Free Republic

About five years ago, pollsters identified a crucial bloc of swing voters they called the “Walmart Moms.” These are women with children at home 18 or younger, and they shop at a Walmart at least once a month. They are also women who know what it is like to stretch a budget and juggle the demands of a family. For them, stress is a normal state these days. Walmart Moms don’t spend a lot of time thinking about politics, but when they do, it is on a very pragmatic level: Which candidate or party is going to make life better...

The sad fact is that it appears completely rational to be ignorant about politics. The cost of being an 'informed' voter - as opposed to a bigotted closed-minded ignoramus - is high, from the time spent following (and interpreting) the news in the paper, online, and on the television. As the following clip notes, "becoming an informed voter is competing with a lot of other needs in your life," from American Idol watching to eating Cheetos in the bath. Of course, the sad truth is that it has never been more important to be 'informed' and so the 'bread-and-circuses' will...

According to pollster Rasmussen, last week 42% of registered voters gave the President 'positive marks' on job creation-  huh? Barack Obama has created ZERO net jobs- hello! The current unemployment rate -identical to when he first took office- SHOULD have been a hint, no? And would you imagine that 62% of voters now favor smaller government -with fewer services/lower taxes- here just a couple months past an election in which Americans returned a far-left Cloward-Pivenist for another 4 years of fiscal mayhem...? Perhaps some supporters were genuinely surprised by Obama's Big Government, rabble-rousing, class-warfare coronation speech last week -even disturbed/disappointed- but you would...

WASHINGTON - House Republican leaders seized the high ground this week in the furious battle to curb federal spending, forcing Senate Democrats to produce their first budget in nearly four years. It was a political high wire act, but House Speaker John Boehner pulled it off without a hitch. In one master stroke, he reunited most of his rebellious Republicans behind his budget strategy, and divided the Democrats. When the smoke cleared in the latest budgetary skirmish Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who has dictatorially ignored previous House budgets, agreed to accept the GOP's limited debt ceiling suspension as...

Nearly 3 months after the presidential election the Republicans are still trying to fix what they think went wrong. A popular culprit is the Republicans’ alleged failure to communicate forcefully or persuasively a message that would move voters presumably receptive to conservative policies and principles. Just in the last week Jonah Goldberg, Daniel Henninger, Ari Fleischer, Ross Douthat, and Karl Rove have worked variations on this theme. Yet we should remember that any act of communication comprises not just a sender and a message, but also a receiver. We need to focus on the nature of America’s political “receivers,” the...

Nearly 3 months after the presidential election the Republicans are still trying to fix what they think went wrong. A popular culprit is the Republicans’ alleged failure to communicate forcefully or persuasively a message that would move voters presumably receptive to conservative policies and principles. Just in the last week Jonah Goldberg, Daniel Henninger, Ari Fleischer, Ross Douthat, and Karl Rove have worked variations on this theme. Yet we should remember that any act of communication comprises not just a sender and a message, but also a receiver. We need to focus on the nature of America’s political “receivers,” the...

President Obama is entering his second term with many of the nation’s voters still pessimistic or unsure about their economic prospects, a new poll for The Hill has found. The president was reelected for another four years by a relatively comfortable margin, but 39 percent of likely voters say his first four years were worse than expected, compared to just 18 percent who say he exceeded expectations. Forty-one percent of those polled said his first term went as expected. The president assumed office in the midst of one of the worst financial meltdowns in U.S. history, and those polled are...

Exclusive: Robert Ringer seeks ways to get through to the redistribution-minded While driving into D.C. last week, I was listening to Rush Limbaugh expound on an important issue that I don’t believe many pro-liberty people give much thought to. He said that “low-information” voters present a serious problem because there is no way to reach people who are uninformed. Worse, most of these people don’t like conservatives or libertarians. No doubt about it, Rush has zeroed in on the crux of the problem when it comes to the decline and fall of the American Empire. How in the world do...

DENVER (AP) — Sara Stevenson spends her working hours surrounded by Republicans, namely the married men who work alongside her in a Denver oil and gas firm company. But after hours and on weekends, she usually spends her time with other single women, and there's not a Republican in sight among the bunch. "There was just no way I could have supported any Republican this year," said Stevenson, 31. "They skew so much to the religious right. ... They focused so much on taxes. It's not something that women in my demographic really care about. I've never heard my friends...

The number of Utah citizens going to the polls continues to drop. The “Salt Lake Tribune” reports that while election officials point to 80 percent voter turnout across the state, that number only reflects registered voters, and doesn’t include more than half-a-million Utahns who are eligible to vote but not registered. Overall, the number of people in the state who cast ballots in the presidential election was 57 percent. That’s basically the same number as the 2008 election, when Utah placed 9th lowest in the country in voter turnout.

