Donald Trump, Jeb Bush to hold simultaneous New Hampshire town halls
Donald Trump and Jeb Bush will hold simultaneous town halls in New Hampshire on Wednesday, giving voters a comparative look at the two candidates at the head of the GOP presidential primary field.
Bush, a former governor of Florida, will hold his event at 6:30 p.m. in Derry, New Hampshire - the latest in a series of public forums he's done in the Granite State.
But on Monday, Trump announced he'd hold a town hall of his own in Merrimack, a town roughly 20 miles away from Derry, on the same day and at the same time as Bush's.
Coincidence? Unlikely.
"Because Bush draws so poorly, I figured it would be a good time to draw a crowd," Trump, a billionaire businessman, told a Wall Street Journal reporter on Monday. "Something like that."
Bush's team reacted with cool indifference.
"Someone should tell Mr. Trump he will be trying to troll us from an entirely different county," Allie Brandenburger, a Bush spokesman, told the Journal.
New Hampshire was supposed to be Bush country, and the former Florida governor led the polls there fairly consistently until Trump jumped into the race in June. Now the script has flipped: In a Boston Herald poll released earlier this month, for example, Trump led Bush 18 to 13 percent.
The results reflect a similar shift nationwide, as Trump surges into the lead of surveys of GOP primary voters. The two men have exchanged barbs in recent days, with Bush criticizing Trump's immigration proposals and his remarks about women, and Trump calling Bush a "puppet" of his family's political network. Trump has also called Bush's own remarks about spending on women's health care "totally out of order."
Earlier on Wednesday, Bush attended an education summit in New Hampshire with several other GOP candidates hosted by former journalist Campbell Brown.