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Hispanic Republicans Like Hillary Clinton And Bernie Sanders Better By Philip Bump March 12 The Washington Post and Univision News asked Hispanic voters which 2016 presidential candidates they prefer, which issues matter to them and whether they think the country is on the right track. Here's how they responded. (Sarah Parnass/The Washington Post) Donald Trump has regularly insisted that, despite his rhetoric about illegal immigrants, he would win the support of Hispanic voters in a general election. This argument was bolstered by the results of the voting in Nevada, where he won nearly half the Latino vote, according to entrance...

And then there's Nevada. It, too, was a closed caucus. And Trump won by a wide margin. It's clear that Cruz has done better in states that are holding closed caucuses, but it's not necessarily clear why. It is not the case, though, that Trump is leading in the contest for the nomination because he's being pushed there by independents. Trump's claim that he's bolstering the Republican Party may be exaggerated, but it's clear that an awful lot of Republicans want him to be the party's nominee. As much as other members of the party may not like it.

Donald Trump is very self-conscious about his hands. If you didn't know that before right this second, I'd have to describe you as someone paying only casual attention to the campaign; the subject of the length of Trump's fingers has been raised repeatedly by the media, by Trump's opponents and by Trump. It stems from a story told by Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair.

What Christie offers Trump, then, isn't voters, and it probably isn't the emotional appeal of a beloved character. As the announcement press conference made clear, Christie will over the short term continue to play the other role he played effectively while a candidate: serial bully toward Marco Rubio.

Trump's strong performances have moved him from "lol what" to "jeez" very, very quickly. And while he's also had three straight wins in relatively friendly states, it's still not totally clear where the unfriendly states might be.

His campaign's clumsy effort to translate Ben Carson's post-Iowa travel into a Carson concession was unfair, but it likely didn't make much difference and can probably be chalked up to zealousness as much as anything. That "you haven't voted" flyer in Iowa was poorly received, but it was based in sound political research -- and was only sent to a few thousand people who probably wouldn't have voted anyway. Cruz's ads against Trump, quoting Trump's past positions as stated by Trump himself, are fair game, despite Trump's threats to sue. There were late robocalls in South Carolina hammering Donald Trump...

Iowa, Donald Trump told a crowd in Little Rock, Ark., last night, is a great place. A great state, amazing people. Trump remains a big fan of Iowa, despite the results of the caucuses that took place there on Monday. Or, perhaps, because of those results. After all, Trump thinks Trump came in first.

Earlier this month, Fox News released a poll showing Ted Cruz leading Donald Trump by four points. The two had a sizable lead over everyone else in the state, and the poll was confirming what others were showing: Cruz had an advantage. On Sunday, Fox released another Iowa poll, with substantially different results. Now, Trump is up by 11 points, a 15-point swing in the two weeks between surveys. This poll, too, mirrors the recent trend: Trump has regained the advantage.

The Washington Post published a glowing profile Friday morning about Heidi Cruz - highlighting her professional accomplishments - beyond the fact that she is Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)'s wife. The profile was mostly flattering, pointing to her career at Goldman Sachs in Houston before she stepped down when her husband decided to run for president. Curiously, however, the article began pointing out the similarities between Heidi and Hillary Clinton: -snip- Is that a compliment?

During a rally in Iowa on Friday evening, Ted Cruz made a joke that went over fine with his audience -- but was less popular once the wider world caught wind. Replying to a woman who asked him about holding someone accountable for the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi in 2012, Cruz said that she was "exactly right." He criticized President Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for "engag[ing] in deception" on the matter. Then he zeroed in on Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee for the presidency. "We do know Hillary told her daughter Chelsea, 'Well, gosh,...

On Friday, CNN/ORC released new poll data showing Donald Trump with his biggest lead in their 2016 polling -- which also gave him his highest polling average since he joined the race. One big reason for that is that Trump has a massive advantage among those who don't have a college degree, as we noted in a graph We can look at this as a microcosm of the 2016 election on the whole. Trump has consolidated a base of support; the establishment is fractured in its support for someone to stand up to him. This isn't a clean analogy, but...

Not to unduly stress out Reince Priebus and the other members of the Republican establishment, but there are only 71 days until the Iowa caucuses, and only eight more days after that until New Hampshire. That's of now, Sunday, Nov. 22, a day on which a slew of new polls show that Donald Trump has improved his leads in both of those states and nationally. Seventy-one days ago, the national Republican front-runner was ... Donald Trump, who led by 13.8 points in the Real Clear Politics polling average. Seventy-one days before that, though, the front-runner was Jeb Bush. If you...

In what was already a grim week for the Jeb Bush campaign, a bit more bad news late Thursday night. After a meeting in Houston on Monday, the campaign sent parts of a presentation to reporters detailing how they saw the race moving forward. But the day after Bush's inept debate performance, U.S. News and World Report obtained the whole document, including detailed plans for what the campaign had -- or, really, hadn't -- done so far in Iowa. The Iowa Starting Line blog was stunned by what it saw. "[A] brief look at their Iowa numbers show extremely troubling...

The day after the first Democratic presidential debate, Donald Trump called Bernie Sanders a maniac. "This socialist-slash-communist," Trump said to raucous cheers. "I call him a socialist-slash-communist, because that's what he is." Well, no. The terms "socialist" and "communist" are often confused, thanks in large part to the Cold War. Layer on top of that the nuance of the term "democratic socialist," which is how Sanders describes himself, and it's easy to see why people might generally be confused... To offer America a bit of a primer, I reached out to Dr. Lawrence Quill, chairman and professor of political science...

Donald Trump Is Free To Cherry-Pick His Polls. But His Decline Is Clear. By Philip Bump September 27 When announcing the results of a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on Sunday, NBC senior political editor Mark Murray tweeted this: Donald Trump, up two points! Sure, he's neck-and-neck with Carson, as other polls have shown, but still. The idea that Trump must be slipping, promulgated by some folks, doesn't quite to hold water it seems. In fact, since last Sunday's CNN/ORC poll, the change Trump has seen since the last polls from each outlet has varied — up since the...

On Friday night, while the political media was transfixed watching Donald Trump's in-all-ways-secular stump ramble in Mobile, Ala., Ted Cruz was holding a deliberately religious rally in Des Moines. Evangelical voters were always meant to be a linchpin of Cruz's presidential bid, and as our Katie Zezima and Tom Hamburger write, the Des Moines event was not shy about making that pitch. Blasting Planned Parenthood and lamenting the "persecution" of business owners sued for denying services to same-sex couples, Cruz was clearly trying to do two things: Plant his flag as the Republican crusader -- and prompt religious voters to...

Ted Cruz was not the first person to officially declare his presidential candidacy when he announced on Monday. Scores of people are running just as officially as the junior senator from Texas, as measured by their having filled out the proper form with the Federal Election Commission. So why do we consider Cruz a "real" candidate and those other 200-odd candidates not worth mentioning? Is it viability? Few people think Cruz has much of a shot at the Republican nomination. The Upshot's Nate Cohn makes the case against his doing so pretty concretely. We looked at the strength of his...

Hacked emails indicate that Hillary Clinton used a domain registered the day of her Senate hearingsSNIPIn March 2013, an adviser to Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal, had his email hacked by "Guccifer" -- the Romanian hacker perhaps best known for revealing George W. Bush's paintings to the world. At the time, Gawker reported that Blumenthal was communicating with an account that appeared to belong to Clinton at the "clintonemail.com" domain. The content of some of those emails was published by RT.com. Examining the registry information for "clintonemail.com" reveals that the domain was first created on January 13, 2009 -- one week before...