Outside the Beltway

With just over a week to go, the New Hampshire primary is being dominated by a bombastic New York celebrity and a septuagenarian Vermont socialist.

Fundraising in the final three months of 2015 largely reflected the state of the race itself, but some candidates are better positioned going forward than others.

Without Trump, the seventh Republican debate largely focused on Ted Cruz, who doesn’t seem to have done himself any favors. Donald Trump, meanwhile, will likely not pay any price at all for skipping the last pre-Iowa debate.

Last night’s Republican debate had a different feel with the absence of a certain bloviating narcissist.

The first debate after the Iowa Caucuses will have fewer participants than past debates, and there will be no undercard debate.

With mere days until voting starts, the possibility of Donald Trump running the table in the February primaries and caucuses, or nearly doing so, is more and more likely.

With less than a week to go before voting starts, Donald Trump continues to dominate the GOP race, with Ted Cruz the only candidate even close to looking like a viable challenger.

The attacks on Ted Cruz’s eligibility to be President have no legal merit, but they appear to be having an impact with at least some Iowa voters.

There are signs that Ted Cruz’s rise in the Hawkeye State will be short-lived.

Rand Paul and Carly Fiorina are the biggest losers in the lineup for the latest Republican debate on Thursday.

With under a month to go before voting starts, the race for the GOP nomination looks about the same as it did before Christmas.

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders both released strong fourth quarter fundraising reports, as did Republicans Ted Cruz and Ben Carson.

Former President Clinton is set to hit the campaign trail for his wife in the New Year, and that could make things quite entertaining.

Rand Paul is throwing a bit of a temper tantrum. It’s not very Presidential.

Mike Huckabee says he’ll drop out if he doesn’t finish in the top three in Iowa. He should probably start packing his bags now.

In a new Gallup poll, Republicans say they want a “conservative” as their Presidential nominee, but they may regret what happens if they get the kind of hard-right conservative they seem to be thinking of.

Donald Trump remains firmly at the top of of the GOP field in what is likely one of the last polls of the GOP race for 2015.

Fox Business Network has announced its criteria for the next GOP Debate, and it looks like Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina, and John Kasich will be kept off the prime time stage.

There have been many arguments that polling has over-stated Donald Trump’s actual level of support among likely Republican voters, but there’s also a good argument that they are understating it and that Trump may do better when people start voting than many think.

Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are surging in state polls as we head toward the holidays.

If Donald Trump is going to win in early states like Iowa or New Hampshire, he needs a ground game that will get voters to the polls. It doesn’t seem like he has much of one right now.

After making a big deal about voting against the budget bill passed yesterday by Congress during the last debate, Marco Rubio ended up missing the vote altogether.

The first post-debate polls of the GOP race have more good news for Donald Trump.

Marco Rubio has been getting a lot of love lately from both conservatives and so-called ‘establishment’ Republicans, but his seemingly meager ground game in early states is raising doubts about his campaign.

The Fifth Republican Debate, and the last of 2015, was marked by expected clashes between the candidates, and one that never happened.

Previewing the fifth Republican debate, and the last Republican debate of 2015.

Heading into another Presidential debate, a new poll shows that Republicans are very receptive to Donald Trump’s proposal to ban Muslim immigration to the U.S.

A pair of new national polls shows a new trend in the GOP race heading into the final debate of 2015.

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul got a break today when CNN included him in the prime time debate on Tuesday even though he fell short of meeting the criteria.

Ted Cruz surges to a lead in the latest Iowa poll, setting up a seemingly inevitable showdown between the Texas Senator and Donald Trump.

Rand Paul is likely to miss the main stage for next Tuesday’s debate, so his campaign is already calling on CNN to change the rules.

The quadrennial fantasy of a brokered convention, which American politics has not seen since 1952, is rearing its head again, and it’s no more likely now than it was when we talked about this four years ago.

Donald Trump continues to have a commanding lead in the Granite State, but it’s unclear whether he can translate poll support into votes when the primary rolls around.

Donald Trump and Ted Cruz have mostly avoided attacking each other, but if the polls are any indication that detente may be about to come to an end in the Hawkeye State.

Donald Trump’s plan to bar all Muslim immigration to the United States is being widely condemned by his fellow Republicans and others, but the proposal probably won’t hurt him politically in a Republican Party that is deeply bigoted against Muslims in general.

The no-fly list is a flawed, arbitrary mess that has kept innocent people from flying for years. Using it to deny people rights recognized by the Constitution is, quite honestly, insane.

Donald Trump just keeps leading in the polls, and Republicans keep arguing that it can’t last.

Donald Trump’s speech yesterday at a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition was as bizarre as anything else we’ve seen from him.

Yesterday, the British Parliament debated the expansion of that nation’s military strikes against ISIS. For more than a year, our cowardly Congress has failed to even hold one debate or vote on America’s role in that conflict.

The latest national poll of the Republican race shows Trump continuing to lead, Ben Carson fading, and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio rising while the rest of the field is stagnant or sinking.

Chris Christie has gotten the endorsement of the biggest newspaper in New Hampshire, but it’s not clear that this will have any impact on the race.

Another poll shows Ted Cruz rising and Ben Carson falls in the Hawkeye State. The only question is who attacks who first, Donald Trump or Ted Cruz?

Even as the focus of the Presidential race shifts to national security, Donald Trump continues to lead the race.

Different criteria than in the past, but there may not be much of a change in the participants.

Seemingly disproving yet another round of predictions of his imminent demise, Donald Trump continues to dominate the race for the Republican nomination.

Syrian refugees have quickly become political footballs in the United States in the wake of the Paris attacks, and it’s become an exceedingly shameful display of pandering and fearmongering by a group of largely Republican politicians.

Much more so than in the past, the race for the Republican Presidential race has become a battle to define what it means to be a ‘conservative.’ Especially on issues like immigration and national security, one side seems to be winning the battle.

The initial responses of the Republican candidates for President to the attacks in Paris are about what you’d expect, but it’s far too early to tell what impact the events of the weekend will have on the race for President here in the United States.

The Supreme Court is now considering a case that deals with the problem of overly broad civil asset forfeiture laws and a Defendant’s right to counsel under the Sixth Amendment.