Free Republic

Republicans have a major electoral-map problem in November. Major. Donald Trump’s victory last week in Indiana’s primary not only effectively sealed the GOP nomination for the real estate billionaire but also brought into sharp relief how difficult it will be for any Republican to get to 270 electoral votes and beat Hillary Clinton to become the 45th president this fall. Start here: Eighteen states plus the District of Columbia have voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in every election between 1992 and 2012. Add them up, and you get 242 electoral votes.

"This was the greatest vote, the greatest margin and the greatest percentage (61 percent) that any President had ever drawn from the American people; we shall live long before we see its like again," the inventor of the modern campaign chronicle, Theodore H. White, wrote after Lyndon Johnson's lopsided triumph over Barry Goldwater in 1964. In fact we would see its like again twice in the next 20 years, and from the Republican side, as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan swamped their opponents in 1972 and 1984, respectively... Those gripped by either despair or euphoria over the 2004 election might...

In this month's election, President Bush carried 97 of the nation's 100 fastest-growing counties, most of them "exurban" communities that are rapidly transforming farmland into subdivisions and shopping malls on the periphery of major metropolitan areas. Together, these fast-growing communities provided Bush a punishing 1.72 million vote advantage over Democrat John F. Kerry, according to a Times analysis of election results. That was almost half the president's total margin of victory... In states like Ohio, Minnesota and Virginia, Republican strength in these outer suburbs is offsetting Democratic gains over the last decade in more established — and often more affluent...

At the turn of the 20th century, both United States senators from New York were Republicans; at the turn of the 21st century, both were Democrats. In 1904, 20 of 37 New York members of the House of Representatives were Republican; in 2004, 19 of 29 New York Congress members were Democrats. Of the 13 members of the U.S. House of Representatives from the city, only one - Vito Fossella of Staten Island – is a Republican... At the same time, the painful truth is that slow-growing New York has become increasingly less important in national electoral politics. When Dwight...

On Saturday they would appear before the convention’s Credentials Committee and ask to be seated as the official Mississippi state delegation... Shortly after he signed the Civil Rights Act, Lyndon Johnson told his aide Joseph Califano, "I think we’ve delivered the South to the Republican party for your lifetime and mine." Maybe so, but he was determined to hold onto the region long enough to ensure his own re-election; the opinion polls might show him leading the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, by an enormous margin, but he was desperate not to stoke the fires of sectional conflict. Only one...

Remember the Danish cartoons? A 27-year old Somali does: Danish police on Friday shot and wounded a man trying to enter the home of an artist who drew controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. The man, a 27-year-old Somalian who was armed with an axe, was caught trying to break into the home of Kurt Westergaard at 10pm local time, police said. Police shot the man, injuring him in his leg... Mr Westergaard's cartoon was seen at the time as the most controversial, as it depicted the Prophet with a bomb in his turban. "Controversial" but entirely vindicated by events...