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I have performed some math showing Polls versus Results Ted Cruz has been dominating the polls recently. Every time the polls say he is going to perform X, he outdoes them with two minor exceptions.(GRAPH-AT-LINK) As seen in the graphic above Ted Cruz has been outdoing the Republican Polls by 15% or higher on average. In two cases we could not identify how much higher because of lack of Polls, these are Hawaii and Maine. However an examination of his wins shows either an extreme bias in the polls, or that the vote is always breaking for one candidate when...

A new 20,000-voter straw poll by the Senate Conservatives Fund shows Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) out in front of the other 2016 candidates with 65 per cent of the vote. Donald Trump came in second, with 25 per cent support, even though he holds the lead in delegates ahead of the four March 8 presidential primary races. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), banking on a win in his home state of Florida, came in fourth place, with a mere 3.11 per cent support. Ohio Gov. John Kasich barely beat out Rubio with 3.44 per cent. "With over 20,000 ballots cast, Ted...

Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are locked in a tight Republican race - separated by just three points - according to results from a new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Trump is the first choice of 30 percent of Republican primary voters - followed by Cruz at 27 percent, John Kasich at 22 percent and Marco Rubio at 20 percent. (GRAPH-AT-LINK) Last month, the same NBC/WSJ poll found Cruz with a two-point lead over Trump, 28 percent to 26 percent, but that was before Trump's big wins in South Carolina and Nevada. The new NBC/WSJ poll - conducted mostly...

Nineteen states have now voted. Here are Marco Rubio's vote percentages and ranking in each:(GRAPH-AT-LINK)This is not the performance of a candidate with a future. Rubio did worse in Maine than he did in New Hampshire, Vermont or Massachusetts. He did worse in Kentucky than he did in Arkansas or Tennessee. He did worse in Louisiana than he did in South Carolina or Alabama. He did worse in Kansas than he did in Iowa or Oklahoma. And he did worse even though the field has narrowed over the course of those contests, leaving him the default candidate to consolidate the...

I've never been a fan of early voting. Those who vote early do not have the opportunity to include in their deliberations late breaking events or campaign developments that might cause them to re-examine their decision. I've always believed we're better off having everybody vote on the same day. That way everybody has access to the same information before they pull the lever. (Absentee ballots, of course, should be made available to those who cannot show up on election day due to travel or other unavoidable complications.) An illustration of this comes from the Louisiana primary on Saturday. Donald Trump...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.wkyc.com/news/politics/four-reasons-ted-cruz-could-win-ohio/72520313

Maybe Donald Trump isn't invincible, after all. On Saturday, Ted Cruz nuked Trump from orbit in Kansas, pantsed him in Maine, and almost scored coups in the other two states, Kentucky and Louisiana, where he fell short of Trump by just two delegates in the first case and one in the second. Overall, the Texas senator trails Trump in the delegate race by a very manageable 378-295. There's an awfully long way to go to get to the 1,237 needed for the nomination. It's enough to launch a thousand think pieces on what's become of the GOP's once-unstoppable frontrunner. But...

Sorry Marco Rubio, but the political establishment in Florida thinks it's over for you. Nine out of 10 people surveyed in the latest Tampa Bay Times Florida Insider Poll expect Rubio to lose Florida's March 15 presidential primary to Donald Trump, and nine in 10 expect Trump to be the Republican nominee. More than eight in 10 of the more than 170 politicos surveyed said that Florida's junior senator should suspend his campaign if and when he does lose his home state. "I'm resigned to the fact that Donald Trump is going to be the nominee. Rubio or Cruz can't...

Donald Trump holds a 6-point lead over his Republican rivals on the eve of the Kansas caucuses, according to a new poll released Friday. Trump is supported by 35 percent of likely GOP caucusgoers, followed by Ted Cruz, at 29 percent, Marco Rubio, at 17 percent, and John Kasich at 13 percent in the Trafalgar Group poll. Public polling in the state has been infrequent. The Trafalgar poll is only the second survey included in the RealClearPolitics index of Kansas polls. Cruz has 43 percent support among self-identified conservative Republicans, followed by Trump, at 30 percent, and Rubio, at 16...

The truth sets us free...

