ABC National Poll: Trump Still Leads, But His Support Declines While Everyone Else's Rises
NEW NBC/WSJ POLL PUTS IT TRUMP 30, CRUZ 27

Big Update: Thanks to commenters alerting me to this new poll.

Donald Trump holds a narrow, three-point lead in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows, but the data also reveal potential cracks in his support.

The New York businessman is the top choice of 30% of likely Republican primary voters nationally, the poll finds, followed by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, at 27%.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich has 22%, while Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has 20%, according to the poll.

This is the wrong trajectory for a guy who's winning the nomination. As I'm sure you've heard, this is the point at which the front-runner begins gaining support, as people take a second look and decide, "Okay, I can live with him. Let's rally around him."

The opposite is happening with Trump. Yes, he still leads, but his lead is now single digits over Cruz in a new ABC News poll as well, and Cruz's get out the vote organization exists, whereas Trump's does not.

As Tom Hanks said in A League of Their Own as the team was on the verge of giving up a lead: "This is starting to get interesting." (He meant that in the bad way a game can be interesting -- you don't want the game interesting, you want it boring because you're too far ahead for any effective challenge.)

The topline number is just the beginning of bad news for Trump -- on all the key metrics (honesty, etc.) Cruz beats him by fifteen or more points.

AllahPundit writes this up, and wonders what happens to Trump when the last (probably false) strut of his support -- that he'll win the general election because Winning is all he knows how to do -- falls away.

Here's why Cruz is serious about delivering a coup de grace* to Rubio in Florida:

Dip into the crosstabs and you’ll find that, among non-Trump and non-Cruz voters, Cruz wins... 72/17. In other words, if the field clears, virtually all of Rubio’s and Kasich’s support goes to Cruz over Trump. No wonder Cruz suddenly seems keen to finish off Rubio in Florida by starving him of conservative votes there; if these numbers are right, Cruz could beat Trump the rest of the way even if Trump has Florida in his back pocket.

The Rubes won't like this -- they whine an awful lot -- but it's just business, guys.

For a year it's been Mario's strategy to kill all candidates except Trump and then win a head-to-head contest with him. Mario can't complain too much about Cruz taking the same position.

But they will. Because it's what they do -- they whine. Right now they're whining that a Cruz volunteer spread a CNN story -- which CNN stands by-- that some of Rubio's advisors are advising him to drop out of the race before Florida to keep his electoral viability in other potential non-presidential contests.

The Rubes have claimed this to be "false," but CNN stands by the story, and it's still up on their site.

So why is it wrong for a Cruz volunteer to push this story out into the world? The Rubes people have done nothing but savage other candidates. Part of the reason I quit Twitter was because I was tired of dealing with the Fury of the Rubes.

So what's wrong with this? Absolutely nothing at all, except the story hurts Mario. Which is, in a Social Justice Warrior sort of way, enough to make it a Heresy.

* Which is pronounced coo deh grahs, with a short s, but definitely with an S sound. A lot of English speakers incorrectly pronounce this without the S -- coo de grah -- which is wrong. Wikipedia calls this "hyperforeign," a sort of error of pronunciation one makes when one tries to apply poorly-understood rules of pronuciation of a foreign language. The "s" sound would be absent if it were "gras," meaning fat (as in foie gras). But this is coup de grace, ce. The e is silent, which makes the c not silent, but instead sounded. The silent e "protects" the next-to-last letter from being silent.

I noticed this watching Man with the Golden Gun when Herve Villechaiz, who spoke French as a first language, pronounced it correctly as coo de graS.

He was right. It's how you say it. I hadn't actually heard the term pronounced since I started learning French, and had only said it when I didn't know French -- I was using the "hyperforeign" "coo de grah" pronunciation myself, out of (incorrect) habit.

Always trust content from Herve Villechez.

posted by Ace at 05:06 PM

| Access Comments