NH Poll: Trump +16, Kasich in 2nd, Jeb Bush Surging

AP/David Goldman

by MIKE FLYNN7 Feb 20165,234

The latest Monmouth University poll of New Hampshire shows Donald Trump continuing to lead the GOP field by a double-digit margin.

The poll, however, shows a very tight race for second place, with Jeb Bush surging 9 points since Monmouth’s last survey in January.

Trump leads the field with 30 percent support, essentially unchanged since Monmouth’s last poll in early January. Ohio Gov. John Kasich is second with 14 percent support, also unchanged since early January. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) has 13 percent support, up just one point in the last month. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has 12 percent, down just two points since the beginning of the year.

The momentum seems to be with Jeb Bush, who has surged 9 points in the last month. Bush has moved from 4 percent support in early January to 13 percent support today. He is tied with Marco Rubio for third.

Considering the poll’s 4.4 percent margin of error, New Hampshire currently has a four-way race for second. Kasich, Rubio, Bush and Cruz are all well positioned to finish runner up in Tuesday’s primary. Chris Christie is much further back with just 6 percent support, down slightly since January.

All the pundit talk about Marco Rubio having momentum going into Tuesday’s vote looks hollow against this poll. Rubio’s support level in the state is unchanged since November. The only significant change in New Hampshire since the Fall is growing support for both Bush and Ted Cruz and a collapse in support for Ben Carson.

Two notes of caution, however. The Monmouth poll was conducted before Saturday’s Republican debate, which may reshuffle the race for second and third in the state. Marco Rubio was widely acknowledged to have stumbled in the debate, while Govs. Bush, Kasich and Christie were perceived to have done well.

In addition, only 49 percent of likely Republican voters say they are certain in their vote. Almost one-third of voters, 31 percent say they have a “strong preference” in whom to support. Monmouth did a follow up survey after the Iowa caucus and found that just over half of those voters with a “strong preference” stuck with their candidate on election day.

“Volatility is the name of the game in 2016’s first primary contest, just as it was in the first caucus state last week. While Trump’s placement as the top finisher seems fairly secure at this point, the margin of victory and final order of the remaining candidates are still very much up for grabs,” Patrick Murray, director of Monmouth polling, said in a release.

Monmouth’s final poll in Iowa greatly overestimated Trump’s support and underestimated support for both Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

Almost half of likely Republican voters, 49 percent, say they have been personally contacted about supporting at least one of the Presidential hopefuls. This indicates a very active and robust ground game currently trying to turn the vote out for Tuesday’s election. This high level of retail politicking is a feature of New Hampshire’s primary.

It is also one of the reasons that the final outcome is so predictable. With so many voters making their ultimate decision in the final hours of the campaign, that “last touch” with voters can prove decisive.

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Bill Kristol: ‘We’ll Have to Start’ New Party If Trump Wins Nomination

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by BEN SHAPIRO21 Dec 20152673

‪On Monday, Weekly Standardeditor-in-chief Bill Kristoltweeted out what the rest of the Republican establishment is thinking: better Hillary than Donald. Here’s the tweet:

Crowd-sourcing: Name of the new party we’ll have to start if Trump wins the GOP nomination? Suggestions welcome at editor@weeklystandard.com

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) December 20, 2015

Kristol isn’t alone. As I wrote at Daily Wiretoday, Politico’s Jeff Greenfield says, “If the operatives I talked with are right, Trump running as a Republican could well face a third-party run – from the Republicans themselves.” That follows last Thursday’s Politico column from former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman, who compared Trump to Hitler and called him “evil,” and last Wednesday’s Politico column reporting that Jeb Bush’s aides “began looking into the possibility of making a clear break with Trump – potentially with the candidate stating that, if Trump were the nominee, Bush would not support him.”

Last week, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said that former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour “and a lot of the Republican leaders would much rather Hillary Clinton be President of the United States than have Donald Trump represent them as a Republican.” And in November, The Hillreported that “GOP establishment donors have confided to The Hill that for the first time in recent memory, they find themselves contemplating not supporting a Republican nominee for president.”

I’m old enough to remember when it wasscandalous for Trump not to pledge his allegiance to the eventual Republican nominee. Now, day after day, reports from party leaders leak, stating that should Trump gain control over the party apparatus, they will simply smash the machinery.

Classy.

This wouldn’t be the first time.

As Greenfield points out, when iconic conservative Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) won the nomination for president, many of his rivals refused to endorse him for the Oval Office, including Governor Nelson Rockefeller (R-NY) and Governor George Romney (R-MI). Romney ripped Goldwater’s “extremist” supporters” and would later support Gerald Ford over Ronald Reagan in 1976 and George H.W. Bush over Reagan in 1980.

These liberal Republicans, who believed in bigger government, didn’t appreciate Goldwater’s libertarianism and forcibly undercut his doomed bid. Greenfield cites the New York Herald-Tribune going so far as to endorse LBJ, the most leftist president until Barack Obama, for the White House over Goldwater.

And while the Republican establishment would like everyone to think that they were the reason for the rise of Ronald Reagan, they did everything they could to stop Reagan. Not only did establishment Republicans back George H.W. Bush over Reagan in the 1980 primaries – Bush infamously bragged about his support from liberal Republicans like Henry Cabot Lodge – but a few went so far as to support the independent candidacy of former liberal Republican Rep. John Anderson of Illinois, who dumped the Party after Reagan won the nomination. Anderson explained, “I would be more comfortable with Teddy Kennedy in the sense that I do believe that Ronald Reagan’s view of the problems of our day is so utterly inappropriate.”

Obviously, the establishment failed in stopping Reagan. But with the election of H.W. Bush, they grabbed control of the Party again, and they haven’t given it up since.

Today’s establishment Republican “saviors” of the Party like to think of themselves as fighting not Reagan or Goldwater, but David Duke – they color Trump a racist and a xenophobe. The truth, however, is that it wouldn’t matter at all whether Trump were the establishment’s enemy or whether it was Senator Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), currently the second-place finisher in national polls. So long as the frontrunner remains an outsider, the establishment will use all of its power to stop them, including the threat of a third-party run.

Which shows, as always, that they care more about maintaining control of the party apparatus than about beating Hillary Clinton. After all, they said the same about Trump when he was threatening a third-party run.

Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News, Editor-in-Chief of DailyWire.com, and The New York Times bestselling author, most recently, of the book,The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.

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