Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders on the other hand, as emerged as the one to beat, now barreling towards the Democratic presidential nomination after having comfortably clinched the popular vote in Iowa, captured a first place finish in New Hampshire, and securing...

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...

Joe Biden is heading south. The former vice president abruptly announced on Tuesday morning that he won’t spend primary night in New Hampshire as planned and instead is flying to South Carolina to headline a newly scheduled kick-off rally in the state he’s long considered his campaign firewall. “We’re going to head to South Carolina tonight,” Biden told reporters as he visited a polling station with voting underway in the state that holds the first primary in the race for the White House. “And I’m going to Nevada… we’ve got to look at them all.” The campaign confirmed Biden is...

Former Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro dropped out of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary on Thursday. Castro made the announcement in a campaign video, which was first published by The New York Times.

11/21/16 Donald Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon contacted Tulsi Gabbard to arrange Monday’s meeting with the president-elect...Many in the media raised their eyebrows when the news broke that Trump was meeting at Trump Tower Monday morning with Hawaii’s Democratic congresswoman. But for those who know Bannon best, there was no surprise at all. Bannon, who hates the entrenched two-party system, has long admired Gabbard. She’s an Iraq War veteran with an independent streak. Bannon, a navy veteran, was drawn to her when she began publicly excoriating the Obama administration over its plan to defeat ISIS. “He loves Tulsi Gabbard. Loves...

It has been revealed that the reason most of the candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination decided to skip the annual AIPAC event in March, long a standard stop for major candidates of both parties, is their decision to instead attend an afternoon tea in a Chicago nursing home. The 2020 nomination is expected to be a particularly tight race, as almost every Democratic voter in the country is already seeking the nomination. The only two remaining Democrats in America who are not themselves running for president, Mrs. Mabel Teagarden and Mrs. Hattie Seabiscuit, realizing their unique situation, decided...

In a political season already chock-full of strange moments, another one took place last week when Bernie Sanders bailed out on the Empire State campaign trail to jet across the ocean to Rome. He was off to see the Pope, or so we were told. But before Bernie had even touched down near Vatican City I saw conflicting reports that His Holiness didn’t have the Vermont Senator on his schedule. Then the meeting was back on again, but reduced to a quick bit of face time in passing. In the end, Sanders did get to meet with Pope Francis, if...

Bernie Sanders said in tonight's Democratic debate that as a senator, he's well aware there is "an enormous amount of waste and inefficiency and bureaucracy throughout government." Asked if there are any areas of government he would like to reduce, Sanders said, "I believe in government, but I believe in efficient government, not wasteful government." Here's the exchange: WOODRUFF: Welcome back to the Democratic presidential debate. Before we return to our questions, we have a follow-up question from our Facebook group. And it is to Senator Sanders. Senator, it comes from Bill Corefield, he's a 55-year-old musician from Troy, Ohio....

Vermin Supreme, a boot-wearing, pony-loving political satirist who runs for president every four years, placed fourth in New Hampshire's Democratic primary election and ultimately received more votes than Republican candidate Jim Gilmore. Supreme got 256 votes Tuesday evening, finishing just behind former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, who attracted 619 votes despite dropping out of the race after the Iowa caucuses. Gilmore, the former Virginia governor and last-place finisher on the Republican side, received just 131 votes. Sporting a boot on his head, Supreme is a fixture in New Hampshire politics, where he has run for president seven times. In a...

Republican presidential hopeful John Kasich on Saturday joked that he may have more appeal to voters outside of his party, according to CBS News. While campaigning in New Hampshire, he ran into a Democratic voter who said the Ohio governor is the only Republican he'd consider voting for. "I ought to be running in a Democrat primary. I got more Democrats for me - you have any Republican friends?" he quipped. Kasich is considered one of the more moderate GOP candidates and has been attacked by the right for using the Affordable Care Act to expand Medicaid in Ohio. He...

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders turned up the heat in New Hampshire on Wednesday, trading jabs on a number of issues including who is the more progressive Democratic presidential candidate. Trailing in the polls by an average of 18 points, a fiery Clinton maintained that she "would never quit" New Hampshire and will be campaigning hard despite her campaign's contention that Sanders, a senator from neighboring Vermont, has a built-in advantage. Team Sanders fought that narrative, saying it was an "insult" to the people of the Granite State who "are serious about their role in the nominating process." Sanders has...

Iowa City, Iowa - They'd been singing and dancing to live performances from trendy alt-rock bands Vampire Weekend and Foster the People for over an hour. But to the thousands of college kids screaming as a white-haired 74-year-old finally took the stage, there was only one rock star at the University of Iowa Saturday night. The throng that greeted Bernie Sanders here utterly dwarfed the one at Hillary Clinton's competing rally, held 30 minutes up the road in Cedar Rapids. While the former secretary of state attracted a few hundred people, a Sanders staffer tells National Review that the Iowa...

Overwhelming support from black voters is said to be Hillary Clinton's "firewall" against the possibility of Bernie Sanders victories in Iowa and New Hampshire. It's the reason that she's likely to build a delegate lead by winning primaries across the South in late February and early March. As Slate's Jamelle Bouie wrote last week, Clinton's advantage in this area has been built through decades of appearances and face-to-face conversations with voters and influential figures at "black civic and community organizations, from church networks to civil rights groups." The idea is that Sanders, however appealing his policy positions might be to...

Former GOP presidential candidate George Pataki is predicting that Democrat Hillary Clinton's "legal issues" will force an outside candidate to jump into the 2016 White House race as a white knight. "People talk about the problems in the Republican Party, but I think Democrats have a bigger problem," the former New York governor told host John Catsimatidis on "The Cats Roundtable" on New York's AM-970 on Sunday. "Hillary Clinton is cratering, the scandals just keep coming. She has grave legal issues that could totally prevent her from continuing her campaign, and the alternative is a self-avowed socialist who has never...

Chelsea Clinton is stepping onto the 2016 battlefield against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a shift that some Democrats are interpreting as a sign of trouble for her mother’s presidential campaign. Making her first solo appearance on the stump, Chelsea Clinton late Tuesday ripped Sanders over his proposals on healthcare and college affordability, arguing the White House hopeful wants to "dismantle" ObamaCare and Medicare. Democrats have almost universally panned the attack, believing it to be ineffective and a misuse of her talents. They note that Chelsea Clinton has mostly been used to highlight Hillary Clinton's softer side as a mother and...

While much of the ongoing evaluation of the Democrat primary remains both hypothetical and anecdotal until we start counting some votes, I can say with 100% certainty that Bernie Sanders has two big fans in my household. One is my wife, a Democrat who really likes Bernie for the next president and despises Hillary Clinton to the point where she suggested one evening (after a glass of brandy) that she might even vote for Trump over the former First Lady. The other, of course, is me. I still have to believe that running an avowed socialist on the Democrat ticket...

A major progressive group that tried to draft Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren into a presidential bid will decide its presidential endorsement with an online vote starting this week. Democracy for America opened online voting on Monday and will endorse a Democratic candidate if two-thirds of voters back one of the party's three presidential candidates by Dec. 15, DFA confirmed to The Hill. "After spending the last two years making certain that the battle against income inequality was a defining issue of the 2016 race and seeing every single Democratic candidate respond by putting the issue at the front and...