GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie discusses race to White House

Donald Trump seems set to end 2015 as the dominant force in the race for next year’s Republican nomination for president, with Texas Sen.

“However, if [Rubio] wins the primary, I’d be happy to support him, because I think he brings a lot to the table”, Doherty said.

“I think both of them, their campaigns have a natural arc, and with both of them, I think gravity is pulling them down”.

It was indeed unusual for Trump.

Under traditional rules of thumb, one would expect that many Trump fans won’t actually vote, and that his percentages will be well under the 33 percent he’s getting in national polls and the 25 percent and 29 percent he’s polling in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The jury is still out on whether the strategy will work.

Trump has been a constant atop the polls since his ascent to the lead in July, and this new CNN poll marks the first time that Ted Cruz stands significantly apart from the other candidates vying for the nomination. That’s a state where Trump is behind. A majority of independents and Democrats believed that Clinton has a “good chance” of beating Trump.

When asked if they would be proud of have Trump as their president, Republican voters say yes, 60 percent to 39 percent. The news gets worse and worse, as Trump polls over 50% with Republicans on his handling of nearly every issue (he gets 47% on handling ISIS; his next competitor, Ted Cruz, gets 21%), which refutes popularly-held notions of a Trump “ceiling” in the low forties.

Between Trump and Cruz, however, the level of voter certainty was dramatically different.

“We’ve been looking for Marco, but we can’t find him”, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who’s betting his entire presidential candidacy on New Hampshire, dug playfully at Rubio Tuesday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Polls indicate that after a myriad of controversial statements, including Trump’s proposal that no Muslims be allowed to immigrate into the United States, he has maintained a large lead over his rivals nationwide.

In a stark contrast to Trump’s quick stop in Portsmouth to pick up the endorsement of the New England Police Benevolent Association, Christie spends hours in coffee shops and has held numerous town halls where he fields questions on everything from Syria to healthcare to taxes.

What if Trump’s numbers are really higher than the polls show because folks are lying to pollsters? But even a partial resurgence of Bush and a strong Christie showing in New Hampshire – Christie helped himself by deriding his senatorial opponents for being way too senatorial – could block Rubio’s emergence. It’s also the latest indicator that Christie may have become a threat to Bush and other “establishment” candidates now that he has rebounded in polls since poor national polling relegated him to the undercard debate last month.

The Republican frontrunner logged almost 23 hours of airtime in 119 appearances on the network from May 1 to December 15, according to progressive media watchdog Media Matters for America. That’s more than double the share backing Cruz, who, at 18%, has inched up 2 points since the last CNN/ORC poll, which was taken in late November. Republicans as a whole are evenly divided on that issue, 40/40.

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush was to be the Republican front-runner.

“This is a momentum game”, Christie said. “Jeb Bush shows signs of life in New Hampshire”, said a hopeful headline on Politico.

SANDERS: He responded to Trump’s language about Clinton’s debate bathroom break, saying in Iowa: “I don’t know what his relationship with women has been like, but he has discovered that women go to the bathroom”.

If an eventual nominee gets crowned without having won New Hampshire, future candidates could downgrade the state’s traditional importance. That means the other half did not indicate embarrassment as their reaction to a Trump presidency.