Free Republic

The Michigan Republican Party voted to break a delegate tie Wednesday night, awarding 16 delegates to Mitt Romney and 14 to Rick Santorum. The decision, which broke a 15-15 tie that would have resulted under the pre-primary interpretation of the rules, caused disbelief at Rick Santorum’s campaign. A spokesman rejected the decision. Even Romney supporters in the Michigan GOP said the decision was unfair to Santorum. “I have this crazy idea that you follow the rules,” said former Attorney General Mike Cox said after a 4-2 vote by a Michigan GOP credentialing committee, according to the AP. “I’d love to...

WASHINGTON - Mitt Romney takes a hard line against congressional earmarks, but the Republican presidential candidate had a more favorable view of federal pork-barrel spending as governor of Massachusetts. Under Romney's leadership, Massachusetts sought tens of millions of dollars in earmarks for transportation projects through the state's congressional delegation. A prime example was the $30 million his administration requested to renovate the historic Longfellow Bridge over the Charles River between Cambridge and Boston.

It is only fitting that two relatively meaningless wins in the Conservative Political Action Conference straw poll and the Maine caucus for Mitt Romney should rewrite the media narrative created after three equally unmeaningful wins for Rick Santorum last Tuesday. In this yo-yo race, no sooner does the punditocracy pronounce someone is “surging” or another candidate is ”in trouble” than fortunes reverse and the candidate who’s “surging” experiences a setback and the candidate “in trouble” stabilizes. This does not, however, prevent the press from once again over-interpreting or misinterpreting events. The CPAC win for Romney was especially telling. The press...

At 10:45pm, MSNBC reported that 21% of the votes were in. Romney with 3642 votes (39%), and Gingrich with 2573 vote (27%). Here is the screen shot: And here is the screen shot with a time stamp: Six minutes later, at 10:51pm, MSNBC reported that only 19% of the votes were in -- Romney with 3569 votes (42%) and Gingrich with 2059 votes (25%). Here is the screen shot: And here is the screen shot with a time stamp:

"The main reason the Republican establishment overwhelmingly favors Mitt Romney over Newt Gingrich is that Romney stands a better chance of beating Barack Obama," says Jonathan Chait at New York. So it's a problem for Romney that "as the campaign goes on, this seems to be growing less true." A new Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that negative views of Romney have "spiked" over the past two weeks, from a net +4 favorability rating (39 positive/34 negative) to a -18 rating (31 positive/49 negative) — very similar to Gingrich's -22 rating (29/51). The shift is most notabe among independents, who...

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum is shrugging off reports that the vote count from Iowa’s caucuses might be wrong, saying the errors appear not to change the fact that he and Mitt Romney were nearly tied. Santorum tells Fox News that a party official says the two cases in which errors were reported in the count from Tuesday night nearly cancel each other out. A Ron Paul supporter told Des Moines TV station KCCI that the posted count from his precinct in Appanoose County gave Romney more votes than he actually received. The GOP chairman...

Rasmussen released the second part of its GOP primary polling this morning, this time concerning those potential candidates not in the race. The survey of likely Republican primary voters does not indicate a massive desire for more candidates to jump into the race, but support for bids by Rick Perry and Rudy Giuliani exceeds opposition. That isn’t true for Sarah Palin: A plurality of Republican primary voters think it would be good for Texas Governor Rick Perry to jump into the party’s presidential race and bad for the party if former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin joined the field. They are...

Romney leads our newest poll with 22% to 17% for Herman Cain, 15% for Sarah Palin, 9% for Newt Gingrich and Tim Pawlenty, 8% for Michele Bachmann, 7% for Ron Paul, and 1% for Jon Huntsman. Romney's strength is with those voters for whom electability is the paramount concern. He gets 27% with them to 14% each for Cain and Palin and 12% for Pawlenty. With GOP partisans more concerned about ideology Romney is third at 16%, behind Cain's 22% and Palin's 18%. If Palin doesn't run Romney's lead expands. He gets 27% to 20% for Cain, 13% for Bachmann,...

Open primaries should be eliminated. Not only should members of political parties be allowed to select their own nominees, but open primaries provide too many opportunities for mischief by their political foes. We saw this in 2008, when Rush Limbaugh organized “Operation Chaos,” urging his listeners to vote for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries at a time when Barack Obama had seemingly wrapped up the nomination. I led a similar campaign during the Michigan primary — which was meaningless on the Democratic side — urging my readers to vote for Mitt Romney as a way to try and extend...