Free Republic

With Milwaukee set to host the 2020 Democratic convention, the Democratic National Committee is counting in part on the region’s fast-growing Asian American and Pacific Islander population to help them win back the Midwest. “In certain states, the Asian-American vote is enough to help make that margin of victory,” Rep. Grace Meng, of New York, a DNC vice chair, said in a phone interview last week.

If your family's from the Midwest (especially Wisconsin or Minnesota, both of which have a significant Scandinavian-rooted population), you might remember your grandma boiling up big, big batches of what she called Scandinavian coffee (or perhaps Norwegian or Swedish coffee, if she wanted to get specific). If she was making it for a church get-together, she might have called it church basement coffee and brought along one of these heavenly potluck dishes. But what was that secret-ingredient coffee that Gran made? If you peeked in the percolator, you might have seen it. The secret ingredient in Scandinavian coffee Eggs! They...

President Trump hasn't just rewritten the political rule book; he has also redrawn the political map. While plenty like to complain about how the polls got the 2016 election wrong, they got it wrong in only one region of the country: along the Rust Belt and into the Upper Midwest. And that's where Trump pulled out his narrow victory. We and plenty of others have been somewhat consumed with how that shift came about and whether it represents a fundamental realignment in American politics. But I still don't think people realize how big a shift it was or where exactly...

LOST RIVER, W.Va. -- The tale of the enigmatic flowing river that seemingly disappears underground only to reappear elsewhere, which explains away the naming of this town, is the stuff that holds visitors or children spellbound. Lost River is one of four unincorporated towns along West Virginia state Route 259 that attracted America's frontier families for its rich resources. Surveyed by then-16-year-old George Washington, this area has never had much population; it's had the commerce to keep enough people there not long enough to make it boom but just long enough to make it stick with tourists. Today, it attracts...

Following a Democrat’s special election win in a Wisconsin Senate district that voted for President Donald Trump, a group backed by former President Barack Obama said it plans to invest millions of dollars into state-wide elections in Wisconsin and 10 other states. The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, said this year’s election cycle is critical to affecting the congressional redistricting process. It is the first cycle whose winners will participate in drawing congressional maps for the decade starting in 2021. The committee backed Democrat Patty Schachtner in last month’s election in the 10th...

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — More than a dozen states banded together Monday to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to block a California law requiring any eggs sold there to come from hens that have space to stretch out in their cages. In a lawsuit filed directly to the high court, the states allege that California's law has cost consumers nationwide up to $350 million annually because of higher egg prices since it took effect in 2015. The lawsuit argues that California's requirements violate the U.S. Constitution's interstate commerce clause and are pre-empted by federal law. A federal appeals court...

Corny Capitalism: This is one campaign promise we wish President Trump would break. But alas, he just told his EPA to give up any thought of cutting back on the federal government's anti-consumer, anti-environment ethanol mandate. Sad. The story begins in 2005, when President Bush approved the Renewable Fuel Standard program as part of an energy bill, which required oil refiners to blend in predetermined amounts of "biofuels" into their gasoline, starting at 4 billion gallons in 2006. A revised version of the RFS, which Bush signed in 2007, expanding the program, requiring ethanol levels to climb steadily to 36...

Notebook: Victory is a potent tool as is delivering on stump promises It is more than 100 days since Donald Trump was elected president of the US. Would he win again, if the vote were held today? Many in the US, not to mention the world, are tempted to say: no way. They think all reasonable people must surely be fed up with him by now, after three months of tweets mostly unbecoming of the presidency, scandals over everything from Russia to the Nordstrom department store and an immigration crackdown that has left even legal migrants fearing granny may be...

With the dust now settled from the election, Democrats are looking to rebuild the political “blue wall” of traditionally Democratic upper Midwest and Great Lakes states that Republican Donald Trump captured with an appeal to white, working-class voters. Hillary Clinton’s failure to hold key blocs of these voters helped seal Trump’s stunning electoral victory and leaves Democrats with a gaping, perhaps long-term, hole in the party’s national battle front. Trump boasted of his accomplishment at a post-election rally in Ohio. The president-elect crowed: “We didn’t break it; we shattered that sucker. We shattered it, man. That poor wall is busted...

