U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, meanwhile, saw support grow by eight percentage points to tie the retired neurosurgeon for second place with 18 percent, according to a NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll released Friday.
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The billionaire then pointed to Carson’s reputation of being a nice, soft-spoken man. “We can’t be nice”, he said.
However, despite Trump and Carson’s confident statements, not all members of the G.O.P. share their opinions.
Carson’s campaign quickly fired back. This month 42% of Carson’s Iowa backers are backing him with “some reservations”, up from 30% in October.
The poll shows Romney with 31 percent support, compared to Donald Trump’s 15 percent. He called Iowa voters stupid.
While the poll was conducted largely before the terrorist attacks on Paris, it’s not clear how new questions being raised in the news media about Carson’s foreign policy expertise might affect his standing in Utah.
He said: “I hate to admit this but I totally agree with President Obama’s reason for canceling Thanksgiving”. “Maybe I helped it along by making a speech two weeks ago”.
A post-Paris Reuters poll had him once again leading the GOP presidential field nationally with 36 percent of Republicans’ backing – far more than any rival. The reporter asked if that was something Trump would put in place as president.
The moves underscore growing concern among Republicans that Trump’s bid for the GOP presidential nomination, which at first was considered a long-shot, has moved closer toward becoming a reality as he leads national polls with less than three months before the first votes are cast in the 2016 race.
“They’re sneaking around, putting bombs in your cafeterias in your airplanes, so we have to be very, very tough”, he said. “I’ve flat out condemned the idea that we were going to have Muslims register”. Trump replied: “I would certainly implement that. We should have a lot of systems”, Trump said. “If we’re just going to pick out a particular group of people based on their religion, based on their race, based on a few other thing, that’s setting a pretty unsafe precedent”.
Trump will be holding a campaign rally at 7 p.m.at the Greater Columbus Convention Center.
“It’s evil and it’s coming from a group of people”, he said. “You talk about closing mosques, you talk about registering people”, he said, “that’s just wrong…it’s manipulating people’s angst and their fears”.
“I find that Utahns feel that Trump is loud, arrogant and really not suitable to be commander in chief of the United States”, pollster Dan Jones said.
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But the two candidates were in a dead heat on issues like managing the economy, knowing best how to get things done and combating Islamic terrorism.
