The bad news for Ted Cruz: His Iowa win looks very similar to Mike Huckabee’s and Rick Santorum’s

[applegrove]

The bad news for Ted Cruz: His Iowa win looks very similar to Mike Huckabee’s and Rick Santorum’s

By Scott Clement, Kevin Uhrmacher and Dan Keating at the Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/02/02/the-bad-news-for-ted-cruz-his-iowa-win-looks-very-similar-to-mike-huckabees-and-rick-santorums/

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Ted Cruz's Iowa victory was a surprise, after the final polls showed him trailing Donald Trump. But Cruz also followed a very familiar path to victory in the Hawkeye State: heavy reliance on strong conservatives and evangelical Christians -- and not on first-time caucus-goers.

The entrance polling shows Iowa's Republican electorate was rich with both groups, with more than 6 in 10 identifying as evangelical Christians (64 percent) and 4 in 10 saying their political views are "very conservative."

More than three-quarters of Cruz's supporters identified as evangelical Christians, compared with fewer than 6 in 10 of Marco Rubio and Donald Trump supporters. The concentration of evangelical Christians among Cruz backers is similar to the last two Iowa Republican victors, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee; these voters made up 76 and 83 percent of their supporters, respectively. Both Trump and Rubio received a greater share of their support from evangelicals than Mitt Romney in 2012 or John McCain in 2008, both of whom lost the state but eventually won the party's nomination.



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