Free Republic

PHILADELPHIA — The Democratic Party has a God problem. And over the last couple of decades, as its base became more educated, less religious and more urban, this problem has only grown. Some of this has to do with lower church attendance in cities versus rural areas, and the Democratic Party’s increasing reliance on urban voters. Some of it is the divisiveness of social or cultural issues like abortion and gay marriage. And the divide has seemingly sapped Democrats’ ability to communicate to religious Americans. Especially if those people of faith are white, according to Brad Chism, a longtime and...

NASHVILLE, TENN — President Donald Trump is returning to the road, rallying supporters to recapture the enthusiasm of his campaign and reassuring them about his tumultuous early days in the White House. It's a welcome distraction for a president whose first months in office have been dominated by self-inflicted controversy and roadblocks, courtesy of federal courts and a divided Congress. "We have done far more, I think maybe more than anybody's done in this office in 50 days, that I can tell you,'' Trump said to cheers from thousands of supporters at a campaign rally in Nashville, Tennessee....

Many Donald Trump voters cast their votes for the president because he’s “authentically inauthentic” and serves as a “middle finger” to the mainstream news media, according to NBC’s Chuck Todd. The “Meet the Press” host made those remarks during a recent interview of former Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, who found herself in the national spotlight in 2013 for her efforts filibustering a bill to regulate the Lone Star State’s abortion clinics. Ms. Davis suggested to Mr. Todd that both her failed 2014 gubernatorial run and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential loss can...

A pregnant answer at 7:40 below in response to an excellent question by Tucker Carlson: How can a populist president support an ObamaCare bill that would mostly benefit the well-off at the expense of older, blue-collar, rural Americans — the very people who put him over the top against Hillary? Is he even aware that the bill does that? “Oh, I know,” says Trump, before emphasizing that everything’s negotiable. Well … yes, but all of the negotiating that’s been done so far has been designed to please conservatives, in particular accelerating the rollback of ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion by starting it...

From MSNBC politics shows to town hall meetings across the country, the overarching issue for the Democratic Party’s base since Trump’s victory has been Russia, often suffocating attention for other issues. This fixation has persisted even though it has no chance to sink the Trump presidency unless it is proven that high levels of the Trump campaign actively colluded with the Kremlin to manipulate the outcome of the U.S. election — a claim for which absolutely no evidence has thus far been presented. The principal problem for Democrats is that so many media figures and online charlatans are personally benefiting...

President Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon has credited Kellyanne Conway for helping to save the businessman's campaign after the release of the Access Hollywood tape where Donald Trump could be heard making obscene comments about women. In a recent profile on Conway by The Atlantic, Bannon is quoted as saying, "If Kellyanne had not been there when the firestorm hit, I don't know if we would have made it. She literally became a cult figure during that time period, just because of her relentless advocacy for Trump on TV." The media broke news about the tape on October 7....

Don Peay says the 54 percent of Utah voters — especially Mormon Republicans — who didn't cast their presidential ballots for Donald Trump need to do at least one thing: repent. The former head of the Trump campaign in the Beehive State told the Utah County Republican Women group Monday night, according to Provo's Daily Herald, that "the people who did not get behind Trump probably need to look at themselves in the mirror and say, 'Maybe I need to show a little bit of humility and ask for forgiveness, because I was wrong.' " Peay, a Latter-day Saint and...

Chaos and uncertainty have defined the beginning of Donald Trump’s presidency, and it appears there is nothing more American these days than having a baked-in opinion about our brash, unpredictable tweeter-in-chief. So, halfway through Trump’s first 100 days in office, we thought it was a good time to ask: Can you ever see yourself changing your mind about President Trump? Never, said Claudia Corona, a 25-year-old hydrogeologist from Oakland. “I will continue to oppose him until he steps down or gets impeached,” she said. “I want nothing to do with this man. I am frankly ashamed to speak the same...

Trump’s outrageous tweets have drawn silence from the sometimes over-dignified former president. But Mr. Ex-President, your half of the country needs you. President Barack Obama doesn’t have any official engagements on the horizon and hasn’t said much since returning from vacation, but we should still probably brace ourselves for another 6 a.m. tweetstorm this weekend from President Donald Trump accusing the former president of undermining his presidency. In less than a week, Trump has accused Obama of wiretapping his phone and releasing 122 Gitmo detainees, and he has given oxygen to the conspiracy theory of an Obama-empowered “deep state” or...

DALLAS -- Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Donald Trump Jr. will headline the Reagan Day Dinner hosted by the Dallas County Republican's Party Saturday evening. The event will take place at the Omni Hotel in downtown Dallas and includes a meet and greet with Republican leaders and dinner. Attendees have to purchase tickets starting at $150 and going up to $25,000. This is the second meeting between the Trump family and Ted Cruz in recent weeks. Senator Cruz and his wife recently had dinner with President Trump, tweeting a photo of the Cruz family's children with the President afterwards.

