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In a very close race with Ken Cuccinelli, Terry McAuliffe is the projected winner in the highly contested Virginia governor race.
Despite Obama campaign bundlers financing Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis, returns show that Cuccinelli ended within 1% of McAullife.
The reason this race was so closely watched was because going into this race, it was considered a battle-ground state.
Now, it will wind up being a ‘base-camp’ if you will for Hillary Clinton to make a run for president in 2016.
In the race to become Virginia’s next Governor, Tea Party favorite Ken Cuccinelli has closed the gap to single digits against the Democrat candidate Terry McAuliffe.
On Tuesday in Virginia, voters will show that elections have consequences.
Terry McAuliffe is the typical Democrat insider.
Ken Cuccinelli is the Tea Party-backed nominee.
The outcome of this one election sets in place things to come for 2014 heading in to the 2016 elections.
If Cuccinelli wins, it gives traction to the Republicans to take seats in 2014. If McAuliffe wins – should Hillary Clinton become the Democrat nominee – it would give her a place to set up base camp for a 2016 Presidential run.
So, if you still aren’t convinced this is a must-watch race, look at these numbers from a Fox News report:
Whoever wins the race has already eclipses previous fundraising for a Virginia gubernatorial race – with Cuccinelli having raised $16.8 million to McAuliffe’s $26.3 million, according to a report late last week from the Virginia Public Access Project.
The nonprofit group also reports that roughly 70 percent of that money has come from outside the state, marking the first time in which Virginia gubernatorial candidates have raise more than half of their money outside the state.
McAuliffe has gotten money from some of the country’s most wealthy liberals including Hollywood moguls Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who each gave $5,000, and President Clinton who gave $100,000. (emphasis added)
Elections have consequences and from this you can see who Washington doesn’t want elected.
Billionaire fiancier George Soros began funding for Hillary Clinton to make a run for president in 2016.
His pledge of $25,000 to Ready For Hillary PAC is just the start.
Soros is a MAJOR donor to the Democrat Party.
His funds helped elect Obama.
Michael Vachon, a Soros spokesman said, “His support for Ready For Hillary is an extension of his long-held belief in the power of grassroots organizing.”
Do not dismiss the fund machine named George Soros. During the 2004 elections, his donations were estimated at $27.5 million.
So, for now, the top spot of the 2016 Democrat ticket is held by Hillary Clinton without any challengers.
Siting website woes as one of their reasons, support to delay the mandate is a threat to Obama.
It ups the pressure to re-evaluate the failure we know as Obamacare.
So, who is doing what?
As if that wasn’t enough pressure, Rep. Rick Nolan (D-MN) and Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) are calling for people to get fired.
And, The Chicago Tribune wrote that ‘the bugs aren’t just in the software. They’re in the law itself.’
So, it seems that Obamacare’s house of cards is beginning to topple.
Former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) on Monday night urged voters to replace any Republican lawmaker unwilling to vote to defund ObamaCare during next month’s budget showdown.
DeMint, the president of the Heritage Foundation, dismissed fears that Republicans would be blamed for a government shutdown, as they were in the 1990s.
“The risk of that is so much less than the risk to our country if we implement ObamaCare, and so I’m not as interested in the political futures of folks who think they might lose a showdown with the president,” DeMint said at a town-hall meeting hosted by Heritage Action, the think tank’s political arm, in Fayetteville, Ark., the first stop on a nine-city tour.
DeMint said President Obama believes he has the upper hand in the coming fight.
Read more at The Hill’s Blog Briefing Room
But why would he do this? Well, it’s pretty obvious that he is gearing up for a 2016 run for president. So, he released a copy of his birth certificate to hopefully curb the argument that he is ineligible to run.
Cruz was born in Canada to an American mother, which would make him a United States citizen. But, it also makes him a citizen in Canada under Canadian law.
However, Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier denied the senator’s dual citizenship.
“Senator Cruz became a U.S. citizen at birth, and he never had to go through a naturalization process after birth to become a U.S. Citizen,” Frazier said. “To our knowledge, he never had Canadian citizenship, so there is nothing to renounce.” via HuffingtonPost
The Constitution says that “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President.”
Time will only tell if this becomes a much larger issue for Ted Cruz and the Republican party.
There are no polls showing Ted Cruz leading the 2016 Republican presidential field in the Iowa. A PPP survey last month found Cruz in sixth place in the state, behind Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio. But after a particularly well-received appearance at a conservative event in Ames, Iowa over the weekend, there seems little doubt that Cruz, who has been in the U.S. Senate all of eight months, is zooming toward the front of the GOP pack in the nation’s first-voting state.
The gathering, sponsored by the social conservative organization Family Leader, featured appearances by Rick Santorum, winner of the 2012 Republican caucuses, and Cruz, along with billionaire gadfly Donald Trump. From all accounts, Santorum was a popular speaker; the social conservative crowd appreciated not only his positions but the enormous effort he has made to get to know the state of Iowa and its conservative residents.
But Santorum’s welcome could not compare to the wildly enthusiastic reception for Cruz. Joined by his pastor father, Rafael Cruz — he was a big hit, too — the Texas freshman senator wowed the crowd, and then wowed them again.
