Trump pushes Cruz out of the lead in Texas

WASHINGTON - The Trump bandwagon has come to Texas.

Two months after billionaire Donald Trump polled at a lowly 2 percent in a University of Texas survey of Texas Republican voters, he's shot up to the top - the same position he occupies in the national polls.

A new poll released Thursday puts Trump in the lead with 24 percent of support among registered Republicans in the state, pushing Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas into the second spot at 16 percent.

The latest poll was commissioned by a group called the Texas Bipartisan Justice Committee, which hired the Florida-based Gravis Marketing firm to conduct the research.

The poll could be bad news for Cruz, who enjoyed a commanding lead with 20 percent in the June Texas Politics Project poll. It's also more bad news for former Gov. Rick Perry, who was second at 12 percent in the previous poll, but who now has dropped to 4 percent, at the back of the pack with Scott Walker and Mike Huckabee.

In third place after Cruz in the new poll is Ben Carson, at 12 percent. Jeb Bush follows at 9 percent, a troubling fourth place standing for an establishment favorite and scion of the Bush family in Texas.

Carly Fiorina and Marco Rubio are tied at 5 percent, and Rand Paul, another candidate with Texas ties, didn't rate a mention at all.

Political analysts say Texas reflects the national mood in the GOP presidential primary, which favors brash outsiders like Trump and Cruz over establishment figures like Bush and Perry.

"Texans are clearly an independent lot and are as distrustful of the way things are going in Washington as voters in any other state," said University of Houston political scientist Brandon Rottinghaus.

Though Perry, the longest serving governor in Texas history, has sought to position himself as the consummate Washington outsider, his message about his leadership experience and the strength of the state's economy does not seem to have taken flight in the current political climate.

"Frankly, the same is true for Jeb Bush," Rottinghaus said of the former Florida governor, whose campaign has emphasized his conservative record and command of the issues.

Perry's shocking slide

While the Trump phenomenon has clearly cast a shadow over the entire GOP field, including Cruz, Perry's long slide might be the biggest shock of the race.

"The most surprising thing in the polls is that Perry barely shows up, even in Texas, which further suggests the extent of his campaign troubles," said Cal Jillson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University.

Perry's campaign has struggled to raise money, though he's been buoyed by Super PAC money that allows him to concentrate on an intensive ground game in the first-caucus-state of Iowa.

Nevertheless, Perry's campaign has widely been portrayed in the national media as being on life-support, particularly since he announced that he has had to ask his staffers to forgo pay. Many have predicted that Perry would be among the first of the 17-member GOP field to drop out.

"The striking thing is how fast you fall when you're out of office and out of public attention," Jillson said of Perry, who was briefly a front-runner in the 2012 GOP presidential primaries.

While Trump has clearly pushed Cruz out of the commanding lead he once enjoyed in Texas, the junior senator from Texas has managed to stay out of Trump's line of fire.

Cruz visited Trump in New York last month, and has followed a conscious strategy of avoiding criticism of Trump's many controversial and sometimes inflammatory remarks about unauthorized immigrants and other presidential candidates.

Cruz has also made no secret of his desire to win over Trump's conservative base of support, which overlaps his own.

"From Cruz's perspective, it is not terribly worrisome," Jillson said - provided Trump's trajectory ultimately comes back to earth.

But if Trump continues to defy expectations, as he has over the past two months, he could spoil Cruz's long-term strategy of making a stand in Texas and the other Southern states that will vote together in the March 1 "Super Tuesday" primaries.

"It does drive a wedge into Cruz's southern strategy," Rottinghaus said. Coming out of the first three contests in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, Cruz hopes to dominate the South, where he made a well-received bus tour last week.

"The trouble is, if you can't count on Texas to get you a third of those delegates, you have to reprioritize," Rottinghaus said.

Experts skeptical on Trump

The new poll by the Texas Bipartisan Justice Committee found that 70 percent of the Republican respondents in the Lone Star State rate themselves as very to slightly conservative. Nearly a quarter, 24 percent, self-identified as members of the tea party. The respondents also skewed white and over 50, which generally reflects Republican primary voters.

Many analysts and political operatives still caution against reading too much into Trump's improbable surge in the race, noting that early poll numbers are largely driven by name recognition and media attention. Trump, a celebrity TV reality show star, has an abundance of both.

If Trump holds up over time, some analysts say the rest of the field could be playing for vice president.

If he doesn't, Jillson said, the latest poll illustrates one constant about Texas politics, where Cruz still dominates everyone else in the field not named Trump: "This really does clarify for you how the face of today's Republican Party in Texas is the face of Ted Cruz and then Greg Abbott, and then way down the list, Rick Perry."