From The Heart Of God: Chris Christie

Showing posts with label Chris Christie. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Is the Republican Party About To Destroy Itself? by Ray Mossholder

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This is Ray Mossholder from the news desk of Reach More Now in Fort Worth, Texas.

If I didn’t know Ronald Reagan is in heaven, I would think he must be rolling in his grave. It was President Reagan who urged all Republican candidates never to speak negatively of each other. In all my seventy-nine years, I have never seen such a colossal food fight as is going on right now in the Republican Party.

Last night, after the votes were counted in New Hampshire, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders walked away with all the prizes. They won by landslides over the other candidates, no doubt burying many of them. Instead of doing a victory lap today, many of the Republican’s sore losers are trying to figure out a way to dump Trump.

Republican moderates, the elites who up until this time have controlled many years of choosing who would represent them in the general election, are frustrated, angry, double talking, and scared. After Cruz placed first in Iowa and now third in liberal New Hampshire, if the moderates could somehow succeed in throwing Donald Trump under the bus, they know they would still have Cruz to contend with, and they don’t like him either. Trump and Cruz are the two abrasive candidates who most refuse to toe the party line.

There are already casualties among the Republican candidates the day after New Hampshire. Carly Fiorina, somehow treated like a nobody by ABC in not allowing her to participate in Saturday night’s debate, has this morning suspended her campaign. Maybe ABC forgot she was the only other woman besides Hillary who was running, in case someone really did want a woman President this time. Not that that would matter to the over thirty-year-old women’s rightists who never ever mind being women wrongists to all women who dare be anything but liberal. For women’s rightists it’s “Hillary or the highway”. I point it out again, in case they didn’t notice, Carly IS a woman and might have been the first woman president. But today Carly Fiorina dropped out and is no longer available.

This afternoon Chris Christie also dropped out. He spent eighteen million dollars in New Hampshire and it did him no good at all. He all but said so when he spoke to his New Hampshire crowd following his sixth place showing last night. And Christie shows the price the whole Republican Party almost certainly will have to pay if they try to trip up Trump or Cruz. Christie tried that during Saturday night’s Republican debate with Marco Rubio and found out when the vote count was in at the New Hampshire primary that he had broken his own leg. Marco finished fifth with 11% of the vote. Christie placed a distance sixth with only 8% of the vote. Robert Murdoch who owns Fox news network called Chris Christie – “the Suicide Bomber!” If the Republican Party is ridiculous enough to try to stop their two front runners in any way, the Republican Party is very apt to be committing suicide too.

So now, let’s look at the vote count for both the Republican and Democratic party. The first thing that’s obvious is the two candidates who, by far, received the most votes from New Hampshire – Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders – couldn’t be further apart with everything they they stand for.

Trump is a multibillionaire, Sanders hates every wealthy American. Trump is a businessman who has been oober-successful and has carefully planned out with other hired experts each area he wants to explore. Whether federally or internationally, he only works with the best in exploring the possibility of an investment. You hear him, for example, saying that he would consult with our top generals and listen to them as they explain the very best way to destroy Isis, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram, and all the other enemies this world is facing right now. As president, that’s how he would decide on each issue, only after careful examination by those who have proven themselves experts and whom he respects. The “HUGE” wall would be built by only the very best wall builders and undoubtedly paid for by Mexico. Trump is always known for keeping his word.

Bernie Sanders is as outspoken as Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. Bernie’s smile would charm the birds off the trees. When he has debated Hillary Clinton he has done so with kid gloves. But especially after his gigantic win over her in New Hampshire and losing only by a coin flip with her in Iowa, look for his kid gloves to be gone. For now, Bernie Sanders as the front runner of the Democratic Party will attempt to do with Hillary whatever he must do to beat her. Likable, cute, friendly, and persuasive, Bernie has hidden his tough side until now. Watch for it in the next Democrat debate.

But Bernie has weaknesses Hillary can use to her advantage if he does get tough. Bernie is focused on only a few things that matter to him. He is a person who is weak in planning entire strategies. For example, he has never mentioned any plan for stopping the terrorists in or out of America. He welcomes illegal immigrants as warmly as President Obama and Jerry Brown do. As a president, he would be much more of a “let the chips fall where they may” kind of guy. If it’s true that President Obama leads from behind, it would be far more true of Bernie that he leads from way behind.

South Carolina’s primary on the 20th (the Republicans) and the 27th (the Democrats) will answer a whole lot of questions. From the Democrat side, will Hillary vacuum up the black and Latino votes or will Bernie arrive there with unstoppable momentum? On the Republican side, barring something completely unforeseen now, Donald Trump has a huge lead. You can well bet most evangelicals have already decided between Trump or Cruz, and their decisions have been counted in the polls. So have the poll numbers for Doctor Ben Carson and they foretell that he, too, will be a dropout very soon.

