Free Republic

His super PAC, which is said to have amassed $400 million alongside its nonprofit arm, has grown even more influential. And powerful groups for congressional Republicans are being stocked with Trump allies.President Trump is harnessing the Republican Party’s all-encompassing deference to him to exert even greater control over the G.O.P. big-money world, which had long been one of the party’s final remaining redoubts of Trump skepticism. For years, the super PACs allied with House and Senate Republicans have been some of the most powerful and independent fiefs in American politics, raising and spending hundreds of millions of dollars in each...

On a Friday in late September, Donald J. Trump took time off the campaign trail for a closed-door meeting at Mar-a-Lago with officials representing the vaping industry. The vaping emissaries talked about loosening regulations and told the former president he had “saved” the industry in the past. The group — including Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, and another 2016 campaign aide, Michael Rubino — showed him mock-ups of mailers they were sending out through Election Day. Mr. Trump asked for input on what he could say on social media about a complicated regulatory issue. Within hours, Mr. Trump...

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...

Donald J. Trump took his seat at the dining table in his triplex penthouse apartment atop Trump Tower on the last Sunday in September, alongside some of the most sought-after and wealthiest figures in the Republican Party.There was Paul Singer, the billionaire hedge fund manager who finances Republican campaigns and pro-Israel causes, and Warren Stephens, the billionaire investment banker. Joining them were Betsy DeVos, the billionaire former education secretary under Mr. Trump, and her husband, Dick, as well as the billionaire Joe Ricketts and his son Todd.Some politicians might have taken the moment to be charming and ingratiating with the...

Control of the Senate appears likely to flip from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party this fall, as one of the nation’s most endangered Democrats, Senator Jon Tester of Montana, trails his Republican challenger in his bid for re-election, according to a new poll from The New York Times and Siena College. Mr. Tester, who first won election to the Senate in 2006, is winning over moderate and independent voters and running far ahead of the Democrat at the top of the ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris. But as of now, that does not appear to be enough to...

Late on Sunday morning, Vice President Kamala Harris summoned a small clutch of her closest advisers and allies to the Naval Observatory, where she lives and works, with little notice and even less information. President Biden had informed Ms. Harris earlier that morning that he was withdrawing from the race. The vice president had assembled her team so that the exact moment Mr. Biden formally quit, at 1:46 p.m. — one minute after the president had informed his own senior staff — they were ready to go. Time was of the essence. A sprawling call list of the most important...

In a sprint of a race, Ms. Harris is poised to attack Donald Trump on his felonies and, in a 2024 twist, his age, but Republicans will be galvanized to fight her, too. Vice President Kamala Harris swiftly established herself as the Democratic front-runner to take on Donald J. Trump within hours of President Biden’s exit on Sunday, fundamentally rewiring the presidential contest at warp speed.

On his last day as president on Jan. 20, 2021, Donald Trump stood in a snapping wind and waved goodbye to relatives and supporters before he took his final flight on Air Force One back to Mar-a-Lago. No elected Republican of any stature showed up at Joint Base Andrews for the bleak farewell. Trump, at that moment, was a pariah among Republican elites. The party’s leaders in the House and Senate, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, blamed him for the Capitol siege. Party fundraisers assured donors they were done with him. On conference calls, House Republican leaders contemplated a “post-Trump”...

If you've read RedState for any length of time, you know one of the things we are most known for is our hard-hitting commentary on press bias. Whether you come for the facts or the snark, we do our best to deliver insight into how the far-left twists narratives to push their political desires. That's what makes this next story so surprising. According to Politico, Donald Trump's campaign team wined and dined with top left-wing reporters on Tuesday night in preparation for the GOP primary debate (the former president will not be attending). SPOTTED IN MILWAUKEE — Team Trump wining...

... All across America, Democrats are using abortion as a powerful cudgel in their 2022 television campaigns, paying for an onslaught of ads in House, Senate and governor’s races that show how swiftly abortion politics have shifted since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in late June. With national protections for abortion rights suddenly gone and bans going into effect in many states, senior White House officials and top Democratic strategists believe the issue has radically reshaped the 2022 landscape in their favor. They say it has not only reawakened the party’s progressive base, but also provided a wedge...

The Federal Election Commission has dismissed Republican accusations that Twitter violated election laws in October by blocking people from posting links to an unsubstantiated New York Post article about Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter Biden, in a decision that is likely to set a precedent for future cases involving social media sites and federal campaigns. The F.E.C. determined that Twitter’s actions regarding the Hunter Biden article had been undertaken for a valid commercial reason, not a political purpose, and were thus allowable, according to a document outlining the decision obtained by The New York Times. The commission’s ruling, which...