<p>In 2016 the path to victory for the GOP ran through the Midwest, and this may remain true for some time.</p> <p>Over Labor Day weekend in 2015, four months before the first primary votes were cast in Iowa, a somewhat obscure policy analyst and strategist wrote a confidential memo to a presidential campaign he was informally advising. He outlined what he believed was the path to victory for the GOP in the 2016 presidential election, based on election simulations he had run using a couple of publicly available models. He attacked the GOP’s official Election 2012 post-mortem as being politically motivated and divorced from actual voting data. A portion of the memo, edited lightly for style and length, is reproduced below.</p>

Clinton ignored people who live outside the trendy urban areas and also played fast and loose with the truth.

Sen. Marco Rubio doesn't plan to be at his own campaign's rally tonight after the results of the Nevada caucuses come in, according to his schedule... In South Carolina on Saturday, Rubio celebrated his second place finish, calling it a dramatic comeback for his campaign... Pundits have increasingly grown skeptical of Rubio's dramatic election night speeches especially after losing each state.

A deep freeze set in across the Midwest on Sunday with low temperatures forecast in the single digits and a few below zero, turning the season's first major snow into ice that made some roads treacherous to travel. After snow on Friday and Saturday across much of the region, temperatures plunged behind the front. The National Weather Service forecast 20 degrees or lower across six states from North Dakota to Illinois. Fargo, North Dakota, could dip to 11 degrees by early Sunday. Madison, Wisconsin, could see 7 degrees and Des Moines 12. Parts of Iowa, northwest Illinois and southern Wisconsin...

A century ago the Rust Belt was the country's industrial heartland, with cities like Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Detroit innovating manufacturing processes that drew, among others, large numbers of European and Latin immigrants. When industrial decline eliminated well-paid blue-collar jobs, entire families of new Americans left for more foreign-friendly metropolises to find better work opportunities and living conditions. Today, many of these once-dominant industrial cities are taking steps to attract immigrants and refugees as a way to reverse a half-century of population decline. Welcoming groups in Cleveland, Dayton, Detroit and St. Louis promote immigrant integration within the region, while public officials...

It’s one of the few polls that has some separation atop the 2016 GOP field, and it shows Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker expanding his lead. The new Iowa poll conducted by Bloomberg Politics and the Des Moines Register has Walker getting support from 17 percent of the 402 registered Iowa voters who say they are likely to attend 2016 GOP caucuses. In the previous poll, Walker came in at 15 percent. [snip] In favorability rankings, Walker also leads the pack, with 66 percent of Republicans saying they view him favorably. [snip]

PASADENA, Calif. — Shattered cave formations in the central United States may preserve one of the longest records of powerful earthquakes in this region. Historical records from European settlers provide vivid accounts of deadly earthquakes in states such as Missouri, Tennessee and Illinois. For instance, in 1811 and 1812, people saw the ground ripple like ocean waves when the New Madrid Fault Zone unleashed earthquakes thought to be greater than magnitude 8. However, no written accounts exist from before Europeans arrived. And most earthquake faults in the Midwest are hidden deep beneath the surface, so scientists can't dig into the...

Many urbanites use doggie day cares while they work long hours. Paying others to exercise their pets, owners can forgo long walks and enjoy guilt-free pooch snuggling in the evenings. While usually a healthy experience for the dogs, the day care environment, with dozens of pets mingling, contributed to an epidemic of dog flu in Chicago that is spreading in the Midwest, experts say.

Republicans are debating whether their path to the presidency in 2016 runs through the blue-collar Rust Belt states, or the demographically changing new South and Sunbelt states. For Democrats looking to retake the Senate, however, the formula is more clear-cut: Win back white working-class voters, or be consigned to a longer-term minority. (SNIP) Exit polls show that Rust Belt Democrats performed dismally among non-college-educated white voters in these states in 2010. Feingold won just 40 percent of their vote in 2010, five points behind Obama's vote share in the state two years later. In Ohio, Strickland tallied just 40 percent...

Republicans are debating whether their path to the presidency in 2016 runs through the blue-collar Rust Belt states, or the demographically changing new South and Sunbelt states. For Democrats looking to retake the Senate, however, the formula is more clear-cut: Win back white working-class voters, or be consigned to a longer-term minority. Most of the Senate battlegrounds run through the Midwest—Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio—along with New Hampshire, which carries demographic similarities with those older, whiter Great Lakes states. To defeat the vulnerable Republican incumbents, Democrats have a challenging task ahead: Making inroads with blue-collar voters, who have been stubbornly resistant...