begin with and gotten him all the attention, thomas. the firebrand that is donald trump, katy tur, thank you very much. now chuck todd host of mtp daily and med ray or the of meet the press and looking at the sustainability of the dr. ben carson in the race, what does history tell us at this time in the election psych snl. looking at the polls, you would say, oh boy, this is precarious. look at the same poll we had herrmann cain ahead. this same poll in the republican side, rudy giuliani. flash in the pan. that sort of thing. here s the difference between dr. carson and giuliani and cain. dr. carson leads the field in money, leads the field in small donors, leads the field in social advancement. not only up in the polls there is evidence of depth to his support. all of those other things were totally sort of flash in the pan
impersonation when he hosts saturday night live. this evening i m meeting with lorne michaels and the staff and we will start the preparation. my jeb impression? i don t want to do that. i don t like showing a person sleeping at a podium. we have got the political field covered with our correspondents cross the campaign trail. katy tur, chris jansing with ben carson, msnbc s kasie hunt following the bush campaign and kristen welker covering the battle between hillary clinton and bernie sanders. katy, i know you were there in what was a blustery news conference for donald trump. but talk about a course correction for donald trump as he remains on the campaign but also now on a book tour. reporter: it was a blustery news conference but certainly not as blustery as donald trump normally is or had been at least in the past up until a few weeks ago. he was attacking his opponents. other than having that joke about jeb bush and falling asleep at the podium, most of the atta
table debate. in fact, drawing a line right here, an you went with the bottom eight candidates on the republican side and added up the support, it would hit 15%. that s just it. 8 candidates accounting for 15%. the question is, why are so many of them sticking around? the reason is there s a sense among republicans and there s a sense in the political world that the rules are changing. and what i mean by that is we can go back to the last presidential election and we can show you. we can if i press the right button. this is in the same time right now. october of 2011. if you looked at a national poll of the republican race back then, two things jump out at you. who s in first place? it was i m going to really figure this out one of these days. see if we can get back to it. okay. herrmann cain in first place with 30% and lasted 3 weeks in first place and then fell apart.
again, we realize people are tuning in and the story you might have heard a bit of is true. it s in the trade known as an aerostat. as a semirigid air ship filled with helium that s divided up into different sections on board. this is mostly a flying radar device. there s the still picture that we saw on social media. we have conveniently circled the air ship in red. focusing your attention to the middle of the picture there. it has been loose, untethered. the tether can measure from 5,000 to 10,000 feet long. this has as far as we know no on-board system of propulsion of its own. it has been traveling at about an altitude of 16,000 feet. in basically a northern direction. there are there is a wing of f-16s stationed at atlantic city, new jersey. the air national guard. been in existence for a long, long time. they were scrambled today to get kind of eyes on this thing. of course, the difference in traveling speeds between an air ship traveling at the speed of the wind and
cain unavailable to achieve that? one thing i learned from a story this week is no republican woman or african-american has ever won a primary or caucus. like in the history of the country, period. this is hard for fiorina and carson to do. that said, i think carson is doing well in the polls now and i don t know if the evidence is there yet to win any caucuses. because we don t necessarily know we know he is surging in polls right now. does he have the ground organization in states like iowa, states of new hampshire, hard to win the states in terms of building your campaign now. and that s what i don t necessarily know about yet of carson and the second thing is he s never had anybody really attack anymore in this campaign yet. he compared obamacare to slavery a couple of years. soy think when the candidates and the media really start scrutinizing carson, this s the next question. can he maintain the popular support when people look at the