Free Republic

There shouldn’t be much question about whether 2018 was a wave election. Of course it was a wave. You could endlessly debate the wave’s magnitude, depending on how much you focus on the number of votes versus the number of seats, the House versus the Senate versus governorships, and so forth. Personally, I’d rank the 2018 wave a tick behind both 1994, which represented a historic shift after years of Democratic dominance of the House, and 2010, which reflected an especially ferocious shift against then-President Barack Obama after he’d been elected in a landslide two years earlier. But I’d put...

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow referenced the “House popular vote” in an effort to explain how the Nov. 6th midterm elections really did represent the “blue wave” many Democrats had been hoping to create. “As of this morning, the Democratic lead in the US House popular vote is up to 7.3%, from 7.2% yesterday. For comparison purposes, note that in 2010 – which was widely seen as a GOP ‘wave’ cycle – Republicans won the US House popular vote by 6.6%,” Maddow tweeted. (TWEET-AT-LINK)What Maddow was saying was that overall, more nationwide votes were cast for Democrats in House seats than for...

Rep. Adam Schiff — along with “Crooked Hillary Clinton,” “Cryin’ Chuck Schumer” and “Crazy Maxine Waters” — has long been a target of mockery on Donald Trump’s Twitter feed. But in a post Sunday, the president may have coined his crudest nickname yet for a political rival. “So funny to see little Adam Schitt (D-CA) talking about the fact that Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker was not approved by the Senate,” the president wrote online, “but not mentioning the fact that Bob Mueller (who is highly conflicted) was not approved by the Senate!” Schiff fired back 35 minutes later, quoting...

Being mayor of Portland, Ore., may have gotten to Ted Wheeler. On Thursday, after finishing a speech at the Oregon Health Forum in which he was heckled, Wheeler mumbled, “I can’t wait for the next 24 months to be over,” indicating he may not seek re-election, the Oregonian reported. (TWEET-AT-LINK) "If you know me, you know I mutter quite a bit,” Wheeler said in a statement issued later in the day. “Not one of my most redeeming qualities. I will make a decision next year with my family if I am running for re-election." In previous media interviews, Wheeler has...

Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell plans to run for president in 2020, according to a person close to the California congressman who is familiar with his plans. “He’s definitely running,” the source said. This weekend, Swalwell will be the first potential presidential candidate to visit Iowa after the midterms with a trip to meet the Asian & Latino Coalition in Des Moines and Iowa Democratic Party chairs in Dubuque. The travel to Iowa was first reported by NBC News and confirmed by POLITICO. The 37-year-old Swalwell has been positioning himself for a run over the past year, with several trips to...

With the 2018 midterms now nearly decided, the traditional kickoff for the next election cycle — that is, the 2020 presidential election — would normally be getting underway. However lacking of a clear leader on the Democratic side, the 2020 election season is off to a slow start, with one exception. Hillary Clinton’s former advisers are duking it out over whether America will get to see Hillary 2.0....

Republicans thinking about opposing President Trump in the 2020 primaries are facing the hardest of political choices. Toppling a sitting president of your own party is a maneuver with the highest degree of difficulty. The most relevant historical model is probably Eugene McCarthy’s race against President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, which helped persuade the politically wounded Johnson to withdraw. But McCarthy had a clear policy handhold — opposition to an increasingly unpopular war — and appealed to a discontented element within his party. What are the handholds for a challenger to Trump? Economic conservatives are generally happy with the...

COLUMBIA, Mo. — Standing in an airplane hangar in the mid-autumn chill awaiting the arrival of President Trump, Joan Philpott said she was angry and scared. Only Mr. Trump, she said, can solve the problems she worries most about. “He wants to protect this country, and he wants to keep it safe, and he wants to keep it free of invaders and the caravan and everything else that’s going on,” said Ms. Philpott, 69, a retired respiratory therapist. Ms. Philpott was one of thousands of women who braved a drizzle for hours to have the chance to cheer Mr. Trump...

President Donald Trump's campaign on Wednesday sent an email fundraising off a lawsuit filed by CNN against the president and several members of his administration, saying voters should donate to help keep the media accountable. In an email with the subject line "Breaking: CNN SUES! Help Trump win," the president's campaign asked supporters to take a "media accountability survey" to help "fight back against the fake news attacks and deceptions." CNN is suing Trump and several members of his administration to reinstate reporter Jim Acosta's press access after it was revoked when he argued with the president during a news...

Former first lady Michelle Obama wrote that she was unable to put on a happy face and smile during President Donald Trump's inauguration in her new book, according to ABC News. "Someone from Barack's administration might have said that the optics there were bad, that what the public saw didn't reflect the President's reality or ideals, but in this case, maybe it did," Obama said in audio of the book. "Realizing it, I made my own optic adjustment. I stopped even trying to smile." In its interview with Obama, ABC News further quoted from her book, where the former first...

I read the state GOP Chairman's note on the GOP NYS website and it was pathetic. Ed Cox and the counties lost The NYS Senate for the first time in I don't know how long, decades. This election leaves Andy Cuomo in the Governor seat and control of BOTH Houses. Add to this we lost Assembly seats that should have been won, John Faso in NY-19 is one of them. You, the county Chairmen elect the State GOP Leader. You are continuing to support Ed Cox and his record is PATHETIC. As leaders you are called on to move the...

Link only due to copyright issues: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/19/the-post-midterms-dangers-of-donald-trump

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told The Atlantic in an interview published Sunday that she doesn't know whether President Trump is stable. “I don’t know. You can’t make a diagnosis over TV, they tell me," Pelosi said when asked if she thinks the president is stable. Pelosi, who last week announced her bid to be the next Speaker, also told The Atlantic that anyone who watched President Trump's post-election news conference last week "would know that we have to pray for our country very deeply." “Pray for him, too, but for our country,” she added. Trump has previously defended...

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-South L.A., stopped by the neighborhood for a victory lap after a resounding victory in the midterm elections. She hit the corner of Manchester and Western in the Vermont Knolls neighborhood of South Los Angeles to meet with her constituents. She was reelected Nov. 6, 2018 with 76 percent of the vote.

Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., ripped Fox News on Friday for mocking "working-class people" after the news channel did a segment on her struggle to rent an apartment in Washington, D.C. "As I mentioned, we’ve been preparing and will be fine. However, it's been very revealing to see how gleefully Fox News hosts crack jokes about working-class people. It reveals what they actually think about us," she tweeted....

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Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told The New York Times in an interview Thursday that she will need to wait for her congressional salary to kick in before she can rent an apartment in D.C. She explained that the transition period will be “very unusual, because I can’t really take a salary. I have three months without a salary before I’m a member of Congress. So, how do I get an apartment? Those little things are very real.” Ocasio-Cortez also told the Times that she had saved money before leaving her job at a restaurant and had planned accordingly with her...

Controversial documentary filmmaker Michael Moore on Wednesday said Democratic Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker would lose against President Trump in the 2020 election, suggesting the party should nominate a “beloved American” like Michelle Obama instead. Moore made the comments on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” following the results of the 2018 midterm elections, where Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives. “I think [Trump] is a tumor on our democracy,” Moore said. “But the tumor shrank last night. He has ripped apart and has taken us to the precipice of whether or not we are going to have the country...

With Democrats set to reclaim control of the House in January and President Trump already infuriating them with the forced resignation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, speculation is rampant over whether they will use that power to pursue impeachment against the president -- or even Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who wants to be speaker, has pushed back on pressure from the base to pursue impeachment, saying earlier this week "that's not what our caucus is about" even as Democratic lawmakers make clear they will pursue other investigations of the administration. But that pressure from...