Donald Trump, who has spent most of the summer leading the Republican presidential field in the polls, told a Miami rally Friday he isn't buying the results of two recent surveys that show him falling into second place in the state that will kick off the voting in 2016.
"I love Iowa, and I honestly think those polls are wrong," the billionaire told a crowd gathered to hear him at one of his own resorts, the legendary Doral golf course. "Both of those polling companies do not like me."
Both the Quinnipiac Polland the Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register Iowa Poll this week showed Trump falling behind rival Ben Carson in the state where the first ballots of the presidential race will be cast in caucuses on Feb. 1.
Though Trump insisted he doesn't find the results credible, he went out of his way to appeal the a constituency where both surveys showed him lagging: the Iowa evangelical vote.
"I'm Presbyterian. I'm a great Christian. True," said Trump. The billionaire real estate mogul, who had drawn criticism for hisinsulting remarks about women, also regretted that he's not doing as well with women voters as he is among men. "Will you help me?" he said, addressing some female members of his audience? "What is going on?"
Portraying himself as the victim of a hostile press, Trump said the headlines declaring him No. 2 in Iowa were "bigger than Hillary's talk yesterday on Benghazi," a reference to Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton's marathon testimony before a House investigative committee.
He also took a shot at the candidate who has supplanted him as the front-runner in Iowa. "We informed Ben," Trump puckishly told the crowd, "but he was sleeping."
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