Free Republic

Pete Buttigieg has tapped into the New York fundraising scene better than any other 2020 Democratic candidate — and he’ll be back this Labor Day weekend to rake in more big bucks. The South Bend, Indiana, mayor already brought in $3.7 million from New York state — including $2.9 million just from New York City, according to donor data provided by the Center for Public Integrity and analyzed by The Post. He bests all other Democratic White House hopefuls in the Big Apple — by a landslide — including New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who raised $885,000 in...

President Trump’s high confidence in winning Texas is vexing some Republican insiders, who fret that his 2020 campaign is unprepared to handle a generational challenge from the Democratic Party for control of the state’s critical 38 votes in the Electoral College. The Democrats flipped two suburban Texas congressional districts and another dozen seats in the state house in the midterm elections, while Democrat Beto O'Rourke nearly ousted Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. GOP strategists with deep experience in Texas are bracing for the possibility of more turbulence next year, with some worrying that Trump’s top political officials in the state are...

Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden is facing more campaign issues this week; with analysts saying his fundraising efforts have “tumbled” since a series of gaffes on the campaign trail. “Joe Biden raised $4.6 million online on his first day in the 2020 presidential race, surprising doubters who thought the former vice president couldn’t run a modern campaign. But since then Biden’s online fundraising has tumbled — looking more like flash-in-the-pan opponent Beto O’Rourke than top-tier rivals like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren,” reports Politico. “More than 60 percent of the $13.2 million Biden has raised online came in the first week...

Biden’s online fundraising has tailed off, suggesting problems generating grassroots enthusiasm, a POLITICO review of millions of donations shows. Joe Biden raised $4.6 million online on his first day in the 2020 presidential race, surprising doubters who thought the former vice president couldn’t run a modern campaign. But since then Biden’s online fundraising has tumbled — looking more like flash-in-the-pan opponent Beto O’Rourke than top-tier rivals like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. More than 60 percent of the $13.2 million Biden has raised online came in the first week of his campaign, which launched in late April, according to a...

President Trump's campaign has reportedly spent almost $500,000 on Facebook ads in Texas this year, raising questions about whether his team is concerned the normally deep-red state could flip. The Texas Tribune reported Friday that the Trump campaign spent $481,900 on the social media ads directed at Texans between Jan. 5 and Aug. 3, citing data from Bully Pulpit Interactive, a Democratic firm that monitors digital ad spending. “When we think about digital ads, we think about it in terms of, ‘Is [Trump] using them to engage and excite his existing supporters, or is he using it to reach out...

DES MOINES — A Democratic presidential field that has struggled to precisely define its general election indictment of Donald Trump appears finally to have found it. In the wake of mass shootings in Ohio and Texas — the latter of which was tied to a suspect whose anti-immigrant sentiments led to the killing of 22 people — candidates are road-testing a withering argument that draws a direct line between gun violence and the president’s racist rhetoric. “We are living with a toxic brew of two different things, each of which is claiming lives and each of which represents a national...

Booker and Beto O'Rourke both cited the president's rhetoric and stoking of racial division in the wake of the Texas shooting. Sen. Cory Booker placed blame on President Donald Trump and his racist rhetoric for a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, that left at least 20 people dead. The shooting is being investigated as an act of domestic terror and a hate crime after officials said that they believed, but have not confirmed, a manifesto filled with anti-immigrant and white supremacist language was posted online and written by the gunman. “I think, at the end of the day, especially...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) strong performance in this week’s Democratic presidential debates invigorated supporters who see her as slowly but surely making the case that she’s the best Democrat to take on President Trump. Warren and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) were widely seen as the biggest winners of the two debates, along with Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who tangled with former Vice President Joe Biden in the week’s second debate. Sanders and Warren were the stars on the first night, and they avoided battling one another while presenting a united front against centrists arguing against the progressive proposals.

Pollster Lee Carter measured the responses of a group of 100 voters to President Trump’s rally in Cincinnati and she said Friday that independents are leaning toward the president's immigration stance. At one point in the speech, Trump said Democrats’ greatest “betrayal” was supporting “open borders’ and Democratic lawmakers “care more about illegal aliens than they care about their own constituents." “We’re not going to do that,” Trump said to his base at the rally on Thursday. Carter, president of communications consulting firm Maslansky + Partners, said the voter-reaction analysis showed independents tracking closer to Republicans than Democrats in response...

Joe Biden survived the second round of Democratic presidential debates, but it became more apparent that over half the 22-person field is irrelevant and should get out, the sooner the better. The former vice president was repeatedly under attack on health care, criminal justice, immigration and abortion. He stumbled sometimes, but overall was sharper than his mediocre performance in the first debate a month ago. This won't assuage fears of mainstream Democrats that the 76-year-old Biden may not be up to the challenge of a protracted primary fight and bitter battle against Donald Trump. Still he was sufficiently engaged to...

