Free Republic

Current polls show Joseph R. Biden anywhere from 10 to 20 points ahead of President Trump — a double-digit blowout. The whole election will come down to Mr. Trump’s handling of the global pandemic, which extensive polling shows is where Mr. Trump is most vulnerable. In 2016, President Trump barely won the election — and only because so many voters assumed he had no chance of winning and stayed home. Also: Russia!

Donald Trump understood from day one that he could never win the presidency talking the way politicians talk. And he could never win by “acting presidential.”....this was a man who was out to crash the gates of Washington. And in order to do that, he had to radically upend the way the game of politics is played. He had to start 'by changing the language'. The royalty of the American political scene— known variously as “the Establishment” or “the elites” or “swamp creatures”—closely guard the language that is spoken in politics. It is a powerful tool in maintaining their grip...

Response to NRO attack on the guy who can win it all

Drudge Report editor, Breitbart News contributor, and Washington Times columnist Charles Hurt said establishment Republicans are "looking for a third-tier person" to challenge Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on the Tuesday edition of the Fox News Channel's "Special Report." Hurt said, "Sure, endorsements are important, but I don't know that getting member of Congress to endorse your campaign at this point does much good, and I agree with what Charles is saying, this idea that they're going to attack Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) for missing votes, in a body that they're all ridiculing is sort of insane, and...

Drudge Report editor, Breitbart News contributor, and Washington Times columnist Charles Hurt is a potential candidate for Congress in Virginia’s 5th District, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Hurt’s brother, Rep. Robert Hurt (R-VA), announced last week that he is retiring from Congress when his term ends in 2016. In addition to his weekly “Nuclear Option” column for Breitbart News, Hurt is a Fox News contributor who is the former Washington editor of the New York Post. His columns have resonated with Breitbart News readers because they often take on the GOP establishment and the cronyism associated with Washington’s bipartisan permanent...

If President Obama suffered a “shellacking” in the 2010 elections, then what he endured Tuesday night was nothing short of a vicious gangland beatdown the likes of which have rarely been seen before in the history of electoral politics.

If President Obama suffered a “shellacking” in the 2010 elections, then what he endured Tuesday night was nothing short of a vicious gangland beatdown the likes of which have rarely been seen before in the history of electoral politics. This, of course, is a wonderful and well-deserved outcome. But beware: America now enters the two most dangerous years of her existence — or certainly the most dangerous since the Great Depression and possibly going all the way back to the Civil War. Not to dismiss the promising results of Tuesday’s election. Voters clearly and forcefully rejected the party, politics and...

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus says the RNC has begun “focusing in” on Hillary Clinton as a candidate for 2016 and will continue to do so. Priebus was asked by radio host Hugh Hewitt on Wednesday whether the RNC would work to attack Clinton as the presumed Democratic nominee for president in 2016, according to a show transcript. “We have. So our research shop, along with America Rising, has been focusing in on Hillary Clinton.

. . . of online media manipulation isn’t exactly new. In fact, it goes back well before Romney’s 2008 campaign got underway in earnest. It seems to date back to sometime in 2005, when RNC operatives arranged a meeting between Matt Drudge and Matt Rhodes — a highly placed operative in the Romney organization. Last year, a delegation of RNC officials flew to Miami Beach, where Drudge lives, for a dinner at the Forge steakhouse to introduce the Internet maven to Matt Rhodes, the party’s new opposition research director. Due to Drudge’s now-close friendship with Romney’s chief aide and longtime...

Rick Santorum was sitting at the center of the Drudge Report's homepage Tuesday afternoon looking like a religious nut. "SANTORUM'S SATAN WARNING," the headline screamed, under a black-and-white photo of the candidate standing behind a lectern with a cross on it. The conservative blogger drives mad crazy traffic, and he's using it to attack the biggest threat to his reported ally, Mitt Romney. This isn't the first time Drudge has gone nuclear on a Republican who threatened Romney's candidacy.

