Free Republic

While the presidential primary is over in Virginia, we still have other primaries. Here in the 5th District, I know of three republican candidates: Tom Garrett - State senator Jim McKelvey - Entrepreneur Michael Del Rosso [Today, discussing Tom Garret.] Is Tom Garret for real? Here is his issues page ... Issue Positions 2nd Amendment Tom is a strong advocate for our 2nd Amendment rights. Tom doesn’t need to talk about what he will do; he can talk about what he has done. The 2nd Amendment says “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be...

Sen. Ted Cruz's two big wins on Saturday bolstered his case that he is the strongest candidate to stop Donald Trump's march toward the Republican nomination, as Sen. Marco Rubio's support faded. Cruz crushed Trump in Kansas, upset the businessman in Maine, and provided Trump with a tougher than expected challenges in Kentucky and Louisiana. The results come as an anti-Trump movement began to galvanize conservative activists as well as party elites. Trump came under fire in a Thursday debate, was the subject of blistering attack speech from 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney, has been at the receiving end of...

GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz established himself on Saturday night as the challenger with the best chance to take down Donald Trump, as the Texas senator posted two impressive victories and nearly caught the front-runner in two other states. Cruz won the caucuses in Kansas and Maine in a runaway. Trump edged him at the caucuses in Kentucky and the primary in Louisiana. “To see strong wins across the board is very encouraging,” Cruz said. “And I think what it represents is Republicans coalescing, saying it would be a disaster for Donald Trump to be our nominee and we’re going...

The Koch brothers, the most powerful conservative mega donors in the United States, will not use their $400 million political arsenal to try to block Republican front-runner Donald Trump's path to the presidential nomination, a spokesman told Reuters on Wednesday. The decision by the billionaire industrialists is another setback to Republican establishment efforts to derail the New York real estate mogul's bid for the White House, and follows speculation the Kochs would soon launch a "Trump Intervention." "We have no plans to get involved in the primary," said James Davis, spokesman for Freedom Partners, the Koch brothers' political umbrella group....

From Michigan to Louisiana to California on Friday, rank-and-file Republicans expressed mystification, dismissal and contempt regarding the instructions that their party's most high-profile leaders were urgently handing down to them: Reject and defeat Donald J. Trump. Their angry reactions, in the 24 hours since Mitt Romney and John McCain urged millions of voters to cooperate in a grand strategy to undermine Mr. Trump's candidacy, have captured the seemingly inexorable force of a movement that still puzzles the Republican elite and now threatens to unravel the party they hold dear. In interviews, even lifelong Republicans who cast a ballot for Mr....

From Michigan to Louisiana to California on Friday, rank-and-file Republicans expressed mystification, dismissal and contempt regarding the instructions that their party’s most high-profile leaders were urgently handing down to them: Reject and defeat Donald J. Trump. Their angry reactions, in the 24 hours since Mitt Romney and John McCain urged millions of voters to cooperate in a grand strategy to undermine Mr. Trump’s candidacy, have captured the seemingly inexorable force of a movement that still puzzles the Republican elite and now threatens to unravel the party they hold dear. In interviews, even lifelong Republicans who cast a ballot for Mr....

From Michigan to Louisiana to California on Friday, rank-and-file Republicans expressed mystification, dismissal and contempt over the instructions that their party’s most high-profile leaders were urgently handing down to them: Reject and defeat Donald J. Trump. Their angry reactions, in the 24 hours since Mitt Romney and John McCain urged millions of voters to cooperate in a grand strategy to undermine Mr. Trump’s candidacy, have captured the seemingly inexorable force of a movement that still puzzles the Republican elite and now threatens to unravel the party they hold dear. In interviews, even lifelong Republicans who cast a ballot for Mr....

Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign is moving hard into Florida, where the senator from Texas hopes to knock out rival Sen. Marco Rubio and position himself as the only last alternative to front-runner Donald Trump. Cruz’s campaign announced Friday that it is opening 10 field offices in Florida, which holds a Republican primary March 15. Trump has a big lead in the polls there, but Cruz’s campaign thinks it can increase its support in the state by appealing to conservatives and positioning the candidate as an alternative to Trump. “We recognize that it’s an uphill battle for us, but it becomes...

