Trump on top, Cruz and Rubio trail

The poll, released Wednesday by NBC News/Wall Street Journal, shows Trump dropping to second place behind Ted Cruz for the first time since October 2015.

So, endorsements matter to at least some voters and may help some candidates to compete with Donald Trump and his double digit lead in the polls.

Cruz said he met the constitutional requirement that a president must be a “natural born citizen” because his mother was an American. The margin of error is two percentage points. The survey also was conducted amid fierce criticism of Trump from all sides, especially from Cruz and Bush.

“When you see a number this different, it means you might be right on top of a shift in the campaign”, McInturff said.

Unenrolled voters make up 53 percent of the stat’e’s electorate, dwarfing registered Democrats (36 percent) and Republicans (11 percent.) The name is deceiving; “unenrolled” voters are registered to vote, but do not formally belong to either reigstered party and are commonly called “independent” (not to be confused with the new, officially recognized United Independent Party).

On Feb. 12, Donald Trump tweeted the following about Ted Cruz: “How can Ted Cruz be an Evangelical Christian when he lies so much and is so dishonest?”

“That phony Wall Street Journal poll that came out yesterday was, in my opinion, it was a fix…It was a Rupert Murdoch hit”.

The truly interesting question from this poll is that respondents were asked who they would support in a one-on-one matchup. “I don’t have a prediction; I just don’t know”.

A three-way feud among the GOP’s leading White House contenders escalated Wednesday, with Republican Ted Cruz daring Donald Trump to sue him and dismissing Marco Rubio’s charges of dishonesty just days before South Carolina’s high-stakes primary.

Rubio, hoping to overtake Cruz for second place in SC, where Trump leads in the polls, accused Cruz of spreading falsehoods with an ad attacking Rubio over his position on immigration. About 1-in-5 say they wouldn’t support Trump should he win the nomination, and roughly the same share say so about Cruz and Rubio. However, despite the increasingly adversarial relationship between the two candidates, almost 26 percent of Cruz supporters would still support Trump if Cruz dropped out.

The pope made his comments en route home from Mexico, hours after he prayed at the Mexico-U.S. border for migrants who died trying to reach the United States.

Jeb Bush, the target of Mr Trump’s attack last weekend, has fallen back to a new low mark of 4%. “My dad is the greatest man alive in my mind”.