“Trump’s support is heavily concentrated among non-college educated Republicans and those who only lean Republican and thus are less inclined to show up and vote in primaries and caucuses”, Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics said via email. His numbers have moved up and down a bit but have stayed between 22 and 30 percent since early August. Trump critics have been sitting in the pumpkin patch waiting for the Great Pumpkin, i.e. Trump’s supposedly inevitable slide in the polls, for six months now.
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In fact, according to a 1999 Gallup poll analysis, in nearly every election since 1952, the leader in the Republican polls in the fall ended up being the party’s nominee. As Rick Santorum boasted, he even met a Jew once. If for no other reason, someone else must be nominated to maximize the party’s chances against Hillary.
This is essentially what CNN/ORC did with the five questions that were focused on illegal immigration. His trash-talking of opponents and members of the press seems shockingly un-presidential. It’s the time of the year where everyone is lighting up the fireplace and they have to get the fire started somehow, right? That doesn’t mean that the polls in Iowa are all that more meaningful as voters there typically don’t make up their minds until the last minute.
Trump grabbed 36 percent of the vote, up 9 percentage points from mid-October.
On ISIS, 46 percent of those polled say Trump is best equipped to deal with the terror group. This is a bad polling practice that can skew the results. Respondents to Internet polls tend to be self-selected volunteers, not random samples, and it has been assumed that respondents are more likely to spoof machines than actual human beings.
Conservative Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin called Trump’s remark about money “cringe-worthy” while writing that the event “showed his potential vulnerability when cornered on serious issues”.
One thing polls of any kind don’t do well is project turnout. Only Trump polled higher.
Other data in the polls suggests that at this stage of the campaign voters haven’t completely thought through their choices and preferences. There’s room for it to balloon this time.
The other good news for Democrats is that Ted Cruz is steadily rising in the polls, and he’s becoming a dark horse candidate to win the nomination.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) gained +4 points to earn 12%.
Predicting a comeback, however, Bush said that “I’m going to win New Hampshire first”.
“You know, I’ve got to say FDR and JFK and Ronald Reagan were spinning in their graves to hear an American president say he doesn’t believe in American leadership or American winning”, the GOP hopeful said, explaining he would “borrow a page from Ronald Reagan in the Cold War” when fighting radical Islamic terrorism. Rubio, the hawkiest hawk in the top tier, is in single digits.
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Regardless of his relationship with donors, Trump’s comments mark a sharp contrast from his Republican rivals who pledged unconditional allegiance to Israel. Eight years ago, Mike Huckabee had a Trump-sized lead over John McCain.