Former President Donald J. Trump on Wednesday sued three tech giants — Facebook, Twitter and Google — and the firms’ chief executives after the platforms took various steps to ban him or block him from posting. Mr. Trump, speaking from his Bedminster, N.J., golf club, announced that he would serve as the lead plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit, arguing that he has been censored wrongfully by the tech companies. Speaking about “freedom of speech” and the First Amendment — which applies to the government, not to private-sector companies — Mr. Trump called his lawsuit, which was filed on Wednesday in...

PITTSBURGH — Though they are both Democrats, John Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor, and Bill Peduto, this city’s mayor, have their differences on the environment. Mr. Fetterman, who toppled an incumbent Democrat in 2018 from the left, nevertheless calls Pennsylvania “the Saudi Arabia of natural gas” and sees extracting and taxing gas as critical to the state’s economy and the “union way of life.” Mr. Peduto lobbied unsuccessfully against a local petrochemical plant and is steering his once-struggling steel town to be independent of fossil fuels within 15 years. But they agree on one thing: a pledge to ban all hydraulic...

After five debates including at least 10 candidates, tonight’s face-off among seven Democrats will be the most intimate affair of the 2020 primary. The shrinking stage has not been without controversary: only one non-white candidate, businessman Andrew Yang, will be featured.

A member of the Republican National Committee rules panel accused his own party leadership of “institutional tyranny” on Monday, another escalation in the growing internal battle over the party’s arcane parliamentary procedures. Solomon Yue, the Oregon committeeman and member of the RNC’s Rules Committee, sent a more than 1,300-word email, obtained by POLITICO, to members of the rules panel on Monday morning, charging that RNC Chairman Reince Priebus and his allies had improperly tried to scuttle Yue’s proposal to change the underlying rulebook for what could be the party’s first contested convention in 40 years this summer. Yue is the...

Despite landslide victories on Tuesday, Donald Trump still needs to win Indiana — and he’s starting to act like it. The frugal Manhattan mogul has begun opening his wallet for the air war, spending more than $900,000 on TV and radio ads. He’s working the inside game, wooing Gov. Mike Pence one-on-one in what multiple Indiana insiders said appears to have been a successful effort to keep the governor on the endorsement sidelines. And Trump’s new campaign strategist Paul Manafort has been telling Republican officials, multiple people told POLITICO, that Trump is in the midst of doubling the ground team...

The collective reluctance to engage crystalized the state of the GOP nomination fight with five days left until winner-take-all primaries in Ohio and Florida that are must-win contests for native sons John Kasich and Rubio, respectively. They're fighting to survive, as is Cruz. But they're also looking to preserve their own dignity. As the nomination fight approaches what could be a climactic moment where Trump becomes the GOP’s presumptive nominee, his rivals are ditching the personal insults that only Trump seems capable of executing. No one, in fact, is eager to attack him at all—even on these issues of real...

SPARTANBURG, S.C. -- Ted Cruz's campaign is trying to make the most of Gov. Nikki Haley's endorsement of Marco Rubio days ahead of the South Carolina primary: driving sky-high his political expectations here. "If he doesn't finish first, this is a massive loss," Jason Miller, a senior Cruz adviser, said hours after news reports began circulating that Haley would endorse Rubio at a rally Wednesday evening. "Rubio has to win here." Earlier this week, Jeb Bush had called Haley's endorsement "the most powerful, meaningful one in the state." Haley's backing of Rubio comes on top of the support of Sen....

MOUNT PLEASANT, S.C. - Days before the primary in military-heavy South Carolina, Ted Cruz came to a warship here to deliver a detailed plan to rebuild America's military after what he called "years of neglect" under President Barack Obama."More tooth, less tail – that will be our guiding philosophy," Cruz declared.In a sign of the speech's seriousness and importance, Cruz, who prefers to speak extemporaneously, stood at a lectern in a blue suit and tie and spoke from notes, with American flags and war planes behind him, aboard the U.S.S. Yorktown.For much of the 2016 race, Cruz has sought a...

Donald Trump unexpectedly announced Friday that he would skip a major Republican gathering to be held later in the day in South Carolina due to an unidentified “significant business transaction.” Trump was one of 11 GOP presidential candidates slated to speak at the Heritage Action Presidential Forum at an arena in Greenville. The event is co-sponsored by two of the biggest names in South Carolina GOP politics: Gov. Nikki Haley and former Sen. Jim DeMint. Trump’s campaign said his undisclosed transaction “was expected to close Thursday” but a delay made him unable to attend. “He sends his regrets,” the campaign...