Free Republic

TAMPA, Fla. — Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) on Tuesday said Republicans aren’t going to close the gap with Hispanic voters until they “stop acting stupid.” Bush said many Hispanic voters share the GOP’s commitment to faith, family and small government but have been alienated from the party by exclusionary rhetoric on immigration. But that, he said, is finally changing. “I promise you this is where the conservative cause is going, and thank God it is,” he said to cheers at a lunch sponsored by the center-right Hispanic Leadership Network. The advantage that Democrats have with Hispanics is a...

For those out there loving the current Republican race but worrying that it has become somewhat orthodox in appearance and stable in candidates and support numbers, fear not: ABC News’ Jonathan Karl has the blind item for you. In the most mysterious and, for the GOP, worrisome dispatch on the Republican field in a while, Karl reports that a “prominent Republican senator” told him that the Party will not stand for a Mitt Romney loss in Michigan, and that he expects a result like that to lead the Senator to “publicly call for the party to find a new candidate,”...

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is speaking out against the new hard-line immigration law in Arizona, becoming the first prominent national Republican to do so. "I think it creates unintended consequences," he said in a telephone interview with POLITICO Tuesday. "It's difficult for me to imagine how you're going to enforce this law. It places a significant burden on local law enforcement and you have civil liberties issues that are significant as well." The measure, signed into law last Friday, would require police to check the immigration status of any individuals they reasonably suspect are illegal immigrants and arrest them...

Sometimes good advice comes from the most unlikely of places. In this case, it comes from a Bush. In an interview with Tucker Carlson for Esquire magazine, Gov. Jeb Bush stated the most obvious fact of American electoral politics today: if the GOP is to rise again, it has to stop hating on Hispanics– or at least it has to stop appearing to be hating on Hispanics! He’s talking about you, Tom Tancredo, non-office-holding cable-news ranter. [T]he demographics are going against us. Alex [Castellanos, Republican media consultant] told me today, for example, that there is not a district in California...