Rand Paul Surpasses Trump and Fiorina, Wins Michigan Straw Poll

Meekhof announced his support Saturday on Mackinac Island, where Kasich spoke at the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference. He captured 22 percent of the vote among 16 candidates.

“This primary today is a version of Mad Max and Thunderdome”, he said. “If someone made a nasty or controversial statement about me to the president, do you really think he would come to my rescue? You know he’s not even an American”, the man said. Trump declined last week to correct a town hall participant who inaccurately stated that President Barack Obama is a Muslim.

Michigan’s presidential primary election is six months away. She’s delivered the line before. However Calif. businesswoman Carly Fiorina, buoyed from the momentum of what seen as a robust debate performance Wednesday ., completed second.

When asked if she was aware that a European subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard had sold hundreds of millions of dollars of computers to Iran while she was chief executive, Fiorina said the company is a larger global enterprise than any one of the 50 USA states.

Fiorina says as more people learn who she is, her support will grow. The others were Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, John Kasich and Rand Paul.

The News poll comes as CNN reports that Carly Fiorina has moved into second place among Republican presidential candidates in a CNN/ORC poll. “The straw poll was previously won by Gov. Mitt Romney in 2011”, noted Paul’s campaign in a press release. Trump said on Twitter.

“We know our current president is one”.

The 2016 Republican presidential candidate has been mingling at an Iowa event for evangelical voters.

Going into the weekend, many believed that Paul had a built-in advantage.

Graham was noting that President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill would share a drink in spite of their differences. Then again, there’s not much else to gauge progress at this point.

Before dashing to attend the South Carolina-Georgia college football game in Athens, Georgia, Bush on Friday evening had a message similar to Kasich’s.

Asked who he was rooting for in the game, the former Florida governor declares that he’s “kind of neutral on the subject”.

“The Constitution specifies that there shall be no religious test for public office, and I am a constitutionalist”, Cruz said.

Ohio Gov John Kasich was third with 14% and Texas Sen.

Paul also hammered Hillary Rodham Clinton, the former Secretary of State who is the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president, for her handling of security at the embassy in Benghazi, Libya, prior to a 2012 attack and for putting sensitive and potentially classified e-mails on a private server that was not secure.

Paul, who has fallen to the back of the pack in Republican polls, addressed the conference on Saturday, telling those gathered that the nation had been too interventionist in its approach to foreign policy and declaring that he wanted to restore “common sense” to America’s worldwide posture.

Supporters for Kasich had hoped that a win would provide him with an aura of momentum in Michigan, a Midwestern battleground that he plans to seriously contend. Walker, another Midwestern governor, did not seriously compete in the straw poll. The president of the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce says he didn’t find the comments offensive.

So early on in the race, it’s hard to attach a lot of significance to polls. Held each year by the state party, the state convention serves purposes that vary from voting on issues to electing delegates, according to Tufts Democrats member junior Ben Kaplan.