Free Republic

Michelle Nunn has fired her primary weapon: a TV ad running in Georgia featuring Dad, former Senator Sam Nunn.

There is “overwhelming confidence in the federal government’s ability to prevent a nationwide epidemic,” according to a new CNN/ORC International Poll. “More than 7 in 10 Americans say the federal government can stop an Ebola epidemic, and 54% believe the federal government is doing a “good job” in addressing the disease.” Yes, the media hysteria has had an effect, as 8 in 10 believe that a new person will be diagnosed with Ebola in the coming weeks, however 53% think that healthcare workers and hospitals in their community are ready to treat an Ebola case. But, and here’s the bad...

Sen. Mary Landrieu is flailing. She doesn’t own a home in Louisiana, but insists that her 7,300 square foot, $2.5 million house on Capitol Hill isn’t a “mansion.” She’s attacked her main Republican opponent for being soft on immigration, hoping that voters will pay no heed to her own voting record and rhetoric. She says she supports the Keystone pipeline and “fixes” to Obamacare (for which she cast the deciding vote and pledged to be “100 percent” accountable), but hasn’t been influential enough to persuade her own party’s leadership to allow votes on either issue. And Sean Trende’s deep data...

Two-thirds of Muslim voters plan to visit the polls on Election Day, and more than half of them are Democratic Party supporters, according to a new survey. Of 1,500 Muslim registered voters surveyed, 69 percent plan to cast ballots in the Nov. 4 midterm elections and 16 percent do not plan to vote, according to the poll conducted Wednesday by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). Fourteen percent declined to answer. Of the nearly 1,000 Muslim registered voters planning to vote, half said they support the Democratic Party, and 15 percent said they back the Republican Party. About one-quarter of...

More GOP cavalry arrived in Georgia today as Texas Sen. Ted Cruz stumped with David Perdue and Gov. Nathan Deal in Canton, invoking memories of long gas lines and stagflation as he attacked their Democratic rivals. “Here in Georgia, we’ve got on the ballot Jimmy Carter and Sam Nunn,” he said. “It’s like ‘That 70’s Show.'” The Texas firebrand echoed Perdue’s talking points by saying that an election of Michelle Nunn, the Democratic nominee, equals a stamp of approval for President Barack Obama’s agenda. Republicans need a net gain of six Senate seats to take control of the chamber, and...

(AUDIO-AT-LINK)There's a woman running in the tight race for the Senate in Iowa — one of the contests that will decide who controls the Senate next year. In the 21st century, a female candidate for Senate may not sound historic. But in Iowa, it is. The state shares a rare distinction with Mississippi: It has never elected a woman to the Senate, to the House, or to be governor. Republican state Sen. Joni Ernst is trying to change that in her race against Democratic U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley — a race in which the role of female voters is central....

Rand Paul, the heretofore libertarian senator from Kentucky, gave a foreign policy speech to Republican grandees in New York last week with a clear message: I'm not an isolationist like my dad.. The senator's peppery father, the thoroughly libertarian former Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, hardly ever saw a U.S. military intervention he liked. He said George W. Bush's war in Iraq was nuts, suggested that the United States could live with a nuclear Iran and thought stationing U.S. troops overseas was just an expensive way to invite trouble. On Thursday evening in a Manhattan ballroom, Sen. Paul, a probable...

It wasn’t long ago that coal executives were openly discussing their dream of Republicans seizing the White House and making Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe — who believes climate change is a “hoax” concocted by greedy scientists — the head of the EPA. Now, they have a second chance. As dark money groups and SuperPACs backed by millions of dollars from the fossil fuel industry are propelling Republicans to a Senate majority, climate science-denying politicians are likely to seize control of key committee chairmanships, a coup for companies seeking to pollute the atmosphere with impunity. What’s more, Inhofe is slated to...

Everyone who hasn’t drunk the progressive Kool-Aid is aware that during elections Democrats resort to the race card to scare African Americans, for whose intelligence they have limitless contempt, into voting for them. If Republicans are elected, their propaganda claims, “black churches will burn” or the racial clock will be turned back to the era of segregation, an era that Democrats happen to have been directly responsible for. This year it’s the mythical threat white policeman allegedly pose to black youth, as Democrats and their media enablers encourage a “lynch mob” mentality — as Howard Kurtz put it recently —...

Early voting is looking good for Iowa Republican Joni Ernst. In fact, it’s looking better than usual. Kirsten Hunter of the Washington Free Beacon reports that even CNN is acknowledging the trend: CNN: Iowa Early Vote Data Shows Unprecedented Republican Numbers Elated Republicans are celebrating the unprecedented success of U.S. Senate candidate Joni Ernst (R) in Iowa’s early voting. Iowa Republicans banked a surge of early voters this week, a practice usually dominated by Democrats in the state. Ernst’s unprecedented success is also the result of her opponent, Rep. Bruce Braley’s, failure to mobilize Iowa Democrats despite receiving support from...