Never has there been a presidential race as sprawling and wide-open as the 2020 Democratic primary. It would be a landscape entirely without a map, except that a small handful of battle-hardened veterans have navigated similar terrain before. At the kickoff of the primary debate season four years ago, no fewer than 16 candidates were jockeying for position in the largest Republican presidential field in history—only to end up being mowed down by Donald J. Trump in what became a slaughterhouse of a campaign. What’s in store for this year’s Democrats? To get an insider’s view, POLITICO Magazine invited four...

President Donald Trump over the weekend backed off a threat to have Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) conduct massive nationwide raids to deport "millions" of migrants illegally in the United States, an act that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says came after she phoned the president last week. "When I spoke to the president, I said, 'Look, I'm a mom, I have five kids, nine grandchildren and children are scared. You're scaring the children of America, not just in those families, but their neighbors and their communities,'" the California Democrat said Monday while discussing immigration at an event in Queens, New...

America doesn’t lack for superhero movies in the summer of 2019: an X-Men sequel will premiere a few days from now, followed in July by another Spiderman instalment. But what of the Democrats’ search for a superhero of their own? May I suggest: Aquaman? Here’s why the submariner seems appropriate (other than the film’s preachy environmentalism): remove former Vice President Joe Biden and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg from this Quinnipiac Poll of 2020 Democratic candidates and what one discovers is a field that’s “underwater” (higher negatives than positives). Biden’s numbers: 49% favorable; 39% negative. His rivals for the nomination:...

Donald Trump singled out four of his challengers for ridicule on Tuesday, mocking Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke and Bernie Sanders and predicting one of them will win the 2020 Democratic nomination. ‘Boy, you got some beauties there!’ he said during a speech in Louisiana about energy infrastructure. ‘Three hundred and fifty million people and that’s the best we can do?’ ‘It’s going to be one of these people,’ he said. So far 23 different Democratic White House hopefuls have declared their candidacies. He poked fun at O’Rourke for quickly losing what a month ago looked like juggernaut momentum....

Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, one of the first lawmakers who called for President Trump's impeachment, expressed his fears on Saturday that if Democrats don't pursue his ousting, Trump "will get re-elected." Green was asked on MSNBC about how unpopular impeachment was among voters. MSNBC correspondent Phillip Mena pressed him with recent polling numbers from Quinnipiac showing 66 percent of voters were against impeachment -- including 38 percent of Democrats and 70 percent of independents. "Are you concerned that impeachment talk may actually help the president's re-election?" Mena asked. "I'm concerned that if we don't impeach the president, he will get...

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said Sunday the Democratic House majority is determined to impeach President Trump, regardless of the findings in special counsel Robert Mueller’s now-concluded investigation into Russian election meddling. Lamenting what he called “extremism” on the part of the Democrats, Cruz cited remarks by House Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) in an earlier segment on CNN's "State of the Union" that the House’s mandate goes beyond investigating crimes. Cruz added that the House "doesn't care about the basis" for impeachment. When asked by CNN’s Dana Bash whether he agreed with Trump’s frequent characterization of Mueller’s investigation as a...

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said Sunday Dreamers, children of immigrants brought into the country illegally, should get legal status. "Well, it's been put in place by President Obama and I believe we have a responsibility to fulfill what is a presidential pledge and commitment. So that's in the past. I would provide legal status for those Dreamers in the country," Romney said on NBC's "Meet the Press," referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that shields these individuals from deportation. "That's something the president's put on the table. I think we should get that job done, and hope,...

President Donald Trump suggested in a new interview that former first lady Barbara Bush had a right to be "nasty" to him after his long-running criticisms of her sons. "I have heard that she was nasty to me, but she should be. Look what I did to her sons," Trump told The Washington Times in an Oval Office interview Thursday. Trump was responding to anecdotes in a new biography of Barbara Bush by Susan Page, who writes that at the time of her death, the former first lady no longer considered herself a Republican due to Trump's rise. During the...

Watch in slow motion as Democrats, goaded by the media, conspire to re-elect President Trump: Voters care about the economy and making education and health care affordable. And so Democrats are talking about … abolishing the Electoral College? Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren started the latest distraction at a CNN town hall on Monday. “Get rid of the Electoral College,” she said, neglecting to mention that this has zero chance of occurring in the foreseeable future. The media took it from there. On Tuesday, MSNBC’s Garrett Haake pressed former representative Beto O’Rourke: “Getting rid of the Electoral College: Is that an...

Jeb Bush calls on Republicans to challenge Trump Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush says Donald Trump should face a Republican primary challenge in 2020. Bush, who ran for president in 2016, told CNN the party “ought to be a given a choice.” “I think someone should run. Just because Republicans ought to be given a choice,” he said. “To have a conversation about what it is to be a conservative I think is important...And our country needs to have competing ideologies that people -- that are dynamic, that focus on the world we’re in and the world we’re moving towards...