Free Republic

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...

The case of the young Buffalo mother who police say was killed at the hands of her abusive husband freed from jail without bail could cost Gov. Kathy Hochul the election, a former Clinton pollster said. Mark Penn told Fox News Wednesday that the brutal Oct. 4 murder of Keaira Bennefield shot by her estranged husband in front of her three children could sway voters away from the incumbent candidate. “Crime is the number one issue in New York State,” Penn said. “This horrific murder — in which someone beats her first and then is let out on the street...

Democrats aren't just out of touch with America, they're out of touch with their own voters Black voters are concerned about violent crime. Most Americans agree, with one notable exception: White liberals. According to a recent Pew survey of registered voters, 82 percent of black Democrats said violent crime was a "very important" issue in the 2022 election, compared with just 33 percent of white Democrats. Overall, 61 percent of registered voters described violent crime as a very important factor when deciding who to vote for in the upcoming midterm election. The groups least likely to agree with that assessment...

As the creepy porn lawyer faces fines and jail time, questions about his operation—and who was financing it—linger. id Hillary Clinton or the Democratic National Committee ever pay Michael Avenatti? The question isn’t exactly new. It was at least hinted at as early as May 10, 2018. That day, Mark Penn, a former advisor to President Bill Clinton, published an op-ed in The Hill newspaper. At the time, the news was filled with the rantings of Avenatti, who gained his fame and notoriety representing former porn star Stormy Daniels. Daniels was claiming she was paid to cover up an affair...

'The mounting issues on all fronts have led to the surprise conclusion that Trump is now seen as being as good a president as Biden, suggesting the honeymoon is being replaced with buyer's remorse,' Mark Penn, co-director of the Harvard/Harris survey told The Times.... ...The Harvard/Harris poll also found that 55 per cent of people believed former Vice-President Mike Pence was a better vice president than his successor, Kamala Harris, and that 63 per cent of people thought Mike Pompeo was a better secretary of state than Anthony Blinken. ..

President Donald Trump met with former Clinton strategist and pollster Mark Penn last Monday, according to reports. Penn, who helped former President Bill Clinton weather the storm of his impeachment assault in the 90s, met with President Trump to share polling data and advice for the president.

Former Clinton pollster Mark Penn weighed in on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's power and influence to get 'The New York Times' to update a headline about President Trump's statement on the mass shootings in Texas and Ohio. Penn told FOX News host Tucker Carlson: "To actually bend after it is printed to a political faction is to cave in a way that I think will haunt them for some time to come." "The paper wanted to please a constituency and they weren't willing to stand behind their own headline and were then willing to change for that constituency," Penn said. "That...

Something struck a raw nerve in this country when 26 agents showed up with automatic weapons drawn in a pre-dawn raid to arrest Roger Stone, terrorizing his deaf wife. Suddenly, all the mumbo jumbo about special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation being objective and focused on national security melted away in the face of a police-state action so completely inexplicable. There could be no real excuse for such a potentially dangerous, life-threatening action except to use police power for the purpose of intimidation, under the color and cover of law. Imagine the outcry if 17 vehicles and an amphibious unit had...

Every American should get behind the Trump administration’s efforts to free Venezuela and its 30 million people. Venezuelans have waited too long to be liberated from Nicolás Maduro – an illegitimate despot who has bankrupted and corrupted the nation. Venezuela was once an oil-rich nation that could have lifted its people out of poverty and become a shining example of progress and development in Latin America. It was a vibrant democracy that had everything going for it. I know because several decades ago I worked with two of Venezuela’s presidents, helping them understand the aspirations of their people through polls....

Yet another selective prosecution has been designed to “get” the president, or at least another one of his friends. In 2016, Roger Stone, a volunteer in sometimes-contact with Steve Bannon of the Trump presidential campaign, wanted to know what was going on with WikiLeaks and how it might help Donald Trump. Christopher Steele, employed by the Hillary Clinton campaign, wanted to get dirt on Donald Trump to prevent him from becoming president. Both were trying to dig up fodder on their political opponent. One stands indicted today, after a guns-drawn raid by the FBI — and the other is safely...