Matt Drudge is the Howard Hughes of the Internet. Like Hughes, he lives in splendid isolation, communicating only through a small group of trusted friends. Like Hughes, his influence has quietly helped shape Republican politics for a generation. But while the eccentric Hughes used money to put his pals in the White House, Drudge has always relied on blogs and Tweets. The Drudge Report, which started life as an emailed gossip column, now receives millions of unique visitors per month. One study found that it drives more traffic than Twitter and Facebook combined. Drudge’s claim to be the authentic voice...

Facing the unthinkable here just seven days ago — a second loss in a row to Newt Gingrich — Mitt Romney’s campaign team hatched a two-part plan to win in Florida: make Newt mad and Mitt meaner. -snip- A team of some of the most fearsome researchers in the business, led by Mr. Romney’s campaign manager, Matt Rhoades, spent days dispensing negative information about Mr. Gingrich, much of it finding its way to the influential Drudge Report, which often serves as a guide for conservative talk radio and television assignment editors and to which Mr. Rhoades has close ties. The...

Thursday, Bloody Thursday the Day the Drudge Report Sold Out It may be the Drudge Report sold out a long time ago and I was just too blind to see it. No one has ever accused me of being the smartest guy in the room. But if someone of the unwashed masses like myself has come to see that he has sold out, it must be quite clear to everyone. On this day he is maliciously and brutally battering a Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States by the name of Newton Leroy Gingrich. I have read the...

I’d like you to take a look at DrudgeReport. There is an all-out war on Newt Gingrich, not merely by the left-wing media, but particularly on the right side of the political divide. Drudge has run as many as nine negative articles about Gingrich simultaneously, but he is running few negative articles about Romney, and those he does run are only half-negative, so it’s becoming clear that Drudge is trying to manipulate the outcome in the direction of a result he prefers. I surely hope conservatives realize that nobody in media is pure, because everybody has biases. In the case...

So much for Matt being fair and balanced and showing just headlines and stories others will not...no...he has 14 stories front and center all anti-Newt right now. No excuse for this...not even ABC/NBC/CBS have 14 anti-Newt stories on their front page. Bias? What bias? Conservatives can trust about nobody in media today and this proves exactly why.

......The Drudge outburst seems to reflect a growing sense among the conservative opinion commentariat that Gingrich as nominee is a serious liability in a pivotal election year, a fact the GOP base has yet to fully grasp. The pundits apparently view themselves as the sober older sibling warning a starry-eyed sister about the hot guy on the Harley who's been around enough to leave a mark.

Newt Gingrich better hope voters who lapped up his delicious hits on the “elite media” and liberals don’t read the Drudge Report this morning. Or the National Review. Or the American Spectator. Or Ann Coulter. If they do, Gingrich comes off looking like a dangerous, anti-Reagan, Clintonian fraud. It’s as if the conservative media over the past 24 hours decided Gingrich is for real, and they need to come clean about the man they really know before it’s too late.

It is always here in the birthplace of the Civil War that things go bump in the night for presidential campaigns. In 2000, John McCain’s surge for the GOP nomination was derailed by rumors he had a love child. Four years ago, Bill Clinton injected race into the Democratic nomination in an effort to derail Barack Obama’s juggernaut campaign in South Carolina. But all the shady twists and turns of the past were nothing compared with the Spanish moss-draped soap opera that has unfolded here in the past week.

Thursday, July 10, 2003 12:00AM EDT My stories stand While we have grown accustomed to seeing the unfiltered spin from Sen. John Edwards' press shop appear in The N&O, your reckless report about me in your July 4 editions struck a new low (Under the Dome/Washington item "Edwards in media tussle"). You ignored the significant implications of stories I wrote and instead called up Edwards' spokespeople (both of them for this major effort) and allowed them to use The N&O to attack me and my credibility for reporting that Edwards had blocked popular legislation in one of his committees. The...