Free Republic

How important is it for a politician to tell the truth about his or her personal history? It’s a question Americans face daily, especially since the establishment news media seems solely preoccupied with overturning every stone or pebble in a presidential candidate’s individual background, endlessly snooping for the one scandalous tidbit of dirt (information) that could sway hypothetical voter x’s decision come next spring (the party primaries) or thirteen months from now in the national election. “Character counts” is the gossipers’ mantra, but only appears salient where conservatives or Republicans are at issue. Former Arkansas governor and budding president of...

Irish American Joe Biden is speaking the truth he would beat Trump, impeachment or not, and the polls agree. I’m getting very tired of the liberal media knocking back Joe Biden at every opportunity and promoting loony left Elizabeth Warren. She wins every debate they claim, she has a plan for everything (so did Hillary Clinton), she is Harvard so she would be unbeatable. As a member of the writing class, I can tell you the media retains a veneer of impartiality but they love to play king and queen makers. Despite their best efforts, however, Irish American Biden is...

WASHINGTON, Oct 15 (Reuters) - A strong U.S. economy could help President Donald Trump win re-election next year unless there is a surge in voter turnout, economic research firm Moody’s Analytics said on Tuesday. Across American universities and on Wall Street, researchers are honing computer models designed to predict the winner in the November 2020 election in which the Republican Trump will face a Democratic candidate still to be determined. What makes Moody’s Analytics stand out is its focus on local economic conditions, which have drawn attention this year as a U.S.-China trade war has hit America’s industrial heartland even...

A new survey from a left-leaning polling outlet finds President Trump running even with the top contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination in Ohio, which the president carried by 8 points in 2016. The latest Public Policy Polling survey, conducted on behalf of the progressive group Innovation Ohio, found former Vice President Joe Biden edging Trump 48 percent to 46 percent in Ohio, which is within the survey’s margin of error. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) are tied with Trump at 47 percent each. The survey found Trump trailing a generic Democratic presidential candidate 48 percent to...

'FIRING LINE' WITH MARGARET HOOVER: Governor Larry Hogan (R-MD) joins Firing Line to discuss the Trump impeachment inquiry. Hogan addresses reports that he was considering a primary run against the President, discusses the state of the Republican party, and talks about his record as a Republican governor leading a blue state. (snip) Hogan on Trump alienating groups of people: "We're getting to the people where we're losing suburban women, we're losing all minorities. We're alienating every group we possibly can and we're down to a smaller, shrinking base. Now the president seems to be doubling down on that, that kind...

Many of you dismissed my call for a Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump rematch as lunacy. “Call me crazy,” I wrote. Some of the more polite responses did. But it definitely caught the attention of Donald Trump. How else to explain his out-of-right-field tweet Tuesday after yours truly wrote that Clinton would make a far stronger 2020 opponent than any of the Democrats now running? “I think that Crooked Hillary Clinton should enter the race to try and steal it away from Uber Left Elizabeth Warren,” the president tweeted. “Only one condition. The Crooked one must explain all of her...

Since 2007, there have been three whole Spider-Man franchises. First Tobey Maguire, then Andrew Garfield, and now Tom Holland. In one fewer year, we’ve had three different iterations of the Joker. Hollywood is stuck in an endless cycle of remakes and reboots, and since politics is downstream from culture, it makes sense that instead of doing something unique, new, and weird in 2020 (perhaps a true progressive running on a leftist platform), we’re just gonna go back to the old hits that make us comfortable, tweaked around the edges to give them the veneer of something fresh. It’s why Joe...

At a meeting of White House senior staff last week, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney made a bold prediction: If the House impeaches Donald Trump, he will win 45 states in his 2020 reelection race. Which is some kind of prediction! But could it, you know, actually happen? Well, start here: In 2016, Trump won 30 states as well as Maine’s second congressional district. (Maine apportions some of its electoral votes by House seat.) Meaning he needed to get 14 or 15 more in order to make Mulvaney look like a genius. That’s going to be VERY...

No matter where you turn, the news is filled with embarrassing stuff about President Trump. The CIA whistleblower complaint about his conduct on a call with Ukraine’s president has turned into a full-court impeachment scandal. But through all of this, Trump’s approval rating is at its highest level of the year according to the Hill-HarrisX survey, and the other major polls taken since this Ukraine phone call whistleblower story emerged show few changes from the last surveys taken before the news broke. How is this possible? Anyone still asking that question simply hasn’t come to terms with why Donald Trump...

There's a lot of statistical noise out there, so I wouldn't get too swept up in any individual poll -- especially as many Americans are still trying to figure out what to make of the Ukraine situation, and impeachment more broadly. Virtually every major pollster has measured a clear uptick in support for at least launching an impeachment inquiry, though other surveys have asked different variations of impeachment-related questions (unsurprisingly, there's more popular support for beginning an inquiry than for removing the president from office). A brand new batch of numbers from The Hill's pollster shows Trump's overall approval rating...

