Within the new Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll, Cruz, thought-about the brand new evangelical favourite, leapfrogged the candidate he has regularly prevented to cross paths with all through the marketing campaign.
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Well-respected pollster J. Ann Selzer says Cruz’s newfound lead is a “big shakeup” 50 days out from the Iowa caucuses.
Cruz’s rise marks a 21 percent improvement from the same poll taken in mid-October. “Some reporter named Jacobs, she is the worst”, he said, referring to The Register’s lead political reporter, Jennifer Jacobs.
As the poll was being released Saturday, Trump told his followers on Twitter not to trust it, pointing to a different poll that showed him up by double digits in Iowa.
Cruz finally responded at lunchtime and said: “The Establishment’s only hope: Trump & me in a cage match”. “But with the ethanol, really, he’s got to come a long way”. “I only like polls that treat me well”.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during an interview with the Associated Press at the Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va., Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2015.
He dug himself in deeper when he told Fox News” Megyn Kelly on Thursday evening when he blasted the New York Times for using “anonymous sources’ in its reporting on him.
Cruz has been aggressively campaigning in the Hawkeye State, picking up key endorsements in the state earlier this week.
Cruz now will have to contend with expectations that, for months, he has sought to carefully manage. Trump has gone after his other opponents gleefully and viciously, panning Jeb Bush as low-energy, Ben Carson as “pathological” and Marco Rubio as a lightweight who drinks too much water.
Trump and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson had led in most other polls taken in recent months.
“These polls are always flawed”.
In the audio leaked to the Times, Cruz said his approach has been to “bear hug” Trump.
“It’s very, very hard to poll”. “You don’t get crowds like this at a town hall. I mean, everything I say he agrees with me, no matter what I say”, Trump began.
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Business Insider notes that the survey was conducted just ahead of Trump’s statement on Monday that Muslim immigration to the United States should be halted “until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on”. Nationally, a CNN/ORC poll released earlier this month found the brash billionaire sitting atop the GOP field with 36%, 20 points ahead of Cruz, the GOP’s runner-up. Business Insider cites a Bloomberg Politics/Purple Strategies PulsePoll which finds almost two-thirds of likely Republican primary voters are in favor of Trump’s proposed Muslim ban.
