2010

Rand Paul, who has surprised a lot of people by becoming a real contender for a U.S. Senate seat in Kentucky, bows to political reality — he’s blasting the Obama administration’s policy on terror trials and proposing to “try, convict, and lock up terrorists in Guantanamo.”
Paul’s father, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), is one of the [...]

Rasmussen Reports finds Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) clinging to a two-point lead over a possible challenger, former Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.). Chris Simcox, the leader of the anti-illegal immigration Minuteman Project who’s already in the race, scores 4 percent. All of this puts McCain, who has never been seriously challenged since he came to the [...]

Markos Moulitsas leaks (on Twitter) the results of the latest Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll, which has Marco Rubio surging against Gov. Charlie Crist (R-Fla.) in the 2010 GOP Senate primary. The trendlines:
Charlie Crist – 47 percent (-10)
Marco Rubio – 37 percent (+26)
Likely Democratic candidate Rep. Kendrick Meek (D-Fla.), according to Kos, is a non-factor in [...]

This new Rasmussen Reports poll is going to encourage Republicans who are already running on a 2010 promise to cancel whatever stimulus spending they can.
The survey found 62 percent of voters say tax cuts will create jobs and fight unemployment. Only 21 percent say spending can do that. This cuts against the long-standing economic theories [...]

Rand Paul, the son of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), has surprised a lot of people by surging in polls and fundraising to quasi-frontrunner status in next year’s U.S. Senate race in Kentucky. But Chris Cillizza reports that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is weighing in against Paul and hosting a fundraiser for Trey Grayson, [...]

Toward the end of my lengthy interview with California Assemblyman Chuck DeVore — my second interview to date with the conservative GOP candidate for U.S. Senate — I asked him to respond to a Huffington Post story that made much out of his friendship with part-time Obama birth conspiracy theorist Floyd Brown. I’ve gotten some [...]

Blogger Jordan Carmon catches Marco Rubio’s upstart Senate campaign putting together an ad against Gov. Charlie Crist (R-Fla.) — his opponent in the 2010 GOP primary — that looks and sounds exactly like a hard-hitting ad then-presidential candidate Barack Obama ran against Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2008.
After the jump, check out the ads.

I just talked to Mike Kilburn, a county commissioner in Warren County, Ohio, who’s running against Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio) in the 2010 GOP primary. He was “surprised,” he said, to find out that the Republican National Committee had–until Politico exposed it–included some coverage for abortion in its employee health care plan.

It’s hard to ascertain the impact of Senate candidate Rand Paul’s honest, impolitic statement that he’d consider backing Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) over Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). The latter man would, of course, be Paul’s colleague from Kentucky if he does make it to the Senate. Trey Grayson, the Republican secretary of state who’s having [...]

Lisa De Pasquale, director of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, shares the news on Twitter. It’s another confirmation of Rubio’s prominence as the next, post-Doug Hoffman, conservative cause celebre.