I guess no one in the FBI ever watched “The Apprentice.” It was only the number-one rated show in the country. In it, Donald Trump, more than any other person in the world, made famous weekly the phrase “you’re fired.” Consequently when Donald Trump abruptly fired FBI Director James Comey, exercising the authority he believed he had as president of the United States, he was taking the very action he made famous. It wasn’t out of character for him but in character, as he has been throughout his administration. If anything, it’s hard to find anyone who has not been...

Hillary Clinton will run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, according to a former adviser and a top Democrat in New York. Mark Penn, a pollster and senior adviser to former President Bill Clinton and ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from 1995-2008, and Andrew Stein, a former Manhattan Democratic party figure and New York City Council president, wrote Sunday in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee would not let "two stunning defeats stand in the way of her claim to the White House." "Mrs. Clinton has come unbound. She will not allow this...

Get ready for Hillary Clinton 4.0. More than 30 years in the making, this new version of Mrs. Clinton, when she runs for president in 2020, will come full circle—back to the universal-health-care-promoting progressive firebrand of 1994. True to her name, Mrs. Clinton will fight this out until the last dog dies. She won’t let a little thing like two stunning defeats stand in the way of her claim to the White House. It’s been quite a journey. In July 1999, Mrs. Clinton began her independent political career on retiring Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s farm in upstate New York. Her...

Former senior adviser to the Clintons, Mark Penn, said on “Fox & Friends” Friday that Bill and Hillary should withdraw from the public eye and start donating their speaking fees to charity. Penn said it was detrimental to the Democratic party to have the Clintons front and center, especially with the midterms less than a month away. (RELATED: Former Hillary Clinton Adviser Points Out Double Standard In Mueller Investigation) “At the moment, having the Clintons do a roadshow isn’t the best thing for the party that needs to move forward,” Penn said. “But I don’t really understand why this wouldn’t...

Here is longtime Democrat operative Mark Penn today saying that “Justice is no longer being served” when it comes to the Mueller Probe. Mark Penn worked closely with the Clintons, but he is honest enough to see that “associates of Trump are being targeted” by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in order to “get Trump.” Penn also points out that Mueller is doing nothing to look into the activities of the Democrats to pay for a fake dossier using Russian lies. Penn said the pressure tactics Mueller is using are reprehensible, saying “Cohen would have pled to the Lindburgh kidnapping if...

The plot to get President Trump out of office thickens, as Cohen obviously was his own mini-crime syndicate and decided that his betrayals of Trump meant he would be better served turning on his old boss to cut the best deal with prosecutors he could rather than holding out and getting the full Manafort treatment. That was clear the minute he hired attorney Lanny Davis, who doesn’t try cases and did past work for Hillary Clinton. Cohen had recorded his client, trying to entrap him, sold information about Trump (while acting as his lawyer) to corporations for millions of dollars,...

Prominent Democratic pollster Mark Penn said on Thursday that a vast majority of Americans don’t really support so-called sanctuary cities that shield immigrants in the country illegally from deportation. Penn, who served as chief strategist for Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign, revealed that 84 percent of Americans favor turning undocumented immigrants over to federal agents. “I asked them, ‘Do you think notifying ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] would in fact increase crime because it would inhibit people from reporting crimes or does it decrease crimes because it takes criminals off the street,’ and they overwhelming said ‘decrease,’ ” Penn told...

Former Clinton pollster Mark Penn examined the “out of hand” Robert Mueller investigation into President Donald Trump, saying the “deep state is clearly in a deep state of desperation.” “Every day we discover more and more potential abuses — that the investigation didn’t have a foundation, that they used this flaky dossier, you know, that was never substantiated as part of their investigation,” Penn told New York AM 970 radio’s “The Cats Roundtable” host John Catsimatidis on his Sunday broadcast.

‘What’s unprecedented here is the fuzziness of the accusation of Russian collusion,’ Penn says. In January 1998, longtime Democratic pollster and strategist Mark Penn hunkered down with President Bill Clinton, intending to help the administration ride out the storm of a pending independent-counsel investigation. These days, Penn, still a leading voice on the left, is speaking out against the special-counsel investigation into President Donald Trump and Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election — opposing it for much the same reason that he opposed Ken Starr’s investigation in 1998. “I worked with President Clinton through impeachment,” Penn tells National Review...

The “deep state” is in a deep state of desperation. With little time left before the Justice Department inspector general’s report becomes public, and with special counsel Robert Mueller having failed to bring down Donald Trump after a year of trying, they know a reckoning is coming.