Free Republic

When given the chance this election season, Republican voters are tossing out hidebound incumbents and ushering in new blood, sending a signal to the GOP establishment that the flip-flopping and rampant spending of the latter Bush years won’t be tolerated. Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who’d boasted of her Appropriations Committee power over pork-barrel spending, learned that lesson last week — conceding defeat to upstart challenger Joe Miller, an Iraq War veteran and Tea Party favorite. In this election cycle, the GOP grassroots also ended the tenures of incumbent Sens. Bob Bennett of Utah and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania — despite...

Democratic spin doctors have set out how their side is going to hold on to a majority in the House. They'll capture four at-risk Republican seats, hold half of the next 30 or so Democratic at-risk seats, and avoid significant losses on target seats lower on the list. That's one plausible scenario. The shift of opinion away from Democrats, so evident in the polls, could turn out to be illusory. The widely held assumption that Republicans will turn out in greater numbers than Democrats could prove wrong. Democratic candidates do indeed have a money advantage in many close races, and...

Trust in state government among Michigan residents and their views of Gov. Jennifer Granholm are at all-time lows, according to a poll released on Monday. The poll found 43.7 percent of those surveyed said Granholm was doing a "poor" job; 35.5 percent rated her as "fair"; 17.4 percent said "good"; and 3.4 percent said "excellent." Only 20.8 percent of those surveyed rated Granholm as "excellent" or "good." That's the governor's lowest rating since she took office. The highest was 57.2 percent when Granholm first took office in 2003. Meanwhile, 37.0 percent of those polled said they seldom or never trust...

WASHINGTON – Once, California Democrats led the way to a year of the women. Now, nearly two decades later, Republicans hope it's their turn. Meg Whitman won the party's nomination for California governor on Tuesday and Carly Fiorina will carry the GOP banner into the fall campaign for a Senate seat, a pair of wealthy businesswomen and first-time candidates running against veteran politicians in a year of palpable anti-establishment sentiment. In next-door Nevada, a third woman contender, Sharron Angle, won the right to oppose Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in the fall. And hundreds of miles to the east, South...

...the electorate is in a unique mood. Haley is viewed as the ultimate anti-good-ole-boys candidate, the outsider who shares the values of the Tea Party. Unfortunately, unsubstantiated and unproven charges of marital infidelity hit the campaign like a ton of bricks in the waning days of the race. One source of the charges in particular could not prove his allegations, despite his insistence he had 'documentation.' That proved to be false. The other accuser worked for the Bauer campaign. He has no proof except his own statement that he had 'an inappropriate physical relationship' with Haley at some point in...

Voters sent a strong message to President Obama this week that the change they now believe in doesn't have much to do with him whatsoever -- Americans will vote for change in 2010 by kicking the incumbents out, period. But the message from the polling places in the four states with special primaries on Tuesday wasn't the main one the White House should have been listening to this week -- the message of the markets is far more important and it is signaling tough times ahead for Democrats come November. David Axelrod, listen up. Indeed, the markets are flashing big...

Arizona Senator, Jon Kyl, was on Face the Nation the other day talking about Obama's latest pick for the Supreme Court of the US, Elena Kagan. During this interview he showed that he really had very little information on her background and core far left liberal beliefs. As usual he came off to me as an unknowing politician from Washington DC. He ended the interview by stating that a filibuster was off the table. Folks, we can now concede that this nominee will get voted in as the most powerful way of stopping her has been withdrawn. All the Democrats...

WASHINGTON – Democrats Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania and Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas struggled uncertainly for nomination to new Senate terms Tuesday and tea party activists clashed with the Republican hierarchy in Kentucky in primaries testing anti-establishment anger in both political parties. In a fourth race with national implications, Republican Tim Burns and Democrat Mark Critz vied to fill out the final few months in the term of the late Rep. John Murtha .. ... .. Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden in Oregon faced little opposition .. for .. a third full term. Voters in Pennsylvania and Oregon also selected gubernatorial candidates.

The Power of Incumbency… No More In politics, incumbency usually provides a significant advantage to a candidate. Usually special interests and large-dollar donors flow to those who are currently in power and have control over government purse strings. Incumbents also carry the distinct advantage of staying in the public eye simply in the course of their duties and at the public expense, making campaigning considerably easier. So, election after elections, odds are you get to keep your seat. No more, however. Today, there is an electoral tide turning against this once-impenetrable head-start. Today, it seems that being an incumbent now...

Is America losing its taste for bacon? When it comes to the congressional variety, members of the powerful appropriations committees are finding that holding the nation's purse strings - and the power the positions afford in doling out pork-barrel projects back home - are no guarantee these days for re-election. Six of the 13 members of the Senate Appropriations Committee up for re-election this year have announced they'll retire or have lost a primary challenge. A seventh, Sen. Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Democrat, is trailing challenger Rep. Joe Sestak in the polls heading to Tuesday's primary. The committee has 30 total...