The Democrat caucus (not a primary) in Nevada is on February 20th and the Republican caucus in Nevada is on February 27th. Three days after the Republican caucus, March will come in like a lion. More than a dozen states will hold their primaries on March 1st. It is probable that suddenly in both parties, after March 1st the Republican race will be left with just two candidates to decide on, just as the Democrat race does now.

It remains to be seen whether America is to be made more wonderful than it has ever been because of so many plans that are HUGE, or whether America will be on Cruz control. Or will Wall Street be laid so flat it can’t even lay an egg? Or will Queen Hillary finally receive her coronation?

America’s voters – we the people – will soon decide who will be the last candidate standing.

Is the Republican Party About To Destroy Itself? by Ray Mossholder

Monday, February 8, 2016

Who Will Still Be a Presidential Candidate after New Hampshire? (CNN)

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Who Will Still Be a Presidential Candidate after New Hampshire? (CNN)

This is Ray Mossholder at the Reach More Now news desk in Fort Worth, Texas.

The New Hampshire presidential race has moved to New Hampshire where a lot of lives will be on the line tomorrow as the Granite State casts its primary votes. Chris Christie has said that he will be dropping out of the presidential race if he doesn’t do well in New Hampshire. That may well be true for several others who are candidates today. From CNN, here is an excellent evaluation of the poll numbers until this minute regarding tomorrow’s primary in New Hampshire.

(CNN) On the eve of New Hampshire’s presidential primaries, a new CNN Poll of Polls finds both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are holding on to substantial leads in their respective races, but each faces an opponent whose support is on the rise.

Sanders’ 54% to 40% advantage over Hillary Clinton is down slightly from a 55% to 37% lead in the previous Poll of Polls. No public polling has found Clinton in the lead in New Hampshire since November.

Trump tops the GOP field with 31%, well ahead of Marco Rubio’s 15%. Rubio has picked up four points since the previous New Hampshire Poll of Polls, the biggest change in the averages in the last week. Ted Cruz follows with 13%, John Kasich at 11% and Jeb Bush at 10%. This pack of four — Rubio, Cruz, Kasich and Bush — has been jockeying for second place in the state for some time. The fifth candidate often included in the group, Chris Christie, has generally seen his support dwindle, and now stands well behind, dropping two points in this week’s Poll of Polls to an average of 5%. Carly Fiorina ties Christie at 5% and Ben Carson rounds out the group with 3%.

But the overall wide margins aren’t an indicator that the political world can turn its attentions away from the Granite State just yet. All of the polls included in the Poll of Polls were completed prior to Saturday night’s Republican debate, however, and it remains to be seen how that will impact voters in the final days of the campaign.

Though any candidate would be happy to hold a lead like those held by Trump and Sanders, the polls also indicate large chunks of the electorate haven’t yet finalized their decisions. In the latest CNN/WMUR tracking poll, for example, fully 30% of likely Republican voters said they hadn’t yet decided whom to support, as did 16% of likely Democratic voters.

It’s worth noting that many of the polls included in this week’s update to the Poll of Polls are tracking polls, meaning interviews are conducted daily and each release includes results from the previous three or four days of interviews, dropping out the oldest day and tacking on the most recent day as a replacement. In those cases, only the most recent release from each poll is used in the average, so that no set of daily interviews is counted more than once in the average.

Though the outcome of Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary is by no means certain, one thing we can tell you for sure: Pollsters have been very busy.

About a week ago, CNN’s final Poll of Polls in Iowa covered five polls spanning 11 days, and the updated New Hampshire Poll of Polls rolled up five polls covering nearly two weeks. A new update to the Poll of Polls in New Hampshire covers just five days, yet includes seven polls, and those are only the ones that meet CNN’s polling standards.

The New Hampshire presidential primary is a special case for pollsters, and tends to attract more polling than other primary states. Compared with Iowa, where low-turnout caucuses mean that finding actual caucusgoers can require tens of thousands of calls to adults or registered voters, New Hampshire is a breeze to poll. In years where both parties hold contested primaries, more than half of registered voters in the state typically show up to vote, a rate better than many places see in general elections, let alone primaries. In the 2008 New Hampshire primary, more than 525,000 people showed up to vote in a state with a voting eligible population of right around 1 million. That means the chances of reaching a likely voter with a random sample in the state are pretty good.

New Hampshire is also a notoriously late-deciding state, which means pollsters tend to want to be in the field as close to Election Day as possible rather than risk missing a late swing and look wrong. In that same 2008 contest, a late, wide swing on the Democratic side that went undetected by nearly all public pollsters in the state prompted the polling industry to investigate what went wrong. Though the American Association for Public Opinion Research didn’t settle on one definitive source of the polling error in 2008, their report provides a helpful look at all the things that can go wrong in polling a late-deciding, high-interest electorate.

