Free Republic

Last year’s Democratic vice-presidential nominee has thrown himself into a robust atonement-and-explanation tour, though aides insist there is no grand strategy.Nearly seven months since his ticket lost the 2024 presidential election, Tim Walz is trying all at once to make amends for everything he thinks went wrong.He is going to Republican areas where Democrats lost ground. He is sitting for countless interviews after former Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign limited his media exposure. And as his party engages in collective finger-pointing, he is among the few Democrats admitting that they themselves made mistakes.“I know my job and I didn’t get...

Locked out of power in Washington, the party is struggling to agree on a unified message of opposition. Some of its lawmakers are even telling Republicans they want to work together.As President Trump pushes aggressively to reshape the federal government, Democrats have retreated into a political crouch that reflects their powerlessness in Washington.Far from rising up in outrage, the opposition party’s lawmakers have taken a muted wait-and-see approach as Mr. Trump tries to end birthright citizenship, halt diversity programs in the federal government, undo foreign policy alliances and seek retribution against his perceived political enemies.In some cases, Democrats are even...

America’s democracy will again be put the test, and its government will veer sharply to the right. Kamala Harris and Democrats were dealt stunning defeats across the country. Americans have voted former President Donald J. Trump back into the nation’s highest office four years after he fomented a riot at the Capitol to try to block his removal from power. His election is likely to again place the country’s democracy under enormous stress. For the last decade, he has demonstrated that he has little regard for the checks and balances that have defined American government since the dawn of the...

As the presidential contest enters the final sprint, campaign aides and allies close to Vice President Kamala Harris are growing cautiously optimistic about her chances of victory, saying the race is shifting in her favor. Top Democratic strategists are increasingly hopeful that the campaign’s attempts to cast former President Donald J. Trump as a fascist — paired with an expansive battleground-state operation and strength among female voters still energized by the end of federal abortion rights — will carry Ms. Harris to a narrow triumph. Even some close to Mr. Trump worry that the push to label him a budding...

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump are carrying out a virtual house-to-house hunt for the final few voters who are still up for grabs, guided by months of painstaking research about these elusive Americans. Inside the Delaware headquarters of Ms. Harris’s campaign, analysts have spent 18 months curating a list of which television shows and podcasts voters consume in the battleground states. Her team has assigned every voter in these states a “contactability score” from 0 to 100 to determine just how hard that person will be to reach — and who is best to deliver...

In Eastern Nebraska, far from the presidential battleground states, a drama is playing out that could, in a perfectly plausible November scenario, have history-altering repercussions for the nation’s future and the next president — and it may all come down to one man. A single Republican state senator from Omaha, Mike McDonnell, has so far stood firm against a push by former President Donald J. Trump, national Republicans and the Nebraska G.O.P. to change Nebraska from a state that divides its electoral votes by congressional district to one that awards all of them to the statewide winner. Maine is the...

Vice President Kamala Harris expects former President Donald J. Trump to lie repeatedly during their debate Tuesday, she said in a radio interview that was broadcast on Monday.“We should be prepared for the fact that he is not burdened by telling the truth,” Ms. Harris told Rickey Smiley, a morning radio host whose show is broadcast on 76 stations. “We should be prepared for the fact that he is probably going to speak a lot of untruths.”Ms. Harris’s prediction, which she made in an interview she recorded last Wednesday, serves as a bit of table-setting for a campaign that has...

Vice President Kamala Harris is holed up for five days in a Pittsburgh hotel, doing highly choreographed debate practice sessions ahead of Tuesday night’s clash. There’s a stage and replica TV lighting and an adviser in full Lee Strasberg method-acting mode, not just playing Donald J. Trump but inhabiting him, wearing a boxy suit and a long tie.The former president’s preparations are more improv. They are pointedly called not “debate prep” but “policy time,” meant to refresh him on his record. Nobody is playing Ms. Harris; sometimes his aides sit at a long table opposite him and bat questions back...

Opponents of Donald J. Trump are drafting potential lawsuits in case he is elected in November and carries out mass deportations, as he has vowed. One group has hired a new auditor to withstand any attempt by a second Trump administration to unleash the Internal Revenue Service against them. Democratic-run state governments are even stockpiling abortion medication. A sprawling network of Democratic officials, progressive activists, watchdog groups and ex-Republicans has been taking extraordinary steps to prepare for a potential second Trump presidency, drawn together by the fear that Mr. Trump’s return to power would pose a grave threat not just...

In some ways, it was the turn of events that Democratic voters had dreamed of and some of the party’s lawmakers had long demanded: After years of telling lies, shattering norms, inciting a riot at the Capitol and being impeached twice, Donald Trump on Thursday became the first former president to face criminal charges. But as the gravity of the moment sank in, Democratic voters, party officials and activists across the country absorbed the news of Trump’s extraordinary indictment with a more complex set of reactions. Their feelings ranged from jubilation and vindication to anxieties about the substance of the...

