Free Republic

Just wondering what everyone's thoughts on Senator Ayotte for VP. She appears to come across well and could fit in well with Trump. I have been pushing Rubio but maybe she is a viable option as well. She doesn't appear to me as someone who would suck all the oxygen out of the room and where it would be all about her which was a concern I had about picking a woman.

One area in which Trump can be nailed down is his overall view of trade. As I explained at Conservative Review, when it comes to Trump’s own financial dealings, he is an unrepentant globalist, from which he has made a fortune. But these days, as he runs for president, the billionaire is a radical protectionist who has repeatedly declared his intention to impose massive tariffs aimed at the economies of other countries, such as Japan and Mexico, and a forty-five percent tariff on products from China. Such broad tariffs would most certainly result in retaliation by the targeted countries. This...

Republicans have a major electoral-map problem in November. Major. Donald Trump’s victory last week in Indiana’s primary not only effectively sealed the GOP nomination for the real estate billionaire but also brought into sharp relief how difficult it will be for any Republican to get to 270 electoral votes and beat Hillary Clinton to become the 45th president this fall. Start here: Eighteen states plus the District of Columbia have voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in every election between 1992 and 2012. Add them up, and you get 242 electoral votes.

We all know that a default was inevitable on the debt. There is no way to pay back all obligations within severs lifetimes. Any possibility that Trump was chosen because of his outsider status to win? He would take the blame for the default and retire after a term, then the uni-party could continue with business as usual.

Admitting that the political situation is extremely volatile, the non-partisan Cook Political Report has shifted 11 states toward Democrat Hillary Clinton for the November election. The Hill: “This has been an exceedingly unpredictable year,” the analyst said. “Although we remain convinced that Hillary Clinton is very vulnerable and would probably lose to most other Republicans, Donald Trump's historic unpopularity with wide swaths of the electorate — women, millennials, independents and Latinos — make him the initial November underdog.”  Colorado, Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin were all shifted from toss-up states to leaning Democratic. The “solid Republican” states Missouri and Indiana were...

Monday on MSNBC’s “Hardball” while discussing his New York Magazine article about Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump entitled “America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny,” the former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan said Trump was a “reality television asshole,” to which host Chis Matthews apologized to his audience for at the end of the segment.

Politico reported today on a Florida poll conducted for a business group in the state that shows Hillary Clinton beating Donald Trump by 13 points and Ted Cruz by nine. Why is that important? Because if Clinton wins Florida and carries the 19 states (plus D.C.) that have voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in each of the last six elections, she will be the 45th president. It's that simple. Politico reported today on a Florida poll conducted for a business group in the state that shows Hillary Clinton beating Donald Trump by 13 points and Ted Cruz by nine....

I'll keep this vanity short ... Mods: please feel free to pull it if it's inappropriate.Why have so many here on FR turned on Ted Cruz in such a vicious way? We cheered when we first heard about Ted taking on the establishment in TX to win the primary in the race to fill Kay Bailey Hutchison's vacated Senate seat, in a bad year for the GOPWe cheered again when Ted exhorted us to 'Stand With Rand' when he offered public support for Rand Paul's filibuster over the NDAAOnce more, we cheered when he stood on the Senate floor and...

Riding on a string of big victories in the presidential primaries, Donald Trump has not only extended his lead against his GOP rivals, but also he has gained ground against Hillary Clinton, according to the latest IBD/TIPP Poll. ------------------------------------------------ The poll finds that Trump now leads Ted Cruz by 19 points — 48% to 29% — which is more than double his lead last month. At the same time, Hillary’s lead over Trump is now just seven points (47% to 40%), down from 12 points last month. What’s more, 65% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents now pick Trump as either...

Donald Trump may be the only Republican presidential candidate who can realistically hit the magic 1,237 number for the majority of delegates, but according to a senior Republican National Committee official that does not mean he will become the GOP presidential nominee. "Even if Trump reaches the magic number of 1,237 the media and RNC are touting, that does not mean Trump is automatically the nominee," Haugland said. "The votes earned during the primary process are only estimates and are not legal convention votes. The only official votes to nominate a candidate are those that are cast from the convention...

But in recent years, conservatives have found playing the victimhood card to be equally profitable for their own causes. ... Donald Trump is a successful businessman. His residences and modes of transit are plated with gold. He has married three gorgeous women. He claims to have a multibillion-dollar net worth. He has mocked the disabled, women, Asians, Hispanics, Muslims, even prisoners of war.... Yet he constantly rationalizes his bad behavior and political setbacks as the inevitable consequence of unfair systems and anti-Trump persecution. Disapprove of his pro-violence rally rhetoric? He’s just protecting his beleaguered voters against those “big, strong, powerful”...

