Free Republic

With oral arguments at the Supreme Court concluded in Obergefell v. Hodges, 2016 candidates are starting to weigh in on how they would handle a potential Supreme Court ruling that leads to nationwide marriage equality. This week, Republican Carly Fiorina said that she would not fight a ruling in favor of marriage equality. Fiorina joins Lindsey Graham, another potential 2016 candidate, who issued a similar statement. On the other side, Ted Cruz, who has been a consistent opponent of LGBT equality, has said he will introduce a constitutional amendment to fight marriage if the Supreme Court rules in favor of...

A Texas-based conservative activist has a prediction for who will be left standing among the crowded field of Republicans seeking the White House. "Everything I'm seeing is a Cruz-Walker race at this point," observes Cathie Adams, a longtime Republican activist and currently the president of Texas Eagle Forum. It's still early in the presidential election and the crowd of declared GOP candidates is already lengthy. There are also the undeclared, including Gov. Scott Walker and Jeb Bush. Adams says Republican Party "kingmakers" are behind Bush, and Cruz and Walker are the conservatives most likely to defeat him in the primary....

Release dull, ultra-sanitized, uncontroversial autobiography that folks will own but never read. Check. Buy and memorize The Quotable Ronald Reagan. Check.Lose the beer gut. Camouflage the bald spot. Hire writers to concoct explanation for all that weed smoked in high school? Check. Check. Check.It is now safe to enter the Republican primary. But there is still one major problem left: the current state of the Republican party. Tea Partiers, evangelicals, establishment RINOs, Libertarians, neocon foreign policy hawks, and moderates. According to Dr. Stella Rouse, associate professor and Director of the Center for American Politics and Citizenship at the University of...

"Nothing the Republican Party does, even nominating African-American GOP candidates, works to win them over."(snip) In my encounters with radical black activists, my skin color has commanded no respect. Blackness, it would seem, means how you think, not how you look. A new study seems to confirm this. The Washington Examiner reports: The study… searched through the demographic details of 3,300 African-American voters in the 2010 election, when the GOP had nearly three dozen black House candidates running, part of the Republican Party’s push to attract minority voters. But the authors, political scientists from Washington University in St. Louis and...

Candidates of the left, right and center have something in common: They all want to be seen as populists. Hillary Clinton attacks income inequality and issues booklets showing how well she stacks up, even against Sen. Elizabeth Warren, as a booster for the embattled middle class; Sen. Marco Rubio invokes the American dream; Mike Huckabee and putative libertarian Sen. Rand Paul are against giving President Obama a free hand to negotiate the Pacific trade pact. Meanwhile, pundits and journalists prowl for populists everywhere: Sen. Ted Cruz is a “populist egghead.” Rubio showcases “populist themes” of up-by-the-bootstraps success. Huckabee is going...

On April 17, New Hampshire hosted a Republican Leadership Summit, which drew GOP presidential hopefuls and over 500 Republican activists. The horse-and-buggy show highlighted and defined the 2016 Republican field. Covering all 19 prospective candidates was a stretch, but I will share my insights on a few here. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker: My Wisconsin skeet-shooter friend Margaret claims Walker is a "good man." Is that enough though to win the presidency? Billionaire election investor David Koch seems to think Walker will be the nominee. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) almost ruined the governor's reputation by saying, "I don't...

The field for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination is as flat as any in modern memory—pretty remarkable for a party that usually has a fight but almost invariably ends up nominating whoever's turn it is. While nomination trial-heat polling tells us very little this early, there are some poll questions that are better measurements of at least where these candidates are starting out, before the campaigning, debates, and advertising begin in earnest.An April 26 to April 30 NBC News / Wall Street Journal poll asked Republican primary voters whether they could or could not see themselves voting for each of 10 different...

The 2016 presidential election is attracting an unusually large number of hopefuls. The Republicans will probably field more than a dozen candidates and the Democrats, as many as five. Presently, very few of these supposed contenders have a real chance of becoming president. Republicans Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and Ted Cruz are long shots. On the Democratic side, that term applies to everyone but Hillary Rodham Clinton.. But the size of the crowd isn't terribly surprising; if anything I thought it might be even larger. The barriers to entry are low, and all a candidate needs to keep going, at...

It's not just Gail Collins of the New York Times who's noticed that Jeb Bush is making a mess on the campaign trail or whatever trail he's on. That's despite the fact he's always been considered competent (compared to his brother, of course). As a humorist, Collins is having fun picking him apart, though she does seem honestly surprised. But even fellow Republicans like Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio have attacked him for saying he would have gone to war in Iraq in 2003 even if had known the intelligence was faulty, and they've watched him...

