Free Republic

Hello, party leaders, potential candidates, lifelong donors, and long-suffering base voters. It’s me, the guy who constantly asks about Pennsylvania. The guy who drives people to muting me on Twitter because I won’t stop talking about Pennsylvania. Who is already showing flashcards of Collar Counties to his seven-week-old son. Recently, I received an email from a follower of the Decision Desk, the gist of which was asking me, yes or no, do I really believe the Keystone State is winnable. Well, here’s my answer: Yes. Yes, this state, which hasn’t gone for a Republican president since H.W. Bush in 1988,...

Republican businessman Harry Sidhu announced today that he will be a candidate for the State Assembly in the 68th district, which is currently held by Assemblyman Don Wagner. “I fully expect Assemblyman Wagner to be successful in his campaign for State Senate, which means the 68th district Special Election will be this year,” said Sidhu. “I am honored that so many community leaders I respect have asked me to run for the Assembly when the seat opens up. If elected, I will use my experience in business and local government to work for conservative policies that help create economic growth...

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican presidential candidate, is set to announce his North Carolina-based leadership group, including several activists who previously worked with Lt. Gov. Dan Forest and a civil rights leader who was involved in the Greensboro sit-ins. The campaign said it had recruited evangelical and Tea Party leaders. The Cruz campaign tells Dome that Cruz was looking for leaders to add to “grassroots momentum” and to help him raise money and compete for the nomination. A formal announcement is expected Tuesday to include: ▪ USMC Lieutenant Colonel William “Bill” and Velvet Cowan (Ret.) of Mt. Airy. Cowan...

Sen. Ted Cruz and his supporters are taking over the world of social media, the latest example being a "Twitter Rally" for the GOP presidential candidate that sent tweets to 1.1 billion followers. It occurred midnight Monday when the independent grassroots support group "Cruz Control" blasted out nearly 75,000 tweets on the candidate's behalf under the #CruzCrew hashtag. The rally started with a blast of 5,557 tweets and touched on the Texan's "extensive knowledge of the Constitution, his support for the 2nd Amendment, religious liberty, and his steadfast opposition to Obamacare and Common Core," said a spokesman, who added, "Other...

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush has an obvious route to the GOP nomination: get the more moderate Republicans who voted for John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 behind him this time. Bush, like McCain and Romney, is the kind of wealthy, establishment, conservative-but-not-too conservative figure the Republican Party traditionally nominates. Bush's father and brother also both won the party's nomination, but those are not great analogies to 2016. George H. Bush was the obvious heir apparent, as the sitting vice-president in 1988. During George W. Bush's 2000 primary, the GOP was not as divided as it is...

Don’t dump on my dream, okay? I took enough abuse last night for being man enough to admit that a pizza with pigs in a blanket in place of the crust sounds kind of good, come to think of it. You know what else sounds good? A battle-royal primary where Marco Rubio is throwing chairs at Rand Paul and Scott Walker is smashing Ted Cruz’s head into the turnbuckle and suddenly, “Hey wait, that’s Mitt Romney’s music.” I’m tired of being punished for my bravery in uttering difficult truths. Robert Costa ✔ ‎@costareports Mitt donor whisperer Spencer Zwick meets the...

The Iowa Republican straw poll, once a staple campaign event for GOP presidential candidates, is vanishing because of waning interest from 2016 hopefuls. The governing board for the Republican Party of Iowa voted unanimously during a private conference call Friday to drop the event, said state GOP Chairman Jeff Kaufmann. It was scheduled to be held in the central Iowa city of Boone on Aug. 8. Republican officials wanted to make sure negativity surrounding the straw poll didn’t hurt Iowa’s traditional place in holding the first votes of the presidential nomination contest, with its leadoff caucuses. Kaufmann said he was...

Do you ever get the sense that someone doesn't like you? Its not a super-obvious thing, of course, but every once in a while, possibly, say, because I'm routinely "revealed" to be a "closeted liberal" by the comments section, I get the sense that someone just isn't about to fall all over themselves in an effort to be my friend. It doesn't really bother me - I'm fantastic, so it's really their loss - but I at least know about it. Jeb Bush has clearly never possessed that talent. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he and his team apparently...

In the disintegration-reinvention cycle, the GOP is about a decade ahead of Democrats.America is not as polarized as it might seem from the noise level that in recent years has propelled into office candidates from both parties who hold marginal views. Nonpartisan independents, including the majority of Americans 18-30, are now by far the largest group of voters, representing up to 45% of the total and rising, according to the Pew Research Center. The question is how the presidential candidates in 2016 will engage and try to persuade this critical block of moderates. Institutional momentum favors the Republicans, whose party...

NASHVILLE, Tennessee — Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz has named anti-Shariah activist Kevin Kookogey as his state chairman for Tennessee. Kookogey, a former chairman of the Williamson County Republican Party, was unsuccessful in his bid to coalesce tea party support for a primary challenge to U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander last year....

