In NH, Cruz fires back

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK A white supremacist group said it has placed thousands of automated phone calls in Iowa urging voters to back billionaire Donald Trump’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination because “we don’t need Muslims”.

In Iowa, Trump and Cruz were far ahead of the other candidates in a Quinnipiac University poll released Monday of likely Republican caucus goers.

Kaufmann is predicting Republicans will surpass the benchmark attendance mark for both parities of 120,000, though in the 2007 caucuses, then-Sen.

As a result of his having been born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936 and thus having his Article II presidential eligibility questioned in 2008, Senator McCain knows this issue firsthand.

The change from Cruz’s seven-months-old, turn-the-other-cheek strategy, which was on display just 24 hours ago, involves aggressively highlighting Trump’s ties to the Democratic Party.

“It is more than a little unusual to see Donald relying on as authoritative a liberal, left-wing judicial activist Harvard Law professor who is a huge Hillary supporter”, Cruz said. But Donald Trump maintains a strong lead in New Hampshire, so a candidate could finish second or third by winning over a relatively small segment of the state’s Republicans.

“It seems the Hillary folks are very eager to support Donald Trump and the attacks that are being tossed my direction”, he added.

Cruz stressed, however, that he doesn’t intend to get into the “mud” of the 2016 race.

Iowa decides on February 1; New Hampshire, as always, eight days later. You will get no argument from me when Trump is accused of feeding ethnic and religious prejudice, as my Post colleague Michael Gerson wrote in his recent column about the danger to the Republican Party if Trump becomes their presidential nominee. Cruz’s campaign believes that virtually all constitutional scholars, except Tribe, say he is eligible for the presidency since he was born to a mother who is an American citizen.

The poll of 414 likely New Hampshire GOP primary voters was conducted January 7-10 and had a margin of error of 4.8 percentage points.

“As Granite State voters start to firm up their decision, it’s looking more and more unlikely that Trump will be toppled from his perch”, said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth polling institute in West Long Branch.

With a mammoth American flag as his backdrop, a barn-jacketed Cruz took the stage after former United States congressman Bob Barr of Georgia, but Cruz was quickly interrupted by a young man in a suit, who questioned from the stage why hundreds of people had gathered in support of guns.

More moderate-leaning Republicans have typically fared better in New Hampshire than staunch conservatives like Cruz.