Free Republic

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has now surged ahead of Mitt Romney in the final Rasmussen Reports survey of the South Carolina Republican Primary race with the vote just two days away. The latest telephone survey of Likely GOP Primary Voters in the state finds Gingrich with 33% support to Romney’s 31%. Two days ago, before the last debate, it was Romney by 14 percentage points. Texas Congressman Ron Paul now runs third with 15% of the vote, followed by former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum at 11%. Paul's support is steady while Santorum's support has dropped five points since Monday....

With South Carolina's victory of the first 'Deep South' black Republican to Congress since Reconstruction, one conservative thinks it's evident that the tea party is not racist. Ron Miller, a conservative author, columnist, veteran and tea party member, says Tim Scott's election to Congress is "an impressive victory." "I think it's a great testimony to Americans' ability to evaluate people by the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin..." ----snip. In winning the election, Scott beat out....the son of late Senator Strom Thurmond and the son of former South Carolina Governor Carroll Campbell. ----snip"...they've demonstrated their...

Manning, SC -- Democratic candidate for Senate Alvin Greene saw his longshot campaign come to a close Tuesday night. Although he gained an impressive number of votes, he fell short of defeating Senator Jim Demint. He made a bizarre post-campaign appearance in Manning. 200 people were expected for his campaign party, but only about 2 people showed up, along with Greene and his family. News Channel 7's Jonathan Carlson was the only Upstate reporter there and attempted to speak with Greene in a sometimes odd interview. As he entered the catering hall, Greene was asked if he would run again....

Watching web coverage, looks like John Spratt is going to fall to a conservative. Mulvaney is wiping the floor with him. Spratt was supposed to be unbeatable. Having a great time tonight!

Remember what the voters back home want—less government and more freedom. BY U.S. SEN. JIM DEMINT Congratulations to all the tea party-backed candidates who overcame a determined, partisan opposition to win their elections. The next campaign begins today. Because you must now overcome determined party insiders if this nation is going to be spared from fiscal disaster. Many of the people who will be welcoming the new class of Senate conservatives to Washington never wanted you here in the first place. The establishment is much more likely to try to buy off your votes than to buy into your limited-government...

Besides Jim DeMint it's not looking good in SC with Early Results... 5th Congressional District SC... Spratt is ahead 53% to 48% SC Gov. Race...Shaheen is ahead 52% to 47%

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint will return to Washington for a second term after an easy election that saw his national status rise as a kingmaker for the tea party movement and an unlikely challenge from an oddball opponent. Based on AP analysis of preliminary exit poll data, the Republican rolled over unemployed military veteran Alvin Greene, a Democrat who won his party's nomination but not its support. Greene lives with his father and faces a felony obscenity charge, accused of showing pornography to a female college student. During occasional interviews in his nominal campaign, Greene insisted...

The libretto of this operatic election season, understandably promoted by Democrats and unsurprisingly sung by many in the media, is that Republicans have sown the seeds of November disappointments by nominating candidates other than those the party's supposedly wiser establishment prefers. This theory is inconvenienced by two facts: South Carolina's Nikki Haley and Tim Scott. "I am a policy girl," Haley, 38, says demurely. But she is a savvy politician who in 2004 won a state legislature seat by defeating the longest-serving incumbent. Although the state's Republican establishment opposed her nomination for governor, she won because for two years she...

Republican incumbent Jim DeMint remains far ahead of surprise Democratic nominee Alvin Greene in the U.S. Senate race in South Carolina. A new Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Voters in the state finds DeMint leading Green by a better than three-to-one margin, 63% to 19%. Eight percent (8%) prefer some other candidate, and 10% are undecided.

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham is in hot water again with tea party activists for his comments that their movement cannot endure "because they can never come up with a coherent vision for governing the country." It's an opinion Graham has expressed before, but it drew national attention recently in a profile published in The New York Times as he was leaving for the Middle East during the Senate's Fourth of July recess. Ralph Billeter, 76, said he heard it on Fox News and it reinforced to him that Graham, a Republican from Seneca, is out of touch with the people...

Tim Scott, a charismatic member of the South Carolina state House of Representatives, soundly defeated Paul Thurmond in the GOP runoff for South Carolina's 1st Congressional District. Thurmond is the son of South Carolina's legendary late Sen. Strom Thurmond. Scott won the runoff 69 percent to 31 percent. Earlier this month, Scott won the most votes in the nine-candidate GOP field that also included Carroll Campbell, son of the state's late Gov. Carroll Campbell. On Monday, Sarah Palin gave Scott's campaign a huge bump when she endorsed him for Congress. .......