Donald Trump will not reach 1237 delegates before the GOP July Cleveland Convention and there will be a floor fight for the Nomination. For the purposes of this analysis, both Sen. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump are peripheral characters. Both will continue to pursue their best strategy to the nomination, Trump on first ballot, Cruz on 2nd or 3rd (most likely 4th after Florida delegates are released). There will be a contested convention because the media will push for it. 1. Blood in the streets in Cleveland? Damn, that's a generational story. Somebody's gonna win a Pulitzer here. 2. Permanent...

He commented that Trump only won 47% of vote but won Florida. OK but wasn't that against a larger field of candidates and didn't the popular vote decide? unlike Colorado? just asking.... didn't the vote of the people matter in Florida?

Whenever Donald Trump and his followers are confronted with his evidence of his abysmally terrible polling numbers on personal favorability and versus Hillary Clinton, they typically respond with a pair of deflections. First, they say that Trump "hasn't even started" attacking Hillary yet. Setting aside the fact that Trump has taken many hard jabs at Mrs. Clinton over a span of months, this line of thinking requires a logical leap: That once he does train virtually all of his fire on her, it will both hurt her and help him. American voters have been subjected to endlessTrump coverage since last spring, over...

Strong headwinds of unpopularity continue to hobble leading Republicans Donald Trump and Ted Cruz with the public at-large, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. By contrast, most Republicans see Trump and Cruz in a favorable light - 56 and 58 percent, respectively - while John Kasich is less popular among fellow partisans (47 percent) despite receiving the best ratings among the broader electorate. The poll finds Trump suffering little damage from recent controversies over punishments for women who have abortions and the arrest of his campaign manager, though the real-estate mogul’s ratings are still in the doldrums. Thirty-one...

The conventional wisdom is that though Ted Cruz can excite the conservative-activist base of the Republican party, he can’t beat Hillary Clinton in a general election. But the recent head-to-head polling tells a different story. Unless your name is George W. Bush, it’s tough to win 270 electoral votes without winning the popular vote. And Cruz is hanging in there against the Democratic front-runner. The RealClearPolitics average puts Clinton at 46.4 percent and Cruz at 43.9 percent; the most recent McClatchy-Marist survey has it a tie. Meanwhile, Donald Trump, the current Republican front-runner, hasn’t led Clinton in any national poll...

Our previously Free Republic continues to reel from a one hundred and three year old mistake: the 17th Amendment. Pardon me if I don’t celebrate today’s anniversary. Republican theory demands the consent of the governed. From ancient Greece, republican Rome, Saxon Germany, and even in the English kingdom from which we declared our Independence, the component members of their societies had a place at the lawmaking table. Greek ecclesia, Roman tribunes and senators, Saxon Micklegemots, English commons, lords and king, encompassed the totality of their societies. By this, the consent of the governed was present in every law. Unlike simpler...

For Americans of nearly every race, gender, political persuasion and location, disdain for Donald Trump runs deep, saddling the Republican front-runner with unprecedented unpopularity as he tries to overcome recent campaign setbacks. Seven in 10 people, including close to half of Republican voters, have an unfavorable view of Trump, according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll. It's an opinion shared by majorities of men and women; young and old; conservatives, moderates and liberals; and whites, Hispanics and blacks — a devastatingly broad indictment of the billionaire businessman. Even in the South, a region where Trump has won GOP primaries decisively,...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)’s overwhelming victory in Wisconsin on Tuesday makes it all but impossible for GOP frontrunner Donald Trump to win the 1,237 delegates he needs to secure the nomination ahead of the RNC convention in Cleveland. Trump currently leads the GOP field with 743 delegates. He would need to win 58.9 percent of the remaining pledged delegates to obtain the simple majority necessary. A number of the states remaining award delegates proportionally. The bulk of delegates in one critical upcoming state, Pennsylvania, aren’t officially bound to any candidate. The fight for California’s massive 172 delegates will be fought...

Even Trump's most trusted advisors didn't expect him to fare this well. Almost a year ago, recruited for my public relations and public policy expertise, I sat in Trump Tower being told that the goal was to get The Donald to poll in double digits and come in second in delegate count. That was it. The Trump camp would have been satisfied to see him polling at 12% and taking second place to a candidate who might hold 50%. His candidacy was a protest candidacy.-snip-I don't think even Trump thought he would get this far. And I don’t even know that...