Free Republic

Yet another poll shows women aren't sold on DeSantis in 2024. The gender gap continues for Ron DeSantis in the 2024 presidential race, according to new polling. In an Echelon Insights survey conducted between July 24 and July 27, the Florida Governor is behind both Donald Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy with women who intend to vote in the 2024 Republican presidential nominating contests. Just 12% of the 217 women polled prefer DeSantis, putting him behind Trump (54%) and Ramaswamy (17%).

Republicans view former President Donald Trump more favorably than they do Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the latest Morning Consult survey released Tuesday found.The latest survey examining the current state of the 2024 Republican primary race shows the former president continuing to lead in terms of those who view him most favorably.Overall, 79 percent of potential GOP primary voters view Trump favorably, compared to 20 percent who have an unfavorable view.DeSantis comes in second place in terms of favorability, as 73 percent have a favorable view of the governor. Another 13 percent have an unfavorable view, and six percent said they...

Ron DeSantis, the rightwing Republican governor of Florida and a likely 2024 presidential candidate, has handed favors to his big-money donors in the insurance industry at the expense of cash-strapped residents of his state, a new report claims. The report, “How Ron DeSantis sold out Florida homeowners”, draws on contributions from the American Federation of Teachers union, the non-profit Center for Popular Democracy, the voting rights group Florida Rising and the dark money watchdog Hedge Clippers. [cut] the report’s authors suggest, that DeSantis’s administration has put the insurance companies’ interests ahead of Florida’s own citizens, who are battling homeowner insurance...

With an eye on the 2024 election, young conservative influencers are trying to get a handle on how to reach out to their increasingly alienated generation and pull them back to the Republican Party. Speaking with Newsweek's Katherine Fung, conservative commentator and OutKick podcaster Tomi Lahren, who built her reputation as a staunch defender of Donald Trump, said she is worried about 2024 -- particularly following reports that Joe Biden's digital strategy team is working hand in hand with liberal influencers to reach out to more young voters. "If we want to win [the 2024 election], we're going to have...

Can Ron DeSantis beat Donald Trump? In the game of presidential politics, well-known front-runners often falter and up-and-comers often win—Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton, and Jimmy Carter came from nowhere to beat establishment figures such as Rep. Mo Udall and Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson. When Mr. Trump was the challenger, he polished off Jeb Bush, the Florida governor who once led the pack. The DeSantis ship is clearly listing and must right itself. I wouldn’t normally give advice to a Republican candidate, but someone has to stop Donald Trump from regaining the presidency, and I wouldn’t count on President Biden...

There has been a little boomlet recently of talk about how Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is more electable than former President Donald Trump. I have heard this discussion on podcasts, I have read tweets and articles on electability and I have heard electability discussion on talk radio. The genesis of this discussion seems to be a poll of registered voters commissioned by the Wall Street Journal showing DeSantis leads Biden by 3 points, while Trump trails Biden by 3 points. Ignoring the issue of registered voters rather than likely voters, those are some interesting poll results to some people. At...

You gotta hand it to conservatives – we get abused and dumped and generally treated like dishrags, but we never stop falling for the latest politician who is going to sweep us off our feet and make sweet, sweet political love to us. Yet maybe, instead of acting on our infatuations,----

When Republicans make choices to vote for a candidate based on their stances, credentials, personality, or any other valid criteria, I never hold it against them. We may disagree, but one of the beauties of our constitutional republic lies in the way individual voters judge candidates. It’s the job of candidates, their campaigns, and their supporters to make cases for them and against their opponents. Whoever does the best at this generally wins. There is only one criteria that chaps my khakis when cited by conservatives as their reasoning for voting for or against someone: Electability. While I completely understand...

Supporters of Joe Biden are unlikely to be persuaded by most of the common criticisms. They know he can be rambling and unintelligible. They know his record is unimpressive and that he doesn’t really have “policy proposals”. None of this matters, though, because to them he has the most important quality of all: he can beat Donald Trump. Nothing you can say about the former vice-president’s record, platform or mental state matters next to the argument that he is the best hope Democrats have of getting Trump out of office. There’s just one problem: it’s a myth. It is a...

The leftstream media characterization of Joe Biden is that he is moderate, likable, and the most electable Democrat candidate.  He is affable Uncle Joe, the self-made lunchbox-toting common man of the people. In truth, he is none of the above. Joe the Moderate The "Biden as moderate" canard is getting increasingly hard to defend.  On the economy-, car-, and cow-killing $93-trillion Green New Deal, Biden was asked if it goes too far or is unrealistically promising too much. He answered, "No, no it's not." When previously asked if there would be any place for fossil fuels, including coal and fracking, in his administration, Biden answered,...

