Free Republic

Marco Rubio's coalition is still too shallow, and Ted Cruz's too narrow, to challenge Donald Trump--can either build beyond that? After his solid, broadly based victories in New Hampshire and South Carolina, Donald Trump now holds a commanding position in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. But Trump still faces two "known unknowns," to borrow the memorable phrase from former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, an architect of the Iraq War that Trump now excoriates. One is whether Trump has a ceiling of support. The second is whether, even if he does, any of his remaining rivals can unify enough...

Labor leader Dolores Huerta attended a Nevada caucus to stump for Hillary Clinton — only to get shouted down by Bernie Sanders supporters, chanting "English only," when she tried to offer a Spanish translation. At least, that's what Huerta and other Clinton supporters are saying happened....

Donald Trump comfortably defeated his Republican presidential rivals on Saturday in South Carolina's GOP primary. Trump's resounding victory isn't simply a boon to his prospects for winning the Republican presidential nomination, an outcome once thought impossible that is looking increasingly more plausible. It is also an embarrassing repudiation of conservative orthodoxy that has dominated Republican politics for decades. It suggests that the party's intellectual leaders, who organized the base around the National Review/Weekly Standard consensus -- small government, free trade, pro-Israel, deregulation, low taxes, social conservatism and an aggressive foreign policy -- have been generals of a phantom army. The...

An Illinois judge on Friday said she would decide next month whether she had jurisdiction over a voter's complaint that Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz should not be on the state's primary ballot because he was born in Canada. Lawrence Joyce, a lawyer and pharmacist, filed a complaint in January with the Illinois State Board of Elections saying that under the U.S. Constitution, the Texas senator cannot run for president since he is not a "natural born" citizen. Cruz was born in Calgary, Alberta of a Cuban father and an American mother. The Board rejected Joyce's complaint - saying Cruz...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.expressnews.com/business/eagle-ford-energy/article/Cruz-is-big-oil-s-new-crush-as-donors-cool-to-6843524.php

Well then, you must like losing your job to someone in Mexico who will make $3/hour. Union leaders at an air conditioner factory in Indianapolis threatened with losing 1,400 jobs to Mexico said on Tuesday the plants owner expects to pay Mexican workers $3 an hour compared to an average of more than $20 an hour for the U.S. workers. "We have not given up the fight yet," said Chuck Jones, president of the United Steelworkers union local that represents workers at the Carrier Corp plant. "But Carrier has pretty well indicated that the wage differential is too great and...

Conservatives overwhelmingly support a one-on-one debate between GOP frontrunners Donald Trump and Ted Cruz according to a poll by FedUp PAC. By a margin of 67-31% they say that Trump should accept the Donald Trump Ted Cruzchallenge from Cruz, allowing them to debate each other without the distraction of other candidates. Even some liberal pundits are now saying that the nominee will most likely be either Trump or Cruz. A debate limited to the two of them would allow voters to focus on the strengths each brings to the race and the differences between them. As the primaries move into southern...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2016/02/19/republican-presidential-candidate-marco-rubio-stays-indiana-ballot-commission-rules/80607168/

Much has been made about "Democrats for Trump," are the issue of cross-over voters. Some have speculated that that Democrats who want Trump at this point are just trying some version of "Operation Chaos." Maybe some are, and they're idiots if they think Trump would lose big to either Sanders or a version of Hillary that accommodates the far-left. But in reality, there is a group of people today who indeed are disaffected former Democrats given how the SJWs have taken the party over at its highest levels. Some of Trump’s (formerly) Democratic supporters are people who: 1. Might believe...

Ted Cruz has pinned his hopes on a big showing in the South. He could still do it, but it's far from certain It's taken a while for the chattering classes to come around to the idea that Donald Trump may actually pull this thing off. It's hard to blame them. It's as if we all went to sleep one night and woke up in an alternate universe. But they do seem to have accepted it. He came close to winning Iowa, a notoriously buttoned up electorate, and won decisively in New Hampshire. All the polling going forward looks good....

There's no magic formula to winning the South Carolina GOP primary, but for the best shot at victory February 20, candidates will have to navigate three key groups of Republican primary voters. They must do this while being mindful of something else: South Carolina Republicans are fiscally and socially conservative and often display a strong distrust of government, particularly the federal government. So, first, they need to connect with evangelical Christians. South Carolina is the buckle of the Bible belt, and according to the 2012 exit polls, evangelicals made up 65% of the state's GOP primary voters. Evangelicals propelled Ted...

For Christians, the stakes couldn't possibly be higher in the 2016 elections, and presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) believes he can be the leader the nation needs to help turn things around. To do that, though, he knows he needs the support of a broad coalition--the former "Reagan Coalition"--of which evangelical voters make up a big voting bloc. And, as a result, his campaign has aggressively courted evangelical voters in South Carolina. "I believe we need to reassemble the Reagan coalition, to unite conservatives and libertarians and evangelicals and women and young people and Hispanics and blue collar...

..."The Bush family name is long and deep in South Carolina," Sen. Lindsey Graham...

Graham-who famously said he "never intended to lie" about being a veteran-is pretending to be the 2016 "Republican" expert on military matters. ... During a discussion with Neil Cavuto on Fox News this week, Graham remarked that former president Ronald Reagan never served in the military. The only problem? Reagan did serve.

Right to Rise, the "super PAC" supporting Jeb Bush that has dominated the ad-spending battle so far, has canceled up to a third of its ad reservations in March 1 primary states, according to media buying sources.

Graham said he would still be open to voting for a well-qualified liberal appointed by a future Democratic president, naming Hillary Clinton specifically.

Two things about this. One: Cruz is entirely right that Trump's lawsuit would be frivolous. Watch the allegedly "defamatory" ad below. It's Politics 101: My opponent may say X now but he said Y before, so how can you possibly trust that X is his true opinion? Trump seems to think that using old footage of him stating his own position on abortion constitutes defamation unless the viewer is also told that he's since changed his mind. It would be like Rubio suing over an ad that showed him touting comprehensive immigration reform in 2013 because he no longer believes...

COLUMBIA -- Contention in the Republican presidential contest ticked up a notch Wednesday when Sen. Ted Cruz responded to a cease-and-desist request from Donald Trump's camp asking him to stop playing an advertisement by saying, "file the lawsuit." Cruz told reporters in the morning that the letter accused his campaign of misleading the public in a TV ad that includes footage of Trump saying he is "very pro-choice." "The letter said this attack ad, as they called it, is not only completely disingenuous but replete with lies, false defamatory and destructive statements and downright fabrications," he said, according to a...

Donald Trump says he's considering suing GOP rival Ted Cruz to challenge the Canada-born Texas senator's eligibility to be president. "I'm thinking about it very seriously," the GOP front-runner told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America Tuesday. "I already have a lawyer, we're looking at it very seriously, we're thinking about it." Most Constitutional scholars agree that Cruz, who was born in Calgary to an American mother and a Canadian father, is eligible to run for president. But Trump has repeatedly questioned the senator's presidential qualifications under the Constitution's "natural-born citizen" clause. "He was born in Canada," Trump...

According to reports, Presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was slated to receive Tuesday afternoon the endorsement of the head of the nation's largest pro-Israel PAC. Jewish Insider broke the news Tuesday morning that the Texas senator, who is campaigning in South Carolina ahead of that state's Republican presidential primary on Saturday, will receive Dr. Ben Chouake's backing. Chouake is president of NORPAC, a nonpartisan political action committee whose primary purpose is to support candidates and sitting members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives who demonstrate a genuine commitment to the strength, security and survival of Israel....