Fox News Poll: Trump gains in Iowa, still dominates in New Hampshire

With just over a week until the first 2016 election contest, Donald Trump takes the lead in Iowa -- and maintains his big advantage in New Hampshire. 
That’s according to the latest round of Fox News state polls on the Republican presidential nomination contest.
CLICK HERE TO READ THE IOWA POLL RESULTS
CLICK HERE TO READ THE NEW HAMPSHIRE POLL RESULTS
Trump bests Ted Cruz in Iowa and now receives 34 percent support among Republican caucus-goers.  Trump was at 23 percent in the Fox News Poll two weeks ago (January 4-7).
Cruz is second with 23 percent -- down a touch from 27 percent.  Marco Rubio comes in third with 12 percent, down from 15 percent.  No others garner double-digit support.
Among caucus-goers who identify as “very” conservative, Cruz was up by 18 points over Trump earlier this month.  Now they each receive about a third among this group (Cruz 34 percent vs. Trump 33 percent).
There’s been a similar shift among white evangelical Christians.  Cruz’s 14-point advantage is now down to a 2-point edge.
A lot has happened in the intervening two weeks.  Fox Business Network hosted a Republican debate where Trump questioned Cruz’s eligibility to be president, and Cruz attacked Trump’s liberal “New York values.”  On Tuesday, Gov. Terry Branstad urged his fellow Iowans to vote against Cruz because of his opposition to ethanol -- and former Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin endorsed Trump.
Republican pollster Daron Shaw says, “We tend to over-interpret every little thing in a presidential race, but here we actually have solid evidence Trump didn't just win last week in Iowa -- he won it by enough to put some distance between himself and Cruz.”  Shaw conducts the Fox News Poll with Democratic pollster Chris Anderson.
But a lot can change before Iowans caucus February 1.
A third of Republican caucus-goers say they may change their mind (33 percent).  Even one in four Trump supporters says they may ultimately go with another candidate (25 percent).
Cruz tops the list when GOP caucus-goers are asked their second-choice candidate.  When first and second-choice preferences are combined, it’s extremely tight between Trump (48 percent) and Cruz (45 percent).
That’s because 20 percent of Iowa Republican caucus-goers are so negative on Trump they say they would “refuse” to vote for him over the Democrat in November, while fewer say the same of Cruz (11 percent).  Another 14 percent say they would stay home if the nominee is Jeb Bush.
Here’s how the rest of the field stands:  Ben Carson is at 7 percent, Rand Paul is at 6 percent, Bush and Chris Christie each get 4 percent, Mike Huckabee, John Kasich and Rick Santorum tie at 2 percent, and Carly Fiorina gets 1 percent.
More than a third who say they will attend a Republican caucus this year have never gone before (38 percent).  Many of these first-time attendees, 43 percent, are supporting Trump, while 19 percent favor Cruz and 14 percent Rubio.  The poll can’t predict how many from this group will actually show up.
Among just those Republicans who have caucused before, it’s a 3-point race:  Trump 28 percent vs. Cruz 25 percent.  Another 10 percent go for Rubio.
True conservative values is the top characteristic GOP caucus-goers want in their party’s nominee (27 percent), closely followed by telling it like it is (24 percent) and being a strong leader (23 percent).  Those traits outrank nominating someone who can win in November (9 percent) or has the right experience (7 percent).

New Hampshire
Unlike Iowa, there has been little movement in the New Hampshire Republican race. Trump continues to garner more than twice the support of his nearest competitors.
The Fox News poll shows Trump at 31 percent (down 2 points), Cruz at 14 percent (up 2 points) and Rubio at 13 percent (down 2 points).
Kasich is at 9 percent, Bush and Christie each receive 7 percent, Carson and Paul tie at 5 percent, while Fiorina gets 3 percent, and Huckabee 1 percent.
Despite dominating the NH race, Trump also tops the list as the nominee who would make Republicans stay home in November:  26 percent say they would refuse to vote for Trump against the Democrat.  Fifteen percent say the same of Bush, 14 percent feel that way about Cruz, and 12 percent about Rubio.
Over half of likely Republican primary voters in the Granite State say they are certain to vote for their candidate, while 36 percent could still shift their support.
Granite Staters also want slightly different traits in their nominee than their Iowa counterparts.  NH GOP primary voters want a strong leader (27 percent) and someone who tells it like it is (21 percent) more than a nominee who has true conservative values (15 percent), is electable (13 percent), or has the right experience (12 percent).
The Fox News Poll is conducted under the joint direction of Anderson Robbins Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R).  These polls were conducted January 18-21, 2016, by telephone (landline and cellphone) with live interviewers.
The New Hampshire poll was among a sample of 801 registered voters selected from a statewide voter file.  Results based on the sample of 401 Republican primary voters have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus five percentage points.
In Iowa, the poll was among a sample of 801 registered voters selected from a statewide voter file.  Results based on the sample of 378 Republican caucus-goers have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus five percentage points.

