Confident Carson predicts ‘shock and awe’ in Iowa

Undeterred by his declining poll numbers, a confident Ben Carson is heading into Monday’s Iowa caucuses predicting a strong showing that he says will upend the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

{mosads}Speaking to The Hill in between campaign stops in Iowa over the weekend, Carson said that the media’s haste to write him off will finally be exposed when ballots are cast.

“It’s going to be shock and awe,” Carson said. “The pundits will say, ‘How did we not see this? Are we losing control? What’s going on here?’ That’s certainly the indication I’m getting from talking to people.”

Carson has made it farther in the race than any pundits predicted when he first launched his long-shot bid for the White House from his hometown of Detroit in April.

The retired pediatric neurosurgeon, who has never before run for political office, rode a wave of anti-establishment fervor to the top of the polls. Last October, he became the first GOP contender to make a serious run at long-time leader Donald Trump.

Carson’s soft-spoken nature and perceived authenticity earned him the highest favorability rating in the field for a time, and grassroots conservatives rewarded him by pouring tens of millions of dollars into his campaign coffers.

But Carson’s lack of political experience became a liability when the race turned to national security in the wake of several high-profile terrorist attacks. He was exposed for having a lack of foreign policy expertise and has never recovered.

As his polling numbers fell, Carson’s brain-trust fractured after months of tension between the campaign and close friend and adviser Armstrong Williams came to a head on New Year’s Eve. Carson’s top staffers resigned, leaving the campaign in a bad spot just a month out from the Iowa caucuses.

Now, Carson enters the caucuses back in familiar territory – as the underdog, a role with which he says he’s comfortable.

“As long as that changes,” Carson said laughing. “I expect Monday will be the beginning of that change.”

Carson is running in fourth place in Iowa, according to the RealClearPolitics average, far behind Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the latter of whom has galvanized the evangelical base that once boosted Carson.

Furthermore, Carson has been surpassed by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who has been rising in the final days before the caucuses and emerged as the establishment favorite in the Hawkeye State.

It’s all served to put the squeeze on Carson, largely relegating him as an afterthought in the race, as evidence by last Thursday’s GOP debate, when he got less speaking time than anyone on stage.

Carson now says he’s gunning for a third-place finish, believing it will help propel him into South Carolina, where his campaign believes he can be competitive – assuming he makes that far.

If Carson doesn’t finish in third, he says it will be time to reassess his prospects.

“We’re always in reassessment mode,” Carson said. “We’re always looking at what percentage of the vote we’re getting, whether money is continuing to flow, whether our support base continues to be solid. All of those things have to be looked at beyond just a specific number.”

Carson’s campaign has been defined by tragedy in recent weeks.

In late January, a van carrying three Carson volunteers and one staffer collided with another car after it spun off an icy Iowa highway.

Braden Joplin, a 25-year-old volunteer from Lubbock, Texas, was killed in the accident.

Carson was in South Carolina at the time and immediately suspended his campaign, flying to the Nebraska hospital where Joplin had been taken to be with the young man’s family.

The tragedy has given the campaign a renewed sense of purpose, Carson said.

“It increases your determination to make sure that that death was not in vain,” Carson said.

“It’s impacted the whole campaign,” he continued. “He was such a wonderful, outgoing young man who made it his business to make sure everybody else was comfortable, that everybody else felt good. We call it the Braden affect. It certainly brought everyone closer together and people are working extremely hard in his memory.”

Carson said his campaign has also been buoyed in recent weeks by the new leadership that came on following the end-of-year meltdown.

Following their split, former campaign manager Barry Bennett and others have been pointing the finger at Williams as the source of the campaign’s struggles.

Williams has never had an official role within the campaign, but he has Carson’s ear and the two are close friends.

Williams would often arrange for press interviews without the campaign’s knowledge. An interview with The New York Times backfired spectacularly at a critical juncture, when a former CIA agent advising Carson on national security said the candidate was incapable of grasping the intricacies of foreign policy.

Carson maintains that Williams’s role has been “vastly exaggerated” by his former advisers, who he said are looking for a “scapegoat.”

“There was a lot more wrong with the organization beyond friction between them,” Carson said. “There were substantial financial irregularities, inefficiencies, and inability to get things done. So to blame all that on Armstrong is a far stretch.”

Carson accused his former officials of rewarding their consultant friends with big and unnecessary contracts.

“I don’t know if maybe these were their friends that were being paid back, I don’t know what the issue was there,” he said. “But getting that under control has been a tremendous help. Things are 100 times better.”

Carson has been critical of Williams on the campaign trail, but said “Armstrong still remains a good friend.”

Looking beyond Iowa, Carson said he’d pray on his decision about whether to continue if there’s an unfavorable outcome on Monday.

He signaled that he doesn’t intend to linger if the doors that he says God once opened for him are now closed.

“You always pray for wisdom,” Carson said. “It’s a lot easier for me to do that than for these politicians. For a politician, [the election] is the culmination of everything they’ve been doing. It’s not like that for me at all.”