Cruz trumps Trump in latest poll

Republican candidate U.S. SenatorTed Cruz has expanded his campaign efforts in Iowa and a poll reflects this push, putting him ahead of all the other candidates in his party.

The Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics poll, out late Saturday, shows the conservative Cruz with 31 percent support, 10 points ahead of bombastic billionaire Donald Trump, who has 21 percent.

In the current poll, Trump is the first choice of 27 percent of Republican primary voters (up four points since the last poll).

Since the poll was published Mr Trump has attacked Des Moines Register, Iowa’s largest newspaper, for being biased against him and referred to a CNN/ORC poll, released on Monday, which found Mr Trump has 33 per cent support in Iowa, followed by Mr Cruz at 20 per cent.

Republican presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz.

“We have more work to do, but we can definitively say the message is working”, Cruz’s Iowa state director, Bryan English, told CNN in a statement.

Mr Trump and Mr Cruz have also been trading barbs in recorded statements and on Twitter, prompting speculation that an unofficial pact between the two men has unravelled.

“I always expected that Cruz would do well in Iowa”.

“I was against going into Iraq”, Trump told CNN’s Jake Tapper in an interview that aired Sunday on “State of the Union”. For months, Cruz labored behind the scenes, courting and organizing influential faith leaders as he slowly worked to peel off the born-again believers of candidates like Ben Carson. “This is a sudden move into a commanding position for Cruz”. At an event at the Iowa State Fairgrounds Friday night, Trump lit into Cruz for the first time, claiming the Texan is beholden to Big Oil and trying to plant seeds of doubt about whether a Cuban can be an evangelical Christian.

The polling business, Selzer & Co. of Des Moines, is considered one of the best at predicting the state, which is notoriously hard to poll accurately. The margin of error is plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.