Free Republic

The state capitals of Utah and Arizona saw supporters on both sides of the issue, though the size of the pro-gun rallies appeared to be markedly smaller...The March of Our Lives rally was organized by survivors of the Parkland shooting...some 800 sister marches were also planned in London, Tokyo, Sydney, New York City, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and Mumbai, as well as in Parkland.

Democrats enjoy a 10-point advantage over Republicans in congressional preference for the 2018 midterm elections, even as President Donald Trump's job approval rating has ticked up, the latest national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds.

Less than two years after Donald Trump won a western Pennsylvania congressional district by double digits, a special election race between a young Democrat and a deeply conservative Republican is now closer than either side had expected. The congressional race is being run in Pennsylvania's 18th district, but the March 13 election is expected to offer clues about how voters will turn out in the November midterms. Rick Saccone, the Republican, and Conor Lamb, his Democratic opponent are vying for a seat that opened in October when eight-term Congressman Tim Murphy resigned following a personal scandal. As NPR's Two-Way blog...

A new interview with Mitch McConnell this week showed the first cracks in the wall of his optimism about the midterms. While not going down a path of gloom and doom, he no longer sounds positive of breaking a long-standing trend of the party in power losing ground in such scenarios. He’s not coming out and saying the GOP’s majorities in both chambers are toast, but he seems to think they’ll be losing seats. (The Hill) Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) says in a new interview that he expects to see GOP majorities in the House and Senate shrink...

WASHINGTON — As lawmakers recover from a dispiriting government shutdown and prepare for President Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, Capitol Hill is absorbed with concern that Mr. Trump’s presidency has pushed an already dysfunctional Congress into a near-permanent state of gridlock that threatens to diminish American democracy itself.The sense of gloom is bipartisan. A group of Republicans in the House and the Senate are warning of a secret plot in the F.B.I. to overthrow the Trump government. Democrats speak of corruption and creeping authoritarianism, unchecked by a Congress that has turned into an adjunct of the executive.And...

The three-day government shutdown last Saturday has sharpened the debate about which party has the advantage going into the midterm elections in November, and which will profit from another possible shut-down if February 8 deadline for coming up with a solution for the expiring DACA program isn’t met. More interesting than these analyses and prognostications is what they say about the pundits’ estimation of the American people’s ability to sort out the style “sizzle” from the policy-success “steak” come November. The Democrat instigators of the current shutdown are for now paying a political price for bluffing and then caving to...

With the fate of hundreds of thousands of young immigrants in the balance, relations between key GOP and Democratic lawmakers turned poisonous Sunday over disagreement about President Trump’s use of a vulgarity to describe poor countries last week during an Oval Office meeting. Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.) — who attended the meeting and previously has said they could not recall whether Trump had referred to “shithole countries” — on Sunday denied outright that Trump had ever said it. They suggested that a Democrat who publicly confirmed the remarks, Senate Minority Whip Richard J. Durbin of Illinois,...

The first mid-term elections of Donald Trump's presidency will be held on November 6, 2018. This is January, 2018 so ten months from now - exactly 10 months from now - Washington, D.C. will be poring over the results in all 435 House districts to see who won, who lost, who needs to be sent a letter of congratulations, who needs a condolence note. As of this morning, there are 239 Republicans in the U.S. House, 193 Democrats and three vacancies. As there are 435 voting Members of the House, whichever party has 218 Members or more, gets to control...

Crooked Hillary Clinton Says She Will Help Democrats In Midterm Election! Please Do Damit!!!!

Up until now, the Democratic Party had gone 0-for-6 in Trump-era attempts to win GOP-held legislative seats, with Republicans actually adding to their tally in Louisiana. That changed in two northeastern states last night, where democrats won a pair of races, both of which must be considered significant upsets:

During the ramp-up to the 2014 midterm election, we were given many promises of what would be done if we would support Republican candidates and put them in the majority. We held our nose after primary shenanigans that favored some incumbents, poured donations into so-called Tea Party groups that blew off the candidates they supported. Some of us even believed the new-found conservatism some incumbents suddenly embraced in the weeks prior to November 4th. And it didn’t take long after the midterm election for the Republicans to look at us all like chumps as they excused themselves from the promises...