On Saturday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren got one of her best polls of the cycle. According to a new survey by Selzer and Co. sponsored by the Des Moines Register, CNN and Mediacom, Warren has 22 percent support among Democrats in Iowa, the crucial first-in-the-nation caucus state. Former Vice President Joe Biden sits at 20 percent, followed by Sen. Bernie Sanders at 11 percent, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg at 9 percent and Sen. Kamala Harris at 6 percent. Notably, this is the first high-quality poll to put Warren at the top of the field in Iowa, though her 2...

It isn’t easy to figure out what Donald Trump is up to sometimes. Why would someone who spent half of his first term fighting allegations of colluding with Russia to win the White House try to collude with another foreign country to be reelected? The day after special counsel Robert Mueller appeared before Congress to answer questions about his two-year investigation into whether Trump’s presidential campaign conspired with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton, Trump called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to ask him to dig up dirt on a 2020 rival, Joe Biden. It doesn’t make sense. Unless, of course, it’s...

President Trump has taken back the 2020 election lead over former Vice President Joe Biden. The latest Rasmussen Reports survey put Trump at 47% and Biden at 43%. “Most voters expect Joe Biden to be the Democratic nominee, but President Trump has the edge for now in next year’s presidential race,” said the survey analysis of 1,000 likely voters. While the bottom line isn’t good for Biden, the poll found that most Democrats believe that he will emerge as the nominee. Some national surveys have shown that Biden is losing to Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. The survey was conducted before...

Something big happened to President Trump this week, and it’s not the Ukraine scandal. His job approval ratings have returned to where they were before his big August slump — and that’s bad news for the Democrats. Trump clearly had a terrible late summer. Starting with his tweet that the four progressive Democratic House members who call themselves “the Squad” should “go back” to the countries they purportedly were from (only one of the four, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, is an immigrant), Trump’s job approval ratings declined significantly. From a pre-tweet high of 45.1 percent in the RealClearPolitics average on...

2020 Democratic presidential candidate John Delaney claimed Monday the party's front-runners are at risk of losing to President Trump in the general election and said they must scale back their rhetoric to win over moderate voters. "Our three front-runners... most Democrats know, are inherently vulnerable," he said on "America's Newsroom." "And that’s a real problem... Our top three candidates, I think, have significant weaknesses in a general election." Delaney said the candidates' platforms are moving too far left and will end up scaring away voters who favor private insurance and economic growth. "Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are fundamentally running...

Terrible news for Democrats: Hispanics could help throw the 2020 election to President Trump. The New York Times announced it was shutting down its Spanish-language edition, "NYT en Espanol," which launched in 2016. The venture, management explained, did not prove a financial success, in part because their readers were “less engaged than they were with our core site, and we did not see a path to converting them as subscribers.” Translation: Spanish-speaking readers perhaps didn’t buy what the anti-Catholic, anti-Trump, pro-abortion New York Times was selling. Who is surprised? The Times, along with other liberal media outlets, imagine Latinos to...

Nobody is going to win the 2020 presidential election — somebody will lose. In today’s polarized political world, voters are no longer voting for candidates they like; they are voting against candidates they dislike. President Trump’s reelection campaign is built on this dynamic. The 2020 election will be the most negative campaign in modern times, and the focus will be on the Democratic nominee. The Trump campaign is not so much running to win; it is daring the Democrats to do what it takes to win. Trump is daring the Democrats to nominate a candidate acceptable to independent and swing...

The president's troubles in the Rust Belt state are a potential warning sign for his reelection prospects. MACKINAC ISLAND, Mich. — Donald Trump has long heralded Michigan as the crown jewel of his 2016 victory. But the president's campaign team is increasingly grim about a repeat performance in the traditionally blue Rust Belt state. After a midterm election that decimated the ranks of Michigan Republicans, Trump's campaign is looking to other battlegrounds he lost last time — such as Minnesota and New Hampshire — that they see as more promising. The assessment illustrates how Trump’s support in the Rust Belt...

A recent Fox News election poll released Sunday shows President Donald Trump losing the 2020 presidential race to every Democratic Party frontrunner still in the race for the party's presidential nominee. The latest Fox News poll, this one from Sept. 15 to Sept. 17, shows Trump being beaten decisively by former vice-president Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). It shows Biden with a double-digit lead on Trump, enjoying 52 percent support among voters. On the other hand, Trump was supported by only 38 percent. This 14 percentage point spread is the largest ever garnered by...

More bettors at one British bookmaker are backing Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic Party's 2020 nominee than they are any of the candidates actually running in the race, giving her better odds of winning than Senator Cory Booker and Beto O'Rourke, among others. Clinton, a former secretary of state and first lady, is not a candidate in the party's primaries and was the Democratic nominee in the 2016 election, which she lost to President Donald Trump. Despite winning the popular vote by almost 3 million, Clinton lost the Electoral College. At the bookmaker Ladbrokes, Clinton has seen enough backing...