Former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) argued Tuesday that Donald Trump’s loss in Iowa proved that hype surrounding the Republican presidential candidate isn’t holding up.
Cantor noted during an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that much attention and polling predicted a win for Trump in the state, which didn’t happen when he lost to Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) on Monday night.
{mosads}”It’s a much different thing to go out and turn out voters on a cold night in Iowa or New Hampshire than it is to attract them to a Trump extravaganza where he provides entertainment for 90 minutes,” Cantor told CNBC.
“This is again what I think lot of us have been saying about these polls, that when people get serious and start to vote, the question becomes who’s going to be best put to be our commander in chief,” Cantor added.
Trump got 24.3 percent support in the Iowa caucus, several points below expectations, while Cruz and Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) performed better than expected with 27.6 and 23.1 percent, respectively.
Cantor, a supporter of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush who took sixth in Iowa with less than 3 percent of the vote, maintained that “New Hampshire is a much better bellwether” for Republicans than Iowa.
Both eventual GOP nominees in 2008 and 2012 won the New Hampshire primary. A handful of Republicans are locked in a polling bottleneck for the Feb. 9 primary behind Trump, the clear front-runner there.
Cantor insisted Tuesday that “Jeb is actually the one who’s got the momentum and is on the rise” in the Granite State, where Cantor told CNBC and CNN he would stump for Bush on Wednesday.