Free Republic

The casino magnate and big Gingrich booster in 2012 may have his eyes on a new candidate in 2016. Billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam spent an astonishing $98 million trying to elect conservative candidates during the 2012 election cycle. The Adelsons threw more than a fifth of that total at Winning our Future, a super PAC supporting GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich. We all know how Gingrich’s primary campaign against Mitt Romney turned out, but the Adelsons’ contributions kept Gingrich’s campaign afloat far longer than the former House Speaker would otherwise have survived. With potential candidates...

It was just another routine photo-op at a Republican field office Tuesday morning until Mike Huckabee decided to improvise. In a cheeky attempt to bring himself level with Cody Hoefert -- the 7-foot-tall co-chairman of the Iowa Republican Party -- Huckabee pulled up a chair and began to climb atop it. He didn’t have to complete the physical joke to get the laughs he was looking for from the group of gray-haired volunteers who had assembled for his appearance with Republican Senate candidate Joni Ernst. “Golly!” the 5-11 Huckabee marveled. “I’ve never felt like a shrimp like this before.”

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said pastors from across the United States should send "thousands and thousands" of Bibles and sermons to the Houston mayor who demanded pastors turn over their sermons to the government due to their objection to an LGBT discrimination city ordinance. "I hope she gets thousands and thousands of sermons and Bibles," Huckabee said on his Fox News show Saturday, referring to Mayor Annise D. Parker. "It ought to make you mad that the mayor thinks she can turn in her pastors. And so I got an idea," Huckabee explained. "If she wants a sermon, here...

That would be Mitt Romney, supported for the GOP nomination by 21 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. That’s double the support of his closest potential rival, but it also leaves 79 percent who prefer one of 13 other possible candidates tested, or none of them. When Romney is excluded from the race, his supporters scatter, adding no clarity to the GOP free-for-all. In that scenario former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul have 12 or 13 percent support from leaned Republicans who are registered to vote. All others have support in...

Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee warns he'll leave the Republican Party if it stops opposing same-sex marriage and abortion. "I'm gone. I'll become independent. I'll start finding people that have guts to stand. I'm tired of this," he told the American Family Association's radio show. His comments follow the recent Supreme Court decision not to take up gay marriage. "I am utterly exasperated with Republicans and the so-called leadership of the Republicans who have abdicated on this issue when, if they continue this direction they guarantee they're gonna lose every election in the future," Huckabee said. "Guarantee it." ...

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee threatened to leave the GOP and run for the White House in 2016 as an independent if Republicans “capitulate” and support same-sex marriage. “If the Republicans want to lose guys like me, and a whole bunch of still God-fearing, Bible-believing people, go ahead and just abdicate on this issue—and go ahead and say abortion doesn’t matter, either,” Huckabee told Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association, on Wildmon’s “Today’s Issues” radio show. “Because at that point, you lose me; I’m gone.” “I’ll become an independent,” he vowed in an interview on Tuesday. “I’ll start...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) is fast becoming the king of useless fights and empty gestures. First came his destructive government shutdown gambit. Then came his half-baked idea for fighting the Islamic State. Then he set up a showy albeit unnecessary confrontation with a Christian group, managing to be the only one on the right these days magnifying differences between Jews and Christians — unlike, say, Gov. Mike Huckabee, who rallies Christians and Jews to a shared fight against jihadists bent on slaughtering both. And now Cruz is pushing a constitutional amendment to prevent federal courts from vindicating the rights of...

Part of Mitt Romney's success in securing the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 bore out of the fact that he benefited from the spoils of a divided faction on the right. If Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich were ever able to consolidate the sum of their supporters around one of them, Romney's path to victory could have faced great peril. This calculation is weighing heavy on the minds of social conservatives as they look for a horse to ride in 2016. With an adviser to Sen. Ted Cruz telling National Journal Monday the Texas freshman is "90 percent" likely to...

There is light at the end of the tunnel of Barack Obama’s presidency. With only 843 days left, the presidential campaign will kick off about one month from now. Getting an early boost for his potential bid is U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). This past weekend he won the Value Voters Summit straw poll with 25 percent of the vote. Ben Carson placed second with 20 percent and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee came in a distant third with 12 percent. While so many GOP establishment types are still encouraging former Gov. Mitt Romney to try a third time after...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) WASHINGTON (AP) — Hillary Rodham Clinton is the one figure uniting religious conservatives frustrated by a leaderless Republican Party that's divided over foreign policy, immigration and social issues. The prospect of another Clinton White House stirred anguish at the Values Voter Summit this weekend where hundreds of conservative activists debated the GOP's future and warned that the acknowledged but unannounced 2016 Democratic front-runner would cement what they see as President Barack Obama's attack on religious freedom....

