Billionaire businessman and Republican front runner for the 2016 presidential nomination Donald Trump is gaining political strength since the ISIS attacks on Paris. All new polls that have been conducted after Friday show that Trump is on the rise and that he can handle the ISIS threat to the United States.
The gains made by Trump on what in essence is a foreign policy issue has most political experts totally confused. The conventional wisdom would be that once the Friday attack on Paris took place that the voters would take a longer look at the more establishment candidates like Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, to name one of three or four men running for the nation’s highest office.
Instead, it seems that Republican voters have found themselves drawn to Trump who in a new ad where he proclaims “I will bomb the hell out of ISIS.”
“You have voters who are saying loudly and clearly that they want a strong leader to run our country, and that leader is Mr. Trump,” the business mogul’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, told The Hill. “Some of the other candidates didn’t have that vision. … They have not had the foresight to predict these problems.”
Trump’s approach, which tends to be vigorous in tone but light on specifics, draws plenty of criticism even within the GOP.
A quick look at polls shows that Republican voters seem to welcome Trump’s bombastic tone after last week’s assault on French civilians that left 129 people dead. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) claimed responsibility for the massacre.
In New Hampshire the newest poll numbers from WBUR radio that was done over the weekend just after the attacks, Trump’s support had risen 4 points from a similar poll released at the start of this month, and he has pulled ahead of the No. 2 candidate, retired surgeon Ben Carson, by a stunning 2-1 margin.
Meanwhile, the Florida Atlantic University poll showed that Trump has built a massive lead in the Sunshine State. He holds his biggest lead ever in the state as Republican voters polled favor Trump by 36 percent over Florida’s own sitting Senator Marco Rubio who picks up just 18 percent of the vote.
In another swing state Ohio Trump keeps the ball rolling
Nationally, Trump scored high in the Reuters poll that was released Tuesday. The poll asked voters which of the candidates was best-suited to deal with the threat of terrorism. Among Republican voters, 36 percent backed Trump.
Here is where things get interesting as the No.2 position in the poll was “none of the above,” at 17 percent. Rubio was again in second place in the survey among actual candidates, but he trailed Trump by 20 percentage points.
The latest Bloomberg Politics national poll released this morning shows that again Trump and Dr. Carson continue lead all other candidates. You have Trump at 24 percent, Carson at 20 percent and in the third spot is Rubio at 12 percent with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz moving into the fourth place with 9 percent of the Republican vote.
Trumps stand on immigration has hit a note with potential Republican voters also like his stance on guns and now he has upped his game after the ISIS attack on Paris. Monday he began talking about how some mosques in the United States had to be closed.
America will have “absolutely no choice” but to close down some mosques, said Trump on FOX News. “A lot of people understand it. We’re going to have no choice.”
Trump said Monday the so-called Islamic State’s headquarters in Syria should have been hit even harder, well before Friday’s terrorist attacks in Paris. As authorities search for accomplices in the attacks, France launched airstrikes against the ISIS base in Raqqa on Sunday night in retaliation for the suicide attacks that killed at least 129 people.
