Taking some of carson s bacon, everybody else has stayed static or even dropped. what does this mean for you and people in your party? because there is this what seems increasingly like a fantasy that somehow there is going to be a sea change and trump will no longer be as big a deal because of the votes. now what? to me the big number, it s not that trump is up by so much, although he is up by so much, but it s also if you add up his votes with ted cruz s votes, with ben carson s numbers, you re at like a supermajority of the republican base right now nationally. and that s a really, really big deal because if you were holding out hope that voters will come to their senses, they re flirting with donald trump but they will marry marco rubio let s say, those numbers make it really hard to sort of come to that conclusion. and again, if you add up trump and ben carson and ted cruz, you have a combined three years of
Inside and hurts us on the outside and we lose the general. where is the hope in the general? well, really interesting things raised. there is the of a yot aof a cav nobody has voted yet. if you want to hold out hope and maybe this is a desperation clinging, it s possible if cruz wins iowa, somebody like christie or rubio wins new hampshire, the donald trump facade comes crashing down that he s a winner. but you could imagine that the republican party will nominate somebody like a donald trump who will use rhetoric that is divisive, that will cast the republican party and the conservative movement not as a party of ideas even like ted cruz wants it, but as a sort of white populist nativist party. and if that happens, in the short run, it s maybe not as devastating, but in the long run, it would be very damaging i think for the republican party to sort of be a tribalist party
In iowa, ted cruz is. but who will win it if not him? i think there will be an enormous amount of money spent on selling marco rubio. he is certainly if he did it in the old days of smoke filled rooms and say after you take all the vetoes, who is the guy nobody vetoes, that look like rubio and there will be a lot of money behind him. and i think cruz will discover that his message, although very powerful in iowa, is a little too secretatarian for the north states which have a lot of delegates. but although the republican votes may be in the south, republican delegates are in the midwest and north, too. david frum, thanks soo much. we re following a lot of news this morning. so let s get right to it. trump leads in in the national poll with 39%. this is turning more and more into a two-man race between
Rubio, new. talks like an outsider. carson, trump, they dominate everything. you keep wondering when pragmatism will kick in. yesterday in the journajourna journal, there was a tremendous piece under the headline let s elect hillary right now. he s a conservative and ocean he s saying we are driving ourselves in to a ditch. wouldn t we rather have someone in the white house with whom we can often fre nfrd of someone that we can revile. and yet there is a sentiment out there that says and i think it gets stirred by individuals who are on a.m. talk radio and have cable programs not on cnn, but they make their living by fomenting discontent, by attracting web clicks, by getting people to tune in and watch and listen. and they laugh all the way to the bank. they now control a large part of the nomination process and the party can be damned.
and you re friends with marco rubio. i m imagining this is what you re expecting out of him. can he deliver? and if he doesn t how much is at stake for him? first of all, i think he will deliver. we have not seen one debate debate from marco rubio let. let us not underestimate his debating skills. he s very skillful, he s talented, knows how to connect with an audience. he s witty, humorous, quick, poetic in his rhetoric whereas we see from ted cruz a, you know, kind of a strange dramatic flare. what i see from marco rubio is a, you know, poetic rhetoric. he needs to show that he can land a punch and take a punch, because i think we expect there to be fireworks between the two rookie senators tomorrow on that stage. i also think marco needs to somehow define where he fits in this entire spectrum. i think he s trying to thread the needle. and, you know, not be establishment and also not