In theory, Ted Cruz's best states are behind him. But at the Detroit debate, Cruz was clearly the class of the field and it's clear that no one should count him out as the delegate race moves into its next phase. The delegate math is complicated, but the basic gist goes something like this: Donald Trump has a commanding lead at the moment, but it is not a given that he will reach the 1,237 threshold he needs to clinch a majority. Simply put, Trump has failed to break through the ceiling of support he's held since New Hampshire even...

Marco Rubio had a rough Super Tuesday until the end of the night, at least in the W column, and in two interviews he got pressed on whether he had a realistic chance of prevailing for the Republican nomination. After having come in a close second in Virginia, where Rubio had hoped to perhaps score an upset victory, and falling off the pace elsewhere, Jake Tapper had a question for Rubio. "Is there a certain amount of denial that you're in?"(VIDEO-AT-LINK)Rubio makes the argument (shown in brief here) that this Super Tuesday isn't about wins and losses but simply tallying...

If you had to vote in your state primary/caucus today, knowing what you know now about the various declared and probable candidates, who would you vote for? Why? Who would you like to see as the running mate for your preferred candidate? If you could help staff your candidates cabinet and other top appointments, who would you choose? If you could recommend different congressional leaders than we have now, who would they be? And who would you like to see on the Supreme Court and why? And finally, feel free to donate to Free Republic.

The supporters of Donald Trump believe he might awaken a sleeping giant -- a cohort of white working-class voters that will propel him to the presidency. His more politically-minded opponents insist he will summon a colossal electoral disaster on Republicans that will not only secure the presidency for the Democrats but lose the GOP the House and Senate. I'll let the Trumpkins make the case for their man. I want to look at the potential for Republican disaster here. John McCain got roughly 60 million votes in 2008. Mitt Romney got roughly 61 million in 2012. Barack Obama secured 70...

A new CNN/ORC national poll (full pdf below) is being highlighted in the media discussion based on the top-line results: Donald Trump 49% ! However, that’s not the real headline in the data. The real lead story should be the damage Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz have done to themselves as they continue a scorched-earth campaign. The first signals of a backlash appeared over the weekend’s polling when it became clear Senator Rubio and Senator Cruz where losing support at an exponential rate the longer they continued to make unfounded accusations. Donald Trump and Ben Carson are benefactors of the...

Bernie Sanders, having just finished two rallies in Texas with crowds larger than Hillary Clinton could ever dream of -- a 10,000-person rally in Austin and an 8,000-person one in Dallas -- called Clinton to concede the South Carolina primary and got on a plane bound for Minnesota, a state whose Super Tuesday vote the media hasn't bothered to poll, but which Bernie Sanders is likely to win. If he listened to any of the coverage of his dramatic defeat in the Palmetto State while en-route to Rochester, he probably wondered at its accuracy and cogency. Here's five reasons he'd...

If Donald Trump wins the Republican presidential primary, he is almost a shoo-in to win the presidency this November, a Stony Brook University professor predicts. Professor Helmut Norpoth's statistical model, which looks at a candidate's performance in their party's presidential primary and factors in the broader electoral cycle, shows that Trump has a 97 percent chance of beating Hillary Clinton in the general election, reported Stony Brook's newspaper The Statesman. His odds rise to 99 percent against Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. The professor of political science presented his 2016 forecast at the SUNY Global Center in Manhattan on Monday. "Trump...

Link only, copyright issues. http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-02-25/bloomberg-politics-super-tuesday-sec-primary-republican-poll

I called it - as soon as Rubio rose to second place, Trump would cast doubt(VIDEO-AT-LINK)About a month ago, when Donald Trump was claiming that Ted Cruz probably was not eligible to be president, Trump was questioned by Jake Tapper about whether Marco Rubio was eligible. Trump exhibited some legal understanding of the issue, citing an op-ed written by Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe. Trump's conclusion was that he had no doubts Rubio was eligible: "It's a different [than Ted Cruz], very different thing because he was born here. He was born on the land."(VIDEO-AT-LINK)As the attacks on Cruz's eligibility rose...

Ranked choice voting could have told us this sooner A new poll has Donald Trump beating Marco Rubio 44 percent to 28 percent in Rubio's home state of Florida. This is devastating news for Rubio. It also is bad news for the conventional wisdom that Rubio would pick up support as the field winnowed, allowing him to overcome Trump. But had the GOP used ranked-choice voting in its primaries, this new Florida poll wouldn't have been that surprising. We'd have known by now that Rubio's chances were always poor, and that winnowing wouldn't vault him to the top of the...