Free Republic

WASHINGTON (CNN) – Former Gov. Mike Huckabee, the 2008 Iowa caucuses winner, is running again for the GOP presidential nomination, but this time he’ll skip the state’s high profile straw poll. Huckabee, who took second place in the 2007 survey, announced Thursday morning in a Des Moines Register op-ed that he won’t compete on the Iowa straw poll, instead saying that he wants to focus his resources on winning the state’s official caucus. “I appreciate the Iowa GOP for recognizing the need for some reforms, but playing to win in the straw poll still requires a heavy concentration of staff...

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker brought some sunny Midwestern optimism Tuesday to Washington, D.C, a place known for partisan gloom. Congressional Republicans who met with Walker, a soon-to-be presidential contender, called him a breath of fresh air. The trip even won him some fans in unlikely places.....“I was so impressed that his whole message was positive,” Representative Joe Wilson, from the early primary state of South Carolina, tells Newsweek. “He was not hitting the president or the leading presidential candidate of another party.... It was about him and his agenda.” Wilson attracted national attention in 2009 when he shouted, “You lie!”...

Washington (CNN)Republicans are more positive about their slate of presidential contenders than they were around the same time during the last two campaigns, according to a new survey. The poll, from the Pew Research Center, found that 57% of Republican and Republican-leaning registered voters said they have an "excellent" or "good" impression of their party's presidential candidates. That compares to the 50% that viewed the GOP field positively in September of 2007, and the far fewer -- 44% -- that had a favorable view of the field in May of 2011. Democrats, meanwhile, are experiencing the opposite trend: they're less...

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker met with about 100 House Republicans on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, engaging in a wide ranging discussion that hit on everything from foreign policy to why Walker doesn't have a college degree, according to those in the room Members who spoke to NBC News after the meeting gave Walker overwhelmingly positive reviews. A common refrain from members was Walker's ease at conversing with them, which they felt would play well in a grassroots campaign and eventually with swing voters.

Scott Walker is certainly ambitious, and planning a run for president may seem par for the course. But for a long time—most of the 1990s, in fact—Walker was content to be a backbencher in the state assembly and didn’t do much to advance himself up the party ranks. While the seniority he gathered in his state assembly career (1993–2002) from his safe Republican district just outside Milwaukee allowed him to chair some committees, the most attention-grabbing thing he did was to protest the hiring of a Wiccan as a chaplain in a state prison. The idea that he would become...

PPP's national Republican poll for May continues to find Scott Walker leading the field, but it's tightly clustered and his support has actually dropped two consecutive surveys now. Walker's at 18% to 13% for Marco Rubio, 12% each for Ben Carson and Mike Huckabee, 11% for Jeb Bush, 10% for Ted Cruz, 9% for Rand Paul, 5% for Chris Christie, and 2% for Rick Perry. This is the third national poll in a row where we've found Walker ahead but he was at 25% in late February and declined to 20% and now 18% on the two subsequent surveys. Two...

Last week The New Republic’s Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig wrote an extended pre-mortem not just for Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign but for the culture wars in general. Tracing the rise of Huckabee’s political career to the rise of the religious Right, she tries to use Huckabee’s career as a stand-in for the fortunes of religious conservatism writ large. To Bruenig, a Huckabee defeat will represent “one more [conservative] loss in a greater, longer defeat in America’s culture wars.” I agree with Bruenig that Mike Huckabee will probably lose, but I come to the exact opposite conclusion about the culture wars. A...

MADISON (AP) — The state Democratic Party has paid for a series of billboards demanding Republican Gov. Scott Walker return to Wisconsin...... ....Democratic Party Chairman Mike Tate announced Monday that the party has paid for billboards in Milwaukee and Green Bay that call on Walker to return to Wisconsin, accept federal money to expand Medicaid — a move the governor has steadfastly refused and get back to work for the state."

The poll of 501 Republican primary voters finds James Comer leading the pack with 28 percent, Hal Heiner with 27 percent, and Matt Bevin at 25 percent. The survey has a margin or error of +/- of 4.4 percent, placing the top three candidates neck and neck.

"With Dues Depleted, three AFSCME Councils Merge" Here: Wisconsin’s three AFSCME councils are merging four years after the state rolled back public-sector union rights, prompting two out of three dues-paying members to drop out.

