Free Republic

Herschel Walker’s 100,000-vote loss in Georgia puts the exclamation point on the “Donald Trump is electoral poison” narrative. If the former president had deliberately attempted to sabotage the Republicans' chances ever since November 2020, he could not have been more destructive than he actually was. In the Senate, the Trump effect meant Republicans lost chances at a whopping 10 seats (one of them two times!) they either should have won or in which they might have been competitive. In the House, Trump’s harm was more diffused, but almost equally baleful. On Jan. 5, 2021, Republicans lost two Senate seats in...

I’m having some serious flashbacks this week as I read about the renewed debate over the Respect for Marriage Act. The bill would, among other things, repeal the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act and do other things to essentially codify and enforce the legality of gay marriage at the federal level. The “among other things” aspect of that description is where the real problems are found and there are poison pills tucked away in the legislation that should definitely give some conservatives pause. But the way it’s being sold in the media leaves the public with the impression that the...

Kari Lake, the perpetually soft-lit, camera-ready political newcomer from Arizona, may have lost her bid to become the state's next governor, but it's unlikely she'll leave the spotlight. A Phoenix-area news anchor for 22 years, Lake called it quits in 2021 and decided to go all in on politics. She fended off better-funded, more qualified GOP challengers in the primaries and ran a ground game in the general election in which she regularly made headlines for tearing into fellow reporters and mocking her political opponent. Lake ran a full Trumpist campaign and pushed a familiar but divisive message that questioned...