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Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is holding five rallies across Illinois on Monday in the lead-up to its Super Tuesday vote tomorrow. Although the latest polls show Trump with a lead in Illinois, the Cruz rallies highlight the superior ground effort of his campaign. Donald Trump currently has around 36 percent support in Illinois. Cruz is around 25 percent and Ohio Gov. John Kasich is at 19 percent. While Trump may win the overall vote in Illinois, it is possible he ends up with fewer delegates than Cruz, or even Kasich. In Illinois, the winner of the statewide vote receives...

The important, but overshadowed, Missouri presidential primary is Tuesday. It's overshadowed by the big contests in Ohio and Florida and because of the five states voting that day, it's the smallest prize in terms of delegates. But it's important nonetheless as the oh-so-competitive primary campaigns rage across the nation. And, hey, the candidates are competing here, which means they consider it worth winning. So who will the battle of Missouri? Here's a series of predictions: Dave Helling, Kansas City Star political writer: Republicans: Ted Cruz. "Missouri liked Santorum, Akin, and almost picked Huckabee. And the suburbs may be scared of...

A series of new polls released Sunday show Sen. Ted Cruz surging in key Tuesday battleground states, including Illinois, Ohio and Florida. In Illinois, a new CBS Battleground Tracker poll has real estate mogul Donald Trump and Cruz now locked in a statistical dead head, 38 to 34, for first place. In the NBC/WSJ poll for Illinois, Trump leads with 34 percent, with Cruz close at 25 percent. Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Marco Rubio come in at 21 and 16 percent, respectively. In Ohio, Cruz is now nipping at the heels of both Kasich and Trump for first...

Really, now: Who really knows what any of this means; and I say "tie" advisedly if you factor in the Margin Of Error. OHIO: TRUMP: 33% KASICH: 33% CRUZ: 27% FLORIDA: TRUMP: 44% CRUZ: 24% RUBIO: 21% But, I think it does mean there is a powerful reason to believe that a Vote for Ted Cruz, is, well, a vote for Ted Cruz. In Florida, as well as in Ohio, it means that some sort of clever-by-half strategy to Stop Trump needn't necessarily be employed. This is a shift in the political tectonic plates. Imagine if you substitute the word...

Eight thousand miles from Washington D.C., Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is expected to sweep a Saturday vote that likely will not get much media attention: the caucus in Guam, a tiny unincorporated U.S. territory in the Pacific Ocean with nine delegates to offer to the GOP convention, where about 2,460 others will gather. With little fanfare in January, Cruz secured his first gubernatorial endorsement from Guam's Republican executive Eddie Calvo, whom Cruz sent a cake on his birthday. Calvo pledged to encourage his party to send all the island's delegates to Cleveland in July on Cruz's behalf, according to the...

A new poll from the conservative Civitas Institute found little change in the presidential primary race in North Carolina, with Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton holding large leads. The first poll since a number of Republicans dropped out found Trump garnering 32 percent support, with Ted Cruz in second place with 26 percent. Those numbers were similar to a January Civitas poll. John Kasich had the biggest growth in support, from 2 percent in January to 11 percent this month. That number has him tied for a distant third place with Marco Rubio. On the Democratic side, 57 percent of...

CNN is reporting that a "cluster" of independent groups who are supporting Ted Cruz, are deciding to no longer spend money on anti-rubio ads for the state of Florida. The group is called Keep The Promise and Kellyanne Conway, the president of the SuperPAC group, was very specific about the decision. "We're no longer doing anti-Rubio ads in Florida, because it appears he can lose Florida all by himself. He doesn't need our help."(continued)

ATLANTA -- Marco Rubio's hopes of winning his home-state primary and denying Donald Trump the lion's share of Florida's delegates is looking shaky Thursday with the release of a survey showing him 20 points behind and essentially tied with Ted Cruz. In a poll conducted for the Florida Times-Union and Florida FOX affiliates, Trump commands 43 percent of the vote while Rubio has 24 and Cruz 21. The margin of error is 4 percent. John Kasich holds 10 percent, and 2 percent remain undecided. Performing well in Tuesday's Florida primary is critical to Rubio, one of the state's U.S. senators....

The good news for the Republican "establishment" is that there's a man who might be able to stop Donald Trump. The bad news is that it's Ted Cruz, someone they may dislike almost as much. Cruz, who won Idaho on Tuesday while finishing second to Trump in Michigan, Mississippi and Hawaii, is within striking distance of Trump. So far, 29 percent of Republican primary voters have voted for Cruz as compared with 35 percent for Trump. Meanwhile, Cruz trails Trump by 100 delegates: not a trivial gap, although only one more than the 99 at stake in winner-take-all Florida next...

There's one huge takeaway from Tuesday's primaries results: Ted Cruz overperformed in a state where conventional wisdom says he shouldn't have had a chance, namely Michigan. His overperformance - edging out John Kasich for second place, in a state where Kasich should naturally be stronger - is way more significant looking forward than his once-again second place finish in Mississippi, which is another of those southern states that Cruz's campaign based their dubious "evangelicals who don't vote because no one is conservative enough" strategy upon. Of the "not Trumps" still standing, Senator Cruz is closer to what I'd like to...

Democrats will take the White House in November if Donald Trump is the GOP nominee, yet another poll has found. Regardless of whether Democrats put up Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders against Trump, the incumbent party comes out on top in NBC and the Wall Street Journal's latest survey. Clinton would beat him by 13 points, 51 to 38. Sanders would fare even better and win with 55 percent of the vote to the billionaire's 37 percent - a blistering defeat for Trump of 18 points......

BOISE -- Tuesday marked one of the biggest surprises of the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Available polling suggested Donald Trump had a double-digit lead over Ted Cruz in Idaho, but Cruz won. And Cruz didn't just beat Trump in Idaho. He trounced Trump. He beat him by more than 17 percentage points, when available polls projected an 11-point Trump victory. It's one of the biggest upsets that's happened in the race so far. Cruz captured a greater percentage of the vote in Idaho than he did in his home state of Texas. There are only two other states,...

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...