Donald Trump’s compulsion to exaggerate the magnitude of his election victory––talking about a landslide that didn’t happen and miscounting electoral votes––has distracted from the true strategic importance of his triumph. From one perspective, the size of Trump’s win wasn’t so impressive. He received 45.9 percent of the popular vote––two points less than his opponent and four points shy of a majority––and he captured fewer electoral votes than the winners of seven of the last nine elections. From another angle, Trump’s win was very impressive. He won the battleground states of Ohio, Florida, North Carolina and Iowa––states that swing back and...

Los Angeles County had a dismal turnout rate in the March 7 election, the first chance for voters to express themselves at the ballot box since Donald Trump’s stunning victory. People here seem more political than in the past — they go to a lot of protests and town halls, and they fill their social media accounts with anti-GOP screeds. But less than 12% of eligible voters showed up. This suggests that hatred of our new president isn't sufficient to get out the vote. Granted, the election was a local affair. The most controversial questions for voters involved measures to...

A troubling new poll was just released showing that the Democratic Party is significantly less popular than both Donald Trump and Mike Pence. My gut tells me that Democrats will ignore this poll, or blame it on bad polling, and continue down the same course they are currently on: being funded by lobbyists and the 1%, straddling the fence or outright ignoring many of most inspirational issues of the time, and blaming Bernie Sanders for why they aren’t in power right now. As a general rule the Democratic Party doesn’t listen well and struggles to hear the truth about itself....

Man alive. How often do you see poll results like this anymore?That’s from Quinnipiac. CNN asked the same question and got a slightly less enthusiastic response — but note the partisan numbers: Republicans are now more gung ho to spend on infrastructure than Democrats are, huh? Gotta be “the Trump effect” at work, with the right rushing to embrace Trump’s priorities as the left inches away from them. Here’s a famous bit from an interview Steve Bannon gave last November, 10 days after Trump’s victory: “The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The...

ST. PAUL—The youngest son of U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton's 2016 running mate, was one of six people arrested Saturday after counter-protesters disrupted a rally in support of President Donald Trump at the Minnesota State Capitol. Linwood Michael Kaine, 24, and four others were arrested on suspicion of second-degree riot after the "March 4 Trump" rally in St. Paul; a sixth person was cited for disorderly conduct. Counter-protesters clashed with Trump supporters in the Capitol rotunda after they attempted to disrupt the proceedings with air horns, whistles and chants. At one point, someone set off a smoke bomb....

Despite wall to wall negative coverage from the press, President Trump’s approval ratings have risen over the last two weeks even among millennials. According to a polling report by Quinnipiac University, Trump’s approval rating has enjoyed a slight bounce from 38 percent on Feb. 22 to 41 percent on Tuesday. Meanwhile, his disapproval rating dropped from 55 percent to 52 percent over the same period. Among millennials, the change has been even more drastic. Trump’s approval rating was a dismal 21 percent, and his disapproval was 69 percent two weeks ago. In the latest poll, however, his approval went up...

This is fascinating. A professor of economics named Maria Guadalupe was watching the presidential debates last year and had a thought. What if Trump were a woman and Hillary were a man? How would that change people’s perceptions of the exchanges in the debates? With the help of Joe Salvatore, a professor who specializes in something called ethnodrama, Guadalupe set up a recreation of sections of the original debates using actors to play the roles of Trump, Clinton and the moderator. All the words the actors spoke were taken from transcripts. The candidates’ body language and delivery were studied and...

The right fears it. The left dreams of it. But both may be deceived in assuming demographics will change how America votes anytime soon. Last summer, an anonymous writer by the pseudonym of Publius Decius Mus wrote in the Claremont Review of Books that electing Donald Trump was the last chance to save the United States from certain doom. Invoking one of the planes hijacked by al-Qaida terrorists on 9/11, he argued that: 2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit...

Sabotage is All They Have Left on the Left Like a retreating occupation army, the Democrats and their enablers seek to destroy all before the advancing liberating forces can use it. Sabotage is all they have left on the left. In the wake of Trump's "shock" victory last November, their failure to prevent him from taking office through a variety of loopy legal/political moves, the Democrats, reeling, once again, from the hammer blows of Trump's uplifting and magnificent agenda-setting address to Congress, now openly seek no less than the destruction of the country's ability to govern itself. They offer no...

President Donald Trump will carry out the “full Irish” list of engagements this St.Patrick’s season despite concerns to the contrary, IrishCentral.com has learned. He will have a full schedule of events on Thursday, March 16 at the White House. In addition, Vice President Pence will be the honoree at the American Ireland Fund dinner on March 15 in D.C. Fears that the new president would cut back on the traditional Irish day in the White House and Capitol Hill – or even cancel them – have been quashed after diligent work by the Irish Embassy and key Irish Americans in...