Free Republic

Coachella, the iconic music festival held in the California desert has raised eyebrows this year for all the wrong reasons, leading some to question long-term viability. But experts have reflected on Coachella's poor performance and spoke to Newsweek about the wider state of the music festival industry. In 2023, it was the first time in 11 years that the festival did not sell out both its weekends and this year it has taken one whole month to sell out the first weekend. Considering over the past few years tickets sold out anywhere between 40 minutes to four hours, some have...

Joe Biden is not happy about his polling numbers. According to NBC News, citing 20 anonymous staffers and allies:WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden was seething.In a private meeting at the White House in January, allies of the president had just told him that his poll numbers in Michigan and Georgia had dropped over his handling of the war between Israel and Hamas. Both are battleground states he narrowly won four years ago, and he can’t afford any backsliding if he is to once again defeat Donald Trump. He began to shout and swear, a lawmaker familiar with the meeting said....

President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address last week failed to improve his popularity on key issues among Americans, a new ABC News/Ipsos poll found Sunday; therefore, his campaign received no boost heading into the 2024 presidential election. On key 2024 issues of Biden’s economy, crime, Hamas’s war, as well as the Ukraine war, Biden’s approval rating “remains unchanged,” the poll found: Economy: 36 percent approval Crime: 35 percent approval Hamas: 30 percent approval Ukraine: 41 percent approval Biden’s speech, which many said was angry, partisan, and aggressive, was not well received among independents. Thirty-six percent of independents said...

resident Joe Biden ends 2023 with his polling numbers still in the doldrums - worse than any other president at the same stage of their first term - as he prepares for an election next year with voters still worrying about the state of the economy. And that is despite his overall approval rating ticking up slightly. The latest tracking number from Gallup, published Friday, puts Biden's job approval rating at 39 percent, up two points from lows in October and November. That is worse than the last seven presidents in history as they came to the end of their...

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko expressed concern for the future of democracy in Ukraine under President Volodymyr Zelensky and pronounced himself unsurprised that support for the president is falling in the country in a series of interviews published this weekend. Klitschko, a former heavyweight boxing champion whose name has been floated as presidential candidate material for nearly a decade, lamented to the German newspaper Der Spiegel on Friday that he had not had a single phone call with Zelensky, despite being the mayor of the nation’s capital during wartime. He told the newspaper he was concerned that Ukraine would soon “no...

President Joe Biden’s popularity among Americans plummeted to the lowest rating since April, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found Tuesday, renewing Democrat fears about his chances of winning reelection in 2024. Only 39 percent of Americans approved of Biden’s job performance in November, dropping below previous marks: October: 40 percent September: 42 percent April: 39 percent “Biden’s public approval rating has held below 50% since August 2021, and this month’s rating was close to the lowest levels of his presidency – 36% – seen in mid-2022,” according to Reuters’ polling.

The popularity of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has surged in recent months as he engages in important last-minute discussions with President Joe Biden about raising the federal debt ceiling, according to the latest YouGov poll.Almost half (46 percent) of voters now say they approve of McCarthy’s performance, marking a notable 10-point increase compared to January’s figure of 32 percent. Meanwhile, approximately 36 percent expressed disapproval, a small improvement compared with the 37 percent recorded four months ago.McCarthy’s popularity was drawn largely across party lines, with Republicans showing much higher approval of his performance compared to Democrats. The poll found...

Big Labor and its acolytes have been trumpeting a recent Gallup poll suggesting widespread public support for organized labor.According to the survey, about 71 percent of Americans expressed a favorable opinion of unions, up from 64 percent pre-pandemic and a low of 48 percent in 2009.Even more revealing, they say, are figures from the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) showing the overall number of wage and salary workers belonging to unions increased by 273,000 — 1.9 percent — to 14.3 million during 2022 over the previous year.If true, it would be the best showing for unions since the 1960s.Both notions...

It is hard to think of anyone more disparaged by the media than Donald Trump. In the seven years since he officially entered the political arena, it’s been nonstop hate and lies.Yet, according to the latest survey from the Harvard-CAPS Harris Poll, Donald Trump has higher favorability ratings than any other American politician.The poll found that the top five politicians in terms of favorability are:Donald Trump, 42%Bernie Sanders, 40%Mike Pence, 39%Joe Biden, 38%Kamala Harris, 37%This is an astonishing rejection of the mainstream media’s efforts to destroy Trump with non-stop coverage of the Russian collusion hoax, the J6 Committee, and all...

As her popularity reaches new lows, Vice President Kamala Harris is retreating to one of the few places she knows she’ll get a warm reception — Hollywood. Harris and her husband, Douglas Emhoff, are scheduled to participate in a Democratic fundraiser on Monday evening in Los Angeles, according to multiple reports. Deadline said Walt Disney Television head Dana Walden is hosting the event along with her husband, Matt Walden. Proceeds from the fundraiser will go to the Democratic Grassroots Victory Fund, with money allocated to the Democratic National Committee and state party committees, Deadline reported. The vice president’s trip to...

