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NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who has been criticized by his rivals over his comments about minority groups, said on Wednesday he is the rare Republican who could win a sizable portion of the black vote. Trump, the Republican front-runner, spoke in South Carolina at a meeting of the Greater Charleston Business Alliance, which supports minority businesses and is affiliated with the South Carolina African American Chamber of Commerce. He cited a recent poll from the firm SurveyUSA that showed him getting support from 25 percent of black respondents in a match-up against Democratic front-runner...

This poll is being reset and posted again after fixing a minor technical glitch. I am the official pollster of this forum and this is my second survey. Please vote and make your voice heard. Today's question is: Which candidate do you prefer to be President of the United States? Please explain why after you vote. Thank you

Summer is over. And Donald Trump is -- still -- at the top of the 2016 Republican primary field. That makes lots and lots of Republicans with an eye on winning the White House in 2016 (or even 2020) very, very nervous. That unease -- and its origins -- are explained brilliantly in this paragraph, taken from a broader piece entitled "The GOP is Killing Itself," by former Bush administration official Pete Wehner: The message being sent to voters is this: The Republican Party is led by people who are profoundly uncomfortable with the changing (and inevitable) demographic nature of...

A post-debate poll from Citizens United — provided exclusively to Breitbart News — finds that GOP frontrunner Donald Trump remains the clear favorite in the field, with almost 31 percent of the vote. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) gets 18.5 percent, Dr. Ben Carson earns 17.4 percent, and former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina takes 11.3 percent. Combined, that’s 78 percent for the four consummate political outsiders in the race. Washington establishment candidates, including Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, trail badly. “Seventy eight percent of our respondents have with their vote voiced their frustration with the...

Conservative talk radio host Mark Levin said on his show Tuesday that he believes the fix is in to oust real estate mogul Donald Trump as the highest-polling GOP candidate for President. Speaking on his program, which works as a staple for Tea Party conservatives, Levin said there is a “national media love fest” for Carly Fiorina, which he believes was devised prior to the second primary debate last week: “I believe establishment media were poised to declare Carly Fiorina a victor. A victor over Trump. They wanna take down Trump. If Bush can’t do it then they hope last...

There’s been a whole lot of talk recently about how Donald Trump‘s ride at the top of the Republican primary field may finally be over, blunted by Carly Fiorina‘s star-making debate performance and Trump’s own poor performance. The mainstream media types who just refuse to believe that Republican voters actually are the way every poll proves they are got a little bit of good news this week when a CNN/ORC poll showed that Trump’s support had dropped by eight points, while Carly Fiorina shot up by 12, passing Ben Carson for second place. See? Maybe Republicans aren’t so racist after...

Walker says he dropped out so someone would have a chance of beating Trump – but who?Scott Walker should have dropped out of the presidential race because he was an anti-worker cancer on the state of Wisconsin unfit to hold the office he has now, let alone the most important in the world. But instead Walker dropped out for the only reason any candidate for president drops out before the voting starts: he was running out of money. He's running out of money, of course, because he was a terrible candidate. He was a non-presence in the first two debates,...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://onpolitics.usatoday.com/2015/09/22/republican-power-rankings-week-4-fiorina-trump-rubio/

Donald Trump is not going to be the leader of the free world. That was the reality check delivered to the reality TV star when he was subjected to a pounding in last week’s Republican debate at the Ronald Reagan presidential library. A summer of bombast from the bumptious billionaire had led to his anti-immigration rhetoric and populist demagoguery lifting him to the top of all the Republican party polls. The debate in Simi Valley, however, brought him crashing back to earth. By the time the dust had settled, Carly Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard and the widely...

2016 GOP POWER INDEX: NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS FOR CRUZ Ask yourself who is likely to be the last anti-Jeb still standing on Super Tuesday. That doesn’t mean whether Sen. Marco Rubio or Gov. John Kasich might knock Jeb Bush off in the early going (they might) or whether Bush could be abandoned by donors and key backers if he doesn’t have an early state win (he could). The question is: Who is the person most likely to be Bush’s chief adversary going into the home stretch, if the establishment frontrunner makes it there? Ted Cruz might have sounded...

Last week’s CNN debate stirred the pot in what has been a roller coaster of an early primary season. A post-debate CNN poll showed Carly Fiorina surging into second place behind Donald Trump (a 12% jump since early September,) followed closely by Ben Carson. Right now, it’s an outsider’s race—but how long can it last? The tendency to wax and wane has been a hallmark of the GOP’s “outsider” candidates. Their bumps and slides have had less to do with their budding policy plans, and more to do with how they’ve handled themselves under the extreme pressure of the national...