Over the next 11 days, the Senate could lose three of its incumbents in primary fights. For some perspective on how politically stunning that fact is, consider this: since 1980, only seven senators have lost their seat in a primary election. And one of them, Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman, rebounded to win the general election. Now, Utah Republican Sen. Bob Bennett, Arkansas Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln, and Pennsylvania Republican-turned-Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter are facing serious intra-party fights to hold on to their seats. Bennett could lose his seat on Saturday, when 3,500 delegates at the Utah Republican Party’s state convention will...

Liberal propagandists are very good at changing the subject, their task made all the more easy thanks to their firm grasp on both the channel and volume controls of the mainstream media remote control device. >p>Take for very good example, the current election cycle. Democrats are in trouble. Big trouble. We know that. They know that. But it is also very handy to provide excuses, excuses that will disguise the real reason for rising voter discontent. So the story becomes not that the public is outraged with Democrats or liberals or those who rammed the stimulus or the health care/student...

They're dropping like flies, these Democrats. Some of natural causes (Murtha), some because of special elections (Massachusetts special election), some are being railroaded out (Gov. Paterson), some are being eaten by their own (Schumer), and some are mysteriously retiring (Bayh). It's widely known that the wheels of justice grind slowly, but they do grind -- and in this case, the more the better. And yet, there seems to be an uncanny clustering of misfortune that suggests something more than coincidence at work. While we cannot attribute, prima fascie, the natural causes to anything known to be in the control of...

WASHINGTON – It is probably fair to say that U.S. Senator Arlen Specter, D-Pa., started it all. He perceived, long before anyone else, that this will not be the year of the incumbent. Armed with campaign battle scars, a cantankerous personality and fairly long-in-the-tooth seniority (even by Senate standards), Specter has come to symbolize the end of the incumbent. A CNN poll last week showed that only one-third of U.S. voters (a record-low number) think their members of Congress deserve to go back next year. When Specter switched parties last spring, he was brutally honest why: He didn't want to...

Just when you thought Congress couldn't reach a new low, it did. Only a third of US voters think their Congress members have earned the right to get sent back next year -- a record-low number, a poll released yesterday shows. Thirty-four percent of voters queried think members of the House and the Senate ought to be re-elected -- while an astonishing 63 percent were in favor of throwing the bums out, the new CNN poll showed. That's the worst performance for Congress in the history of the network's polling -- the latest red flag for the floundering Democratic leadership...

In the run up to the mid-term elections of 2010 it seems as if incumbents can read the proverbial writing on the wall. Evan Bayh's announcement is the most recent in a long stream of retirements. What better way to heal the "body politic" than to purge from its bowels the parasites that infect it. What better way to address the financial meltdown we have experienced than to give Congress a colonic and flush away the detritus that litters both sides of the aisle.

Here's the lead and following two graphs for The New York Times story on the results of its latest joint public opinion survey with CBS News: "At a time of deepening political disaffection and intensified distress about the economy, President Obama enjoys an edge over Republicans in the battle for public support, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. [Snip] Reading those graphs might well lead one to conclude that, while the president certainly has some problems, his difficulties are less severe than those facing Republicans and he enjoys significant public support on his major policies. But a...

Well there is no doubt that the Tea Parties are indeed a force in American politics. The democrats called it a fluke when they lost the governorships in New Jersey and Virginia. The loss at Massachusetts flipped them on their collective ears. So what do we do now? I say let's roll on even harder while we have the momentum. Now is not the time to rest on our laurels and wait and see what Sarah Palin and Scott Brown do now.

As Congress begins picking through President Obama's vast election year budget, many Democratic incumbents and candidates seem to be finding something they love — to campaign against. A Democratic Senate candidate in Missouri denounced the budget's sky-high deficit. A Florida Democrat whose district includes the Kennedy Space Center hit the roof over NASA budget cuts. And an endangered Senate Democrat denounced proposed cuts in farm subsidies. A headline on the 2010 campaign website of Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), blares her opposition to Obama's farm budget: ``Blanche stands up for Arkansas farm families,'' it says. Heading into an election season in...

Forget the State of the Union speech last night. In fact, forget Washington and Beacon Hill. If you wanted to see the people who are changing the course of American politics, you should have been at a racetrack in Braintree on Tuesday night. That’s when I hosted a campaign training session for regular citizens who want to run for local and state offices. The room at F1 Boston’s conference facility was set up for 200. Half an hour before our start time, we had 300. By the time we began, we had nearly 400 attendees - and another 100 or...