Free Republic

The Republican establishment gloated after three underfunded Tea Party challengers failed to knock off incumbent Republicans in primaries on Tuesday while another establishment-backed candidate secured the GOP nomination for Senate in North Carolina. "Next up is that fraud @MattBevin! #GOP,” tweeted Jahan Wilcox, a former aide to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) who is now the RNC's director of rapid response. (He later deleted it and said his thoughts were his “personal opinions.”) Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC) defeated her primary challenger Frank Roche despite a series of high-profile outbursts in support of amnesty. Ellmers was heavily backed by Facebook...

North Carolina House Speaker Thom Tillis won the Republican Senate nomination in the Tar Heel State on Tuesday evening, comfortably surpassing the 40 percent threshold to win the nomination. His victory ratifies the aggressive strategy adopted by establishment-oriented outside groups, led by American Crossroads, to spend millions on behalf of favored candidates and attack their rivals when necessary. North Carolina was the opening battleground in the fight between the Republican Party's two main factions, and it's a sign the establishment's no-holds-barred strategy is paying off. American Crossroads spent $1.6 million on behalf of Tillis, significantly more than the resources of...

North Carolina House Speaker Thom Tillis (R-NC), the frontrunner in the North Carolina GOP Senate primary, told a crowd two and half years ago that we must "divide and conquer" people on government assistance. Tillis proposed pitting those who are legitimately in need against those who made bad choices. Tillis made the comments in October 2011 in Asheville, North Carolina. They were reported by local press at the time and are being circulated now by the campaign of Sen. Kay Hagan (D-NC) whom Tillis is vying to unseat. They were highlighted on MSNBC"s Hardball Monday. "What we have to do...

A new television ad in the lieutenant governors race has a charity demanding an apology. The ad from the David Dewhurst campaign show a series of pictures of Dan Patrick with a tie but no shirt looking as if he’s at a wild party, but a written statement from the Be an Angel Fund reveals that Patrick was literally selling the shirt off his back at a fundraiser to help special needs children.

And yet just when the news is getting good, Rove is calling Silver's whole methodology into doubt. On Wednesday, he tweeted a link to a National Journal column titled "Why I Don't Agree With Nate Silver: Number-crunching Senate prediction models are fun to follow but are not very useful." "Smart piece: may disagree w/ some specifics, but major point is correct," Rove wrote. The major point is that the methodology behind Silver's projections is flawed: "Unlike baseball, where the sample size runs in the thousands of at-bats or innings pitched, these models overemphasize a handful of early polls at the...

SANFORD For months, Republican Thom Tillis’ Senate campaign touted his accomplishments and focused his attacks on Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan, acting like a frontrunner with his eye on November. Now, in the final days before the May 6 primary, Tillis is changing his strategy. Last week, he mailed a flier to voters that attacked his top GOP rival for not paying his property taxes on time. He also debuted a TV ad that trumpets his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. Tillis hit the social conservative issues Saturday in his speech at the 2nd Congressional District GOP convention in Sanford....

Oh, good grief! Karl Rove believes Jeb Bush is “the biggest thinker” in the Republican party today. Rove was asked today if Jeb Bush was going to run for president. “If I were betting I’d say yes. But, here’s the thing. He’s a very deliberate thoughtful guy. He’s the biggest thinker on our side. I’m glad he’s thinking about doing it.” Via FOX News Sunday: (VIDEO-AT-LINK) Here are a few examples of Jeb Bush’s big thinking ideas: ** Illegal immigrants come to US in an “act of love” ** Illegal immigrants are “risk takers” ** Ted Cruz needs to have...

The House could come up with a bill to overhaul the country’s immigration system by August, according to the House’s No. 4 Republican. “I believe there is a path that we get a bill on the floor by August,” Rep. Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-Wash.) the Republican conference chairwoman, told The Spokesman-Review last week. An August deadline would resolve the troubled issue months before November’s midterm elections, where the GOP is looking to grow its advantage in the House and pick up enough seats to take over the Senate. Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has pushed for a bill and even mocked members...

The GOP needs to adopt one powerful reform: Stop taking “advice” from people who want Republicans to lose. Almost every problem, dynamic, and force within the Republican Party is currently driven (sometimes in obscure ways) by the naïve assumption that the “advice” freely offered by the GOP’s enemies is sound wisdom the GOP should depend upon. Republican insiders fight any nominee or action which the GOP’s enemies criticize. Insiders think that their enemies’ “advice” shows which candidate will have broad appeal. So if liberal organizations, the liberal news media, or Democrats say a candidate is a bad choice or a...