Republican Johnny Tacherra is in Washington, D.C. at the orientation for new members of Congress, but he’s no longer in the lead for the 16th Congressional District seat. Fresno County updated its vote count Wednesday afternoon, and incumbent Fresno Democrat Jim Costa — behind in his reelection bid since election night more than a week ago — took a slim, 86-vote lead over Tacherra.

Why, you ask, is Lady M doing promos with Penguins?Simple; after a brutal round of campaigning for losers in the midterms she felt the need to get her mojo back. So she put on her big girl dress,and threw her multiple assets into her good works programs for the week:First she honored art teachers for after school programs where kids can learn things like animation, then she appeared with Doc McStuffins, a Disney character of color who takes care of a batch of stuffed animals.Then she appeared at a Joining Forces seminar to address women veterans transitioning to civilian life:If...

A new Gallup poll shows that the majority of Americans don't want President Barack Obama calling all the shots anymore. Americans say by a large margin that they'd rather Obama back off and let Republicans take the lead in the new Congress than the other way around. The poll supports Republican claims that last week's midterm elections were in fact a referendum on the president - an assessment the White House has forcibly denied both before and after the president's party was walloped at the ballot box. ......... just 36 percent of respondents to Gallup's latest survey said they wanted...

If you were observing American elections from the outside, you might be asking yourself the following: Can't these people make up their minds? Four out of the last five elections (2006, 2008, 2010 and now 2014) were "wave" elections in which one party won a sweeping victory. They elect a president of one party, then two years later almost inevitably give the other party a huge victory in the midterm election. Why do they expect things to change? Good question. It's always dangerous to speak of a country of 319 million as having a singular will, or of an election...

Staggering statistics that show nearly a half-million people were caught trying to enter the U.S. illegally -- and more than half were not Mexican, a number far higher than in 2013 -- reportedly were posted on a U.S. government website for just a few hours last month before being taken down. According to the Center for Investigative Reporting, the numbers were posted on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection website on Oct. 10 for roughly five hours. The dramatic numbers raised questions over whether they were yanked to protect the administration before key midterm elections. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, told...

As an accompanying piece to my Midterm analysis located here http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3223860/posts I wanted to maybe give some positive news to those real conservatives who, while happy the Dems have been kicked to the curb, are annoyed that the establishment seems to have 'won the day'. Yes, the establishment robbed us of many high profile primary races, with Mike Simpson hanging on in Idaho as the most liberal Republican of that delegation, Boehner stooge James Lankford winning the senate nod from Oklahoma, and of course the despicable ruination of Chris McDaniel in Mississippi to save the dribbling Cochran. But in the...

So who’s going to be in charge come January? New leadership means new committee chairs. Here is a list of the potential Senate Committee chairmen or chairwomen in the next session of Congress: ----- Agriculture, Nutrition, & Forestry: Pat Roberts (Kan.) Appropriations: Thad Cochran (Miss.) Armed Services: John McCain (Ariz.) Banking, Housing, & Urban Affairs: Richard Shelby (Ala.) Budget: Jeff Sessions (Ala.) Commerce, Science, Transportation: John Thune (S.D.) Energy & Natural Resources: Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) Environment & Public Works: Jim Inhofe (Okla.) Finance: Orrin Hatch (Utah) Foreign Relations: Bob Corker (Tenn.) Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions: Mike Enzi (Wyo.) Homeland...

When you suffer a defeat, sometimes the only thing you can do is crawl into your dark place and stay there until you’re ready to come back out and get on with your life. Understandably, many Democrats seem to be going through that process after Tuesday’s midterm elections resulted in massive gains for Congressional Republicans. The GOP retained power over the House, took control of the Senate and further diminished President Obama‘s relevancy. That’s a lot to take in. Here are five ways Democrats are consoling themselves: 1. Denying the election’s impact, as CNN’s Sally Kohn and MSNBC’s Joy Reid...

In the following post, I am going to go through what happened last night for those finding it hard to follow, perhaps because they don't know who is who etc. I will go systematically through the highlights and lowlights of the governor's races, US Senate races, US House races, and state legislature makeup, picking out the ones I was watching out for in particular. I will then state the big winners and losers of the night in general Finally, my opinion on where we should go next, how to improve on successes and not repeat failures. Without further ado, and...