Location stops play role in seeking early primary victories.Former Gov. Jeb Bush plans to launch his presidential campaign in Florida next week before heading north to make his first stop as a declared candidate in New Hampshire, home to the first-in-the-nation primary and particularly friendly ground for more liberal GOP hopefuls. Former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, meanwhile, traveled first to Iowa, following in the footsteps of former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and ex-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, both of whom then bounced to South Carolina, home of the first primary in the South, and good territory for the kinds of...

(AUDIO-AT-LINK)Jeb Bush was pleading for money. Late last month a fundraising email, sent in his name, asked donors for "$100, $50, $25, or anything you can spare right now." Bush said his political action committee still needed $5,674 to meet a monthly goal. The same day his organization hit "send" on that email, Bush was talking about the big-donor fundraising for his superPAC — $100 million so far, some of it solicited by Bush himself. "We're going to completely adhere to the law for sure," the former Florida governor said on CBS's Face the Nation. Ever since Bush began soliciting...

Former Bogota Mayor Steve Lonegan, a conservative activist who ran unsuccessfully for governor, House and Senate, will be New Jersey chairman of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign. In a news release, Cruz called Lonegan “a tireless advocate for taxpayers” and said he knows New Jersey politics. Lonegan, a former state director for Americans for Prosperity, said his duties include raising money and putting together a slate of delegates who would run in the 2016 primary pledged to Cruz. He praised Cruz’s unsuccessful effort to force a repeal of the health insurance law commonly called Obamacare through a partial shutdown...

When famous people die these days, there is an irritating modern tendency towards hyperbole. Everyone even remotely well known who passes away is instantly, breathlessly propelled via social media into the once rarefied stratosphere of ‘great’ or ‘finest’. Insincere platitudes of alarming extravagance rain down on the heads of often thoroughly undeserving individuals. Sometimes, though, it is deserved. ‘Beau Biden was quite simply the finest man any of us has ever known,’ said Vice President Joe Biden about his son, who has died from brain cancer aged 46. I knew Beau well, interviewing him numerous times when I worked for...

Senator Ted Cruz spoke with gun owners around the country and laid out his agenda for what a Cruz presidency would look like. Gun Owners of America is planning to sponsor other Tele-Town Hall Meetings with other elected officials and candidates.(VIDEO-AT-LINK)About Ted Cruz In 2012, Ted Cruz was elected as the 34th U.S. Senator from Texas. A passionate fighter for limited government, economic growth, and the Constitution, Ted won a decisive victory in both the Republican primary and the general election, despite having never before been elected to office. Propelled by tens of thousands of grassroots activists across Texas, Ted’s...

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who is in Raleigh this weekend organizing his campaign in the state, sees some parallels between the crowded GOP presidential primary and the NCAA basketball tournament. With the GOP primary becoming increasingly crowded, Cruz said it is useful to break down the field into brackets. Candidates must win their brackets in order to advance. “I think of the Republican primary very much like an NCAA tournament bracket,” Cruz said in an interview at the Raleigh Convention Center on Friday. The typical Republican primary, Cruz said, is composed of 35 percent of self-identified moderates, 15 percent libertarians,...

Turnout will drop compared to Obama's two elections, but she's about to roll out a policy platform aimed directly at African-American voters.Barack Obama didn't need to do much—almost anything—to win record turnout from African-American voters. Hillary Clinton will need to pull out all the stops to score just a fraction of that support. An exaggeration? Black political leaders don't think so. "Make no mistake, there will be some drop-off," said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri, a former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, whose comments echoed those of other influential African-American Democrats. Indeed, black leaders concede it will be nearly...

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R- S.C.) is not only doing badly in the polls, he’s also doing poorly on social media. Facebook, which is typically a good measure of support for presidential candidates, didn’t light up Monday when Graham announced his 2016 bid for president. Graham’s announcement generated a paltry 142,000 Facebook interactions — meaning likes, posts, and comments — from just 84,000 people in a 24-hour period, according to CBS News. Of the 10 announced Republican candidates, Graham trails everyone except Former New York Gov. George Pataki who had just 81,000 interactions from 59,000 people. Most of Graham’s interactions came...

Jeb Bush will enter 2016 with plenty of advantages, but the first-in-the-West nominating contest likely won’t be one of them. Nevada lawmakers this week opted against changing the state’s presidential caucus to a primary, a decision that runs counter to the wishes of Bush, Marco Rubio, and other GOP establishment-types who had hoped a switch would give them a better chance at posting a momentum-building victory there. Caucuses require a good deal more effort and patience from voters than primaries, and as a result the contests tend to favor candidates that have built a network of highly motivated activists. That...

Actually no relationship expert said that, not really. I was observing the rift between Rand Paul and John McCain. Really the rift between Paul and most of the party, and that got me thinking about the rift between the RINOs and the Tea Partiers. It reminded me of what relationship expert/marital counselor John Gottman called The Four Horsemen of a marriage destined for divorce. When couples came in for counseling, he knew they were likely irreconcilable when they began showing four key signs: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. The first horseman of the apocalypse is criticism. Criticizing your partner is...