Free Republic

Democrats have an enthusiasm problem, and they know it. A June poll from the Democratic firm Democracy Corps revealed that, among those voters who make up the Obama coalition — young people, Latinos, African-Americans, and single women – only 68 percent describe themselves as “likely” to vote in 2014. 85 percent of other voters who are expected to favor Republican candidates say they are “likely” to cast a ballot in November. The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake observed that this is not the only troubling sign for Democrats ahead of the midterms. “An April AP-GfK poll showed, among those who are...

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, on Wednesday named Nick Muzin as senior adviser and deputy chief of staff for strategy, effective Monday, July 14. “Nick’s broad range of experience and networks make him the ideal person to help us craft a positive, forward-looking vision for America and take that message to every corner of the country,” Sen. Cruz said in a statement. “I am delighted to have him on our team, and look forward to working together.” Muzin, 38, an Orthodox Jew, is a physician and attorney, and is currently the director of coalitions for the House Republican Conference,...

“There’s something strange about a Republican primary that’s decided by liberal Democrats.” – State Sen. Chris McDaniel. There was something strange about that primary election between six-term incumbent Republican Senator Thad Cochran and state Senator Chris McDaniel, period! From reports of a McDaniel supporter sneaking into the bedroom and taking a photo of Mrs. Cochran at the nursing home where she resides to the discovery of more McDaniel supporters locked inside a courthouse where ballots had been counted on primary election night, to some folks actually believing a Democrat (former Rep. Travis Childers) could win the Senate seat this Fall,...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)The GOPe has never stooped lower. Not only have they denied that any fraud has taken place (Reince Priebus has kept so silent you can hear a pin drop). Not only did Cochran’s camp lie to black voters about McDaniel taking away their food stamps and make racist allegations about him that scared them. Not only did the camp STIFF the pastor of money they had agreed on and then DENY he did all the work requested in the first place, they are NOW going after investigative journalist Charles Johnson of http://gotnews.com/. Johnson was ready for it. He had let...

An audio interview has surfaced in which the interviewee claims that he was to be paid by the Cochran camp to grease voters in the Mississippi GOP Senate runoff election. The audio interview, which coincides with a separate audio recording and batch of evidence produced by the newly launched GotNews.com, a project by Charles C. Johnson, alleges that the Cochran campaign conspired with a Mississippi Reverend to buy the votes of African American voters, who happen to be democrats. Before I get into the weeds of what is in the audio interview and transcript, which are both below, let me...

Hillary Clinton applauded efforts in a Republican Senate runoff election in Mississippi to reach out to voters outside its usual voting bloc. Clinton said Monday the contest between incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran and tea party-backed challenger Chris McDaniel "was of historical importance because the Republican Party of Mississippi expanded its base." Forced into a runoff election after a GOP primary was too close to call, Cochran's campaign utilized anti-McDaniel sentiment in a traditionally Democratic voting group to sway the tight contest in his favor. Clinton, a likely 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, suggested politicians from all ideological backgrounds could learn from...

Do you know why everyone loves the holidays? It’s because we all have that one wacky uncle that does enough stupid stuff during each family get together to give the rest of us funny inside jokes that last all year. If you don’t know who that is in your family, it’s probably you. In the GOP, it is the tea party. This fringe group has always clung to the edges of the Grand Old Party. Thanks to Barack Obama — ostensibly because of his policies and not his pigmentation — the group was able to cohere into a politically relevant...

Last Tuesday’s GOP primary runoff in Mississippi is turning out to be the most revealing incident in the protracted fight between the conservative grassroots and the GOP establishment. The GOP party leadership has been exposed for their true motives in front of all the party faithful. Over the past few years, we have been told by some of the inside-the-beltway “conservatives” that the GOP schism is overblown, that it is merely a disagreement over strategy. We have also been told that the grassroots have been too purist in their expectations of how Republicans can govern when they only control the...

Christopher Hitchens got a chance to analyze the Tea Party in 2011, the same year cancer took his life. In a Vanity Fair article titled "Tea'd Off," the great polemicist explains that populist movements like the Tea Party are a reaction to social and political change. Hitchens writes that before the Revolutionary War costumes, America had seen a somewhat similar phenomenon with the John Birch Society: The John Birch Society possessed such a mainstream message--the existence of a Communist world system with tentacles in the United States--that it had a potent influence over whole sections of the Republican Party. It...

It’s not too uncommon for Republican leaders from the House and Senate to occasionally meet, trade notes, and work out bicameral strategies, but as a rule, rank-and-file members tend to stick with colleagues from the same chamber. When they have ideas or grand plans, GOP lawmakers usually turn to their chamber’s leadership or committee chairs. Which is why it’s odd to see House Republicans huddle so frequently with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). Last September, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) presented a plan to avoid a government shutdown. Cruz met directly with House Republicans, urged them to ignore their own leader’s...