Still confused about how Obama won re-election? Check out this Yahoo POLL: Do you believe O.J. Simpson killed Nicole Brown Simpson? Yes, the evidence was convincing. 80% No, reasonable doubt remains. 20% 495,190 votes This means, on a rough statistical basis, that we have a solid 20% of the country out there dumber than a bag of hammers. I suspect its actually a larger number, but this shows the sheer depth of the stupidity (or anti-white racism) of a significant slice of the electorate. We're so screwed.

In the wake of Mitt Romney's loss, many Republicans say the GOP must make far-reaching changes to be competitive in future elections. White voters are a smaller and smaller part of the electorate, they point out, while Latinos and other minorities are growing as a percentage of the voting public. Unless the Republican Party reinvents itself to appeal to those voters, the argument goes, the GOP can get used to being out of power. There's something to that. The electorate is changing, and the Republican Party needs to keep up with the times. But the more fundamental answer to the...

New website logs complaints from Pennsylvania votersBy Adam Smeltz Published: Thursday, November 15, 2012, 12:01 a.m. More than 500 voters used a new Pennsylvania website to complain about possible problems in the Nov. 6 election, the Department of State said Wednesday. The 534 complaints range from concerns about voter intimidation to potential issues with absentee ballots, voter registration, bribery and machine tampering, according to a state report. **SNIP** Election officials in several counties said they haven’t received complaints filed through the page. Ruman didn’t share specifics from the complaint files, but a state overview showed 14 people in Allegheny County...

The Congressional District 2 showdown between Republican Martha McSally and Democrat Ron Barber has gone into overtime - and it could come down to instant replay. McSally holds a minuscule lead of less than two-tenths of a percentage point over Barber - a 400-vote difference in a race in which more 228,000 votes have been tabulated, with several days of additional vote counting to go. What remains are an estimated 70,000 votes in Pima County, about 27,000 of them provisional ballots that need to be verified and the rest early ballots that were dropped off at polling places or delivered...

The key to understanding the 2012 election is simple: A huge slice of the electorate stayed home. The punditocracy — which is more of the ruling class than an eye on the ruling class — has naturally decided that this is because Republicans are not enough like Democrats: They need to play more identity politics (in particular, adopt the Left’s embrace of illegal immigration) in order to be viable. But the story is not about who voted; it is about who didn’t vote. In truth, millions of Americans have decided that Republicans are not a viable alternative because they are...

Perhaps I should have changed the title of this post to "The Americans Who Stayed At Home". That's really where this all lies. In the aftermath of the election, I was reading some posts on Facebook and came across one from someone I am related to. He and his wife shall remain nameless, but what they posted troubled me greatly. They basically congratulated President Obama for his victory and then wrote that they were proud of the fact that they did not vote. I could not believe what I was reading. How can any American citizen not have the desire...

Hey, fellow Freepers. I have to be honest. I am very disappointed and downbeat that Romney did not get elected, and I won't be a sore loser. We should just be better prepared for the war in 2014, and especially for 2016. However, I trolled on Huffington Post and Bill Maher's Facebook page, and to be truthful, I have never seen so many SORE WINNERS as the Obama people...you should be euphoric and jubilant! Why are you so angry? Your guy won! Why all the threats and anger and bitterness. Obama is in for four years and you act like...

The states examined are Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Virginia, Nevada, Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado, and Michigan. The trend for Obama was across the board: fewer votes in all swing states. However, the Republicans were able to increase the votes for Romney in seven of the nine states.

One of the more intriguing narratives for election 2012 was proposed by political scientist Brendan Nyhan fairly early on: that it was "Bizarro 2004." The parallels to that year certainly were eerie: An incumbent adored by his base but with middling approval ratings nationally faces off against an uncharismatic, wishy-washy official from Massachusetts. The race is tight during the summer until the president breaks open a significant lead after his convention. Then, after a tepid first debate for the incumbent, the contest tightens, bringing the opposition tantalizingly close to a win, but not quite close enough. The Election Day returns...

**Pure Vanity Here** Mark these words...THERE WILL NEVER BE AN ALL WHITE LIBERAL TICKET...EVER AGAIN. Bill Clinton got 2 terms because he was known as "The First Black President", Al Gore went with Lieberman and lost. Neither of them had anything remotely black about themselves. John Kerry picked John Edwards = Loss Michael Dukakis picked Lloyd Bensten = Loss Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro = Loss Jimmy Carter ran for 2nd term with Mondale = Loss Obama wins twice as black president. Democrats will trot out Cory Booker (MARK MY WORDS) and San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro in the next...