Free Republic

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): After a midterm election, it’s not unusual for a president to reassess strategy and approach and make appeals to the “middle” or to “reach across the aisle.” But we’re talking about President Trump, who currently doesn’t have a good track record of working with Democrats. So, what evidence do we have that he will try a different approach? And is trying a more bipartisan approach even a good idea? geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst): We’ve been waiting for the fabled “Trump pivot” for, what, two years now? I’m not counting on it happening next year....

No one knows when President Trump will leave office. Possibly January 2021 when his first term ends; possibly not before January 2025 when a second term would end. Ultimately, however, he will leave office sometime to be succeeded by the next president. But who will that be? That intriguing question increasingly occupies the attention of politicians from both parties. Already there is conjecture he may be challenged from within the GOP — an action always fraught with peril for the incumbent party. Even more speculation has centered on a formidable list of Democratic aspirants. At least two dozen potential Democrats...

2028 WATCH … OVERHEARD Thursday at a POLITICO photoshoot at Harvard: REP.-ELECT ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ (D-N.Y.) joking about running for president. PHOTOG: “What are you, twenty...?” AOC: “29. I just turned 29.” PHOTOG: “Happy birthday.” AOC: “Thank you! Thank you!” PHOTOG: “You can’t even run for president for another six years.” AOC: “No, not for a long time. Thank God. Although we’ve been joking that because the Equal Rights Amendment hasn’t been passed yet, the Constitution technically says he cannot run unless he’s 35. … So what we’ll do is we’ll force the Republican Party to pass the Equal Rights Amendment...

President Donald Trump’s economic officials are reassuring investors about recent white-knuckle stock market volatility, while Trump’s political advisers are increasingly alarmed that the economy could present a stiff 2020 campaign headwind. Many of Trump’s political allies acknowledge that his reelection prospects hinge in large part on how Americans judge their economic prospects at the time of the next election. And many independent analysts say that recent market turbulence is a warning sign that the U.S. economy will likely slow and maybe even tip into recession by 2020. At the moment, that scenario could be the biggest threat to Trump’s chances...

He says he's Lyin’ Ted no more. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, declared on Saturday night that the ignominious nickname bestowed on him by President Trump during the 2016 campaign season has been relegated to the annals of history -- as has the feud between Cruz and Trump. "This was also a breakthrough year in which my presidential sobriquet went from 'Lyin’ Ted' to 'Beautiful Ted,'" Cruz joked during a speech at the Gridiron Club. Cruz was joking, in the spirit of the roast. He also quipped: “I gotta say, that new pet name felt like it really hit the mark....

With most of the votes from the midterm election tallied, we now have a better sense of the scale of the Democratic victory. It is historic. Thus far, Democrats have earned more than 8.8 million more votes than Republicans, flipped 39 seats, and are poised to win a 40th as election officials continue counting ballots in California. In terms of their House margin, this makes 2018 the Democratic Party’s strongest midterm performance since Watergate. The popular vote margin is also a record high for Democrats, representing a decisive repudiation of the president and his party. This should make concrete a...

BILOXI, MS (WLOX) - President Donald Trump will make his second appearance in South Mississippi. This time, it’s for a rally in support of incumbent candidate Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, and preparations are a little more intense this time around. While the Secret Service and White House are in charge, Executive Director of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Coliseum Matt McDonnell and his team have to do the leg work. “It’s definitely not something we encounter on a frequent basis,” he said. McDonnell went through a similar process in 2016 when Trump appeared as a candidate, but things have changed, and the...

Together the two have generated some of the most vital moments of democratic change in the modern era Religion and populism have become dirty words in progressive circles, but despite common assumptions, their combination could serve as a resource for the sort of democratic renewal many societies need. There is plenty of evidence to support the view that religion and populism are bad enough in themselves and even worse when combined. The so-called “Christian-Democracy” of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, widespread support of Donald Trump by white evangelicals in the United States, the Hindu nationalism of Modi, and the Islamo-Kemalism of Erdoğan...

Poll of the week: A CBS News poll finds that President Donald Trump's approval rating on his handling of the economy is 52%. His disapproval rating on this metric is 41%. The same poll shows that Trump's overall job approval rating stands at just 39% to a disapproval rating of 55%. Put another way, his net approval rating on the economy is +11 points and his net approval overall is -16 points, which makes for a difference of -27 points. What's the point: The CBS News poll is merely the latest one to show that a majority of Americans approve...

Thanks to a rare unscripted moment for Hillary Clinton, the Democrats’ big secret is out: It’s not only President Donald Trump and his supporters who loath immigrants knocking at our doors. Too many Democrats also reject “migration,” she reminds us. How could I forget? Before Bill Clinton was president, we were called Cuban refugees. Even during the unruly Mariel boatlift of 1980 that brought 125,000 people to South Florida during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, it remained so. But as Clinton faced the challenge of thousands of Cubans taking to the seas in rickety homemade rafts — 35,000 by the exodus’ end...

