Free Republic

A plea to my Democratic friends: It’s time to start calling Joe Biden a great president. Not a good one. Not a better choice than Donald Trump. Joe Biden is a historically great president. Say it with passion backed by the conviction that it’s true… There’s not much I admire about the modern Republican Party, but I find myself wishing Democrats could learn from their eagerness to unite behind a candidate and echo a consistent message. If a Republican president had a record remotely equaling the Biden record, the only debate among Republicans would be if he should be called...

On her Wednesdy MSNBC program, The 11th Hour host Stephanie Ruhle welcomed the Lincoln Project’s Stuart Stevens and left-wing Prof. Jason Johnson to discuss the state of the nation which included the former accusing the GOP of being a “white extremist party” and the latter accusing the Supreme Court of being “absolutely illegitimate.” Stevens went first as he was asked by Ruhle, “why do Republicans need to sell a whole lot of crazy? You've spent your career working with, trying to elect major Republicans right? Mitt Romney, George W. Bush. Does the Republican Party no longer have a platform that’s...

The Lincoln Project co-founder Stuart Stevens has refused to apologize after the 'Never Trump' group admitted to planting five people carrying tiki torches in front of the Republican candidate for Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin's bus. Stevens' statement came as liberals and Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe's staff joined conservatives in bashing the stunt. McAuliffe's campaign manager called it 'disgusting.' CNN's Chris Cuomo asked Stevens, appearing with longtime Democratic strategist James Carville, if he wanted to apologize for the smear.

Twenty-one men have come forward to accuse longtime Republican strategist John Weaver of sexually harassing them online. The New York Times outlined interviews with those 21 accusers - many who were not named - in an article published Sunday. It came two weeks after Weaver publicly admitted to sending inappropriate messages to men and stepped down from the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump super PAC he co-founded. The accusers described how Weaver, 61, groomed and preyed on them for years with unsolicited promises to help them get work in politics in exchange for sex. 'Help you other times. Give advice, counsel,...

staffers with the intention of holding those people professionally “accountable” for supporting the president, according to Stuart Stevens, a Republican operative who works with the Lincoln Project. Stuart Stevens revealed in a tweet Saturday that the group is building what appears to be a blacklist.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/07/08/kill-electoral-college-let-winners-win-force-republicans-change-column/1558858001/

You can’t make it up—there’s a 25 percent or so chance that an unhinged demagogue will be America’s next commander in chief. A few years ago I started noodling on a novel that I hoped would expose the fault lines that seemed to be splitting our politics. My thought was to take reality and push it to the edge both for comic affect and to offer up a cautionary tale of where our politics might be headed. I finished the book in the summer of 2015 and I was a little worried that I had gone too far. How believable...

Former Romney Adviser on Trump Alternative: ‘Until Donald Trump Has the Nomination…All Things Are Possible’ By NOAH FITZGEREL Jun 24, 2016, 5:01 AM ET There remain deep rumblings inside the establishment of the Republican Party about presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. This week’s episode of ABC’s "Powerhouse Politics" podcast paints a picture in which the Republican National Committee may focus its efforts on down-ticket races to hedge the risk of losing the White House in November to presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, leaving a Trump operation with little infrastructure of its own scrambling to catch up. Noting the frustration...

On Friday afternoon, at an exclusive Republican donor retreat here hosted by Mitt Romney, frustration boiled over. During an off-the-record question-and-answer session with House Speaker Paul Ryan, Meg Whitman, the billionaire Hewlett Packard chief executive officer, confronted the speaker over his endorsement of Trump. Whitman, a major GOP giver who ran for California governor in 2010, compared Trump to historical demagogues like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and wanted to know how the speaker could get behind him. At another discussion session during the day, which featured top Romney alumni Stuart Stevens and Matt Rhoades, Ana Navarro, a Republican contributor...

Stuart Stevens called Trump "a dangerous person" and "someone who would embarrass America." The Republican Party's top strategist in the 2012 election would rather see Hillary Clinton as the next president than Donald Trump. "Personally, I think Hillary Clinton would be a better president than Donald Trump because I think that Donald Trump is a dangerous person and is someone who would embarrass America," Stuart Stevens, who advised 2012 nominee Mitt Romney, said Tuesday on Bloomberg's "With All Due Respect." "I have no desire to see Hillary Clinton as president of the United States," he added. "But if this is...

Campaigns are about conflict. It is absolutely necessary not only to show why you are better but the other candidate is worse. Say what you will about Donald Trump, but he understands that to win a fight, you have to fight. Now the race is at a stage where it is clear to beat Trump, a candidate must engage Trump and drive him from the race. .... The good news should be that Trump is one of the easiest candidates to engage and defeat in modern history. But no one is taking advantage of his vulnerabilities. To defeat a candidate,...

