Ted Cruz has jumped into first place in Iowa, a poll released Saturday by the Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics says. Trump’s highest support was 23% in August, when he led the field by 5 points. Ben Carson fell 15 percent from his showing in the October poll and was in third place at 13 percent.
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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on the campaign trail in Des Moines, Iowa.
Well, what do you know: Right on schedule, as voters in Iowa settle on their favorites, Cruz’s fortunes are looking up.
Trump had tweeted that Cruz shouldn’t make statements close door but bring them out in the open. Jeb Bush has 6% – a 1% increase from October.
Cruz, as he has done with Trump, chose to respond in an extra-nice way Saturday.
Conducted between December 7 and 10, the poll comes after Mr Trump called for a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”, prompting severe criticism from politicians and public figures around the world.
Since October, Cruz has wrapped up a collection of big endorsements, including influential radio personality Steve Deace, U.S. Rep. Steve King and Bob Vander Plaats, a social-conservative, evangelical leader in the state.
“Some are suggesting that Trump is still strong, particularly given that he’s actually up 2% from the last poll”, said Hagle.
“With the ethanol, really, he’s got to come a long way, ’cause right now he’s for the oil”, Trump said at the beginning of his remarks, unprompted.
Speaking in Iowa, Trump launched his first attack on Cruz by zeroing in on the senator’s opposition to ethanol standards, an issue dear to Iowan hearts.
Mr. Trump also sought on Friday to undermine the credibility of The Register poll even before it appeared, singling out the newspaper, the most influential in Iowa, during a customary interlude in which he attacks the news media. Cruz’s father, a conservative preacher who has spent 25 days on the Iowa campaign trail for his son, emigrated from Cuba.
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I’m betting that Trump drops this line of attack, since it went over so poorly in the room, but if the media helps him out by underreporting this the way they did his attack on black people a few weeks back, it shouldn’t hurt him any more than anything else has.