WASHINGTON — Gov. Mike Huckabee encouraged pastors to speak out on political issues and for social conservatives to get more fellow adherents registered and to the polls. Social conservatives are not in trouble because of the actions of government, they are in trouble because social conservatives are not speaking out and are not voting in large numbers, Huckabee said Friday at the Family Research Council's Values Voter Summit. Huckabee estimated that there are probably over 100 million social conservatives in the United States. Using just the example of Evangelicals, he said there are about 80 million, but only half of...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Prospective Republican presidential candidates are expected to promote "religious liberty" at home and abroad at a gathering of religious conservatives, rebuking an unpopular President Barack Obama while skirting divisive social issues that have tripped up the GOP. The annual Values Voter Summit opens Friday in Washington with speeches from several potential presidential candidates, including Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. The speaking program features ambitious Republicans with positions on social issues across the spectrum — from the libertarian-leaning Paul, who favors less emphasis on abortion...

Former Florida governor's likely candidacy reveals how desperate GOP establishment has become to avoid Rand Paul. A dozen years after he ran his last political campaign, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is gearing up for a 2016 presidential bid – a campaign that would open up a new front in the Republican Party’s ongoing civil war. Mike Allen reports in today’s Politico Playbook that according to Bush’s friends, he’s “leaning more yes than no” on launching a run. He’s campaigning for Republican candidates in Senate battlegrounds like North Carolina and Kansas, and Allen reports, “has headlined several fundraisers where the...

Senator John McCain (R., Ariz.) touted former governor Jeb Bush (R., Fla.) as a potential contender in the 2016 presidential elections while discussing the merits of nominating a governor as opposed to a senator. “I think that governors who are successful obviously have a cachet that is probably helpful to them, particularly, since the Congress is held in low esteem,” McCain tells National Review Online. “I think there will be some who are very competitive, including Jeb Bush if he decides to run.” McCain says he hadn’t decided to back Bush. “I keep hearing that he may be considering a...

Mike Huckabee dropped his biggest hint to date yesterday that he might run for president in 2016. Should he run, his national name ID and his strong 2008 run probably doom any chance Rick Santorum has (Santorum’s 2012 vote largely overlapped with Huckabee’s 2008 backers). But it also throws a huge monkey wrench into any hopes Senator Ted Cruz has of winning the nomination.

Mike Huckabee is leading the Republican presidential race in Iowa. And not by just a point or two: in a new CNN survey, the former Arkansas governor, winner of the 2008 Iowa caucuses, is at 21 percent, with his closest GOP pursuer, Rep. Paul Ryan, nine points behind. Rand Paul is 14 points back, Chris Christie and Jeb Bush 15 behind. Few frontrunners choose not to run. And when Huckabee, not yet a candidate and officially undecided, invited a group of reporters to meet with him at a hotel outside Washington Monday, he certainly looked like a man preparing to...

Former governor Mike Huckabee (R., Ark.) implicitly made the case against Senators Ted Cruz (R., Texas), Rand Paul (R., Ky.), or Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) serving as president during a meeting with reporters about the prospect of his own candidacy. In a roundtable meeting this morning with journalists in Washington, D.C., Huckabee said that he would decide next year whether or not he will run for president, but he already knows he’s unlikely to support any of those freshman senators. “If not me, I would be supportive of someone who has had executive experience and who has been a governor...

More evidence surfaced on Friday which proves conclusively that the 2016 presidential race is not upon us. At the very least, the “invisible primary” remains perfectly invisible for now. On Friday, a CNN/ORC poll was released which misled its readers into thinking that the presidential race is on in the Hawkeye State. That survey revealed that the campaign is a rather predictable one on the Democratic side. The state which rejected Clinton in 2008 is now prepared to embrace her. At least, 53 percent of Iowa Democrats are prepared to make that leap. Another 15 percent of Democrats back...

Hillary Clinton is heading to Iowa as the politician that most Democrats would choose as their 2016 presidential nominee. According to a new CNN/ORC poll, 53% of all registered Democrats contacted in Iowa said they would support Hillary Clinton if the 2016 caucuses were held today. That number far outpaces the 15% that would opt for Vice President Joe Biden, 7% who would choose Sen. Elizabeth Warren and 5% who would pick Sen. Bernie Sanders. Clinton will be visiting Iowa for the first time in six years on Sunday when she headlines the last Harkin Steak Fry. Biden, likewise, will...

On Friday Fox News host and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) called on conservatives to “stop the fight” over the Common Core standards and, instead, consider the positive effects the nationalized standards might have on students in poor-performing schools. As ABC News reports, Huckabee, considered to be a 2016 presidential hopeful, was addressing the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC) in Washington, a group that includes over 40,000 churches and 16 million evangelical Hispanics. In February, the NHCLC announced its endorsement of the Common Core standards and its plans to launch a nationwide campaign to salvage the increasingly unpopular...