Free Republic

Democratic presidential candidate says the holiday should not be about Trump’s ego. President Donald Trump’s plans for a grand military parade on the Fourth of July make America “look smaller,” Pete Buttigieg said Wednesday. “Think about the strongest, toughest person you know. It’s probably not a person who goes around talking about how strong or tough they are,” the Democratic presidential candidate told CNN’s Jake Tapper in an interview. “I think the president’s trying to honor himself, and, again, my worry is it ultimately makes us look smaller,” he said. Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., and a military...

Democratic 2020 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg admitted during his Sunday town hall on Fox News that when he talks about “fair taxes,” what he means is “higher taxes.” The South Bend, Indiana mayor took a question early in the evening about fiscal responsibility. New Hampshire state director of the Concord Coalition Tyler Sweeney asked, “We reached $22 trillion in national debt. What would a President Buttigieg do to restore fiscal responsibility?” Buttigieg began by attacking the Trump tax cuts, saying, “You don’t blow a hole in the budget with an unnecessary and unaffordable tax cut for the wealthiest. Part of...

South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg said on Saturday that there were so many Democrats in the race, they “might as well carpool.” Buttigieg was speaking at an education-focused meet-and-greet on the back porch of a home in Des Moines, Iowa, as he and much of the nearly two dozen Democratic presidential candidates swarmed the state, whose caucuses top the 2020 primary calendar. Buttigieg offered a unifying tone at the event, saying he did not view the massive field “as having opponents so much as competitors.” “You would be surprised how often we are in dialogue with each other,” Buttigieg...

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Democrat Pete Buttigieg, who hopes to become the first openly gay presidential nominee from a major political party, said at an LGBTQ event Saturday that activists must band together to deny President Donald Trump a second term. "We've got a lot to worry about, a lot to fight for, but we have the means to do it," he said. The mayor of South Bend, Indiana, stressed the need for people to vote and to become involved in politics. Speaking before an audience gathered for Des Moines LGBTQ pride festivities in front of the Iowa statehouse,...

America doesn’t lack for superhero movies in the summer of 2019: an X-Men sequel will premiere a few days from now, followed in July by another Spiderman instalment. But what of the Democrats’ search for a superhero of their own? May I suggest: Aquaman? Here’s why the submariner seems appropriate (other than the film’s preachy environmentalism): remove former Vice President Joe Biden and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg from this Quinnipiac Poll of 2020 Democratic candidates and what one discovers is a field that’s “underwater” (higher negatives than positives). Biden’s numbers: 49% favorable; 39% negative. His rivals for the nomination:...

Donald Trump singled out four of his challengers for ridicule on Tuesday, mocking Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke and Bernie Sanders and predicting one of them will win the 2020 Democratic nomination. ‘Boy, you got some beauties there!’ he said during a speech in Louisiana about energy infrastructure. ‘Three hundred and fifty million people and that’s the best we can do?’ ‘It’s going to be one of these people,’ he said. So far 23 different Democratic White House hopefuls have declared their candidacies. He poked fun at O’Rourke for quickly losing what a month ago looked like juggernaut momentum....

Brit Hume delivers his reaction to Sunday's FOX News town hall event for Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. Hume said it will be "interesting" to see how Buttigieg measures up to former Vice President Joe Biden if they are on the same debate stage together. "I think Pete Buttigieg is the most impressive by far candidate in terms of just raw political talent in the Democratic field. And he may be the most impressive candidate I've seen since the emergence of Barack Obama," Hume said Monday. "Just in terms of being comfortable with himself and being fast on his feet...

Vice President Mike Pence is coming to Eau Claire on Thursday to promote the U.S.-Mexico trade agreement. The visit announced by the White House comes after President Donald Trump held a rally in Green Bay last month. It marks Pence's first visit to Wisconsin since he attended a campaign rally in November in Hudson.

In an appearance on FNC's "MediaBuzz," pollster Frank Luntz shares his finding that the term "capitalism" no longer polls well with the American people and predicts that Senator Bernie Sanders is the most likely to win the Democratic nomination for president with a message of democratic socialism. "It is not that principles are dead, in fact, the principles of economic freedom are alive and well," Luntz explained. "But capitalism itself has been so demonized by media that... if you want to oppose socialism you oppose it by talking about freedom, not capitalism." HOWARD KURTZ, FOX NEWS: An exclusive first look...

Democrats claim to be the party of women. They claim to represent minorities and their interests. One thing they can't deny: numbers, the cold, hard data. Federal Election Commission (FEC) filing data has shown that more women donated to President Donald Trump's campaign in the first quarter of the year than any of the 2020 Democrats. 10,375 women donated to Trump. The Democrat who came in behind Trump was Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), but even then she only had 3,850 women donate to her campaign. According to the Center for Responsive Politics' website, Open Secrets, the majority of Trump's female...

