In a major shift in the race for the 2016 Republican Presidential nomination, Texas Sen. Tex Cruz has opened at 10 point lead over the longtime front-runner billionaire Donald Trump- one of the largest surges ever seen in an Iowa caucus Presidential campaign:
Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz has surged ahead to become the latest front-runner in the campaign for the Iowa caucuses, dislodging Ben Carson and opening an impressive lead over a stalled Donald Trump, a Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register Iowa Poll shows.
The firebrand junior senator from Texas is backed by 31 percent of those likely to attend the Republican caucuses that start the presidential nomination season on Feb. 1. Trump is a distant second at 21 percent, up slightly from 19 percent in October, but below his peak of 23 percent in August.
Donald Trump doesn’t like it when that happens so look for him to start to increase his fire — and the intensity of it — on Cruz.
Cruz’s 21-percentage-point jump since October is the largest surge between Iowa Polls recorded in at least the last five presidential caucus campaigns. When first and second choices are combined, he has the support of 51 percent of likely caucus-goers.
Trump’s support is flat. It’s Ben Carson who is starting to sink.The senator’s great leap forward comes largely at the expense of Carson, as Iowa’s evangelicals appear to have picked the candidate they want to get behind. The retired neurosurgeon, now barely in third-place, is supported by 13 percent, down from the first-place showing he posted in October, when he was at 28 percent.
For Iowa’s conservative voters, “the coalescing has begun,” said J. Ann Selzer, founder of Selzer & Co., the West Des Moines-based firm that conducted the poll.
The same can’t be said for the voters who describe themselves as part of the Republican establishment, which the poll recorded as 29 percent of the likely electorate. For now, Trump has 23 percent from those who consider themselves Republican establishment voters, followed by Cruz at 22 percent. Senator Marco Rubio and his one time mentor, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, are both at 12 percent.
Meanwhile, the bad news continuese for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who is increasingly looking as if he’s the New Coke of this campaign.
If New Coke seems a dated term, Bush’s campaign seems dated to today’s Republican Party where even a whisper of being somewhat moderate or willing to reach across the aisle defines someone as a potential political traitor.
There’s no good news in the poll for Bush, who despite his political pedigree as the son and brother of past presidents and a massive campaign war chest, has moved up only slightly since October, to 6 percent from 5 percent, and is in fifth place. The super political action committee supporting Bush has been by far the largest political ad buyer in Iowa, Kantar/CMAG data shows.
And WORSE:
Bush’s negatives are the highest of any candidate in the field and at an all-time high in the state, with 54 percent of likely Republican caucus-goers viewing him unfavorably. That’s up from 43 percent in October. He also recorded his highest level of likely caucus-goers who say they could never support him, 41 percent. “Based on this data, it’s hard to keep Bush in the picture,” Selzer said.
At the same time, apparently in Iowa to know Cruz is to love him:
Cruz’s new front-runner status in Iowa has been accompanied by a jump in his favorability rating, now an all-time high of 73 percent, the highest in the Republican field. That could come as a surprise to members of Washington’s establishment, who have shown disdain for him and complained that his three years there have been marked by showmanship, inflexibility and a lack of collegiality. In his campaign autobiography, A Time for Truth, Cruz’s opening anecdote recounts him becoming the target of “red-faced name calling” by his Republican Senate colleagues when he wouldn’t go along with a party vote on extending the debt limit.
Now Trump is starting to react.
The détente is over.
Donald Trump on Friday launched his first attacks against Ted Cruz, questioning his appeal to evangelical voters and his commitment to ethanol subsidies in the first blasts by the GOP front-runner against his political ally.
Yet Trump, who has relished in whacking his Republican rivals, at times did not appear totally willing to give the same treatment to Cruz, who has yet to publicly call out Trump. Compared to some of Trump’s typical barrages against his opponents, which often include long-winded and humorous asides, his comments about Cruz on Friday were restrained and concrete.
For five months, Cruz has refused to criticize Trump even as the rest of the Republican field turned on him for a series of incendiary comments. And Trump, in turn, has spared Cruz from the missiles he’s aimed at nearly every other rival.
RELATED: Leaked Ted Cruz audio has Donald Trump readying attack.
But as Cruz surges in Iowa, where Trump has long held top billing, and Cruz began to wonder aloud whether Trump could lead the country in a time of terrorism, Trump ended the peace.
“I do like Ted Cruz, but not a lot of evangelicals come out of Cuba,” he told the crowd at a town hall event at the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines. “Not a lot come out.”
The father of the Texas senator, who has appealed to the born-again believers in the Hawkeye State, escaped from Cuba as a young adult. Both of Cruz’s parents come from traditionally Catholic backgrounds, but Cruz grew up Southern Baptist.
Trump’s personal attack mirrors a previous joust at one-time top Iowa rival Ben Carson, who is a Seventh Day Adventist. Trump, who identifies as Presbyterian, implied that he was a more mainstream Christian.
The Cruz campaign declined to comment on Trump’s remarks. On Saturday, however, a Cruz-aligned super PAC, Keep the Promise, hit Trump.
“We knew when Trump criticized Cruz it would not be substantive, but we hoped it would be coherent,” the super PAC told CNN.
It should be fun to what this week’s GOP debate.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.