A new poll released on Saturday shows that two solidly pro-Israel candidates, Donald Trump and Dr. Ben Carson, are almost tied for the Republican presidential nomination.
Trump has been leading all of the polls both in Iowa and elsewhere, but Carson has sneaked up on the real estate mogul whose mouth so far is far stronger than his policy outlook outside of immigration.
Both men are solidly pro-Israel but their real attraction to voters, fed up with the establishment, is that neither of them have a background in politics.
Jews make up only 0.2 percent of Iowa’s population, and most of them live in Des Moines, where 59 percent of the city’s voters backed President Barack Obama in 2012. It can be assumed that most of the Jews were in the Obama camp, and it is questionable if they will vote for a Republican in 2016.
But the non-Jews lap up Trump and Carson’s tough talk, even though Carson is black in a state where blacks comprise only 3.3 percent of the population and Hispanics only 5.5 percent.
The Bloomberg/Des Moines Register survey gave Trump 23 percent support, compared with 18 percent for Trump. No one else even comes close. Third and fourth-ranked are Scott Walker and Ted Cruz, each with only 8 percent.
Perhaps the most pro-Israel of them all, if that can be measured by supporting Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria, is Mike Huckabee. He has only 4 percent support in the survey.
Israel obviously is not the topic on the minds of Iowans, but the plain-talk attitude of Trump and Carson, neither of whom are too concerned about being politically correct, have no room for the “peace process” and the Palestinian Authority agenda.
The president of the polling company that carried out the survey, J. Ann Selzer, told Bloomberg:
Trump and Carson, one bombastic and the other sometimes soft-spoken, could hardly be more different in their outward presentations.
Yet they’re both finding traction because they don’t seem like politicians and there’s a strong demand for that right now.
Carson is a higher-profile Christian than Trump, which may be one reason why he is gaining support in the state has a large number of Evangelicals.
However, Carson still has a long way to go to catch up with Trump on a national basis. The average of polls, as tallied by RealClearPolitics, puts Trump at the top with 23.5 percent support. Carson is in second place but with only 10.3 percent.
Carson visited Israel late last year and paid a visit to the Western Wall.