Trump’s National Lead Continues to Shrink, While Cruz and Rubio Make Inroads

Mr. Trump will no longer be able to boast that everybody loves him, and Ms. Clinton faces polling showing that Sen.

Christie has been one of Rubio’s fiercest critics this week, calling the first-term USA senator from Florida “the boy in the bubble” the day after the Iowa vote. “The candidates engaged in a spirited debate on Thursday night and it remains to be seen if that may have any impact in the trajectory of the Democratic nomination contest in New Hampshire”. “And you had to turn to look at them and say ‘I believe that fill-in-the-blank – whoever you’re voting for – is the very best person to put your son’s life in their hands”.

“Now, you know, I think that’s the kind of position that New Hampshire voters would be really concerned about”, he added.

Dominick Rubio, 7, joins his father, Sen.

On the Republican side, Trump continued to hold a wide lead among likely Republican primary voters in New Hampshire, according to a new CNN/WMUR tracking poll, with the pack vying for second place beginning to break up. The debate rules left Carly Fiorina as the only candidate without a spot on stage.

The Journal/NBC/Marist survey included 653 likely Republican voters.

Bush, the former Florida governor who was an early favorite but has languished through the fall and winter, is on a crucial mission to stage a comeback. “His handlers handle him all the time”, Christie said on Fox News.

When the axe finally falls, will the governor fall in line and endorse Rubio despite questioning his ability to do the job, or endorse Bush? If there is a mutually beneficial relationship to be found in a Christie endorsement for Bush, Dworkin said that opportunity will arrive if and when the Christie campaign runs out of money and Bush completely reverses his slide in the polls – not after the returns come in on Tuesday. Christie has trained a series of deeply dismissive comments at Rubio.

Rider University Political Scientist Ben Dworkin said that he would hesitate to call Christie’s exit from the race so soon. But, he asked, “what’s Marco Rubio’s major accomplishment in his political career?”

Rubio just about stole that opportunity from them before they even got it.

Rubio, 44, has sought to shrug off the criticism as he has glided from diners to packed town hall meetings delivering his message of generational change. I said all along I felt it would be Cruz-Trump-Rubio. “But at the end of the day the people of Iowa spoke”.

Campaigns and super-PACs, which can raise and spend unlimited sums of cash, have already poured about $100 million into television ads for the New Hampshire race.

By taking on Trump, Cruz, a senator from Texas, is looking to solidify his status as the darling of the hard right, while Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, is striving for relevance after shedding about 50 staffers this week.

But the press, focusing on the dozen or so polls that showed Trump in the lead in the days before the caucuses, concluded the only thing that could stop him was if there was a low turnout by his supporters on caucus night – choosing to ignore the huge number of undecided voters who in poll after poll kept on not deciding, an obvious bad sign for a supposed frontrunner.