Scott Detrow

It took them nearly two months to do so, but John Kasich and Ted Cruz are finally taking Mitt Romney's advice.

When the 2012 Republican nominee lambasted front-runner Donald Trump in March, he called for a strategic effort to stop the New York businessman.

This was supposed to be a quiet week for Mike Rendino. He manages Stan's, the bar across the street from Yankee Stadium, and the Yankees are in Toronto.

Instead, it's been bedlam.

Rendino said he's "been inundated with phone calls, emails, contacts on Facebook from the strangers, most random people. The New York Times, the Washington Post."

The Republican presidential primary race is revolving entirely around the Broadmoor World Arena in Colorado Springs, Colo., on Saturday.

That's where Colorado Republicans are meeting to elect 13 statewide delegates to this summer's Republican National Convention.

In a contest that takes 1,237 delegates to win the nomination, 13 – or even the full 37 Colorado will send to Cleveland — may seem like a minuscule total.

Hillary Clinton is blasting Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Donald Trump for foreign policy stances she argues would "make America less safe and the world more dangerous."

Clinton spoke at Stanford University one day after terror attacks killed more than 30 people in Brussels, Belgium. The former secretary of state said, "the threat we face from terrorism is real, it is urgent, and it knows no boundaries."

Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and John Kasich meet Thursday in the 11th debate of this year's Republican presidential primary. It airs at 9 p.m. ET on Fox News.

It's the first forum since Trump won seven states on Super Tuesday, solidifying his status as the candidate to beat in the Republican field. It's also the first debate since last week's raucous insult-fest in Houston.

Donald Trump has feuded with other candidates, reporters and TV networks during his run for president.

Now, the front-runner for the Republican nomination is feuding with Pope Francis.

On Thursday, the pontiff criticized Trump for the proposal at the heart of his campaign: a pledge to keep people from crossing into the United States illegally by building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

"I'd just say that this man is not Christian if he said it in this way," Francis told reporters in a midflight press conference after a trip to Mexico.

Carly Fiorina is exiting the Republican presidential race after a seventh-place showing in last night's New Hampshire primary.

"While I suspend my candidacy today, I will continue to travel this country and fight for those Americans who refuse to settle for the way things are and a status quo that no longer works for them," said Fiorina in a statement.

In a year where so many Republican voters are angry at Washington, it can be tough to have two former presidents in your family.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has struggled with that dynamic his entire campaign — sometimes embracing the Bush legacy, and sometimes holding it at arm's length. (The campaign logo is Jeb!, not Bush!)

In New Hampshire, the night after the Iowa caucuses, it was hard not to feel the "Marco-mentum."

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio stood on a stage surrounded by more than 700 rowdy supporters, who filled Exeter's picturesque town hall to the brink.

Rubio delivered the same stump speech he's been sticking to for months. But Tuesday night, fresh off his surprisingly strong third-place Iowa finish, the crowd ate up every line.

Harry Rubenstein is deep in a thought about a log cabin when he pauses, mid-sentence, and disappears down a corridor.

He returns a moment later brandishing a large wooden ax.

Rubenstein is the chair of the political history division at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, and he's standing in a room that's packed with about 100,000 items from previous presidential elections. The collection, he says, ranges "from a little bit before the American Revolution, to probably last week."

It's easy to get cynical about the presidential campaign, especially so close to the first round of voting, when many candidates are on the attack.

But see it up close and personal, and the process can feel a bit more charming. That's what a class from Indiana's Manchester University found as it traveled across Iowa last week, taking in the caucuses.

Four years ago, the Iowa caucuses were very, very good to former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum.

In a race where seemingly every Republican candidate took a turn at the head of the polls, Santorum peaked at just the right time. He won a razor-thin race in Iowa, proclaimed "game on" to a caucus-night crowd, and went on to be 2012's GOP runner-up.

Things are different this time for the 2012 caucus victor.

With just hours to go before the end of the year, presidential campaigns are blasting supporters with emails in an attempt to boost their fundraising totals for the fourth quarter of 2015.

But one Republican presidential campaign is already eagerly promoting its haul.

On Wednesday night, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's campaign distributed a memo touting a total of $45 million raised over the course of 2015.

