Cruz Plays Dirty Tricks; Trump Train Prepares To Roll Category: Republicans|GOP
I’m willing to stick my neck out and predict that Donald Trump still wins the GOP nomination. The Iowa caucuses are very strange in that once you arrive you are subjected to debate, peer pressure, and dirty tricks from paid operatives before you get to vote – in full public view. Cruz had a reported 5,000 people on the ground working in Iowa while Trump ran a campaign largely based in the media. It has now come to light that those trained Cruz operatives were at the caucus sites earning their money, while the campaign itself was found guilty of potentially illegal chicanery.
(CNN) – Donald Trump on Wednesday accused Sen. Ted Cruz of stealing the Iowa caucuses, calling for either new voting there or the results to be nullified.
“Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified,” Donald Trump wrote a Twitter, one of a series of Tweets attacking Cruz and questioning the outcome of the Iowa caucuses.
“Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it,” Trump tweeted. “That is why all of the polls were so wrong and why he got far more votes than anticipated.”
Trump also slammed Cruz for sending out deceitful mailers that shared voter’s caucus attendance records with their neighbors and warning voters of “VOTER VIOLATION.”
“The Voter Violation certificate gave poor marks to the unsuspecting voter (grade of F) and told them to clear it up by voting for Cruz,” Trump tweeted. “Fraud.”
Polls in the week leading up to the caucuses showed Trump several points ahead of Cruz, which raised expectations for Trump’s campaign in the Hawkeye State. But on Monday, Cruz was declared the victor after winning 4 percentage points more support than the billionaire real estate mogul.
Trump initially tweeted that Cruz “illegally stole” the Iowa caucuses, before deleting the tweet and tweeting again without the word “illegally.”
Minutes later, Trump tweeted that “during primetime of the Iowa Caucus, Cruz put out a release that @RealBenCarson was quitting the race, and to caucus (or vote) for Cruz.”
“Many people voted for Cruz over Carson because of this Cruz fraud,” Trump said of the Cruz campaign’s caucus day actions.
CNN reported Monday that Carson would go to Florida instead of New Hampshire or South Carolina immediately after the caucuses to take a “deep breath” and get clean clothes. The Cruz campaign informed Iowa precinct captains while the caucuses were underway that Carson was taking a break and suggested that he was suspending his campaign. CNN did not report that Carson was suspending his campaign — instead, CNN said he would return to the campaign trail.
So, the Cruz campaign had its people in the caucus sites tell people before voting begins that Carson is suspending his campaign and that they should now vote for Cruz. This alone could have given him a bump of a couple thousand votes, which was the actual difference between Cruz and Trump.
However, the Carson misinformation pales in comparison to the “VOTER VIOLATION” mailer that the Cruz campaign sent to voters in Iowa the day before the caucuses. Prepared to look like an official mailout from the Iowa Secretary of State, voters were sent something that looked like a legal reprimand. It had given the recipient a “failing” grade and instructed them that in order to improve their score they must attend the caucus and vote for Cruz. I’m telling you now that this will come back to haunt Cruz while serving to motivate Trump to even greater lengths than what we have seen previously.
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