Some Democrats and their advocates in the press believe Obamacare, a year into implementation, is no longer much of a factor in the midterm elections. But no one has told Republican candidates, who are still pounding away at the Affordable Care Act on the stump. And no one has told voters, especially those in states with closely contested Senate races, who regularly place it among the top issues of the campaign. In Arkansas, Republican challenger Tom Cotton is pulling ahead of incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor partly on the strength of a relentless focus on Obamacare. Cotton's newest ad attacks...

After President Obama compounded his ‘every single one of my policies are on the ballot’ assertion by praising vulnerable Congressional Democrats as staunch water-carriers for his agenda, I joked that the only way he could assist Republican ad makers any further would be to call out each Democrat by name. And that’s precisely what he’s now done in Georgia, where Michelle Nunn has been impersonating Gumby to avoid being linked too closely with the unpopular president. Over to you, champ — via America Rising:(VIDEO-AT-LINK) “If Michelle Nunn wins, that means that Democrats keep control of the Senate, and that means...

Regular readers will know that I’m a critic of the “My opponent said something objectionable and I’m outraged!” school of campaigning, not to mention the “Candidate said something objectionable!” school of campaign coverage. One of the most important rules in assessing “gaffes” or outsized statements is that if the moment was extemporaneous, out of character, instantly regretted, and not repeated, then we should give it a pass, because it probably reveals next to nothing about the person who said it. Having said that, there’s a new statement we learn about today from Iowa Senate candidate Joni Ernst that deserves some...

Senate candidate Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) has canceled her meeting with the Des Moines Register editorial board Thursday as the paper works to finalize its Senate endorsement. “Recent editorials in the Des Moines Register make their position in this race perfectly clear, and it’s one that many voters across our state seem to disagree with,” Ernst campaign spokeswoman Gretchen Hamel told the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier in a emailed statement. “With less than 12 days to go, time is precious and Joni wants to spend every minute talking to undecided voters, hearing their concerns, and demonstrating why we need a change in...

The picture of IA GOP SEN nominee Joni Ernst that’s emerging from exposure of her pre-2014-general-election utterances is of a standard-brand Constitutional Conservative embracing all the strange and controversial tenets of that creed. There’s Agenda 21 madness. There’s Personhood advocacy. There are attacks on the entire New Deal/Great Society legacy—and perhaps even agricultural programs—as creating “dependency.” And now, inevitably, there’s the crown jewel of Con Con extremism: the belief that the purpose of the Second Amendment is to enable “patriots” to violently overthrow the government if in their opinion it’s overstepped its constitutional boundaries. Sam Levine of HuffPost has that...

We have seen her on Fox and Morning Joe. She often has to remind us of "The Terrible Republican Record". And we all react in the same manner. Huh? What?, Why didn't the hosts ask her to give an example of the harm the GOP has done to the nation despite the fact that Harry Reid wont allow any of their bills for a vote in the Senate? Terrible Record? You mean like in Texas, Florida and Wisconsin? Oh yah, what an economic mess Rick Scott, Scott Walker & Rick Perry have done for their states. Apparently according to Debbie...

A new poll, this one by Talk Business and Politics/Hendrix College, puts Tom Cotton’s lead over Mark Pryor at 48-41. The survey included more than 2,000 likely voters and was taken after the last week’s Cotton-Pryor debate (as I understand it, there will be no more debates between the two). The margin of error is plus or minus 2.2 percent. According to Dr. Jay Barth of Hendrix College, the survey shows that both Cotton and Pryor have locked up the support of their respective Party faithful. However, “Cotton has a strong advantage among the state’s voters who term themselves Independents...

Western Kentucky University's 2014 Big Red Poll released on Monday shows that incumbent Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) leads Democratic challenger Alison Lundergan Grimes by 3 points, 45% to 42%, among likely voters in the Kentucky U.S. Senate race. The poll, coming two weeks before election day, indicates the race is still close, despite numerous recent gaffes by Grimes and news that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has stopped funding television advertising in support of her candidacy. 5% of likely voters supported Libertarian David Patterson, and 8% were undecided. The most surprising result of the poll is that, despite a bitter...

Arkansas Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor argued that the federal government’s desegregation of Arkansas’s largest public school in 1957 was an “unwilling invasion” that took “a local problem out of the local authorities’ hands” and led to deep suspicions of democracy in the state, according to a copy of his college thesis obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Written in 1985, the 30-page paper—which also suggested that the state’s Democratic Party was hindering economic progress, and attributed policies such as welfare and the Equal Rights Amendment to “wild-eyed liberals”—could add to Pryor’s difficulties as he fights to protect his seat from...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)On Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Wolf,” host Wolf Blitzer sat down with Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) to ask her if she could confirm a Saturday report from The New York Times that claimed President Barack Obama was “seething” at administration officials for their handling of the Ebola response. After replaying a clip of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) calling for greater presidential leadership on the Ebola response, Blitzer asked Jackson Lee if she had been in touch with the White House. “You probably saw that story in The New York Times on Saturday saying the president was, quote, ‘seething’ because...