Posted on 01/20/2016 8:20:45 AM PST by springwater13
Donald Trump holds a more than two-to-one advantage over the next closest contender in a new national poll.
According to the Monmouth University survey released on Wednesday, Trump leads the race with 36 percent support nationally. That's down from 41 percent in the same survey from December, which had marked the highest point he's reached so far.


Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is a distant second place, taking 17 percent support - a 3-point gain over December.
The rest of the field is largely unchanged, with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) in third place at 11 percent support, followed by retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson at 8 percent and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush at 5 percent.
No other candidate takes more than 3 percent support.


A full 65 percent of Republicans said they believe Cruz is a "natural born citizen" and eligible to serve as president. 

Still, 12 percent said he's not and 24 percent said they’re unsure, meaning that more than one-third of GOP primary voters harbor some doubts as to whether Cruz is eligible for the White House.


Cruz was born in Canada to an American mother and Cuban father. Many scholars and legal experts believe that qualifies him to be president under the Constitution’s "natural born citizen" clause.


(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
What percentage of the population is unsure if Trump is a Conservative?
The damage is done. Trump landed a direct hit on the tail with that birther stuff. True or not, Cruz is not gonna pull out of the tailspin.
Hope he is as ruthlessly ingenious when attacking Democrats.
I’d bet most of the people that have doubts about Cruz being NBC are cruz supporters. They an whine and cry about it but the move by Trump to bring the topic up is brilliant politics.
You can bet most of the 35% with doubts are Trump supporters and Trump is basically disqualifying Cruz to them as a second choice. It smashes Cruz’s cynical smother Trump with love and wait for him to implode and pick the bones of his supporters.
* trump supporters I mean.
BTW, rather than looking at this, as the Monmouth interpretation does, as Trump being "down" from the previous December high (which is 100% true), I think we'll see that ALL the polls, for some reason (say, Reuters) had Trump at really unrealistically high levels for anyone to maintain at this point in the race in mid to late December. Reuters had him at 45. I think that reflects the fact that until Cruz began to fight back, Trump had the airwaves essentially to himself.
What percentage of the population is unsure if Trump is a Conservative?
He is a natural born Canadian citizen. Can’t be both.
It does not speak well of our politics, or the thought process of many voters.
Throw a charge out there, proven or not. But make it something explosive and controversial. It will stick like glue, and 1/3 will still believe it a decade from now.
Cruz frankly deserves better. But Trump is a street brawler, and that’s what it takes to win IMHO.
Paris attack took his number very high.
Uh oh - the not sure about NBC position seems to be up 10% from a week ago.
What percentage don’t care. They just want a strong leader who gets the mess we are in turned around. Someone who is not a lawyer or politician Someone who actually understands economics — that you can’t spent more than you have and just because there is a flow of funds available it doesn’t mean you have the right to spent indiscriminately. It’s not your money.
I think we are going to find out just how a proven winner who knows how to get things done deals with a lifelong politician in the form of his Democrat opponent.
The conservative poll Donald Trump could not win
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-conservative-poll-donald-trump-could-not-win/
The straw poll at the summit, a conservative gathering hosted by the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C., showed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz winning over voters, leading the pack for the third year in a row.
Cruz, with 35 percent of support, was followed by neurosurgeon-turned-politician Ben Carson, with 18 percent of the vote. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee came in third, drawing 14 percent of supporters, followed by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio at 13 percent.
Registering at fifth place on the survey results: Donald Trump, the GOP front-runner in many state and national polls.
Trump’s low support among the conservative evangelical base will come as no surprise for those following the billionaire’s presidential campaign. Trump has been known to flout convention when it comes to wooing the religious right, even admitting once that he was “not sure” that he had ever asked God for forgiveness.
“If I do something wrong, I think I just try and make it right, I don’t bring God into that picture,” Trump said in July at the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa.
Well, straw polls are SOOOOOOOOOO important in a campaign.
President Santorum won a whole bunch of them in 2012 (and 2008?).
Why haven’t you caught on? All the folks who claimed they were Conservative have betrayed us, with the exception of a very, very few, such as Rand Paul and Jeff Sessions.
Ted Cruz told Texans he was selling his assets to run for Senate, when it fact, he was getting loans from Goldman Sacks and CitiBank. He didn’t report the loans on his FEC form because it would have showed that he was lying about selling assets. He then listed the loans on his Senate Financial Disclosure form and thought that no one would notice.
Ted Cruz was born in Canada to a naturalized Canadian father. Ted knows that the original intent of the constitution was that citizenship descended from the father. He also knows that up until 1922, a women took the citizenship of her husband. Only by saying that the original intent was “wrong” can he remotely be considered a natural-born American.
Either Ted Cruz is a original-intent Constitutionalist and therefore ineligible to be President or he is a living-document Constitutionalist and eligible to be President. It is one or the other, but it can’t be both.
I agree, Cruz deserves better. But on the other hand---and we can't forget this---Trump can throw nothing at him that the Left won'd throw in spades, so while it sounds self-serving, Trump indeed did Cruz a favor by forcing this out earlier rather than later.
Cruz’s best path would be AG and then the Supreme Court when there is an opening.
Yes. I forgot. You’re right.
Why haven’t you caught on... Trump is a liberal claiming that he is a Conservative that will make deals (Reach across the Isle)
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