Ted Cruz (R-TX) isn’t exactly shared at the top of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
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Donald Trump has moved back into the lead of the 2016 Republican presidential contest, while Ted Cruz has surged into second place, according to a new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
In a tweet on Saturday he wrote: “New CNN Iowa poll – Trump 33, Cruz 20”.
Mr Trump attacked The Des Moines Register’s credibility before the poll was released, describing the paper as “dishonest” and singling out its lead political reporter as “the worst”.
Trump countered Cruz’s assertion that he can’t match Cruz’s judgment as well, recounting to CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union” a list of examples he believes he’s had better judgment.
Support for Cruz may be even stronger than the Bloomberg/Des Moines Register numbers suggest at first glance. That’s a 21-point jump from October.
Cruz and Trump were followed by retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson at 13 percent and Florida Senator Marco Rubio at 10 percent.
As recently as October, Cruz, 44, had just 10 percent support in a Monmouth poll.
Mr Trump has complained that the Des Moines Register is biased against him ever since the newspaper’s editorial board called him to drop out of the race in July. At the same rally, Trump also condemned Cruz for failing to support “subsidies for ethanol”, an important business in Iowa, because of his connections to major oil companies in his home state of Texas.
Trump, whose campaign has been marked by controversy from the start, sparked a firestorm on Monday by calling for a “total and complete” ban on Muslims entering the United States.
Onetime presumed frontrunner Jeb Bush – son of one president and brother to another – has a measly six percent support, while all the other candidates have less than three percent support.
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The NBC/WSJ poll was conducted December 6-9 of 400 Republican primary voters (by both landline and cell phone), and it has a margin of error here of plus-minus 4.9 percentage points.