So Cochran loses the Republican vote substantially, but wins with a Democrat turn-out effort. He won't be punished as Childers will lose to him in November. He will resign in mid-office and a younger "party man" like Reeves or Pickering will be selected to take his place. The Barbour clan (except for Jeppie) have permanent stain on their names, but plenty of cash, so who cares? The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) needs to hear from the voter base and see the results in their fund raising. Next time you get a fund raising letter from them, Mark your return...

Tea Party insurgent Chris McDaniel came tantalizingly close to knocking off Senator Thad Cochran in Mississippi’s Republican primary runoff last week, but a surge in black voter turnout saved the six-term incumbent’s bacon. Cochran’s election to a seventh term in November now seems a foregone conclusion, and boy, are a lot of conservatives mad. “There is something a bit unusual about a Republican primary that’s decided by liberal Democrats,” McDaniel fumed on election night, slamming Cochran and the GOP establishment for “once again reaching across the aisle [and] abandoning the conservative movement.” But whatever else the election outcome meant, Cochran’s...

Some Congressional leaders are coming out in support of creating an emergency refugee program that they believe would help deal with a massive surge of child immigrants coming to the U.S. from Central America. Arizona U.S. Sen. John McCain said that establishing refugee application programs in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador is “key” to help stem the tide, according to Reuters. Since October, 52,000 Unaccompanied Children, or UACs, have been apprehended at the U.S. border. That is up from 6,000 in 2011. Another 39,000 parents with children have been apprehended as well. The surge has strained resources at the border...

The tea partyers made a serious blunder in Mississippi, costing them a runoff win: They carelessly slipped their magic passion potion to the opposition. The hard rightÂ’s strength comes from the nearly religious fervor that propels its small numbers to the polls at times when the larger numbers are snoozing. In Mississippi, the right woke up the larger numbers. Hold that thought, will you? What had been a race between an old Southern pork-master Republican and an insurgent small-government firebrand was turned into something bigger, much bigger. One sensed Chris McDaniel might be in trouble when Sen. Thad Cochran asked...

Last fall, not long after the federal government’s partial shutdown ended, The New Yorker’s David Denby alleged that shutdown point man Ted Cruz seemed to be pursuing the presidency “by sowing as much confusion and disorder as possible—playing the joker in a seemingly nihilistic charade whose actual intent is a rational grab for power.” There’s nothing as pointed or nasty as that in “The Absolutist,” Jeffrey Toobin’s 8,400-word New Yorker profile of Cruz, but Toobin does paint Cruz as an extremist – more of a Goldwater figure than a Reagan figure – as well as a hypocrite regarding judicial activism....

It’s not exactly the Ali-Frazier “Thrilla in Manilla,” but the ongoing Rand Paul-Dick Cheney pugilism certainly packs a punch. The libertarian ophthalmologist and the warlord emeritus have been pounding each other for months, and while it’s tempting to just kick back with popcorn and behold the entertainment, we do need to acknowledge the bout’s deeper meaning. Because this is really about something quite serious. Republicans are profoundly split these days over foreign policy: between the non-interventionists who are increasingly wary of American military involvement abroad; and the neoconservative hawks who blundered us into Iraq and want us to keep flexing...

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has yet to endorse a candidate in the Tennessee primary, but incumbent Sen. Lamar Alexander has already recruited him for an event in his state. The two senators will host a healthcare roundtable discussion in Nashville on June 30 with Tennessee healthcare executives and professionals to discuss the effects of Obamacare. Although the discussion is closed to the press, the two senators will hold media availability after the event. As he faces primary challenger Joe Carr in the fall, Alexander has touted his work with Sen. Paul in campaign ads – particularly on the Freedom to...

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that it’s not the tactics themselves that bother them as much as the attention those tactics are receiving from conservative voters. Says Red State’s Leon Wolf, “If any of these bastards want to avoid the fallout they should go on the record.” According to these conversations [with two Republican Senate staffers], some $800,000 was raised for Cochran by his Senate colleagues after the McDaniel victory in the primary’s first round, largely under the rubric of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. This wasn’t seen as a particularly controversial matter at the...

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) has just unleashed his latest endorsement for re-election. It comes from former Gov. Mike Huckabee. Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas and 2008 presidential candidate, has a strong following of social conservatives and activists drawn to his populist political message. "He's been your governor, university president, America's secretary of education. He brought the automobile industry to Tennessee," Huckabee explains in the ad. "Lamar Alexander is now a remarkable senator that Tennessee needs to return to office." (VIDEO-AT-LINK)Alexander has released a series of endorsements in recent days, including that of country music star Kix Brooks and former...

The Republican Party continues to enjoy a vibrant battle between its establishment stronghold and small-government insurgents sometimes described as the Tea Party. Republican establishment political strategist Karl Rove responded to older-than-Methuselah, longtime-incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran’s runoff victory in Mississippi this week with a Wall Street Journal column about how Tea Party groups had “taken a beating” this primary season. The column explained that entrenched incumbents with huge war chests and the backing of the party establishment have won more often than challengers, which is undoubtedly true. It is worth noting that Rove did not mention the tremendous victory local and...