water run. if he is not treated fairly, the republican party has not exactly fallen all over itself condemning mr. trump after his call this week for all muslims to be banned from the united states. but mr. trump is apparently taking measure of that reaction and warning that if it is not to his liking and he finds it unfair, he will leave. he will leave the republican party and run for president instead as an independent which would of course all but guarantee that not only he but whoever gets the republican nomination would be relieved of any threat that they might ever one day be expected to occupy the white house. joining us now for the interview is dan rather, former cbs evening news anchor, now the president of news and guts media. mr. rather, pleasure to have you here. always a pleasure to be here. we have talked about donald trump in the past. i have to ask with this proposal from him about banning muslims from the united states. is this unprecedented in modern american poli
but republican primary voters, they are a different breed of cat. they like it. a lot. when the republican presidential field this year first started taking shape, really looked like there was a lot of depth to their field this year. i mean, yeah, there were this handful of political amateurs, donald trump and carly fiorina and ben carson. but then out of the 17 people who were declared presidential candidates on the republican side, honestly a majority of them had been governors. 8 of the 17 had been governors. 5 of them had been or currently are senators. and of the governors who are running, obviously jeb bush has the family dynasty on his side so he s i guess the dynastic favorer, but governor scott walker was thought to have the best prospects. david koch told fund-raisers
but nobody lits stened to scott walkery jindal. . best mainstream hope is jeb bush because his super pac raised more than $1 million in the first half of the year. today the washington post reports of that $100 million war chest his campaign has already spent nearly $50 million and for what? all that money has bought him nothing. he s down to 4% in the latest national poll and he s been stuck at roughly that level or even worse for weeks now. $50 million. some people in mainstream republican politics talk about marco rubio as another potentially mainstream savior for the party. maybe he s the one who could potentially beat donald trump. whatever marco rubio has going for him in terms of mainstream media support and billionaire hedge fund donors funding him,
which includes people being called on their phones, not just being polled online. when that poll comes out tomorrow afternoon sometime, 5:30, 6:00 eastern time we should expect to get another look at that number from a slightly broader angle. it will be fascinating to see if this holds up because if this is real, if 65% of republican voters in the united states think it is a great idea to ban all muslims from this country? then we live in a different country than i thought we did. i said though that we got two polls on this subject tonight and the second one i think is even more remark pable than the one i just showed you. second one is a fox news poll just released tonight out of south carolina. bottom line of this south carolina republican poll from fox news, bottom line is pretty amazing. it is not actually the most important thing here. bottom line of the poll is that donald trump is absolutely killing it in south carolina. he s ahead by 20 points in that state. at 35% of the vote.
that s one level at which this common wisdom is wrong. the republican party establishment and his fellow candidates and the conservative media, they are not against him on this. the other part of the common wisdom on this that s wrong is what the reaction was going to be to this among republican voters. we are going to have more data tomorrow in that nbc news/ wall street journal poll and the most important data of augufebr 1st when the voters go to the iowa caucuses and vote. but tonight there is real initial data on the response to republican voters of donald trump. so far, it s clear republican voters love what he is offering. they are buying what he is selling. he wants to ban all muslims from coming in to the united states. that makes them like him more than ever. and the person who has a long enough view on these things to understand what might be going on here, the person who i most