Fiorina, Paul Hope Iowa Polls are Very Wrong

Hoping the polls are wrong, Republican presidential candidates Carly Fiorina and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul both predicted that voters will surprise the political world at Monday’s Iowa caucuses.

Fiorina agreed on “The Laura Ingraham Show” that she is closer to Donald Trump than the Establishment wing of the party.

“I am not Establishment, and I agree with your Venn diagram,” she said. “People are fed up.”

Fiorina said that where she differs is that she has the experience to actually improve the government. She touted her plans to reduce the tax code to three pages, reform the way the federal government budgets and repeal the Affordable Care Act.

“By the way, Donald Trump is the system,” she said. “He has made billions of dollars buying access and influence from politicians. He freely admits it.”

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Fiorina acknowledged that she played the game, too, when she ran Compaq Computer Corp. and Hewlett-Packard.

“I hired armies of accountants and lawyers and lobbyists to make that complexity work for HP and Compaq,” she said. “But the nine-person real estate firm I started out at cannot. So, they’re going out of business.”

Fiorina barely has registered a blip in the Iowa polls and has not performed much better in New Hampshire, which votes next week. But she touted a strong get-out-the-vote operation and took solace in recent polls that have missed the mark, including the Kentucky gubernatorial race in November when Republican Matt Bevin won a surprise victory.

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“The polls have always been wrong,” she said. “Particularly, they’ve been wrong in Iowa and New Hampshire. They were wrong in Kentucky. They were wrong by 17 points 24 hours before an election.”

Paul, another low-polling candidate, also discounted the surveys. He said both public polls and his own internal surveys consistently have undersampled the vote that his father garnered in Iowa four years ago.

“Not only do we think the vast majority are staying with us, the interesting thing is the polls are not capturing them,” he said.

Paul is banking on a higher-than-normal turnout from students to lift his fortunes. He noted that 17-year-olds can participate in the caucuses as long as they will be 18 by November. He said he spoke to a crowd of 1,500 Sunday at the University of Iowa. He said he has student chapters on 22 campuses that have made 1 million calls on his behalf.

“For us to exceed expectations, we need a large student turnout,” he aid. “We’ve been working students hard … It’s really infectious to be around all those kids.”