Last week, the “teflon Don” took a hit in Iowa.
Despite the fact that the last Des Moines Register poll before the caucus showed the brazen billionaire pulling ahead of Ted Cruz in the state for the first time since August, Donald Trump lost, in what many deemed a surprising outcome.
Initially, Trump congratulated Cruz. Later, he called the senator a cheater and accused him of “stealing” the state by bilking the hapless Ben Carson out of votes.
Ted Cruz didn't win Iowa, he stole it. That is why all of the polls were so wrong and why he got far more votes than anticipated. Bad!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 3, 2016
Tonight, we get the nation’s first primary as voters head to the polls in New Hampshire, where Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump hold commanding leads. “Trump, who has held a sizable lead in the Republican race in New Hampshire, appears poised to win his first contest of the 2016 campaign after finishing second in Iowa a week ago” WaPo writes. “In the Democratic race, Sen. Bernie Sanders maintained his double-digit lead over former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.”
“Sanders' 54% to 40% advantage over Hillary Clinton is down slightly from a 55% to 37% lead in the previous Poll of Polls,” CNN reported on Monday. “Trump tops the GOP field with 31%, well ahead of Marco Rubio” who is polling at 15% and “has picked up four points since the previous New Hampshire Poll of Polls, the biggest change in the averages in the last week.”
Ted Cruz has 13%, John Kasich is sitting on a respectable 11% and Jeb Bush has 10%.
Rubio - who put up a strong showing in Iowa before stumbling in the last GOP debate - is keen to keep up the momentum. “It’s great to be targeted, because it means you’re doing something right,” he told ABC. “Rubio's stumble under New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's ferocious fire at Saturday's GOP debate, meanwhile, threatens to stall his momentum heading into New Hampshire,” CNN notes. "Voters in New Hampshire are serious about, they understand what's at stake here," Rubio told CNN. "The future of America is at stake."
“I think the people of New Hampshire deserve better than someone just throwing mud and insulting the other candidates,” Cruz said, in a jab at Trump. “He doesn’t like the fact that he lost in Iowa, so he’s chosen to go down the road of insults.”
In a particularly inauspicious move, Ben Carson is set to skip his own “victory” party in order to get a head start in South Carolina. “Ted Cruz’s campaign and surrogates seized on the news, inferring that the trip meant Carson would be suspending his campaign and encouraging his supporters to caucus for Cruz,” Politico notes.
As for Trump, the real estate mogul taunted protesters at his final rally before the ballot. “Oh, they’re getting rid of some protesters. Look. Are the police the greatest?” he asked a crowd of some 12,000 people. “I like protesters because that’s the only way the cameras show how big the crowd is.”
Here’s The Oregonian with some of the key themes for Tuesday’s vote:
Marco Rubio really might be a robot -- or, rubot, as he's been dubbed. At his last rally before New Hampshire voters headed to the polls, he showed that his tendency to repeat scripted lines -- sometimes the same ones over and over in a single short speech -- isn't reserved for TV debates. At Nashua Community College on Monday he said it was difficult for he and his wife "to instill our values in our kids instead of the values they try to ram down our throats." Then he said it two more times before stepping down from the podium, seemingly unaware that he was repeating himself.
Hillary Clinton is progressive. No, really. Sanders, seeking to clearly differentiate himself from Clinton, tweeted out last week, "You can be a moderate. You can be a progressive. But you cannot be a moderate and a progressive." This claim has received a fair amount of pushback. 'Moderate' is a practical term. Broadly speaking, it refers to a candidate who focuses on consensus building and incremental progress, someone who doesn't believe the US political system is capable of sudden, lurching change, or just doesn't want that kind of change. A moderate's opposite is a radical, someone who believes rapid, revolutionary change is both possible and necessary." Clinton, meanwhile, has been trying to shore up her progressive credentials all week. "I won't cut Social Security," she tweeted last Friday. "As always, I'll defend it, & I'll expand it. Enough false innuendos."
As for Jeb Bush, the candidate who has received the most money from Wall Street, it's do or die time and the former Florida governor is coming out swinging.
.@realDonaldTrump, you aren’t just a loser, you are a liar and a whiner. John McCain is a hero. Over and out.
— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) February 8, 2016
Trump's response: "He's a stiff who you wouldn't hire in private enterprise, OK? This is a stiff. This is a guy that if he came looking for a job, you'd say, 'No thank you.' And that's the way it is."
Tonight we'll find out who the "stiffs" really are in New Hampshire where America's political aristocracy is set to suffer a punishing defeat at the hands of the so-called "protest candidates."
Asked who he thought would prevail on Tuesday evening, President Obama said only this: "I have no idea."
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