On Capitol Hill, Snow cancels House votes on ObamaCare, Iran sanctions

The winter storm that has buried Washington under record-breaking snow has forced Congress to change plans, including the cancellation of key House votes on ObamaCare and Iran sanctions.
The announcement was made Sunday by California GOP Rep. Kevin McCarthy, whose duties as House majority leader is to set the chamber’s voting schedule.
As the storm approached late last week, McCarthy cancelled scheduled votes for Monday. But he has now told chamber members not to "expect" votes on Tuesday and Wednesday “due to the severity of the winter storm."
He also said the next scheduled vote is for the night of Feb. 1.
The Senate is still scheduled to return to work Tuesday morning. However, the confirmation vote for John Vazquez to be federal judge in New Jersey has been postponed until Wednesday night.
Roughly 22 inches of snow landed in downtown Washington, according to an unofficial National Weather Service report Sunday.
The walkways that connect the Rotunda and the office buildings on the Capitol grounds are essentially clear, but Washington’s transit system remains closed.
And flights to the surrounding airports are still cancelled, which means many members of Congress cannot return to Capitol Hill until later this week.
The storm and McCarthy’s announcement likely means the House will hold no votes this week because chamber Democrats are holding a retreat in Baltimore on Thursday and Friday, when President Obama is slated to speak.
The House was scheduled to take a re-vote this week on a bill to impose sanctions on Iran. Two weeks ago, the GOP-controlled House briefly passed the bill. But the House then moved to nullify the vote because 137 members missed the roll call.
The House was also scheduled to attempt an override of President Obama's veto of the special budget reconciliation measure that would repealed ObamaCare and defunded Planned Parenthood.
Successful veto overrides require a two-thirds vote in both chambers. That equals roughly 280 to 290 yeas in the House, depending on how many members cast ballots.
The chamber appears nowhere close to that number, but GOP leadership said it will nevertheless forge ahead with the vote.

Fox News Poll: Trump gains in Iowa, still dominates in New Hampshire

Rosie O'donnell Cartoon

rosie o'donnell

Donald Trump Says Megyn Kelly Should Skip Debate; Fox Says She’ll Be There

Since Megyn Kelly’s pointed question to Donald J. Trump about his treatment of women in the first Republican debate, he has been attacking her regularly, through Tweets and on the campaign trail. Bailey comment: "He should attack her, she ambushed him in the first debate"!

His most recent attack: Ms. Kelly shouldn’t be allowed to moderate the next debate, to be held on Thursday, because of “conflict of interest and bias.”

Since August, the bad blood has been decidedly one-sided, as Mr. Trump has repeatedly called Ms. Kelly a liar and overrated, and retweeted supporters calling her a bimbo. Most memorably, he seemed to suggest she was menstruating during the debate when he said in an interview, “you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”

Ms. Kelly had asked Mr. Trump during the debate about his history of disparaging women he did not like by calling them “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.” After he criticized her, she stood her ground, saying in August that she planned to “continue doing my job without fear or favor.” She has never engaged with the candidate on any of his attacks, and has had his supporters on her show, including most recently Sarah Palin.

Fox News showed no signs of giving in to Mr. Trump’s displeasure with the questioning, stating just a week following the first debate that all three moderators would again host the debate in January.

On Saturday, it reiterated that stance, saying in a statement: “Megyn Kelly has no conflict of interest. Donald Trump is just trying to build up the audience for Thursday’s debate, for which we thank him.”

Request to delay January release of Clinton emails blames snow, Republicans say ask political, tied to early primaries

The State Department is asking a federal court for a one-month extension for the January 29 release of emails from former agency secretary Hillary Clinton, citing in part problems from this weekend’s snow storm and sparking outrage from Republicans about the delay influencing early voting in the White House race.
“It’s clear that the State Department’s delay is all about ensuring any further damaging developments in Hillary Clinton’s email scandal are revealed only after the votes are counted in the early nominating states,” Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus after the request Friday.
Lawyers for the agency, which Clinton ran from 2011 to 2013, made the request in a federal court in Washington, which in May ordered the emails to be released monthly, in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
“The Clinton email team must perform its work on site. … This storm will disrupt the Clinton email team’s current plans to work a significant number of hours throughout the upcoming weekend and could affect the number of documents that can be produced on January 29, 2016,” agency lawyers wrote in their request.
Clinton, the Democratic front-runner for the 2016 nomination, exclusively used a private email account and a home server during her time at the agency. She said this was a decision made out of convenience and has denied doing anything wrong.
An extension, if granted, would push the complete publication of Clinton's emails past several of the earliest primary contests, including the key states of Iowa and New Hampshire. If they come out instead on Feb. 29, it would be a day before the critical Super Tuesday primaries.
“The American people should be outraged at the Obama administration’s gamesmanship to protect someone who recklessly exposed classified information on more than 1,300 occasions, including highly sensitive Top Secret intelligence,” Priebus continued.
State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Friday the agency cannot meet its court-mandated goal of Jan. 29 because about 9,400 of the 55,000 remaining pages "contain a large amount of material that required interagency review."
“The remaining emails are also the most complex to process," he said.
However, the agency will make public as many as possible next week, Toner also said.
The Clinton campaign referred questions by Fox News back to the State Department, include a request to respond to the RNC saying the extension request was politically connected to the 2016 voting schedule.
Some of the most contentious emails haven't yet been published. They include two that an intelligence community auditor says are "top secret" and others he claims are even more sensitive, containing information from so-called special access programs. Such programs suggest the emails could reveal details about intelligence sources.
The State Department says no emails published so far contained material with "top secret" information or any material that was marked classified at the time. The issue has nagged at Clinton's presidential campaign, with the FBI said to be examining in some capacity.
Toner said the delay in publication isn't the result of "ongoing discussion about classification" that has been made public recently. He said he couldn't comment further on ongoing litigation.