Listening to what Karl Rove has to say about elective politics–or most everything else–is about as inviting as swallowing a few raw eggs. He is so consistently wrong that only the consistently wrong GOPe can stand to listen to him. Half-truths and ignoring reality comprise his inexcusable M.O. Almost before the last bit of confetti fluttered to the floor at David Jolly’s victory party last Tuesday night, Rove was leading the GOP establishment’s charge to “caution against thinking he won because of Obamacare.” Despite Democrat Alex Sink’s support of the mess Barack Obama made of our once great healthcare delivery...

Recently Sen. Charles Schumer made a groundbreaking speech outlining a Democratic Party strategy aimed at the Tea Parties. For the first time, a major figure in the liberal political universe sought to both explain the Tea Parties’ appeal to tens of millions of adult Americas and to project a strategy to break the Tea Party base away from its leaders—at least in the context of election campaigns. Mr. Schumer’s was wrong in his description of the Tea Party movement, however, and his proposed strategy was little more than a campaign statement that would do little damage to the Tea Parties....

In 2 minutes, this video message (linked) explains why Karl Rove, "elite" GOP, the RNC and the RGA, are nervous as chickens in a poultry factory. Common Core outrage is uniting Teachers and Tea Partiers, Progressives and Patriots, Atheists and Believers. ALL parents 1) love their kids 2) hate high stress, robotic testing 3) are revolting over data collection and privacy invasions and 4) once awakened, see that corporate profiteering off students and teachers has taken priority over learning. We are "taking it to the streets", sharing this truth with every non-GOP, non-Conservative, non-traditional primary voter in Georgia. Our outreach...

GOP strategist Karl Rove says he can imagine a Republican candidate in the next presidential campaign supporting gay marriage. The statement from the former adviser to President George W. Bush appears to acknowledge that opposition to gay marriage has waned in some conservative circles. …

When David Jolly beat Alex Sink in a recent special election for a Florida congressional seat, the knee jerk reaction from the GOPe’s pet pollsters was to immediately warn the Republican rank and file that Jolly didn’t win because of Obamacare. “Who are you going to believe, us or your lying eyes?” came to mind. Phonies like Karl Rove pontificated about how winning elections requires more than simply getting on the right side of issues voters care about and hammering that message home. Hey, who knew there was more to winning elections than supporting the things voters want and opposing...

Karl Rove was in Sacramento recently and was speaking to the community's business leaders. The event was a $1000 a plate "Leadership Trust" dinner held by the National Federation of Independent Businesses. Rove talked about the upcoming governor's race in California and gave his two cents on the Republican candidates. As to be expected, he suggested that Republican put their support behind the establishment candidate and not the Tea Party favorite. Rove said, "that if the Republicans have to pick someone to lose to Jerry Brown, they'd be stupid to not to pick" Neel Kashkari, who is the establishment choice...

VIDEO AT LINK On Fox News Channel's "America's Newsroom" on Tuesday, former adviser to President George W. Bush Karl Rove reacted to remarks from former Gov. Jeb Bush (R-FL) that called certain types of illegal immigration an "act of love"...

The clip comes from Politico but the translation comes from Mark Krikorian: Karl Rove to Jeb Bush: Wait til _after_ the election to say what you really think http://t.co/Dk3JXnjhmj— Mark Krikorian (@MarkSKrikorian) April 8, 2014 The weirdest thing to me about Jeb’s “act of love” comment is that, as recently as last year, he was positioning himself as some sort of hardliner on the citizenship issue. Remember? No citizenship for illegals, he said; permanent residency is fine but to grant them full citizen privileges would offend the rule of law. Fast-forward a year and now lawbreaking is an act of...

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how the Beltway GOP Establishment has been pushing a liberal, pro-abortion candidate in the U.S. Senate Primary here in Oregon. I talked about how the tired narrative that somehow we have to be more liberal to win elections remains alive and well in DC circles and how the “experts” – including Karl Rove, Saxby Chambliss, Susan Collins, and Richard Burr — do not believe that a conservative pro-life candidate can win in Oregon. They think they know better than those of us fighting here in the trenches. Well, a new Harper poll just...

The GOP establishment is piling on in its support of Thom Tillis. Two sources confirm to the National Journal that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce will endorse the North Carolina House speaker, the Republican front-runner for his party's Senate nomination who is fighting off an array of opponents in a primary. The endorsement is expected before the state's May 6 primary. One source with knowledge of the situation said the chamber also plans to air TV ads on his behalf, a big boost for a candidate who already holds a sizable fundraising advantage over his intra-party foes. The business group's...

It's not hard to understand why. Even without a replay of the Bachmann-Cain-Gingrich-Perry-Paul GOP primary freak show of 2012, the party is heading into its confrontation with Hillary Clinton at a serious general election disadvantage. Some of the weakness has demographic roots that no single candidate can change in a single race. But the rest is a product of the party's rightward lurch over the past six years — and a restive base that demands absolute ideological purity on the part of candidates. The result, as in 2012, is likely to be a primary contest devoted to winning the Real...