Free Republic

The current Republican front-runner has a polling problem. A new Fox News survey shows Donald Trump with a single-point lead on Ben Carson, 24 percent to 23 percent, a gap that is well within the survey’s margin of error and 7 points smaller than it was when the same pollsters asked the question last month.

Donald Trump may seem invincible right now, but his current run can’t last. Even if the belligerent billionaire and current GOP front-runner doesn’t implode on the debate stage next week or on the campaign trail next month, the fundamentals of American politics will still catch up to him: At some point the GOP field will narrow and an establishment favorite will consolidate enough support to knock Trump from his perch. Eventually, that means he will exit a nominating battle he cannot win. It’s no surprise, then, that the Washington parlor game of predicting how Trump’s campaign will end is now...

In the days since Friday's horrific attacks in Paris—the most deadly act of terrorism on European soil in more than a decade—something approaching a consensus has emerged among politicos, pundits, and the political press corps in Washington: The fear-inducing violence in France could bring order to what has been a chaotic Republican presidential campaign here at home. The New York Times reports that the attacks have "thrust national security to the heart of the presidential race, forcing candidates to scramble and possibly prompting voters to reconsider their flirtations with unconventional candidates." Bloomberg Politics calls it "an important gut-check moment for...

Ted Cruz arrived in Las Vegas for Tuesday night's fifth Republican debate surging in the national polls and as the newly anointed favorite in Iowa, where support among evangelicals was always expected to be a strength. After the performance he turned in under the bright lights of this latest debate, he's likely to depart riding an even bigger wave of attention. Cruz has always been one of the strongest and most experienced debaters on the stage, but he was even more aggressive on Tuesday than he has been in past debates. Instead of focusing his attention on criticizing the moderators...

Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are set to huddle in private in New York City on Wednesday, but Trump claims that he’s not sure why he even agreed to the meeting. “I don’t know why I’m meeting him, to be honest, but I do have respect for him,” the real estate mogul said of his fellow White House hopeful during an MSNBC interview Wednesday. “I respect the fact that … he came out and he came out very strongly and agreed with what I said on illegal immigration. And he came out very strongly and he came out early, and...

Conservatives hoping to keep Donald Trump from turning the first Republican presidential debate into a complete circus might just get their wish. Either that, or they’ve just given the business mogul and former reality TV star another reason to stick around well into the fall, if not beyond. The Washington Post is reporting that Fox News has clarified the criteria for participation in the first GOP debate in such a way that Trump and most of his fellow candidates will have to file their personal financial disclosures before the debate or be kept off the stage. That’s unlikely to be...

Donald Trump has been inching upward in the polls lately, and now we finally have one from The Economist and YouGov showing him in a clear first place. "Trump supporters may be making more of a statement than voting for someone they consider a contender," Kathy Frankovic writes at YouGov. "Just one in five of Trump's supporters think Trump will win the nomination." Other tidbits Frankovic points out are that Trump's supporters tend to back the Tea Party and to identify as "very conservative," and are less likely to be college-educated. The new poll is probably a bit dispiriting for...

In the red corner we have Gawker's Tom Scocca, who argues that regardless of the not-guilty verdict reached by a Florida jury this past weekend, George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Martin. To believe otherwise, he wrote shortly before the trial ended, more or less makes you a racist: "This is what the real dispute is: do you believe that a 17-year-old black person counts the same as any other human being? The local cops did not, which is why the case turned into a national scandal to begin with. George Zimmerman did not. Trayvon Martin was walking along, heading home from...

Following a second strong, if understated, debate performance late last month, Marco Rubio is currently riding a wave of positive press. He is “surging in the polls,” has “the hot hand,” and is even emerging as “the favorite to win the GOP presidential nomination.” With the summer of Trump coming to a close, it seems, we are at the cusp of a new stage of the campaign where the non-silly-season favorites begin to assert themselves and the race finally gets serious. And there is good reason why that means Rubio’s stock is on the rise: With Scott Walker out and...