State Rep. Tim Scott took a step toward history Tuesday night, handily locking up the Republican nomination for the 1st Congressional District. He took 68 percent of the vote to beat his former Charleston County Council colleague Paul Thurmond, which makes him likely to become the first black Republican to serve in the U.S. House since J.C. Watts of Oklahoma retired six years ago. If these unofficial results hold and Scott also wins Nov. 2, he would become the first black Republican elected to Congress from the Deep South since Reconstruction. During their campaign, Scott and Thurmond, whose late father...

Voters in South Carolina nominated a black Republican lawmaker for an open congressional seat Tuesday, rejecting a legendary political name and potentially changing the face of the national party. State Rep. Tim Scott defeated Paul Thurmond, an attorney who is son of the one-time segregationist U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond. Scott, who won the runoff with 69 percent of the vote, is now poised to become the nation's first black GOP congressman since 2003. Scott, 44, owns an insurance business and became the first black Republican in the South Carolina Legislature in more than a century when elected two years ago....

State Returns from SC (polls close at 7pm EST): http://www.enr-scvotes.org/SC/16213/28352/en/summary.html From NC (polls close at 730 EST) http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/NC/17242/28326/en/summary.html For Utah (Polls Close 10pmEST) http://electionresults.utah.gov/xmlData/300010.html If anyone has better links, please share them. GO Haley, Scott, and Lee!

Republican Tim Scott earned a landslide victory against challenger Paul Thurmond in the Republican runoff in South Carolina's 1st Congressional District. The Associated Press called the race for Scott with the candidate leading Thurmond 74 percent to 26 percent. There was no question that Scott was the candidate of the party's D.C. establishment in South Carolina's 1st congressional district. It's a label that has essentially been the kiss of death for other GOP primary candidates this election cycle. But in the open seat primary to replace retiring Rep. Henry Brown (R) the party appeared thrilled to coalesce behind Scott, the...

Politics: The Democratic Senate candidate from South Carolina is not a GOP dirty trick but an appropriate representative of a party detached from reality. An incoherent and off-the-wall empty suit, he is a perfect fit. Late Thursday night, the South Carolina Democratic Party's Executive Committee rejected a protest of the June 8 primary for U.S. Senate, in which Alvin Greene, who has a felony arrest for showing porn to college girls, defeated Vic Rawl, a former state representative and judge. Greene has been declared the party's legitimate nominee, much to the chagrin of MSNBC's Chris Matthews, whose leg no longer...

Ballot position? Electronic prompts? Pondering the theories behind an unlikely victory.Does anything feel more proudly patriotic than voting? You stride into your local polling place, past fellow citizens smoothing “I Voted!” stickers to their chests. You snap the booth’s curtain shut and turn to the ballot, ready to execute what Samuel Adams called “the most solemn trust in human society,” only to realize: Crap. Who are these guys? Academics call it “low information voting”: the psychology of what goes through our heads when confronted with a ballot full of names or issues we know very little about. Long established...

Alvin Greene may be the only Democratic nominee in U.S. Senate election history to walk to his father's kitchen every time his telephone rings. And it rings every five minutes or so — supporters he'll never meet, television and radio bookers hoping to juice ratings and reporters trying to figure out what Greene means for South Carolina and America's troubled democracy. "I don't have caller I.D.," Greene tells one caller. He also doesn't own a cell phone or a computer. As recently as Memorial Day, Alvin Greene was an unemployed 32-year-old, 13-year military veteran, who had been involuntarily discharged from...

The victory of the mysterious Alvin Greene in the South Carolina Democratic primary for the US Senate race left many scratching their heads, with the losing candidate making an appeal on Thursday. Alvin Greene has been given a hard time since the primary. He has been ridiculed on YouTube, accused of being a "plant" by senior Democrats, and questioned over his mental state on live television. Much has been made of the fact he is unemployed, was unknown to local Democrats and seemed to have done no campaigning. Despite this he won the primary 59% to 41% and will now...

An unemployed military veteran who raised no funds and put up no campaign website shocked South Carolina's Democratic Party leadership by capturing the nomination Tuesday to face Republican U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint in November. With nearly all precincts reporting, Alvin Greene, 32, commanded 59 percent of the vote against 41 percent for former four-term state lawmaker Vic Rawl, 64, who had raised about $186,000 and had to abruptly scrap a late-week fundraiser for the fall. State Democratic Party Chairwoman Carol Fowler said voters unfamiliar with either candidate may have voted alphabetically for Greene over Rawl.