Marco Rubio backers had been hoping after two debates in which Rubio and Ted Cruz tag-teamed Donald Trump and played rather nice together that Cruz would take a pass on campaigning in Florida in order to give Rubio a better chance of winning his first primary election. The polls, for what they are worth seem to make this feasible: [interactive polling graphic] Florida is a closed primary state which means that many of the independents and disaffected blue-collar Democrats who have helped out Trump will not be allowed to vote. And, as we saw on Super Tuesday, the polling, generally,...

A plan to block Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump struggled to gain traction on Friday as rival candidates rejected it, while Democrats reveled in the chaos they hoped would boost their chances of keeping the White House. The country's top elected Republican, House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, said he was not interested in an effort to draft him into the White House race. And U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, a conservative presidential hopeful, ruled out a deal to pick a compromise Republican candidate at the party's July convention, which senior party figures see as their best chance to stop the...

Doc source appears legit – link address directs to FEC disclosure site. Original app was created in late October of 2015 and signed off on January 30th, 2016. Those dates make it appear even more likely this has been a plan in the works for some time and more fully explains Mitt Romney’s anti-Trump speech yesterday. Mr. Romney is making certain he has a seat at the proverbial convention table should there be a brokered convention. It shows Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan preparing to make another presidential run – a plan that began back in October according to the...

“I want to get to the elephant in the room, and I’m not talking about the Republican Party,” Sean Hannity told a slightly rowdy, tipsy crowd at the CPAC pre-debate party on Thursday night.The Fox News host had warmed up the audience with his usual mixture of throwing foam footballs into the crowd...And now it was time to get to what truly was the “elephant in the room” on the first day of the Conservative Political Action Conference: the extraordinary race for the Republican presidential primary.The word Trump was uttered maybe two or three times throughout the opening day of...

Tonight was the night when I could clearly see Ted Cruz as President of the United States. He made the right moral judgment — dealing with Donald Trump was far more important than jockeying for position with Marco Rubio or John Kasich. He made the case against Trump in the right way — he was civil even as he eviscerated Trump again and again. And he connected with the audience not just with his command of the facts, but also by making his case in an effective, human way. When he asked the audience how many had been waiters or...

[snip] "......At the rally [Sen. Ted Cruz] spoke for forty-five minutes without notes, let alone a teleprompter. His speech was a mix of time tested tropes and new riffs pulled from the headlines. He did not stutter, stammer, or search for a word. There was an ideological coherence to his presentation that I have not seen from a presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan. Nor was this just all talk. In his three-plus years in the Senate, Cruz has deviated from his stated principles far less than any of his colleagues and has the stab wounds in his back to prove...

Mitt Romney ripped into Donald Trump today, calling his candidacy a case of "evil trumping good.” "A person so untrustworthy and dishonest as Hillary Clinton must not become president. Of course, a Trump nomination enables her victory," Romney said this morning in an address to the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah. And that was the tip of the iceberg in a scathing speech the former GOP presidential nominee gave of his party’s 2016 campaign front-runner. "Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University," Romney said. "He's...

Trump took seven of 11 contests, winning by stunning margins in states as diverse as Massachusetts (by 31.2 percentage points) and Georgia (by 14.4 percentage points.) There is evidence that he is not only winning over a large segment of the Republican base but also that he is bringing new voters to the polls. It is not hyperbole to say that Trump has created an existential crisis for the Republican Party – one that would play out very publicly in a brokered convention. Does the GOP risk losing its conservative identity – and many of its conservative members – by...

If you’d signed up on Eventbrite for the Marco Rubio rally in Baton Rouge, you got an email this afternoon that likely disappointed you.

2016 Super Tuesday Results and GOP Presidential Analysis Now that Super Tuesday is over and tabulated, there are some clear trends setting in. Here is a table of data I am using to see the trends, and comment on the data: Click for a larger, readable image Going into Super Tuesday, some very definite trends had already been established in the GOP Presidential race. Bacisally it was the very steep trend line of Donad Trump in both the cumulative vote and the cumulative delgates from the first four primary contests, the last three of which he had won. Here's...

Delegate rundown chart and a good Interactive Map.

Here’s how Rubio and Cruz can still take down Trump In theory, Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz could yet defeat Donald Trump and secure the GOP nomination — even after Trump’s seven-state win in the 12-state Super Tuesday primary. But as the conniving hero of the great Broadway comedy “The Man Who Came to Dinner” put it, they each have about 14 minutes to pull out of their hats the goddamndest rabbit you’ve ever seen. Cruz, who beat Trump in two states, might hone his message, find his footing, and make his move. Marco Rubio won Minnesota and surged in...