So what did Iowa’s entrance polls tell us about the landscape in New Hampshire?

For one thing, late-deciders are a real thing in this race. On the Republican side, 35% of caucusgoers said they made up their minds in the last few days, and those voters broke more for Cruz and Rubio than they did for Trump.

On the Democratic side, they showed just how strong Sanders’ support is among younger voters. The Vermont Senator topped 80% support among those under age 30, an almost unheard of level of support. For comparison, in 2008 in Iowa, Obama, whose mobilization of young and minority voters is the goal for many Democratic candidates, netted 57% in that same age group. And this time around, although Clinton garnered higher support among women than among men in all other age groups, among the under-30s there was no gender gap at all, which is obviously bad news for Hillary, at least in New Hampshire.

Who Will Still Be a Presidential Candidate after New Hampshire? (CNN)

Saturday, August 23, 2014

SPECIAL REPORT FROM RAY: THE ELECTION 2016 August 23, 2014

Have you ever been to a horserace? If you have, you know what it’s like. When the horses break from the gate it means very little compared to the final gallops to the finish line. The announcer says something like: “They’re off and running. Glue–factory is in the lead, followed by Hasn’t Got A Chance, The Old Gray Mare and Beetlebomb. They are rounding the clubhouse turn and Broken Leg has gone to the front, followed by Why Did I Bet on You and Loser. That’s just about where the presidential possibles for the 2016 presidential race is right now – rounding the clubhouse turn. Often in a horserace, the horses I just mentioned are in the back of the pack when the race is over. Often too, the horse who eventually wins keeps a low profile and moves up very slowly to the winners circle.

SPECIAL REPORT FROM RAY: THE 2016 ELECTION

A free service of Jesus Christ is Lord Ministries

Report written by John Zogby

and delivered by Ray Mossholder

Saturday, August 23, 2014

Hello America. Hello world.

From the headquarters of reachmorenow.com in Fort Worth, Texas, this is Ray Mossholder and this is a special report: The 2016 election.

I am only going to do this once this year because it’s far too early to make any definite predictions of who will be the front runners in the 2016 presidential election. None of the candidates listed in this report have yet declared that they will be running for president. However, all of them have said enough to make me think they no doubt will.

Two things cause me to do this report. First, it will give you a ringside seat on being sure you know all of the possibilities and where they stand in the polls more than two years away from that election. Second, is my deep respect for John Zogby and the amazing work he does in collecting all this data. Of course, I’ll keep you posted on all the possible presidential candidates for 2016 individually, especially once they do declare that they are running.

The most respected national polls of all today are the Zogby poll and the Gallup poll. Doing polls on political candidates and obvious political issues, Zogby and Gallup make phone calls all over the United States to people who will affect the future of America – the American voter.

On nonpolitical issues, they broaden the field to include all American adult citizens. Fox News is new to this kind of thing, but because they use a totally independent outside source to do their polls and allow no conservative bias, they are becoming more and more respected too.

Zogby has just completed a report and analysis on how the probable presidential candidates are doing at this exact moment in history. By hearing this, you will be able to sort out the national opinion, I stress, AT THIS MOMENT.

That’s just about where the presidential possibles for the 2016 presidential race is right now – rounding the clubhouse turn. Often in a horserace, the horses I just mentioned are in the back of the pack when the race is over. Often too, the horse who eventually wins keeps a low profile and moves up very slowly to the winners circle.

Far more people lose their money at a horserace than ever take money home. And right now I wouldn’t put my money on any presidential candidate. That’s because sometimes horses fall badly during a race and so do candidates. So what I am giving you in this report is the probable major candidates who are rounding the clubhouse turn. Here are the results from the Zogby poll and his analysis and he egregious egregious. Zogby begins:

John Zogby

I am sorry to have to tell you this: sometimes the pundits have no idea what they are talking about.

If you watch the talking heads (I try not to) and read the blogs (I read some), you would think that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has mortally wounded her chances of ever becoming President. Her book tour is just short of disastrous; her interviews have revealed a woman who is clearly out of touch with the reality of the 99%; and she has committed the most egregious act a party nominee can do by criticizing a sitting President from her own party. I truly get the scenario.

The only problem is that none of this is true. Our new Zogby Analytics poll shows Mrs. Clinton comfortably leading all the Republican big names we submitted for testing. The new poll, conducted online August 13-15 among 1,223 likely voters nationwide, shows Mrs. Clinton shooting each GOP duck in a row.

She beats former Florida Governor Jeb Bush 49% to 36%

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul 50% to 34%

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie 47% to 35%

Former Massachusetts Governor and 2012 GOP standard-bearer Mitt Romney 50% to 35%

Former Arkansas Governor and Fox News host Mike Huckabee 49% to 33%

Florida Senator Marco Rubio 51% to 29%.

As we can see, Hillary hovers around the 50% mark against each challenger while none of her putative opponents receives 40%.