Is a woman a shoo-in to win the Democratic nomination and take on President Trump in 2020? Some women in three states that could make or break White House hopes aren't so sure. “I want to be for a woman, but it’s just hard when you see a lot of other people not supporting women yet. I feel that America’s just not there yet,” Wendy McVey, a 20-year-old junior at Iowa State University, told The Associated Press. At the moment, the candidate McVey is most interested in is former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke. Women are among the Democratic Party’s most...

California Democrats, especially those with ties to the influential LGBTQ and Hollywood communities, are finding themselves torn between a home-state senator they love, Kamala Harris, and an out-of-state suitor who has suddenly captured their attention, Pete Buttigieg. It’s a dynamic that’s unsettling the Democratic presidential primary in California — home to an early 2020 March contest that offers a mother lode of nearly 500 delegates. No two candidates are crowding each other quite so closely here, or elbowing each other quite so aggressively, in the pursuit of some of the party’s most generous and influential donors. Buttigieg, the mayor of...

A month ago, he was the hottest Democrat candidate for President. Now he appears to be a flash in the pan. Conservatives largely overestimated what turns out to be a major blowfish. So let’s cast our net and dissect this fish of a candidate named Pete Buttigieg. Pete’s meteoritic rise featured months of being on television steadily building likability among CNN’s most devoted watchers. He has been able to raise large sums of money. Yet in these strengths hides his very weakness. Twitter is not real life. CNN’s ratings are poor. Polls cannot be trusted when a race is competitive....

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — Continuing his outreach to African American voters, Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg acknowledged Sunday that he needs to do more work to connect with the community, particularly in the early-voting state of South Carolina. "It shows we've got a lot of work to do," Buttigieg said after a town hall with 600 mostly white voters in North Charleston, where nearly half the population is black. Buttigieg is planning to do just that during his two-day swing in South Carolina, the first state where black votes play a major role in the presidential primaries. On Monday, he's...

President Trump's recent stonewalling tactics, aimed at blocking Congress' ability to follow up on the allegations detailed in the Mueller report, are rooted in the belief that he can run out the clock on the Democrats in the House through the 2020 election. Nonetheless, it's a strategy fraught with peril, and if the President begins to see a significant erosion in his approval numbers from Americans tired of the endless standoff, he might need to reach deep into his bag of tricks to reset the national narrative. There is one move that could prove to be a complete game changer:...

He’s just a likable, plain spoken Midwestern mayor who happens to be about everything that Donald Trump isn’t. Now, South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg has surged to third place in a new Iowa poll, making strides in a crowded field in the key caucus state. The 37-year-old Iraq and Afghanistan vet jumped to earn 11 percent support in the latest Emerson poll of Democratic presidential candidates in Iowa. He trailed two vastly better known candidates: former Vice President Joe Biden, who hasn’t yet entered the race, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Back in January, Buttigieg didn’t even register in the...

Watch in slow motion as Democrats, goaded by the media, conspire to re-elect President Trump: Voters care about the economy and making education and health care affordable. And so Democrats are talking about … abolishing the Electoral College? Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren started the latest distraction at a CNN town hall on Monday. “Get rid of the Electoral College,” she said, neglecting to mention that this has zero chance of occurring in the foreseeable future. The media took it from there. On Tuesday, MSNBC’s Garrett Haake pressed former representative Beto O’Rourke: “Getting rid of the Electoral College: Is that an...

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Various reports indicate President Donald Trump will return to West Virginia before the Nov. 6 General Election to stump for state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey in his run for U.S. Senate. According to a Reuters report, Trump will go on an 8-state blitz beginning next Wednesday including campaign stops in West Virginia, Florida, Missouri, Indiana, Montana, Ohio, Georgia and Tennessee. Morrisey, who has trailed U.S. Senator Joe Manchin in most of the major polls, predicted during an appearance on MetroNews “Talkline” earlier this week that Trump would return. Trump visited Wheeling Sept. 29. “A vote for Patrick...

Democratic leaders need a unified caucus to put maximum pressure on a handful of holdout Republicans. Democrats have all the cover they need to vote in lockstep against Brett Kavanaugh. But a half-dozen of them have refused to go there, even after the pair of sexual assault allegations against the Supreme Court nominee. Democratic insiders are feeling more bullish than ever that the party’s 49 caucus members ultimately will oppose Kavanaugh. Yet the undeclared bloc of Democratic senators could be a problem for Democratic leaders, who want to put the weight of the nomination entirely on a handful of holdout...

Are you rooting hard for President Trump to be impeached and removed from office? Or, as the anonymous New York Times op-ed last week discussed, hoping there will be an invocation of the (completely unrealistic) 25th Amendment? Or better yet, for him to hang his head in shame and resign? If so, you’re certainly not alone, as every passing day there is new reason to doubt Trump’s competence and evidence linking him to criminal behavior is piling up. But there’s a huge risk: If Trump vacates the office, we could face almost 10 years of President Mike Pence. Is that...