Republican operatives from inside and outside New Hampshire agree: Sen. Ted Cruz is all but doomed to finish below the top tier in the Granite State. The winning coalition Cruz put together in Iowa won't work in New Hampshire, they say, pointing to the fact New Hampshire has the second-lowest rate of church attendance in the country. So the edge that Cruz had among evangelicals isn't particularly applicable there. "I would advise Cruz to skip New Hampshire and go to South Carolina. I believe you shouldn't compete anywhere where it's not a favorable battlefield to win," said Stuart Stevens, a...

El Trumpo was not too pleased with Romney advisor Stuart Stevens over his prediction about when the Donald’s campaign going down. So he did what he does – started a Twitter war: Political strategist Stuart Stevens,who led Romney down the tubes in what should have been an easy victory,has terrible political instincts! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 5, 2015

The top strategist to 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney doesn't think 2016 front-runner Donald Trump will even be in the race when the first votes are cast. Stuart Stevens, an unaligned strategist who spearheaded Romney's successful bid for the GOP nomination, said Monday that Trump is likely scared of losing. "I don't think he's going to be on the ballot by February 1," Stevens told CNN's Jake Tapper..."The greatest sin in his value system is to be a loser, and most people who run for president lose. I don't think he'll risk it." Trump enjoys a solid, but shrinking,...

Making political predictions rarely turns out well, but here’s one: Donald Trump will not be a candidate for president in 2016. What? Yes, I know, he’s already announced. In my view, though, he won’t take this all the way to the ballot in Iowa, New Hampshire, or any of the Republican caucus or primary elections. Why? Because he’s Donald Trump and everything we know about him tells us he won’t do it. Let’s step back from the Trump frenzy and consider the realities of a possible Trump run. First is the essential question: Will Donald Trump be the next president...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) In the fall of 2007, as Mike Huckabee was surging in the Iowa polls, Mitt Romney’s foundering presidential campaign dispatched a camera crew to Arkansas with the charge to produce one of the most brutal ads of the election cycle. The final product — a withering spot that tied Huckabee to a 2003 murder committed by a serial rapist who was paroled while he was governor of Arkansas — never saw the light of day. But the unaired ad, obtained this week by BuzzFeed News, highlights a potentially potent line of attack on Huckabee as he considers a 2016...

Stuart Stevens was the chief strategist for the Romney presidential campaign. Over the years, one of the more troubling characteristics of the Democratic Party and the left in general has been a shortage of loyalty and an abundance of self-loathing. It would be a shame if we Republicans took a narrow presidential loss as a signal that those are traits we should emulate. I appreciate that Mitt Romney was never a favorite of D.C.’s green-room crowd or, frankly, of many politicians. That’s why, a year ago, so few of those people thought that he would win the Republican nomination. But...

Romney Adviser: It Was the Messaging By Robert Costa | November 7, 2012 Boston — A Romney adviser partly blames last night’s defeat on a weak message. “Turnout was the big problem, since we didn’t get all of McCain’s voters to the polls, but we really should have been talking more about Benghazi and Obamacare,” an adviser says, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Those are major issues and Romney rarely mentioned them in the final days.” The adviser expects Stuart Stevens, Romney’s chief strategist, to bear the brunt of the blame, but not all of it. “There is a...

Charleston, South Carolina (CNN) - With Newt Gingrich creeping up in the polls and potentially on the cusp of a South Carolina victory, one of Mitt Romney's senior advisers sought to change expectations ahead of Saturdays' pivotal presidential primary. Though his campaign has competed aggressively in the state and is hungry for a win here, Romney strategist Stuart Stevens said the idea of a loss to Gingrich on Saturday is not far-fetched. "Do I think we could lose South Carolina? Sure. Of course," Stevens told CNN after Thursday's presidential debate in Charleston. "The very idea that we are sting where...

If the Republican primary is now a Mitt Romney-vs.-Herman Cain contest, Romney has an ace up his sleeve: One of his top advisers has run a winning campaign against Cain before. Not many in politics can make that claim. In his only real previous try for elected office, Cain ran in Georgia's 2004 GOP Senate primary, coming in second to now-Sen. Johnny Isakson. Back then, Romney strategist Stuart Stevens was a consultant to Isakson. Of Cain, Stevens recalls: "He scared the heck out of us." Cain's 2004 candidacy positioned him to the right of an establishment candidate distrusted by the...