Trump up 4 percent over Cruz

“And it talks about how critically the committee rejected, that would be the committee you’re trying to get this amendment to, rejected the Cruz amendment that would have allowed immigrants here to obtain legal status”. “He’s someone whose foreign policy advice I think is exceptionally sound”.

Except that an actual policy divide did emerge here, between Rubio and Cruz, over government surveillance, immigration and, most interesting, the wisdom of US intervention to topple dictators. In a decisively more offensive stance toward Rubio, Cruz’s aides zeroed in on the Floridian’s absence from a high-profile vote in the Senate and sharpened their questioning of whether he was betraying Sunshine State voters when he joined the Gang of Eight.

At first, Cruz tried to brush off the charge by declaring that he has always opposed amnesty.

Charlie Riedel/AP Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) tangled frequently with Cruz at last week’s GOP debate, but their conflict doesn’t appear to have affected Cruz’s fondness for him.

Cruz stated that Rubio and Cruz both made the exact same promises to their constituents to “lead the fight against amnesty”.

“There’s a heavy evangelical base down there and they think his focus on those states sets him apart”, said Mattingly.

Cruz’s campaign is convinced that any minute spent debating immigration with Rubio is a net positive for the Texas senator. Cruz, in weasel words one commentator correctly characterized as “Clintonian”, responded, “I have never supported legalization, and I do not intend to support legalization”.

“Even though there has been some criticism of things I have said, it doesn’t seem to come up anymore, because Donald Trump’s name will emerge in that conversation, and whatever I might have said looks a little bland in comparison”, said King, who has come under fire for comments about immigration and other topics over the years.

Despite similarities, Rubio is different to Cruz. Cruz’s campaign spokesman told the Times that the memo merely reflected Cruz’s boss’s thinking, not his own.

Next, is it really true that Cruz doesn’t “intend to support legalization” for the undocumented? As the New York Times has written, they have a much better record than polls of pointing to the eventual nominee of a party. Radio host Hugh Hewitt asked Trump what his priority would be among aging nuclear forces, and Hewitt named the components of the triad: B-52s, missiles and submarines. “What don’t you understand, Greta?”

Christie took part in the prime-time debate December 15 because CNN’s qualifying rules took into account candidates’ standing in polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, the two states holding the first nominating contests. The state, which has historically supported conservative-leaning candidates during past presidential elections, joins a dozen other mostly southern states during the March 1 “SEC Primary”.

Christie is averaging around 11 percent support in recent polls in New Hampshire.

It is in some of those deeply conservative states that the immigration debate is most pitched.

Rubio accurately accused Cruz of making it more hard to detect terrorists by opposing renewal of the government’s bulk collection of telephone metadata. But this is GOP primary politics, 2016.

Rubio said that while the USA has to “deal with (Putin)” from a “geopolitical, realistic level”, the Russian president “is not someone who is going to go down in history as a great leader”. “That just about kills Marco Rubio in Alabama”.