Former Candidates Start to Coalesce Behind Trump

With the Republican primary race all but over, GOP leaders are slowly beginning to unite behind the party’s presumptive nominee, Donald Trump. This includes three of his former rivals for the nomination. Just days following Trump’s significant victory in the Indiana primary, former candidates Scott Walker and Rick Perry announced they would be backing Trump in this year’s presidential election. Walker framed his support as a fulfilling of his pledge last August to support the Republican nominee and stated that he thinks Trump “is clearly better than Hillary Clinton for a variety of reasons.” Perry was even more complimentary, stating

BREAKING: Gov. Scott Walker Makes Huge Endorsement

Many have been speculating whether Scott Walker would make an endorsement prior to Wisconsin’s primary on April 5th. Would he jump on the Donald Trump train? Would he go with the establishment’s reluctant favorite, John Kasich? Nope. Scott Walker is going with Ted Cruz. And as a thrice elected governor in Wisconsin, Walker certainly carries a lot of weight with GOP voters. From The Hill: Walker’s endorsement has the potential to shift the dynamic in the state, which has 42 delegates up for grabs. But Matt Mackowiak, a Republican strategist, told The Hill that the true effect will depend on how

Voters Want Fighters, Not Appeasers, on Common Core

Heidi Huber — founder of Parents Against the Common Core and Ohioans Against Common Core — is running for the Ohio House of Representatives. In a dramatic showdown, she is challenging incumbent Rep. Tom Brinkman (27thDistrict), whom she originally helped elect, for reneging on his campaign promise to fight for the repeal of Common Core. In a recent interview for the Cincinnati Examiner, Brinkman dismissed Huber’s complaints, “Huber doesn’t understand how things work in Columbus and killing Common Core isn’t an overnight process.” Brinkman argues that he has done everything he can to stop Common Core, including authoring a bill to repeal it. However,

How N.H. Common Core Moms Made Candidates Take Notice

New Hampshire is about to embark on a tradition like no other. We are about to go to the polls to elect a candidate in the primary election who will likely be a nominee for President of the United States. What most people don’t know, however, is that the groundwork for one of the major issues of this election was laid years ago by moms and parents across New Hampshire. In 2010, New Hampshire’s Board of Education voted, with little notice to the public, to adopt the Common Core Standards. However, alert parents researched the standards and began to warn others about

The Forgotten Story: How Common Core Changed the Race in Iowa

Now that Iowa caucus-goers have spoken, lost in the discussion of Donald Trump’s underperformance, Ted Cruz’s ground game and Marco Rubio’s surge is an acknowledgement of one issue that separated the top Iowa finishers from (as Trump would say) the “losers.” That issue is Common Core. Cruz and Rubio have long been on record as opposing the national standards. Trump has relentlessly raised the issue ever since he entered the race. As the Iowa campaign came down to the wire, Trump released a Common Core-specific ad, and Rubio began devoting more and more time in his stump speech to the

How Common Core Killed Conventional GOP Candidates

I wanted to piggy back on what Paul wrote last week about an article written by Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard. Barnes said that governors making the best presidential candidates is conventional unwisdom. I agree. The crop of candidates who are governors or were previously governors have demonstrated time and time and time again that they will put pragmatism above principles. One such instance is with the Common Core State Standards. Barnes notes that this is a serious problem for the remaining governors in 2016: A serious problem for Republican governors has been all but ignored by the media

Goodbye Governors: Voters Look Elsewhere in 2016

In The Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes observes that this election cycle, despite initial indications, has become a very unfriendly one for governors: At full tide, 9 of the 17 Republicans running for the 2016 presidential nomination were current or former governors. There was a perfectly good reason so many were in the race: Governors have an advantage with voters. They are executives who make real-life decisions, not just talk about doing so. Governors, more often than not, are regarded as leaders. At least that was the conventional wisdom as recently as last spring. But it has died this year like many other assumptions

Common Core Killed These GOP Candidates

I recently gave The Hill some insight into the politics of Common Core: Republican governors struggling in the GOP presidential contest are weighed down by their failure to fully rebuke Common Core education standards, according to the conservative think tank American Principles Project (APP). Common Core, the set of education standards that were adopted by 46 states five years ago but have since become toxic with the conservative base, has not been at the center of the Republican primary debate, which has so far been dominated by national security and immigration. However, APP and its education director Emmett McGroarty argue that

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