NEW ORLEANS — For the last two years, Democrats in battleground states have played defense against Republican efforts to curtail voting access and amplify doubts about the legitimacy of the nation’s elections. Now it is Democrats, who retained all but one of the governor’s offices they hold and won control of state legislatures in Michigan and Minnesota, who are ready to go on offense in 2023. They are putting forward a long list of proposals that include creating automatic voter registration systems, preregistering teenagers to vote before they turn 18, returning the franchise to felons released from prison and criminalizing...

HARRISBURG, Pa. — In the same spot where he spoke to thousands of people at a raucous State Capitol rally demanding an end to pandemic restrictions in April 2020, Doug Mastriano appeared on Saturday before a crowd of just a few dozen — about half of whom were volunteers for his ragtag campaign for governor of Pennsylvania. Mr. Mastriano, an insurgent state senator who in the spring cruised to the Republican nomination, is learning this fall that while it is one thing to win a crowded G.O.P. primary on the back of online fame and Donald J. Trump’s endorsement, it...

More than 30 years ago, Robert Reives Sr. marched into a meeting of his county government in Sanford, North Carolina, with a demand: Create a predominantly Black district in the county, which was 23% Black at the time but had no Black representation, or face a lawsuit under the Voting Rights Act. The county commission refused, and Reives prepared to sue. But after the county settled and redrew its districts, he was elected in 1990 as Lee County’s first Black commissioner, a post he has held comfortably ever since. Until this year. Republicans, newly in power and in control of...

WASHINGTON — A year before the polls open in the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans are already poised to flip at least five seats in the closely divided House thanks to redrawn district maps that are more distorted, more disjointed and more gerrymandered than any since the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. The rapidly forming congressional map, one-quarter of which has taken shape as districts are redrawn this year, represents an even more extreme warping of American political architecture, with state legislators in many places moving aggressively to cement their partisan dominance. The flood of gerrymandering, carried out by...

Kevin Rusch was at home on a recent Sunday evening scrolling through Facebook when he saw a photo that shocked him: A man with an American flag bandanna wrapped around his head stood at a rally demanding Wisconsin lift orders that had shuttered schools and businesses. That man was David Murdock, a cardiologist from his hometown, Wausau. And, like the hundreds of other people at the rally, Murdock was maskless and did not appear to be practicing social distancing. In one photo, Murdock’s arm was slung around a priest, with the two holding a sign that read “We are an...

With concerns mounting over how the country can conduct elections during a pandemic and Democrats pressing for alternatives to in-person voting, President Donald Trump has begun pushing a false argument that has circulated among conservatives for years - that voting by mail is a recipe for fraud. “Mail ballots, they cheat,” Trump said at the White House on Tuesday afternoon. “Mail ballots are very dangerous for this country because of cheaters. They go collect them. They are fraudulent in many cases. They have to vote. They should have voter ID, by the way.” Studies have shown that all forms of...

The New York Times is trying to explain the almost total lack of black support for Peter Buttigieg without a mention of his homosexuality. The Times beclowns itself today with a long article titled, “Pete Buttigieg Is Struggling With Black Democrats. Here’s Why,” that doesn’t even mention widespread negative attitudes among African Americans toward homosexual behavior. The only mention of sexuality at all comes 40 paragraphs into a 41-paragraph story, when the article notes: And Mark Barbee, the first black mayor of Bridgeport, Pa., is, like Mr. Buttigieg, an openly gay millennial mayor. He endorsed Mr. Buttigieg in September and...

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has 154 endorsements from current or former black or Hispanic elected officials. Senator Kamala Harris has 93. Senator Bernie Sanders has 91. Senator Cory Booker has 50. Senator Elizabeth Warren has 43. Mayor Pete Buttigieg has six. The South Bend, Ind., mayor has surged to first place in some Iowa polls and has built a big-money fund-raising operation that is the strongest in the Democratic presidential field.

Reducing Pete Buttigieg’s struggle to attract black support solely to black homophobia is not only erroneous, it is a disgusting, racist trope, secretly nursed and insidiously whispered by white liberals with contempt for the very black people they court and need. I have never been blind to this — the people who see black religiosity as an indicator of primitive thinking and lack of enlightenment. (For the record, I am bisexual and not a religious man.) They are those who see black people as a blight on our big cities, pathologically prone to violence and in need of pity and...

Bruce Rauner, the billionaire Republican nominee for Illinois governor, is doing all he can to turn himself into a career politician named Mark Kirk. Fresh off a closer-than-expected primary victory over three underfunded opponents, Rauner is avoiding social issues at all costs and hewing to a throw-the-bums-out message against the unpopular Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn. Rauner has on his staff four Kirk alumni in his effort to replicate the moderate GOP senator’s path to blue-state victory. And like Kirk — and unlike Republicans in almost everywhere else in the country — Rauner avoids bashing President Barack Obama, who remains popular...