"The phone call — which featured Rove, Crossroads officials and a pollster — laid out swing state polling and electoral map analysis done by the group showing circumstances in which Trump could beat Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner, in a general election, according to three sources briefed on the call."

A professor of political science at Stony Brook University has forecasted that Donald Trump has a minimum 97 percent chance of winning the general election as the Republican nominee. Professor Helmut Norpoth’s forecast presentation took place Monday evening in the SUNY Global Center in Manhattan, which was organized by the Stony Brook Alumni Association. Norpoth created a statistical model of presidential elections that uses a candidate’s performance in their party’s primary and patterns in the electoral cycle as predictors of the presidential vote in the general election. Donald Trump has a 97 percent chance of defeating Hillary Clinton and a...

The establishment wing of the Republican party has been banking on the fact that once voters begin to focus on who can win in the Fall - electability - then they will see the folly of voting for Donald Trump and will turn to Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Jeb Bush or, Ted Cruz. The problem with that - one of the problems - is this: The Democratic field is so weak that Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or John Kasich beats either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. Or, at least fights them to a tie. The only break...

Thought you’d want to see what’s flying around New England and online today as Bush, Cruz, Kasich, and Christie (but not Trump, oddly) empty the chamber at Rubio to try to deny him another momentum-boosting showing in New Hampshire on Tuesday. Four clips for you below, in order: A new ad from a pro-Cruz Super PAC comparing the “lightweight” to Peter Pan; a “Rubio = Obama” compilation clip being touted by Kasich advisor John Weaver; a snippet from MSNBC this morning of Christie hinting that Rubio’s no-exceptions position on abortion makes him unelectable; and an interview with Jeb Bush...

None of us knows how this election is going to play out, but the one thing that we can say is that this has been the most entertaining presidential primary season ever. By far the most amusing part has been the utter state of panic the GOP establishment has been in since the voters took a look at their “electability” candidate, Jeb Bush, and started laughing. Since then one nightmare has followed another. If I’d had the foresight, I could have financed my children’s college expenses by selling brown trousers to the US Chamber of Commerce and the GOP Senate...

Results of Tuesday's primaries, particularly the victory of state House Speaker Thom Tillis in North Carolina's Republican Senate primary, are being hailed -- or decried -- as a victory for the Republican establishment over the Tea Party movement. There's something to that. Tillis benefited from support from Karl Rove's American Crossroads and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and endorsements by Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush. In contrast, Sen. Rand Paul flew in on the day before the election to campaign for second-place finisher and fellow physician Greg Bannon, who was also endorsed by Tea Party Patriots and FreedomWorks. Mike Huckabee...

Nashville, Tenn. -- Newt Gingrich said there are "profound reasons" why Rick Santorum lost his re-election bid in 2006, painting a picture of a two-term senator who took positions that would make it "hard for him to carry that all the way to the general." "He voted for the unions over FedEx," Gingrich told a luncheon of supporters. "I suspect most folks in this state don't know that. But in fact, he was a big labor Republican in Pennsylvania and I suspect when you get to Memphis and you say this is a guy who wanted to guarantee that FedEx...

I keep reading on FR that Rick Santorum is unelectable (although Rasmussen's latest poll has him just 6 points behind Obama in a head-to-head matchup) as they try to justify why they are supporting Newt Gingrich. Santorum is definitely less well-known than the former Speaker, but that's the problem for Newt. He is well-known and not well-liked. Talking Points Memo has a rolling track of Gingrich's favorable/unfavorable numbers in national polls. His favorables are now consistently in the 20-25% range since the Florida primary but his unfavorables have topped 60% in two of the last three polls (click link below)....

One thing that has remained constant in the ever changing GOP Presidential race is that Mitt Romney is the strongest candidate against Barack Obama...at least until now.  PPP's newest national poll finds Romney trailing Obama by 7 points at 49-42, while Santorum trails by only 5 points at 49-44.This is a new development in the flavor of the month game. Over the previous 6 months when Romney first trailed Michele Bachmann, then Rick Perry, then Herman Cain, then Newt Gingrich in our national polling he still did on average 6 points better than them in our general election tests....

The Republican establishment is having a bad week. It’s darling Mitt “Arnold Schwarzenegger/Nelson Rockefeller” Romney, whose main virtue has been said to be his electability, stumbled big time by losing all three contests this week to Rick Santorum, he of no organization and less money. Now comes this quite troubling news out of Ohio, at least if you’re from the Mitt-Arnold-Nelson wing of the party: Head to head against President Barack Obama, Romney comes in second, 45 percent to 41 percent, according to Rasmussen Reports. . .