Clinton, Rubio score key Iowa paper's endorsement ahead of caucuses

Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Marco Rubio each won a key endorsement Saturday from the Des Moines Register newspaper,(
The Register first endorsed candidates in the 1988 caucuses. "Before that time, the thinking on the editorial board was that the Register, as an independent newspaper, should refrain from getting mixed up in the internal affairs of the Democratic and Republican parties as they chose their nominees," wrote Richard Doak, former Register opinion editor. "The thinking changed in the run-up to the 1988 caucuses."
That year was much like this year, drawing several candidates to Iowa to vie for the nominations of both parties.)
eight days before the state holds its first-in-the nation voting caucus for president.
"If there’s one thing Democrats and Republicans agree on this year, it’s the fact that the next president will face enormous challenges," the paper's editorial board said in endorsing the Democratic front-runner and Florida GOP senator.
The paper, considered Iowa's most prominent daily, said the next president must work with Congress in confronting a host of issues including immigration, health care, gun control and the growing national security threat.
And he or she must "on the world stage" work with foreign leaders in stopping the Islamic State and other terrorists, North Korea and Iran's nuclear threat and the Russian incursions in Ukraine.
The paper said Clinton was "not a perfect candidate" but that no other can "match the depth or breadth of her knowledge and experience."
Board members said Republicans have the opportunity to define their party’s future in this election by choosing “anger, pessimism and fear.” Or it could be the party in which Rubio “the son of an immigrant bartender and maid could become president,” they said.
“Rubio has the potential to chart a new direction for the party, and perhaps the nation, with his message of restoring the American dream. We endorse him because he represents his party’s best hope,” the board said in an apparent rejection of the political rhetoric of front-running Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who are in a close race to win the Iowa GOP caucus.
The Clinton endorsement comes ahead of the Feb. 1 caucus in which Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders trails Clinton 42-to-48, according to the RealClearPolitics poll average.
The board argued Sanders was "an honorable and formidable campaigner" but said even Sanders' acknowledges that essentially all of his reform plans have no chance of being approved by a GOP-heavy Congress.

The editorial board acknowledged concerns about how Clinton handled “the furor over her private email server" and argued that she has yet to realize that "when she makes a mistake, she should just say so."
The Democratic and Republican candidates met twice with the board in question-and-answer sessions.
“It’s been a long time since the Republican Party has had an agenda that talks to students,” the board said after Rubio’s meetings.
While calling Rubio “whip smart,” the board also suggested that he and some of his plans, including one to replace ObamaCare, remain a work in progress.
 Trump and others, the board suggested, have responded to the public’s anger and frustration with Washington by trying to demonize government and “resorting to the cheap demagoguery.”

Trump weighs lawsuit over Cruz citizenship

Businessman Donald Trump hinted Saturday he might decide to sue rival Texas Sen. Ted Cruz over the legality of his U.S. citizenship.
“Ted has a lot of problems – number one Canada. He could run for the Prime Minister of Canada and I wouldn’t even complain because he was born in Canada, it’s a serious thing,” Trump told a few thousand supporters at a rally in Sioux Center, Iowa.
He said Democrats would look to sue Cruz if he became the Republican nominee. “There are already two lawsuits filed, but they don’t have standing, I have standing to sue (as a candidate), can you imagine if I did it? Should I do it just for fun?”
Though Trump went on to explain he’s confident on winning the GOP nomination, thus “I don’t really think its going to matter, that’s probably why I want to save the legal fees … maybe I would do it, maybe I won’t either”.
Cruz pushed back earlier this month during the Fox Business debate on claims made against him. “You know, back in September, my friend Donald said that he had had his lawyers look at this from every which way, and there was no issue there. There was nothing to this birther issue.”
He added, “the facts and the law here are really quite clear. Under longstanding U.S. law, the child of a U.S. citizen born abroad is a natural-born citizen.”
Cruz did become a Canadian citizen at birth due to that’s country legal system, which the senator didn’t realize until 2013. He formally renounced his Canadian citizenship in May 2014.
While there is debate over what defines American citizenship, the Supreme Court has never ruled directly on the criteria for presidential office holders.
In 2008, then-Republican presidential candidate John McCain faced questions over his own citizenship since he was born in the Panama Canal Zone, a U.S. territory at the time.  Attempts to further the debate over his status didn’t pan out.
McCain did tell Phoenix radio station 550 KFYI in early January that his situation was different. The Arizona senator said that he “didn’t know” about Cruz’s eligibility to run for president and added, “it’s worth looking into”.