Former UN Ambassador John Bolton announced today that he will not seek the GOP nomination for president in 2016, effectively leaving the foreign policy hawk’s top super PAC donors to look elsewhere for someone to back. Some have already found their candidate — or maybe more than one — though in many cases we don’t yet know whom they’ve anointed. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is the only White House aspirant whose campaign has reported donors at this point. (Mid-July, when the reports will come due, will likely be full of surprises.) Texas oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens seems to have...

Ask around and you’ll hear a consistent theme from political strategists in the Republican party: The 2016 primary is wide open. “It is by far the most interesting presidential year since I’ve been involved [in Republican politics],” says Steve Munisteri, a senior adviser to Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.). How interesting? Top-tier presidential campaigns are preparing for the still-unlikely scenario that the nomination fight goes all the way to the 2016 Republican National Convention. There hasn’t been a brokered convention since 1976, but the strength of the GOP field, when coupled with the proliferation of super PACs, increases the chances...

GOP presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz said today that ABC News anchor and former Clinton White House staffer George Stephanopoulos has no business moderating any 2016 presidential debates. Cruz was asked in the Senate hallway this afternoon whether Stephanopoulos should host any debates following today’s revelation that he gave $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation without it disclosing it while officially covering the organization for ABC News. “Of course not,” Cruz responded, according to a transcript provided to The Federalist by one of his campaign communications staffers. “Debates should not be moderated by partisan Democrats who are actively supporting one of...

“I would have invaded Iraq, and you would have too.” That is literally what Jeb Bush told Megyn Kelly in an interview set to air tonight on “Fox So-Called News.” Amazing, right? Up until this point, Jeb has done everything he can to separate himself from his brother George W. Bush’s disastrous eight years as president. Just a few months ago, for example, he went out of his way to say during a speech at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs that he was his “own man” and that his family’s track record didn’t say anything about what he would...

You might know Nicolle Wallace as one of the co-hosts of The View, but you’re more likely to be familiar with her work as the GOP campaign operative that was once responsible for handling vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin. It was a role for which she apparently feels duty-bound to repent. Absolution from the liberal entertainers who have given her a second career seems, however, eternally just beyond her reach. As a commentator and frequent television guest in the Obama era, Wallace has embraced punditry. Offering unsolicited advice to political figures is part of that job description, and Wallace has...

In recent presidential primary cycles, the influence of Southern states — with the exception of Florida, whose "Southern status" is perhaps more locational than anything else — has been minimal. While pundits like to say that GOP presidential nominees have relied heavily on a "red state" electorate based in the South, that same base has had little to say in determining the nominee. After all, neither John McCain nor Mitt Romney had much in common with the region. Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp sensed that voter turnout intensity in the region could be stronger in November 2016 if...

A number of Republican candidates for the 2016 presidential nomination have now formally declared or are poised to announce very soon. Here’s my assessment where each stands right now and how I see their strengths, weaknesses and prospects – at least at this moment. Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush – his family has a record of winning elections and he has won perhaps the most important swing state twice. He has name recognition, money, clear leadership capacity, and the demeanor to be President. He also will raise a staggering amount of money. Given the GOP tradition of ultimately nominating the...

We've seen a flurry of presidential campaign announcements over the last several weeks: Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee. Oh my. But there's still at least one big notable absence. Jeb Bush, the first candidate to actually declare he was exploring a presidential bid, seems in no hurry to formally launch one. Instead, Bush has put in motion a plan that's effectively wrecking what's left of our flimsy campaign finance laws. Bush is taking the time before his formal announcement to build a super PAC that Politico says "would be...

WILMINGTON, NC (WWAY) — Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz will be a keynote speaker at next month’s NC Republican Party State Convention. Cruz, a US Senator from Texas, will keynote a luncheon reception on Saturday, June 6, at the Raleigh Convention Center. The GOP says the convention’s other featured speakers include Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who may also run for president next year, Donald Trump and Amb. John Bolton, who is expected to announce tomorrow if he will run for the White House.

Athens hasn’t seen this many Republicans roll into town since Reconstruction. For the second time in a row, the Georgia Republican Party will hold its biannual convention in our bastion of socialism—specifically, at that taxpayer-funded monument to big government meddling with the private sector, The Classic Center. Seeing as how we’re merely 18 months away from a presidential election, a number of GOP contenders will be on hand (after feting big donors in Atlanta, of course). So far, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is scheduled to speak at an 8:30 a.m. breakfast Friday; Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s speaking slot is...

Tell me who I’m leaving out: Bush, Walker, Rubio, Paul, Cruz, Christie, Huckabee, Perry, Jindal, Santorum, Graham, Carson, Fiorina, Trump, maybe John Kasich, maybe even Rick Snyder. There’s also a chance Peter King and/or John Bolton will run, just to make life extra miserable for Rand. That would be … 18 candidates onstage in a forum that’s never accommodated more than 10. Huh. You could, of course, limit the debates to the 10 most popular and/or credible candidates in the field. Just tell me how you go about reliably discerning who those people are circa early August, five months before...