Free Republic

It’s definitely late. Is it too little? During the GOP primary Frei, who lost to Lee Terry 53-47, accused Terry of “dirty politics.” In the final hours of his toughest and at times strangest Capitol Hill campaign in 16 years, Republican Congressman Lee Terry is scrambling to shore up his GOP base—thousands of potential voters who refused to back him in the May primary election. Early today Team Terry launched a 60 second radio ad which finds Dan Frei,—Terry’s tea party opponent from that rough and tumble, six-point primary—asking his “friends” to vote for Terry on Tuesday.

Election 2014: Kentucky Senate Kentucky Senate: McConnell (R) 48%, Grimes (D) 41% Friday, May 30, 2014 Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell now holds a seven-point lead over Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky’s U.S. Senate race following last week’s state party primaries. McConnell earns 48% support to Grimes’ 41% in the latest Rasmussen Reports statewide telephone survey of Likely Kentucky Voters. Five percent (5%) like some other candidate in the race, and seven percent (7%) are undecided. The two were tied with 42% support each in late January in Rasmussen Reports’ first look at the then-hypothetical race. McConnell, a...

According to one of the tea party's leading voices, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R), who is being challenged by conservative Matt Bevin in Kentucky's Senate GOP primary, is not an "Arlen Specter" Republican."It's not like we're talking about Arlen Specter here," said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), in an interview with The Washington Post. "Senator McConnell has a longstanding conservative record and for an opponent to beat him, they'll have to prove somehow that he's not a conservative."Specter, the late Pennsylvania senator who left the GOP for the Democratic Party in 2009, was a villain-like figure to many on the...

Fresh off his resounding Republican primary victory Tuesday night, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell Thursday laid out a broad vision of what the Senate would look like under his control. Bottom line, McConnell, wouldn’t run the way Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., runs it now, the Kentucky Republican told the center-right American Enterprise Institute. ‘A Senate majority under my leadership would break sharply from the practices of the Reid era in favor of a more free-wheeling approach to problem solving,’ McConnell said in a speech. ‘I would work to restore (the Senate’s) traditional role as a place where good...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had vowed to crush the tea party in this spring’s primaries. His decisive win on Tuesday over a tea party challenger in Kentucky’s GOP primary has fueled plenty of establishment-over-tea party stories. Let’s just say the war ain’t over. “After the primary is over, it’s really the responsibility of everyone who wants to see a change in Washington, D.C., come November to support our candidates,” said Texas Sen. John Cornyn, McConnell’s deputy GOP Senate leader, who survived a much more tepid tea party onslaught in his own primary in early March. Cornyn singled out Kentucky’s...

Sen. Mitch McConnell was all smiles today: Not only because of his Republican primary victory in Kentucky, but because of a string of about-face endorsements from conservative groups intent on destroying him. “I’m happy to have them on board,” McConnell said dryly, standing just off the floor of the Senate, where he hopes to become majority leader in November if Republicans pick up six seats and control of the Senate. “Collectively, this group spent about $1 million against me in the primary,” McConnell said. “But they all got on board last night.” Not only did they get on board, they...

Matt Bevin reaches into the breast pocket of his jacket and extracts a wrinkled, yellow piece of paper. "Fraud Alert," it reads, in alarming, official-seeming font. "Sensitive Materials Enclosed. Please Open Immediately." A Republican he met received the notice in the mail a few weeks ago and showed it to Bevin, who now carries it with him wherever he goes. Bevin, Mitch McConnell's tea party-backed Republican primary challenger in Kentucky, flattens it out on the table in the back of a community ballroom in Georgetown where he just addressed the Scott County Republican Party's Lincoln Day Dinner. The unfolded paper...

Support for the tea party has dropped to an all-time low, said a new CBS News poll released Wednesday. Just 15 percent of Americans told the pollsters that they are supporters of the tea party movement today, which is less than half the level of support at its peak of 31 percent in November 2010 shortly after the midterm election when the movement fueled a landslide Republican win to take majority control of the House.

At present, every poll has McConnell’s race against Alison Lundergan Grimes, Kentucky’s secretary of state, as a dead heat with Election Day just six months away. Grimes also easily won her Tuesday primary. Her race with McConnell also is expected to be the most expensive congressional race this election cycle, as Republicans try to win a net six seats to take control of the upper chamber. If that happened, McConnell would replace Nevada's Democratic Sen. Harry Reid as the Senate majority leader.

