Republican primary survey: Donald Trump continues to dominate in Sunshine State

It’s an extension of their exchanges in Tuesday night’s GOP presidential debate, where Cruz hit Rubio for supporting a 2013 immigration reform proposal that granted undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship and Rubio shot back that Cruz, too, had pushed an amendment that granted those immigrants legal status. He has similarly gained in other national polls amid increased terrorism fears.

Everyone’s happy to have his blessing.

Ted Cruz, locked in a heated battle with Marco Rubio over their immigration records, received an assist Saturday afternoon from one of the most hardline opponents of illegal immigration in the U.S. Senate.

■ Besides Trump, the top GOP joke targets were Jeb Bush (76 jokes), Ben Carson (51), Chris Christie (31), Rand Paul and Scott Walker (tied with 20 each), and Carly Fiorina (16). Bush said, referencing Trump’s garbled answer on modernizing the nuclear triad.

Jeb Bush says the endorsement of Vladimir Putin won’t help Donald Trump. Among moderates, Trump is capturing 42 percent of their vote, compared to 14 percent for Rubio and Bush.

Trump responded with juvenile camera mugging and even more juvenile my-poll-numbers-are-bigger-than-yours taunting.

Cruz has called that a poison pill created to highlight Democrats’ hypocrisy by painting them as more interested in gaining votes than helping immigrants. Trump more or less stood with them, noting his opposition to the Iraq War. Hillary Clinton will say that the 2013 fight for comprehensive immigration reform failed because Republicans refused to negotiate.

This is Bush at his best and Trump at his dismissive, shallow (from a policy perspective) worst. If scolding Trump for being unserious, irresponsible, divisive and hurtful were the keys to bringing him down, Bush would have devastated Trump by now.

Party leaders want the GOP to be more open and inclusive.

Two things make this GOP dispute over “regime change” particularly fascinating. That’s why I rate him at 35% at the moment and Trump at 50%. PolitiFact would have to rate this claim at least mostly true. And he shouldn’t care about getting Trump’s less than brilliant followers. Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Kentucky Sen. Or are they doing it because they perceive Cruz as a greater threat than Trump?

“Governor Bush made explicitly clear on Tuesday his view that Donald Trump would be a chaos president who would be wrong for the country”. Rubio’s campaign was at it again hours before Cruz’s rally, circulating a 2013 interview in which the Texan suggested “compromise” was possible in the debate over how to deal with the 11 million people in the country illegally. This may be a coincidence, or it may have something to do with their ability to rationally calculate their political interest. One reason is because it had lately become fashionable to conclude that Donald Trump had made Cruz suddenly palatable to the establishment types.

That is precisely the impression Mr Cruz hopes to create, painting Mr Rubio as a darling of the pundit class and himself as the choice of the grassroots. Cruz appears to live in mortal fear that Trump might look at him crosswise.

“Now, Marco Rubio is a friend of mine he is a wonderful communicator, he’s a charming individual he’s very well liked”, Cruz said.

Cruz’s submissiveness to Trump is – depending on your tolerance for insincerity in the service of a larger political goal – either appallingly or gloriously disingenuous.

Rubio accurately accused Cruz of making it more hard to detect terrorists by opposing renewal of the government’s bulk collection of telephone metadata.