Free Republic

A new class of voter is waiting to shake up our politics. In 2016, we learned about the crucial importance of “Obama-Trump” voters. Some estimates held that up to 13 percent of Trump’s voters in 2016 had voted for Obama in a previous election. This reflects the moodiness of swing voters, the changing composition of the two parties, and the continuities between the two very different men. Notably, Obama and Trump both ran their campaigns as critics of NAFTA. Hillary Clinton lost about one out of every four Obama voters who were white men with only high-school education. Some analysts...

Herschel Walker’s 100,000-vote loss in Georgia puts the exclamation point on the “Donald Trump is electoral poison” narrative. If the former president had deliberately attempted to sabotage the Republicans' chances ever since November 2020, he could not have been more destructive than he actually was. In the Senate, the Trump effect meant Republicans lost chances at a whopping 10 seats (one of them two times!) they either should have won or in which they might have been competitive. In the House, Trump’s harm was more diffused, but almost equally baleful. On Jan. 5, 2021, Republicans lost two Senate seats in...

Former president Donald Trump boasted on Saturday that he’s polling way above “Ron DeSanctimonious” for the GOP 2024 presidential nomination, in an early taste of the rivalry that’s widely expected to develop after next week’s midterms. Trump at 71, Ron DeSanctimonious at 10 percent, Mike Pence at 7 percent . . . Oh, Mike’s doing better than I thought,” Trump told a crowd of supporters at a rally in Latrobe, Pa., for Republican Senate and gubernatorial candidates Dr. Mehmet Oz and Doug Mastriano. The fact that Trump assigned the governor of Florida a derogatory nickname is a telltale sign that...

Two new polls show Florida governor Ron DeSantis with a realistic shot of defeating Donald Trump in a 2024 primary. The former president remains the strong favorite, but he’s under 50 percent in the latest YouGov survey:GOP Presidential Polling:Trump: 46%DeSantis: 21%Pence: 6%Haley: 6%Carlson: 2%YouGov / January 24, 2022 / n=1568 / Onlinehttps://t.co/axPvpnEU7N— Polling USA (@USA_Polling) January 28, 2022A new poll by Echelon Insights shows that DeSantis’s position has improved in the last few months in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup:TRUMP v. DESANTIS two-way GOP primary:Trump 57%DeSantis 32%In October, this was Trump +40. Today, it's Trump +25. pic.twitter.com/1vYJYby3EN— Patrick Ruffini (@PatrickRuffini) January...

By most accounts, there is an electoral wave building in favor of the Democratic party. Democrats are in good shape to win the necessary 23 seats to take control of the House of Representatives, nab several governorships, and collect a multitude of state legislative seats. The Senate, by virtue of this year’s map that favors Republicans, should remain in GOP hands. But all in all, a wave seems to be looming. Granted, the out party usually does well in midterm elections such as the one scheduled for November. But this is not always a guarantee. Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and...