Mitch Perry
Since Donald Trump began emerging as the front-runner in GOP presidential in late July, skeptics have noted that while he’s been leading a scattered,17-person field, his unfavorable rankings among Republican still portend poorly for him in acquiring the nomination.
That may beginning to change now.
A new Gallup survey released on Friday shows that Trump’s net favorable rating among Republicans has climbed 16 points over the last two weeks. Gallup notes that this marks a “significant shift, as Trump’s image previous to the last two weeks had been relatively stable despite the extraordinary media attention his candidacy has engendered.
The next ascending Republican presidential contender according to Gallup is Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who has seen him favorable rankings rise by 7 points.
Carly Fiorina, was wasn’t being taken all that seriously by the national media until her performance stood out in the early debate in Cleveland last month, has seen her net favorable score go up to 37, up five points from the Aug. 5-18 time period, and up 14 points since mid-July. Her familiarity is also up 14 points over the past eight weeks.
Dr. Ben Carson has certainly been rising in the polls. The retired neurosurgeon now possesses Gallup’s highest favorable rating at 51. However, the pollster says that his “familiar rating” of 63 percent is only average.
Jeb Bush’s numbers are going down, which is revealing in the respect that he seems to be commanding the most media attention (next to Trump) over the past few weeks. Bush has had a net drop of six points in terms of his favorable score in just the past two weeks.
Gallup mentions Marco Rubio with former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee in the same sentence. Both candidates net favorability and familiarity have not changed much, “but both are still well-positioned image-wise, with above-average scores on both dimensions.” They join Cruz and Trump as the four candidates in the positive, upper-right quadrant of the standings — enjoying both above-average favorability and above-average familiarity.
Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted July 8-Sept. 1, 2015, on the Gallup U.S. Daily survey, with a random sample of 13,996 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. Each candidate was rated by a random subset of respondents during this period, with the sample sizes rating each candidate averaging about 1,000 Republicans and Republican-leaning independents within each two-week interviewing period.
For results based on the total sample of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, aged 18 and older, rating each candidate at each time period, the margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. All reported margins of sampling error include computed design effects for weighting.
