Free Republic

How best to respond to the dramatic rise of outsiders like Donald Trump or the demise of the Bush dynasty? These conservative Americans share their thoughts.Emily Zanotti The 2016 Republican campaign has been unlike anything I've experienced in my time working in or covering politics. Since the early 2000s, I have thought that partisan politics and reality television-style entertainment have been heading for a collision course, but few could have predicted they would intersect so quickly and with such a dramatic impact on the Republican field. Certainly, the Republican party has always been trying to reach beyond its borders to...

Ted Cruz is trying to drum up support in rural Nevada from Republicans angry at the federal government's control of most of the state's land. Marco Rubio wants to lay claim to the Mormon vote that drove Mitt Romney's two big victories in presidential caucuses here. Jeb Bush's exit from the Republican presidential race Saturday in effect turned Nevada into a three-man brawl, with Cruz and Rubio scrambling to break Trump's winning streak after victories in New Hampshire and South Carolina. Over the weekend, Rubio's team started cajoling Bush's huge pool of big-money donors. The senator from Florida is the...

Why would Ted Cruz, who has a well-stocked campaign, more delegates than Marco Rubio, and a strong ground game, give that up for a snowball's chance at a SCOTUS confirmation? Following the Donald Trump blowout in South Carolina, pundits are calling for Ted Cruz to get out of the GOP presidential race to make room for Marco Rubio, even though Cruz won Iowa, came in third in New Hampshire, and essentially tied with Rubio in South Carolina. The reasoning is sound if you don't want a Trump nomination. As long as Rubio and Cruz are in the race, they'll split...

Pahrump, Nevada (CNN)--A Bernie Sanders supporter was escorted out of a Ted Cruz rally Sunday, after a scuffle that included the man interrupting the Texas senator and another attendee grabbing his throat. In a dusty town halfway between Las Vegas and Death Valley, a municipality where prostitution is legal and citizens recently voted to remove most of the Town Board's power, it's a part of the Old West where Cruz hopes to consolidate his party's libertarian wing. The heckling started in full when Cruz delivered a standard line in his stump speech about repealing Obamacare. Craig Bohannon, a 50-year-old Sanders...

For the last several days, I’ve spent a lot of time spreading the following paragraph around the Internet: Donald Trump is a biblically-illiterate, adulterous, strip-club owning, casino magnate. He has been on every side of almost any political or moral issue you can imagine. Yeah, he's said some things that people like to hear, but what is there in his life that reveals that he will actually do what he says? He is "wise in his own eyes" and we should not be swayed by his cunning, craftiness, and deceitful scheming. Even the shallowest of political observers knows well that...

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.