On Fox News, Martha McCallum has just put up some preliminary numbers from the entrance poll. They are somewhat good news for Donald Trump, but very good news for Marco Rubio, or at least for the possibility that Rubio will far exceed the 11 percent he was getting in the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls on Jan. 23.
Evangelical Christians: Cruz 26 percent, Trump 21 percent, Rubio 21 percent.
First time caucus-goers: Trump 33 percent, Rubio 21 percent, Cruz 17 percent.
Late deciders: Rubio 28 percent, Cruz 20 percent, Trump 14 percent.
This suggests that Trump indeed attracted many people who were not caucus-goers in the past, and that he attracted them well before this month, as late deciders apparently went more for Rubio than Cruz. Cruz leads among evangelical Protestants, but not by the kind of big margin he needed to beat Trump, and especially not by what he had probably hoped for over Rubio among this group — something of the magnitude of the 18-point margin by which Rick Santorum beat Mitt Romney with Evangelicals in 2012. Rubio’s apparent margin among late deciders suggests that the surge seen for him in late polls was genuine.
But these are early numbers, subject to revision by later reports. Remember that on election night four years ago, Mitt Romney was counted as the winner by a narrow margin in the Iowa caucuses and only days later revealed that he lost by a narrow margin to Rick Santorum.