This post was updated at 7:30 p.m. ET

Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign has filed a lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee to regain access to the committee's voter file. The DNC blocked the campaign from the resource Friday after a Sanders staffer accessed data collected and organized by Hillary Clinton's campaign.

Unless you've spent the past year or so in an ice cave on Hoth — or have the misfortune of living on a planet farthest from the bright center of the universe — you're probably aware there's a new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, coming out on Friday.

If you've given money to a political campaign, brace yourself.

You're going to be seeing a whole lot of emails in your inbox over the next couple of weeks, asking for money as the year draws to a close.

Those emails will take many different forms:

Until this week, presidential candidates have mostly stayed away from discussing the National Security Agency's surveillance programs. That's quickly changing.

The Paris attacks have reframed the debate between electronic privacy and national security, and also brought that debate into the Republican primary.

Former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood is really, really into bipartisanship. So much so that the word appears more than 100 times in his new book, If that doesn't hammer home the point, just glance at the title: Seeking Bipartisanship.

This story was updated at 10:00 p.m. ET

Listening to a man say he wanted to "strangle" Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina at a New Hampshire campaign event Tuesday, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton laughed, made a joke — and did not say anything to distance herself from the statement.

That has drawn the outrage of conservatives, who accused her, Democrats and the media of a double standard, especially because Republicans have been criticized for not distancing themselves from questioners who make incendiary remarks.

"Hello, Facebook! I finally got my very own page."

That's the top of the first post written by one of Facebook's newest users — a man who identifies himself as a "dad, husband," and, oh yeah, "44th President of the United States."

President Obama finally has his very own Facebook page: facebook.com/potus.

If you've got a smartphone, you've probably got that app you can't live without. Maybe it's a game, or maybe it tells you the weather.

A growing number of Ted Cruz supporters are checking their smartphones every day, in an effort to gain points and make their way to the top of the "Cruz's Crew" leaderboard.

The Texas senator's campaign is hoping that the app — and the competition it fosters — will motivate voters to not only volunteer and contribute to their effort, but also turn over a lot of vital personal information.

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson says he never applied to West Point, even though in his 1990s autobiography, Gifted Hands, he wrote that he had been offered a "full scholarship" to the prestigious military academy.

Here's a key passage from Carson's book:

Some of the most important real estate in presidential politics is actually right in front of your nose. Or under your thumbs — it really depends on how you log onto Facebook.

The social network is now a key place for campaigns to advertise. One reason for that: It's getting easier and easier for campaigns to target those ads to very specific, tailor-made audiences.

"This is our hub of communication," explained Ken Dawson, who heads digital strategies for Ben Carson's presidential campaign. "We really see it as the heart of our campaign."

People who want Sen. Bernie Sanders to be the Democratic presidential nominee are twice as likely to book travel reservations on Kayak or take that flight on budget carrier Spirit Airlines as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton supporters.

They're also twice as likely to tune in to The Daily Show.

Clinton backers, on the other hand, are far more likely to use a Fitbit or other wearable device to track their activity levels. That's according to survey results a major collector of online data recently provided to NPR.

It was probably only a matter of time before we got the live-streamed campaign.

With Periscope, Vine and Snapchat, candidates have seized on new apps this cycle to produce behind-the-scenes, unfiltered moments and deliver them to voters.

On Tuesday, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul took the trend to its inevitable conclusion and broadcast the bulk of his day on the Iowa campaign trail on the Internet.

Want to follow what the presidential candidates are saying on Facebook, but not quite ready to turn over your news feed to pleas for money, stilted memes and behind-the-scenes pics from Iowa and New Hampshire?

Interested in hearing more from, say, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, but a little hesitant to declare to your Facebook friends that you "like" them?

There's a hack for that!

It sounds like a politician's dream: a machine that can tell you exactly what to say to change a voter's mind.

Well, that's what a political scientist has come up with — at least, a first tentative step in that direction.

Using text from a pro-Obamacare website and testing different combinations of sentences on volunteers, an algorithm created by Northeastern University assistant professor Nick Beauchamp was able to identify optimally persuasive terms that make people more inclined to support the landmark health care law.