Some observations on the 2016 presidential race as we head into the dark period, i.e., the two weeks of Christmas and New Year’s holidays in which no one has ever dared, at least in the past, to conduct any polls.
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Last week, many Republican candidates spoke out against Trump after he embraced Putin as a world leader he would get along with and respected.
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It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
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“Half of American voters say they’d be embarrassed to have Donald Trump as their commander-in-chief and most Americans think he doesn’t have a good chance in November, but there he is still at the top of the Republican heap”, said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac poll.
This time, it seems, may really be different.
Among blue-collar Republicans, who have formed the core of Trump’s support, the polls were about the same regardless of method. Forty-seven percent of respondents in Iowa who were part of this same poll said they left Carson for Cruz.
The numbers dovetail with other recent surveys that have shown Cruz moving into a lead in the Hawkeye State. The Texan’s lead has shot up in Iowa from earlier this month, when he led Trump by nine percentage points.
Donald Trump has consistently led in polls of Republican primary voters since August, when he first took the lead. But many college-educated Republicans may hesitate to admit their attraction to Trump, the experiment indicates.In a public setting such as the Iowa caucuses, where people identify their candidate preference in front of friends and neighbors, that same social-desirability bias may hold sway. John McCain of Arizona, who won there in 2000 and 2008, and Romney, the 2012 victor. Bush, Christie and Kasich have all spent considerable sums advertising in New Hampshire.
Rubio, meanwhile, fared best among the candidates surveyed in the poll.
The Battleground Tracker online poll shows Trumps enjoys a 15-point advantage over his nearest rival, Ted Cruz, by a margin of 38 to 23 percent. Carson and Paul each nab 5%, while Fiorina comes in at 4% support. Whether voters will take a chance on another one-term senator whose previous experience, like Obama, was in state Legislature is, itself, a matter up for debate that won’t be settled until the first votes are cast. As things stand, it looks improbable that one of the Establishment Four would fare better than third in the state. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie climbed to 6 percent in the new poll, his highest national support in nearly six months.
Where does it go from here? .
If there is an alternative to Trump right now it is Cruz. Rubio has charged Cruz with being unclear on how he would deal with the 12 million people already in the country illegally, while Cruz has countered that he has never wavered in his oppostion to providing any form of “amnesty” to them.
Since the December 7 meeting, endorsements have been announced by influential figures such as James Dobson, a radio host who founded Focus on the Family; Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage; and Bob Vander Plaats, head of the Iowa Family Leader organization.
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For the GOP establishment, this is crunch time.