This weekend, a dozen Republican presidential hopefuls showed up at the South Carolina Freedom Summit. They were there to court primary voters who will winnow the presidential field next February. Judging from the speeches, it’s going to be an ugly race. What the candidates are selling, and primary voters are buying, is vituperation against people who don’t look, talk, or pray like the Republican base.............. [SNIP of stuff that sounds good to me - Santorum was on fire] ...............Mexicans, Muslims, gays, rats, roaches. Christian superiority, military contempt for the president, and gauntlets thrown down to queer-loving CEOs. It’s going to...

GREENVILLE, S.C. — Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker took shots at President Obama’s national security policies at the Citizens United Freedom Summit. Walker mentioned he was on his way to Israel to speak to Benjamin Netanyahu and others during his trip and noted how emotional he becomes when he sees reports of terrorism. “It’s something I feel passionate about. You see people are very concerned about safety them selves and their family coworkers and their fellow citizens because of what we see around the world. Not just in the Middle Mast but now we see in other parts of the world....

GREENVILLE, S.C. — The Republican dog and pony show hits Upstate South Carolina on Saturday as nearly a dozen presidential hopefuls pitch conservative activists during a forum on economic freedom. The Palmetto State hosts the third nominating contest of the 2016 presidential primary and first in the Republican-dominated South. That makes South Carolina a critical battleground in the race for the GOP nomination, even though the state's streak of picking the party's presidential nominee was broken three years ago. Upstate South Carolina is considered the conservative bastion of this decidedly red state. Scott Ramsey, a 47-year-old Republican voter from Spartanburg...

".....We also tested Walker against all of the other potential Democratic candidates, and he leads them by wide margins. He's up 15 on both Lincoln Chafee (41/26) and Bernie Sanders (43/28), and 18 on both Martin O'Malley (43/25) and Jim Webb (44/26). Those large deficits are largely a function of the candidates' name recognition- because it's so low, only 53-58% of Democrats even commit to voting for those folks against Walker in a general election. But at any rate Clinton is by far and away the strongest candidate for the general in the Democratic field. The Republican primary field in...

Scott Walker said in 2008 that the government "needs to do more to give people freedom back" by fighting the "poverty pimps in our society," referring to government officials and community-based organizations that, he said, use poverty for political power. ...

Hillary Clinton shook up the presidential race in both parties with her declaration that she would not only protect President Obama's unilateral executive actions on immigration but that she would go further to offer new status to currently illegal immigrants, and in the end grant "full and equal citizenship" to those who came to the U.S. illegally. It was a move so swift, so consequential — and so far to the left — that Democratic immigration activist groups were stunned. Some on the right saw an opportunity for Republicans to go on the offensive against Clinton. "Now the GOP campaigns...

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker took aim at Hillary Clinton's latest comments on immigration, saying her "full embrace of amnesty is unfair." He's one of the first Republicans to directly respond to Clinton, which is a difficult issue for many Republicans running for the presidential nomination - or considering a run. His willingness to draw attention to the issue by responding to Clinton indicates that he's going to use the issue to separate himself from not only Clinton, the overwhelming favorite to win the Democratic nomination, but more immediately his Republican challengers. On Tuesday, Clinton told a largely Latino audience in...

In the 2016 presidential race, a new poll shows New Jersey Republicans prefer a governor who isn’t theirs. Their choice would be Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. According to a Monmouth University poll released today, in a matchup between Walker and Gov. Christie, 44 percent of New Jersey Republicans would pick Walker, while 30 percent would go with their own governor. Three months ago, the state’s Republicans had favored Christie over Walker, 51 percent to 30 percent.

The religious right remains the largest voting bloc in the Republican Party, and that gives Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, the potential to play a big role in the presidential nominating contest. But Mr. Huckabee, who was set to announce his presidential bid Tuesday morning, will have a harder time winning Iowa than he did in 2008, when religious conservatives had serious reservations about the two main candidates, John McCain and Mitt Romney. This year’s conservative favorites do not have Mr. Romney’s vulnerabilities among evangelicals, like Mormonism or past support for abortion rights. Some candidates might be outright good...

It’s a big week in the Republican presidential primaries. Today, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson both announced their candidacies, and Mike Huckabee is expected to make his official tomorrow. Now that the field is filling out (though there are still plenty of candidates in the running-but-officially-not-yet-running category), it’s looking a little unusual.In fact, the group of Republicans running for president is almost everything the Republican Party itself is not: it’s demographically diverse, it’s less wealthy than you might expect, and it’s extremely young. The question is whether voters will look at them and say that the GOP really has changed.By...