It was suggested that one be started so I'll take the lead!

Live results

Some businesses in states with pitched Republican primary fights are turning to a relatively new tool to help ensure the outcome they want: telling employees how they want them to vote. Thanks in part to Citizens United, it's perfectly legal — but it probably doesn't do much good. Bloomberg Businessweek describes the concerted effort by business groups to get their member corporations ready to weigh in on the election — an election, we'll remind you, that has largely been framed as business-versus-Tea Party. The National Association of Manufacturers spent a week in Kentucky, briefing "as many as 10 businesses a...

Matt Bevin seemed like the ideal candidate to challenge Mitch McConnell. The handsome and personable businessman, a father of nine, impressed national conservative groups looking for a chance to knock off the Senate Republican leader. These groups, from the Senate Conservatives Fund to FreedomWorks, the Tea Party Patriots and the Madison Project, invested more than $1 million in the Kentucky GOP primary. Bevin himself spent more than $3 million, including $1 million of his own fortune. And, yet, polls indicate he’s going to get creamed Tuesday.

That’s among likely voters too, although when you’re looking at a lead this big, it doesn’t much matter which slice of adults you’re using. I thought next Tuesday’s primary night open thread would be rip-roaring food-fight fun between “true conservatives” and RINOs. Instead, we’re destined for a snoozer. Note the tea-party numbers, in particular. Bevin never got traction even among his ostensible core constituency.

The Republican Establishment always says conservative purists would rather lose than compromise. But the opposite is playing out in Nebraska. The moment Ben Sasse got endorsed by the Senate Conservatives Fund, Mitch McConnell went all in for Shane Osborn. Well, Osborn is now toast. He has extremely high negatives, extreme negative poll numbers, and outside groups have just finished him off with an ad blasting his involvement in a made up military memo. That leaves Sid Dinsdale who’d have you know he is a lifelong Republican despite years of significant giving to Democrats. Dinsdale too, however, is behind in the...

30 years ago, a man ran for the Senate because his opponent kept claiming to be for spending cuts while raising spending. His opponent kept claiming to be a conservative, while letting big government grow, even when he was the majority and could stop it. Maybe that candidate needs to be reminded of his own words.

The Chatter: WAVE exposes Bevin at cockfighting rally, McConnell hit on jobs comments, Grimes finally weighs in on pipeline Republican U.S. Senate candidate Matt Bevin is again struggling to explain his appearance at a cockfighting rally last month after a local news reporter aired Bevin’s remarks at the event in which Bevin had been asked specifically about cockfighting. WAVE 3 News reporter John Boel went to the March 29 cockfighting rally undercover and got Bevin on video speaking at the rally. Bevin was asked a direct question by American Gamefowl Defense Director Dave Devereaux. Devereaux asked Bevin “Will you vote...

EDMONTON — U.S. Sen. Rand Paul made a visit to Edmonton on Wednesday afternoon for a community forum during which he spoke mostly about health care and the economy and how he proposes to fix problems with each. The stop was one of several he made across the state during the week. After addressing about 30 people who turned out to hear him, the senator opened the floor for questions. One constituent asked him why he came out in support of Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Louisville. Paul declined to answer the question publicly, saying he would speak with her in private...

Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes announced that she spoke Wednesday with two of the state House Democratic staffers who raised the allegations of sexual harassment against former state Rep. John Arnold. According to the campaign, Grimes talked with Yolanda Costner and Cassaundra Cooper about issues affecting women in the workplace and asked them what to do with the $250 campaign contribution Arnold gave her campaign last year. And the campaign did confirm that Grimes will keep the contribution from Arnold after the conversation with the two women. The press release reads: Alison Lundergan Grimes also asked their personal...

Matt Bevin, Sen. Mitch McConnell’s primary challenger, told a group of Kentucky voters that American workers are less productive than immigrants. “For those who think that all these fifteen to twenty million [illegal immigrant] people are here just to take advantage of us and ride the system, you’re wrong,” he said at a diner in Jessamine, Kentucky, in March. “Most of them are not… but I’ll tell you what, there are more people like that even proportionally that were born here in this country,” he added.