Morning Consult monitors the approval rating of a set of leaders in democracies globally. Every week, information gets updated for leaders in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, South Korea, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Most leaders in the selected democracies are underwater by a significant margin. Especially those in the West:The notable exceptions are Italy, India, and Mexico. Prime Minister Mario Draghi in Italy just took office. The media describes him as an outsider with no particular political party after a career in economics in the European and global financial bureaucracies. Because he...

Morale among staffers is reportedly low in President Biden’s White House as his first year in office comes to a close and polls show his popularity underwater with the majority of Americans. According to a Politico report late Wednesday, White House staffers are unhappy with their jobs to the point where they anonymously leaked to the online publication in hopes that senior staffers would be alerted to the lack of comradery and overall happiness in the workplace. "A lot of the natural coordination that happens in a typically functioning White House has been lost, and there has been no proactive...

The supposed popularity of "Black Lives Matter, Inc." is a complete fantasy — willfully repeated ad nauseam by the left and the media — that is distorting public discourse around the wave of radicalism that has ravaged our cities this summer. Mainstream polls ostensibly show striking levels of "support" for Black Lives Matter — up to 69 percent of respondents in one recent survey. In another poll, 60 percent said they support the "ideas of the Black Lives Matter movement." Predictably, the liberal press has hailed these surveys as proof of a massive shift in public opinion since the first...

From the day Donald Trump declared his candidacy for President of the United States he faced an unprecedented media onslaught that unsuccessfully tried to sink his campaign. As anyone with eyes and ears is aware, that has continued during his tenure as President. During his first hundred days in office, 89% of network coverage of the Trump presidency was negative. For the entire year of 2018, coverage was 90% negative. During the recent impeachment hysteria (which already feels like ancient history), media bias maxed out with 100% negative coverage. And now we’re in the midst of a global pandemic, which...

The politics of Utah Sen. Mitt Romney’s 11th-hour mystery on how he will vote on President Trump’s impeachment has become sticky now that a new survey finds that the president is more popular in Utah. The Utah Policy survey showed that for the first time since his election, a majority of Utah voters approve of Trump’s job performance, echoing his surge in national surveys. According to the poll analysis, “The survey, conducted for UtahPolicy.com and 2 News by Y2 Analytics shows 52% of likely voters approve of President Trump, while 45% disapprove, giving the president a net-positive approval rating of...

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan repeatedly steered state transportation development money to projects that would increase the value of his real estate holdings, according to a lengthy investigation by Washington Monthly’s Eric Cortellessa. Cortellessa reports that Hogan, who ostensibly left his brother in charge of his real estate brokerage firm when he was elected, has, in fact, maintained ownership and control while serving as governor; the trustees he handpicked to run his company have continued to keep him apprised of its business dealings. And as governor, he has advanced highway and road construction projects that directly boosted the value of land...

Today we are going to take a look at the top 10 most popular sports in the world. But before we do that it is important to know the importance of sports and criteria that should be used to make a ranking of sports. Sports play an important role in our lives. From early childhood years where we take sports very seriously to the later years in life where we consider it as a hobby, fitness ritual, and sometimes even a profession. Today in every part of the world some sport is passionately followed. People take their sporting heroes as...

Socialist 'it girl' Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is no match for President Trump on the popularity front in their mutual home state of New York. According to the Washington Examiner More registered voters in the state of New York view President Trump favorably than outspoken left-wing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., according to the latest poll numbers from the Siena College Research Institute. While neither politician crossed the 40 favorability percent threshold, Trump had the backing of 36 percent of people surveyed, compared to Ocasio-Cortez's 31 percent.  The report has some caveats, notably on the unfavorable front. But in a deep blue state, that...

The mainstream media pretends that their scorn for President Trump is almost universally shared overseas. While globalists everywhere (along with their media allies) dislike him for standing up for national sovereignty, a rising tide of populist revolt is shaking them to their core. And Trump is a hero – even a superhero – to the growing number of anti-globalist populists around the world. Stark evidence of this popularity of President Trump comes from Italy, where a populist government won power – though the media tend to ignore this. The Carnival of Viareggio, described as “world-famous” by Medium.com (the website...

Parents used to worry about “peer pressure” encouraging their kids to experiment with alcohol or drugs, or to have sex. Now, they have to worry that it may encourage their kids (especially daughters) to change sex altogether. If you are a parent of a child or teenager, you owe it to yourself to read World magazine’s latest cover story, which addresses the relatively new but expanding phenomenon of “rapid-onset gender dysphoria,” abbreviated “ROGD.” Advocates for the LGBT movement have long argued that you can diagnose “gender dysphoria” in children who are “consistent, insistent, and persistent” in expressing a discomfort with...