Aside from holding solidly on to the Democratic base of young voters, Hispanics, African Americans, and Creative Class voters, what is most striking is how much better she does among Democrats than her opponents do among Republicans. In every test case, Mrs. Clinton polls anywhere from 81% to 88% of her fellow Democrats, while no GOP candidate (including Romney or Paul) achieves more than 77% of Republican support.

Of even greater significance is that Mrs. Clinton receives at least 80% of liberal support while no Republican gets higher than 69% of conservative support. At the same time, Mrs. Clinton is within two points in either direction among white voters, a formula for GOP disaster if that continues among this shrinking demographic within the electorate. And, for icing on the cake, she outpolls even Mr. Rubio 61% to 24% among Hispanics.

Hillary with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez

Meanwhile, Ms. Warren runs about even with all of the GOP candidates: 34% to 36% against Bush; 34% to 35% against Paul; 34% to 37% vs. Christie; 36% to 38% against Romney: 35% to 33% vs. Huckabee; and 35% to 31% against Rubio.

While about a third of the voters are undecided, it is important that none of the GOP contenders is able to pick up ground against the lesser known and more ideological Warren.

Elizabeth Warren

The summer has been good to pundits but it has been even better to Mrs. Clinton. Right now there appears to be no chink in her armor but there are some things to remember. The first is that for now she is running against herself and high expectations. In a potentially crowded field, it will be hard to match this 50% plus showing. Any sign of falling short may be treated as failure.

Second, is the very real possibility of “Clinton Fatigue”. For now, both she and the former President are riding high in public sentiment. President Clinton’s eight years are recalled with fondness for peace and prosperity. But they more they are in the public eye, the greater the possibility for mistakes or overreach. She will have to continue to walk a very fine line for a long time. Even Clintons can make mistakes.

Third is the possibility of another challenger – notably popular U.S. Senator from Virginia Mark Warner and Tim Kaine.

Virginia Senators Mark Warner (L) and Tim Kaine

Or even California Governor Jerry Brown, who is basking in his own wave of glory for performing some fiscal miracles in the Golden State.

But polls measure a moment in time and at this moment it is all about Hillary.

It turns out that there are some good reasons why the former Governor and GOP Presidential nominee is allowing his name to be circulated as a potential candidate in 2016. Some of those good reasons can be found in a new poll by Zogby Analytics showing him outpolling his nearest rivals for the nomination by about two to one. The poll of 315 likely Republican primary voters was conducted online on August 13-15 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5.6 percentage points.

Romney places first in the 2016 race for the nomination with 20%.

Romney is followed by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie 12%.

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul 11%.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz 9%.

Former Arkansas Governor and Fox News host Mike Huckabee 8%.

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush 6%.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker 4%.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio 4%.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindahl 3%.

New Mexico Governor Suzanna Martinez 1%.

South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley 1%.

Ohio Governor John Kasich .3%.

Ohio Senator Rob Portman at 0.

Three percent selected the “Other Candidate” category and 17% were not sure.

Romney has strong support across the board, leading all candidates among men (21%) and women (20%), moderates (27%) and conservatives (19%), and among Born Again/Evangelical Christians (23%).

Christie’s best showing is among the nearly one in four voters who describe themselves as moderates (21%).

Rand Paul’s support is about 10%-12% across the board.

Romney’s showing is no doubt due a lot to name recognition – after all he has been out campaigning for two full cycles already. But it also shows that he has not really hurt himself among the GOP base. In fact, in a field where no new candidate has distinguished himself or herself as dominant, Romney can certainly be a player. He campaigned and performed respectably in 2012 and has maintained a restrained dignity over the past few months. He also has an “I Told You So” factor that helps him among Republican voters on Iraq, immigration, and on the budget. While President Obama’s job performance numbers have dragged, Romney has been critical but not overbearing and, perhaps above all, he has remained out of the dysfunctional Washington DC-Beltway loop.

What is most impressive to me is the 23% support he receives from self-described Born Again voters. His closest rival among this group is Mike Huckabee with 14%. This was the group that was most troubled by Romney’s leadership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and his strong showing in this poll not only shows a lead, but how other candidates are splitting the remainder. They alone represent almost half of GOP primary voters and their support is vital.

What would Romney need? Again, as he did in 2012, a very strong showing in Iowa. This poll suggests he can do it again if he retains strong support among Born Agains. Then a win in New Hampshire, which he did before and where he still maintains a residence.

For all the thunder on the Right, Republicans normally end up nominating a moderate candidate. (The only exception was Ronald Reagan in 1980, but he faced a number of more moderate candidates who split the vote). They also end up nominating the “Gold Watch” candidate – the one who has been out there the longest. The only exception to that was George W. Bush in 2000, but he was the scion of a family who had many years of solid GOP credentials.