By Rebecca Morin | [email protected]
All eyes are on Iowa.
The state’s first-in-the-nation caucuses are this evening, and the results could propel candidates forward to the New Hampshire primary on Feb. 9 or stop them in their tracks.
After about two months of battling to be Iowa’s front-runner, business mogul Donald Trump took the lead from Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in the latest poll released by the Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics on Jan. 30.
“Here’s a guy with all of these senators. Not one endorsement of Cruz, because he’s a nasty guy. Nobody likes him,” Trump told ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday. “You can’t run a country that way. It will be a total mess. It will be worse gridlock than you have right now.”
Trump led the poll with 28 percent, followed by Cruz at 23 percent — with both candidates considered “antiestablishment.” Florida Sen. Marco Rubio came in next with 15 percent and is the favorite of the Republican establishment.
With 602 Republican likely caucus attendees surveyed, there is a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
“I think the people of Iowa deserve more,” Cruz said about Trump on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “I think the American people deserve more than just a battle of petty insults. And so I don’t intend to play that game.”
In the same Register poll, however, Republican likely caucus attendees said they would be more comfortable with Cruz winning the presidency than Trump.
And one the the main concerns Republicans have is if Trump supporters will actually make it to the caucuses.
Dallas County GOP Chairman Tyler De Haan said the “million-dollar question” has to deal with Trump supporters making it to caucus.
“Nobody really knows, and all we can do is guess and speculate at this time,” he said about caucus neophytes knowing how and where to go.
That is also a top concern with one of the leading candidates on the Democratic side.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders polled in the single digits when he announced his campaign last spring, but he is now within the margin of error in the polls with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Clinton was at 45 percent, and Sanders was at 42 percent, according to the Jan. 30 Register poll.
The virtual tie has called for a push on both sides. Sanders, who has garnered a number of young voters as well as brought in thousands to his political rallies across the nation, emphasized actually caucusing will be the only way he will succeed.
“How would you like to make the pundits look dumb on election night,” Sanders told a crowd of approximately 3,700 at the University of Iowa on Jan. 30.
Voters are more comfortable with Clinton, who ran for president in 2008 but came in behind then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, over Sanders if she became president, however.
“It’s a lot easier to go from 90 to 100 than to go from 0 to 100,” Clinton has said about Sanders. The former New York senator has been favored by the Democratic establishment over Sanders, who is a self-declared democratic-socialist.
Though there are two top candidates for each party, in the Iowa caucuses it can go any way.