Word: gop
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...friend Mitch McConnell. "I hope everybody here understands how much he stuck his neck out for me through thick and thin during that race last year," Bunning, 77, said pointing to Kentucky's senior senator, the number two Senate Republican at the time and the key architect of the GOP's astonishing ascendancy in the state over the previous decade. McConnell, 67, had indeed spent much of the final weeks of Bunning's 2004 re-election campaign on a tour bus, telling crowds across the Bluegrass State that Kentucky, and America, needed Jim Bunning in the Senate...
...found himself even more isolated. Party leaders in Washington met with a potential primary opponent, David Williams, a McConnell ally who is the whip-smart and baldly partisan president of the Kentucky senate. Last month, Bunning called Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who will lead efforts to re-elect GOP senators in 2010, a liar after Cornyn denied he was recruiting an alternative candidate to Bunning. Just for good measure, he also threatened to sue the party if they did indeed recruit a candidate to run against Bunning...
Given the GOP's precarious position, it's a threat that not even McConnell can afford to take lightly, and the war may be entering a truce. Few figures in the state have publicly taken sides, and Williams has been silent about his intentions. But the prospect of war between Bunning's camp and McConnell's has kept party activists in Kentucky fretting. "Everyone is focused on winning," said Republican strategist Scott Jennings of Louisville, a member of the state party's executive committee and a former Bush White House aide. "No one doubts Jim Bunning's conservative positions...
Florida's Cuban-American GOP lawmakers, including Lincoln Diaz-Balart's brother and fellow Congressman, Mario Diaz-Balart, are also reaching out to other Latin Americans whose home countries have recently elected leftist leaders, most notably Nicaragua, Bolivia and Ecuador. Some contend the effort is a strategic political move aimed at consolidating their power base during a palpable shift in the dynamic of Florida's Latino community - from traditionally Cuban and reliably Republican, to more Central or South American and Democratic or independent. While incumbents Ros-Lehtinen and the Diaz-Balarts all won re-election in November, their margins...
...Florida's 1.1 million registered Latino voters were Republicans, while 31% were Democrats and 26% independents. In 2008, however, when the total rose to 1.35 million, 38% were Democrats, 33% GOP and 28% independent. A 2008 poll by the Miami-based nonpartisan group Democracia U.S.A. shows that since 2000, Latino voters in the Sunshine State registered as independent have increased about 10%, while the percentage of Florida Latinos backing Republican candidates has fallen 13 points. (Watch TIME's video about Florida's hispanic voters...