As the Trump Dynasty stumbles into misrule and failure, how long before the first well-known journalist gets murdered? With the president designating the news media as “enemies of the people,” unstable personalities like pipe-bomb mailer Cesar Sayoc and the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter have been shaken loose from their moorings. Imitators surely will follow. Not that there’s anything new about it. Soreheads have been menacing journalists since the invention of newspapers. Recently, a man in Mountain Home, Arkansas, was charged with terroristic threatening after repeated phone calls targeting CNN’s Don Lemon. I wondered if he was the same idiot who used...

Hillary Clinton popped back into the news cycle on Thanksgiving in the worst possible way, after the Guardian quoted her as saying, basically, that Europe needs to get harsher on migrants and refugees or else people like Donald Trump will keep winning elections. Just to reiterate this is a bad and terrible stance that only some kind of ultra-warped center-think could come up with. The interview took place before the midterms, according to the Guardian, and was published as part of the paper’s new “The New Populism” series, which might explain why they decided to drop the quotes on Thanksgiving...

There shouldn’t be much question about whether 2018 was a wave election. Of course it was a wave. You could endlessly debate the wave’s magnitude, depending on how much you focus on the number of votes versus the number of seats, the House versus the Senate versus governorships, and so forth. Personally, I’d rank the 2018 wave a tick behind both 1994, which represented a historic shift after years of Democratic dominance of the House, and 2010, which reflected an especially ferocious shift against then-President Barack Obama after he’d been elected in a landslide two years earlier. But I’d put...

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow referenced the “House popular vote” in an effort to explain how the Nov. 6th midterm elections really did represent the “blue wave” many Democrats had been hoping to create. “As of this morning, the Democratic lead in the US House popular vote is up to 7.3%, from 7.2% yesterday. For comparison purposes, note that in 2010 – which was widely seen as a GOP ‘wave’ cycle – Republicans won the US House popular vote by 6.6%,” Maddow tweeted. (TWEET-AT-LINK)What Maddow was saying was that overall, more nationwide votes were cast for Democrats in House seats than for...

Being mayor of Portland, Ore., may have gotten to Ted Wheeler. On Thursday, after finishing a speech at the Oregon Health Forum in which he was heckled, Wheeler mumbled, “I can’t wait for the next 24 months to be over,” indicating he may not seek re-election, the Oregonian reported. (TWEET-AT-LINK) "If you know me, you know I mutter quite a bit,” Wheeler said in a statement issued later in the day. “Not one of my most redeeming qualities. I will make a decision next year with my family if I am running for re-election." In previous media interviews, Wheeler has...

Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell plans to run for president in 2020, according to a person close to the California congressman who is familiar with his plans. “He’s definitely running,” the source said. This weekend, Swalwell will be the first potential presidential candidate to visit Iowa after the midterms with a trip to meet the Asian & Latino Coalition in Des Moines and Iowa Democratic Party chairs in Dubuque. The travel to Iowa was first reported by NBC News and confirmed by POLITICO. The 37-year-old Swalwell has been positioning himself for a run over the past year, with several trips to...

With the 2018 midterms now nearly decided, the traditional kickoff for the next election cycle — that is, the 2020 presidential election — would normally be getting underway. However lacking of a clear leader on the Democratic side, the 2020 election season is off to a slow start, with one exception. Hillary Clinton’s former advisers are duking it out over whether America will get to see Hillary 2.0....

Republicans thinking about opposing President Trump in the 2020 primaries are facing the hardest of political choices. Toppling a sitting president of your own party is a maneuver with the highest degree of difficulty. The most relevant historical model is probably Eugene McCarthy’s race against President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968, which helped persuade the politically wounded Johnson to withdraw. But McCarthy had a clear policy handhold — opposition to an increasingly unpopular war — and appealed to a discontented element within his party. What are the handholds for a challenger to Trump? Economic conservatives are generally happy with the...

COLUMBIA, Mo. — Standing in an airplane hangar in the mid-autumn chill awaiting the arrival of President Trump, Joan Philpott said she was angry and scared. Only Mr. Trump, she said, can solve the problems she worries most about. “He wants to protect this country, and he wants to keep it safe, and he wants to keep it free of invaders and the caravan and everything else that’s going on,” said Ms. Philpott, 69, a retired respiratory therapist. Ms. Philpott was one of thousands of women who braved a drizzle for hours to have the chance to cheer Mr. Trump...

President Donald Trump's campaign on Wednesday sent an email fundraising off a lawsuit filed by CNN against the president and several members of his administration, saying voters should donate to help keep the media accountable. In an email with the subject line "Breaking: CNN SUES! Help Trump win," the president's campaign asked supporters to take a "media accountability survey" to help "fight back against the fake news attacks and deceptions." CNN is suing Trump and several members of his administration to reinstate reporter Jim Acosta's press access after it was revoked when he argued with the president during a news...