Ted Cruz took first place in the Iowa caucuses on Monday night, beating out Donald Trump.
Marco Rubio finished in third place, but his stronger-than-expected showing could be enough to move establishment Republicans to line up swiftly behind him as the candidate with the best shot to take out Trump and Cruz.
With 99 percent of precincts reporting, Cruz had 28 percent over Trump’s 24 percent.
In the night’s biggest surprise, Rubio nearly caught Trump, finishing with 23 percent of the vote, which should give him significant momentum heading into the New Hampshire primary on Feb. 9.
Ben Carson, who said he needed a third-place finish to remain viable, finished at a distant fourth place. No other candidate reached 5 percent support.
Iowa will award its 30 delegates proportionately, so none of the candidates has opened up a big lead in the presidential race yet.
However, Cruz’s toppling of Trump is a huge symbolic victory that could severely damage the real estate mogul’s campaign.
Trump’s argument to conservative voters has long been that he’s a winner. At campaign rallies, Trump has spent considerable time ticking through his dominant polling numbers, which on Monday night proved to be inflated.
Trump’s second-place finish will reinforce the notion that he does not have a campaign organization in place to turn enthusiasm surrounding his bid into votes.
Still, polls show he has a big lead in New Hampshire, so he’s likely dismiss his Iowa showing as a fluke driven by Cruz’s appeal to evangelicals as the contest moves into mainstream waters.
Trump’s late decision to skip the final GOP debate before the caucuses – many believe he was playing it safe to protect his lead – will receive new scrutiny amid his poorer than expected showing.
Rubio is the other winner on Monday night. Despite a third-place finish, he far outpaced his standing in the RealClearPolitics average of polls and nearly caught Trump.
But perhaps most importantly, Rubio crushed his next closest rival in the establishment lane, Jeb Bush, who is at 3 percent of the vote.
That should set Rubio up nicely heading into New Hampshire as he seeks to be the candidate that mainstream Republicans rally around as they seek to topple the insurgents, Trump and Cruz.
“This is a big night for us, this is better than we did in any public opinion poll,” Rubio spokesman Alex Conant said on MSNBC.
“It’s a lot of momentum,” Conant said. “I think it’s a three-person race leaving here. If you don’t want Donald Trump or Ted Cruz to be the nominee, you better get on board with Marco Rubio.”
Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler sought to dismiss Rubio’s strong showing, saying on MSNBC that it is a “two-man race between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.”
“Marco Rubio is going to come in third,” Tyler said. “Coming in first is better than coming in third.”
The results in Iowa put an exclamation point on the anti-establishment sentiment that’s taken hold of the conservative base. The trio of outsiders — Cruz, Trump and Carson — combined to take more two-thirds of the vote.
Updated at 10:30 p.m.
There is an ominously ear-shattering silence now emanating from Israpundit’s vaunted Marco Rubio Marching And Chowder Society. Please refrain from approaching sharp objects until you recuperate emotionally from Little Boy Automaton’s excruciating meltdown last night.
Eight times he repeated “Obama knows exactly what he’s doing,” which is absolutely true and yet not the answer to every question in the English language. It was like watching the robot from Lost In Space on that episode where his gyroscope jammed and he kept repeating “Danger, Will Robinson!” for no apparent reason.
Oh, well. If you still cannot appreciate the awe-inspiring magnificence of Ted Cruz there is always John Kasich, who must be pretty wonderful because he was recently endorsed by The New York Times which on various occasions has also written favorably about Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Yasser!
@ babushka:
from the comments section of your link(although from alex jones the facts are worth knowing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wT9hOeIyuts
..,which is the factor that made it possible for the Establishment to manipulate GOP primary voters into supporting McCain and Romney. Are Republicans sufficiently gullible to fall for the ruse three times in a row? FOX apparently believes so. Did you know that Rubio is “most electable”? It must be true, because the polls say so.
Romney was ahead of Obama by five points just two weeks before the election. In the polls!
Bear Klein Said:
comments on PPP
thats the headline that they want you to internalize as fact..
but whats in the fine print from this source which has more than once been exposed in massive intentional distortion of the facts:
the idea behind all this fakery is that they know that many fools vote for whom they believe will be the winner… so if you think Trump is now losing you will want to switch to a winner. Therefore the GOP establishment will keep paying its puppet media like murdoch’s fox, who shows no daylight with Soros open borders, to destroy trump and support Rubio who not only supports the Murdoch/Soros open borders but also the HB1 visascam which has shifted the focus from replacing american laborers with foreign laborers to replaceing american middle class tech empolyees with foreign imported tech employees.
Liberal Republicans never learn.
If February polls mattered, Reagan would have lost to Carter by 25 points.
Howard Dean would have been president.
So would Rudolph Giuliani.
The most recent time the GOP nominated a conservative, he won 49 states.
But for those who have no principles, all that is available is polling data..which as we saw again on Monday is highly inaccurate.
It is amusing that four days after the polls were proven completely wrong, you postmodern Machiavellis continue to obsess about them.
Polls are written on the wind. They are so inaccurate that they were wrong one day before the caucuses, and this is ten months before the general election.
Conservative principles are eternal, and they prevail on those rare occasions when the GOP is willing to embrace them.
Netanyahu recently won by campaigning hard right, defying the polls and trouncing the opposition.
Do facts even matter to you, boys?
Trump is ahead in NH probably will win but not for sure as you think. The latest polls show things closer. I know you are obviously pro Trump and that is okay but would recommend that you read
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-still-leads-in-new-hampshire-but-the-ride-could-be-wild/
New Hampshire is now less than 96 hours away from the first statewide primary election primary election in this campaign year. Not a summation of county caucuses with massive vote switching and other tricks, but one person at a time in the election booth.
And in the last four days after Monday’s Iowa caucuses, Trump has maintained commanding leads over Cruz and Rubio, irrespective of Rubio overtaking Cruz by paper-thin margins in three of the four polls cited by Real Clear Politics.
In the two New Hampshire-focused tracking polls — UMass and ARG, Trump maintains an average of 18 points over Rubio and about 20 over Cruz. Undecided voter numbers are still small, and Trump not only is attracting huge numbers of people to his big-time speeches around the state, but is now also going from one small place to another for question and answer sessions with locals and all the state new media giving him coverage.
In any case, nobody reverses poll numbers such as cited above in just 3-4 days. So I expect that Trump will flatten both of the feuding Cubanos and bury all the minor candidates, including Jeb Bush, who has deployed his mama to campaign for him.
Arnold Harris, Outspeaker
If your dude Cruze wins the nomination it is like voting for Hillary and the democrats because he would loose because of his narrow evangelical base (about half the republicans and zero independents who are 40% of the population). So vote Cruze and get Hillary. Not so wise a strategy!
The Republicans are about 26% of the voters according to Gallup. Evangelicals are maybe 50% of this group. Cruz does not win the swing states of Florida, Ohio or Pennsylvania in a general election. So the Republicans can NOT win with him. Analyzing the big picture is important and not trying to muddy the waters by speeches by Obama. You may not like it but Rubio is PRO ISRAEL – ANTI-RADICAL ISLAM AND ELECTABLE!
And here is a quote from another senator running for president whose subsequent Arab Spring initiative was supported by Rubio:
It is understandable when cubs exhibit gullibility, but a Bear should not be so easily deceived.
Rubio in his own words in a Senate Speech supporting Israel its security, slamming Obama for trying to force a deal down Israel’s throat with the Palestinians who raise their children to kill Israelis. He in his own words is clearly pro Israel and proud of it!
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-pro-israel-guide-to-republican-candidates-in-2016/