I’ve got to think this over. But Ted Cruz’s rise nationwide and now his jump into a big lead in Iowa looks like a perfect storm of awful for the GOP. Especially on the GOP side, folks who win the Iowa caucuses have a pretty poor record of winning the nomination. But with Trump far ahead nationwide and in the lead in virtually every other state this looks more and more like Cruz will end up as the alternative to Trump. At least, he looks likely to prevent someone else from emerging with enough primary support to take him on. To put it in the appropriate firearms argot, you’ve got Trump making off with the Crown Jewels while Cruz stays at the door laying down a line of fire to prevent any normal Republican from chasing after him. And I actually think it’s possible that Cruz could do worse in a general election than Trump.
Help them Rubi-Wan. You’re their only hope.
In one of our recent Insight polls we asked this question: “Whatever you believe in principle, have you ever been wary or fearful of a person because they appeared to be Muslim or from a Middle Eastern background?”
We drew a very large sample (almost 9000 qualified respondents) because I wanted to look at the demographic breakdown of the answers. The topline results were: No – 72.3%, Yes – 23.3%, I’m not sure 4.4%.
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When I saw a publicity emails pushing Politico’s morning story ‘The Kochs’ war on poverty’, I admit I thought the worst. I figured it might one of those articles with the message, ‘Hey, you might think the Koch’s are trying to shred the social safety net and only care about the super rich, but …’ But I was too cynical. It turns out the piece is pretty fascinating and not at all one of these ‘counterintuitive’ pieces where the reporter gets taken in by a lot of flimflam. In fact, the Kochs’ efforts are even more comical that I might have expected.
Can Paul Ryan break the stranglehold House conservatives have on the legislative process in Congress? We may find out this week, and the initial inklings suggest he’s having a tough time bringing them to heel.
Trump storms ahead to his biggest lead yet. 41% support nationwide.
Before launching off on this discussion, let me say that I realize that many people will say that my premise is simply wrong. The country is so scared about terrorism today because the objective conditions have become more threatening. There’s certainly some evidence for that. We just saw a major, well-planned terror attack in Paris, followed only a couple weeks later by a smaller but still very lethal attack in San Bernardino, California. Some of the reaction is feeding off heat spun off by the GOP primary battle, with each candidate vying with his rivals for a more terrifying and apocalyptic version of the terrorist threat, with Fox News chiming in with an almost constant mix of scare stories, fabulism and incitement. Today Rick Santorum’s PAC put out an ad warning that bands of radicals are waging “world war III” against us. But let me just suggest that these events alone don’t fully explain the climate of something bordering on panic that is abroad in the country today.
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In a telling development, Donald Trump has finally gone too far for Rush Limbaugh and Marc Levin: he’s attacking Ted Cruz.