Following a second strong, if understated, debate performance late last month, Marco Rubio is currently riding a wave of positive press. He is “surging in the polls,” has “the hot hand,” and is even emerging as “the favorite to win the GOP presidential nomination.” With the summer of Trump coming to a close, it seems, we are at the cusp of a new stage of the campaign where the non-silly-season favorites begin to assert themselves and the race finally gets serious. And there is good reason why that means Rubio’s stock is on the rise: With Scott Walker out and...

The above screenshot from CNN actually happened this afternoon. Wolf Blitzer's tease as CNN was going to commercial: "So can a drink of water make or break a political career? A U.S. senator, possible presidential candidate. Going to find out, whether he likes it or not."

Officials leading the search effort for Flight 370 sounded their most optimistic tone to date on Wednesday, suggesting that they hope to locate the wreckage of the missing Malaysian airliner "within a matter of days." Here's why optimism is running so high despite the past month's worth of false starts, red herrings, and dead ends that have spanned a rather massive swath of the globe, via the Washington Post: Since Saturday, the Australian navy ship Ocean Shield — equipped with a U.S. Navy black-box detection system — has picked up four separate transmissions, the two most recent of which came...

Nearly five months into Colorado’s great pot experiment, the early returns are good. In Denver, home to the bulk of the first-in-the-nation retail stores, violent crime fell by 5.6 percent over the first four months of the year, with major property crimes down nearly twice that, according to the city’s police. State coffers, meanwhile, are flush with tax revenues from the nearly $50 million worth of recreational weed that was sold through March, the last month for which official estimates are available. Those sales translate into $7.3 million for the state, a number that jumps to $12.6 million when you...

You know the rule by now: If the headline asks the question, the story most likely provides the less exciting/sensational/terrifying (in this case, definitely the third) answer. From the very Telegraph article that Drudge links to: Despite the increasingly belligerent rhetoric and new images emerging from the North Korean regime, analysts believe its missiles are not capable of striking targets as far away as the US mainland and are not, as yet, capable of delivering a nuclear payload. North Korea's state-media announced earlier today that Kim Jong-un has ordered his missile units on standby to strike the United States and...

Rick Perry's "treason" comments are drawing sharp criticism from a wide range of political observers and talking heads, among them Karl Rove. "You don't accuse the chairman of the Federal Reserve of being a traitor to his country. Of being guilty of treason," Rove, who has clashed with Perry before, told Fox News (via TPM). "And, suggesting that we treat him pretty ugly in Texas — You know, that is not, again a presidential statement." Rove continued: "If Rick Perry were to be elected president he'd be saddled with Ben Bernanke who has a term. He's an independent chairman of...

Since unexpectedly jumping into the Republican race this past summer, Donald Trump has shaped the political conversation, dominated the national polls, and bended long-held electoral laws to his will. But on Thursday night in South Carolina, the blustery billionaire did something he had still yet to do during the past seven months: He lived up to his campaign trail performance on the debate stage. During the first five GOP get-togethers, Trump repeatedly found himself absorbing attacks from everyone from Fox News‘ Megyn Kelly to Carly Fiorina. And when Trump wasn’t fending off parries from his rivals or the moderators at...

... I spent much of Friday afternoon rewatching that clip as though it was the Zapruder film and--I can't believe I'm about to say this--I think Trump's technically right: He doesn't explicitly advocate for creating the database. Yes, he seems to go along with the general idea after the reporter asks him about it--but he also doesn't explicitly endorse it either. The reporter is asking about Muslims in America, but Trump appears unable to imagine that group includes U.S. citizens, which is probably why he immediately starts talking about the wall--a telling blind spot for a man campaigning on nativist...

Jeb Bush will enter 2016 with plenty of advantages, but the first-in-the-West nominating contest likely won’t be one of them. Nevada lawmakers this week opted against changing the state’s presidential caucus to a primary, a decision that runs counter to the wishes of Bush, Marco Rubio, and other GOP establishment-types who had hoped a switch would give them a better chance at posting a momentum-building victory there. Caucuses require a good deal more effort and patience from voters than primaries, and as a result the contests tend to favor candidates that have built a network of highly motivated activists. That...