Erick Erickson makes the case. Theory: This match-up, more than any other, would bring the most happiness to all wings of the party. I think Trump will fade, Fiorina will fade, and Carson is already fading. They are doing so because their momentum is based more on name identification and not on records or ground games. If we look at traditional campaign data, which under the smoke and veneer of Campaign 2016 still matters, what we will find is that Ted Cruz is laying down a hell of a ground game and has tons of cash with not nearly the...

Madison (WKOW) -- A new national poll shows Governor Scott Walker polling at 0 percent in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. The CNN/ORC poll released Sunday shows there were five candidates who received less than one percent of support from likely Republican voters. Walker was among them, joined by former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, and former New York Governor George Pataki. Less than one percent equates to zero percent, statistically. The results show Donald Trump is still the front-runner with 24 percent, but has lost ground from earlier in...

For those who played youth or school sports, you possibly had to wait outside a coach’s office door after tryouts for the posting of who made the team and who was cut. The same could be true if you tried out for the school play, or cheerleading squad. Who made it, and who didn’t? The GOP fielded an 11-player squad Wednesday night in the latest presidential candidate debate. While that is enough to field a football team, it is time for some cuts. I’m not a coach or director, but nonetheless, I am posting my cuts. Sen. Rand Paul you...

The Republican presidential contest has taken many twists and turns through 2015, but one theme appears to be a constant, driving the dynamics of the race. GOP primary voters want an outsider, not a politician who currently holds, or who has ever held elected office. That point was reiterated after the Wednesday debates, when post-debate polls showed that Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina, three candidates who have never held elected office, were in first, second and third place respectively. Combined they had won the allegiance of 58 percent of GOP voters, while none of the elected officials could...

There are sixteen major candidates for the Republican nomination for president. All but three of them have been United States senators or state governors at some point in their careers. The other three, according to a Morning Consult poll of people who watched the 11 leading contenders debate this past Wednesday, are leading the race.A couple of big caveats: this is Morning Consult's first campaign season and it isn't yet a proven pollster, and the people who watched the Republican debates may not represent the party's primary electorate as a whole. But when you consider that this is a poll...

9:27 a.m. ET: Allahpundit ‎@allahpundit Wonder how long it’ll be before the first “major donor abandons Walker” story appears 8:27 AM - 17 Sep 2015 Two hours later, via WaPo, voila: There is mounting anxiety among Scott Walker donors about the direction of his campaign and increasing fears that it is running low on cash, leading to a growing consensus among some of the Wisconsin governor’s biggest financial backers that he needs to make a dramatic change… Stanley S. Hubbard, a Minnesota media mogul and top Walker donor, said that while he is sticking with Walker for now, he is...

Rich Lowry, writing at -- of all places -- Politico has an interesting analysis of the current GOP state of play ("Ted Cruz, Sitting Pretty"): Ted Cruz isn’t topping the polls or dominating the conversation, but he’s one of the winners of the past few months. His odds of winning the nomination have increased more than anyone else’s besides Donald Trump, and if you believe (reasonably enough) that Trump isn’t built to last, more than anyone else’s, period. Let’s review. There was always the danger of Cruz, who made his national reputation on the strength of a misbegotten government shutdown,...

With the second debates concluded, plenty of commentary has already been written about the night’s winners. Mary Katharine has an excellent rundown of the performance of the consensus winner, Carly Fiorina, who did a masterful job of grasping policy and connecting personally. Frankly, while Fiorina displayed an encyclopedic knowledge of military needs and other foreign-policy issues, her best moment of the night may have come in this rebuttal to Rand Paul’s contention that marijuana use is a victimless crime. Agree with her or not, this was a powerful moment and perhaps the most raw on a personal basis as we...

Long assumed a flash in the pan, Donald Trump is starting to make Republican insiders sweat.If Donald Trump is known for anything it’s for being a hard “counter-puncher,” as he would be the first to tell you (and in fact did, on “Meet the Press” last month: “Well, I think I’m a nice person. I really do. And I think that’s why my numbers always go up as you get to know me better. I think that frankly, I’d like to discuss the issues. I’m not looking to take anybody out or be nasty to anybody. And as you know,...