Debate night: Trump to rejoin rivals, Rubio may feel heat

And then there was Texas Sen.

Where: St. Anselm’s College Institute of Politics, Manchester, N.H.

The Cruz campaign also whizzed about with phone bank volunteers Friday night at their Front Street headquarters in Manchester. Three governors whose hopes of breaking out of the second tier are riding on their results here will be on the attack.

Trump was back on the debate stage after skipping the last contest before the Iowa caucuses.

Cruz hopes a strong debate performance will help prevent him from becoming yet another Iowa victor who quickly faded into irrelevancy.

The controversy isn’t going away – in large part because Cruz’s top opponents won’t let it.

The state executives are well aware they need to stop Rubio this week or never.

“You didn’t even want to go back. It’s a lie. Don’t believe it”, he said.

Businesswoman Carly Fiorina protested her exclusion from Saturday’s debate, saying the Republican Party is “going along with this biased ABC scheme”. Polls suggest there’s little room to grow support among New Hampshire’s centrist-leaning voters and given Rubio’s surge in the state, Cruz’s campaign has said.

The candidate most likely to be under the spotlight will be Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida.

Iowa didn’t turn out the way Donald Trump wanted. Will he soften his tone, as he has in some post-Iowa appearances? He has held a comfortable lead in national polls, as well as surveys in Iowa and New Hampshire for months, but had to settle for second in last Monday’s opening caucuses. Or will he double down on his charge that Cruz stole a victory in the Hawkeye State through dirty tactics? I think if we could have gotten him there more often, it would have increased his numbers….

Marco Rubio tripped up early under attack from former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who are jockeying for the same Republican voters. The primary is on Tuesday. Ideologically speaking, Rubio is just as conservative as Trump and Cruz when it comes to economic policy (pro-business and anti-labor), global relations (neo-conservative), and social issues (a staunch ally of the Christian Right). Looking forward, Mr. Cruz will have a mighty struggle to repeat his efforts in Iowa, a state saturated by Evangelical Christians.

With wet snow already ankle deep and falling fast, Dave Chiokadze and James Radcliffe trekked down one long driveway after another in search of potential votes for Donald Trump. The former businesswoman did not satisfy polling criteria set by ABC News and says the game was rigged against her because she beat Christie and Kasich in Iowa, and they will be on the stage and she won’t.

New Hampshire marks the ultimate showdown between four candidates trying to consolidate so-called “establishment” support in order to take on relative outsiders Cruz and Trump.

Now that he has won a state, Cruz has fully dropped the niceties toward Trump.

“He says a lot of things that people think but I’m not sure he is so well credentialed that we feel that he can carry our country as president”. This means he has been getting it from all sides and he was braced for more as the candidates gathered for a last televised debate before the primary on 9 February.

The candidates seized on a long-range missile test by North Korea minutes before the debate opened to portray the Obama administration as weak on foreign policy and to promise to have a much more robust posture in the world.

And based on the intensifying war of words with Trump, it’s hard to imagine anything short of fireworks between the two leading candidates.