“The reception for Santorum was appreciative, consistent, and steady,” Bob Vander Plaats, head of the Family Leader and organizer of the event, told me via email. “The anticipation for and reception of Cruz was over the top. He was propelled by an amazing speech by his father, Rafael. All that said, Cruz delivered. Most walked away talking Cruz!”
“Although they both received a warm reception from the Christian conservative audience, Cruz clearly bested Santorum in terms of enthusiasm, excitement, and anticipation of a 2016 presidential run,” said Jamie Johnson, a GOP state committeeman and a strong Santorum backer in 2012.
“While [Santorum] delivered a good speech, he was upstaged by Cruz, who from everything I’ve seen has become the great conservative hope for Iowa conservatives,” said Craig Robinson, founder and editor of the influential Iowa Republican blog. “You could sense the crowd’s anticipation before Cruz spoke. The energy in the room as he spoke was unmatched by any other speaker that day.”
“Cruz has only been to Iowa twice,” Robinson concluded, “but in the limited time he’s been in the state he’s done everything right.”
None of that is to say that Cruz has left any other Republican candidates in the dust. Rand Paul, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush, Bobby Jindal — each will be welcomed by Iowa Republicans if he decides to run. But it does say that, at least for the moment, Cruz has almost instantly joined the group of Republicans who should be taken seriously as a presidential hopeful. Maybe that will change — maybe Cruz will make a big mistake or just wear out his welcome — but right now, he is the hot name in Iowa Republican circles.
Digital democracy is here. We no longer passively watch our leaders on television and register our opinions on Election Day. Modern politics happens when somebody comments on Twitter or links to a campaign through Facebook. In our hyper-networked world, anyone can say anything, and it can be read by millions.
This new world will undermine the polling industry. For nearly a century, conventional wisdom has argued that we can only truly know what the public thinks about an issue if we survey a random sample of adults. An entire industry is built on this view. Nearly every serious political campaign in the United States spends thousands, even millions, of dollars hiring campaign consultants who conduct these polls and interpret the results.
Digital democracy will put these campaign professionals out of work. New research in computer science, sociology and political science shows that data extracted from social media platforms yield accurate measurements of public opinion. It turns out that what people say on Twitter or Facebook is a very good indicator of how they will vote.
How good? In a paper to be presented Monday, co-authors Joseph DiGrazia, Karissa McKelvey, Johan Bollen and I show that Twitter discussions are an unusually good predictor of U.S. House elections. Using a massive archive of billions of randomly sampled tweets stored at Indiana University, we extracted 542,969 tweets that mention a Democratic or Republican candidate for Congress in 2010. For each congressional district, we computed the percentage of tweets that mentioned these candidates. We found a strong correlation between a candidate’s “tweet share” and the final two-party vote share, especially when we account for a district’s economic, racial and gender profile. In the 2010 data, our Twitter data predicted the winner in 404 out of 406 competitive races.
Why does this happen? We believe that Twitter and other social media reflect the underlying trend in a political race that goes beyond a district’s fundamental geographic and demographic composition. If people must talk about you, even in negative ways, it is a signal that a candidate is on the verge of victory. The attention given to winners creates a situation in which all publicity is good publicity.
Read entire article at The Washington Post
The liberal media is on notice: If you’re in the business of spending millions to promote Hillary Clinton, you will not take part in Republicans’ primary debates in the 2016 presidential election.
On Monday, I sent letters to NBC and CNN informing them that the RNC will not sanction any primary debates they sponsor if they do not cancel their plans to promote Hillary Clinton.
NBC is planning a miniseries, CNN a documentary. If they don’t cancel these poorly disguised political ads by August 14, they can plan on watching Republican debates on networks other than their own.
It’s bad enough that liberal reporters have deposed Republican candidates at debates in the past and tried to make news at the expense of our party; it’s even worse, appalling really, that their networks would go to such lengths to coronate Hillary Clinton. Their brazenness has gone to a new level.
Republicans across the country are speaking out. The networks’ actions are so outrageous that even some prominent liberals agree with the RNC. But we have to keep the pressure up if we’re going to expose the media for who and what they are. I encourage you to sign the RNC’s petition here.
I called out NBC and CNN because I refuse to let biased networks turn the 2016 debates into the same traveling circus they caused the 2012 debates to be. This is just one step toward creating a better, fairer debate system. But this is also an opportunity for us to begin to do something even bigger.
For years—decades really—Republicans have tried to expose the bias in the media to the public at large. We’ve had some successes, but most of the liberal media continue to claim they’re just neutral observers. Well, neutral observers don’t actively promote the Democrats’ leading candidate for president. So by keeping the spotlight on NBC and CNN, we can alert more Americans to the liberal influence at these—and other—networks, and we’ll begin to ensure better debates in the process.
via RedState
The RedState Gathering has been meeting annually for five years now. In that time, the RSG has made a name for itself by making a name for others- spotlighting up-and-comers in the conservative movement who have made their mark in the Republican Party and challenged the mediocre majority.
Rick Perry announced his intention to run for president at the RSG in 2011. Erick Erikson’s RSG vision helped Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio earn national recognition.
This year’s gathering, held last week in New Orleans, served as a launching point for a number of candidates seeking to make their way into the GOP establishment. Below is a list of names-to-know and what to expect in the way of a Republican shake-up in 2014 and beyond: [Read more…] about RedState Gathering Brings Out New Crop of GOP Challengers