Mitch Perry
Donald Trump may or may not have already peaked in the Republican presidential contest, but no other candidate gets close to him in yet another national poll of GOP candidates, this one released Tuesday.
The Public Policy Polling survey has Trump up with 27 percent support. Ben Carson is in second place with 17 percent, and Marco Rubio is next with 13 percent. These are all numbers that were about the same as when PPP conducted its last survey in early September.
Rounding out the field in fourth place is Jeb Bush with 10 percent, Ted Cruz is at 7 percent, Carly Fiorina is at 6 percent, and Mike Huckabee and John Kasich are each at 4 percent round out the list of candidates with with higher levels of support.
Chris Christie, Rand Paul, and Rick Santorum are all at 2 percent, Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal, and George Pataki each get 1 percent, and in last place with less than 1 percent is Jim Gilmore.
PPP says that Rubio “is really the only candidate who can claim any sort of momentum.” They say that because he’s gone from fifth place at 7 percent to third place at 13 percent during the past five weeks. And he has a 57/24 favorability rating that puts him only behind Carson when it comes to the most broadly liked of the Republican hopefuls.
No one other than Rubio has seen more than a 2-point gain since the last poll.
Florina’s 6 percent showing is down 2 points from a month ago. No one’s really lost much ground in the past month either. The biggest decline anyone has seen in their support is 2 points: Trump, Fiorina, and Kasich have all seen that minor dip in the last month. Fiorina being at 6 percent after registering at 8 percent in the PPP national poll in late August does suggest that whatever benefit she received from her strong debate performance last month may have already receded.
Bush’s 10 percent showing is actually slightly up from a month ago and puts him in the top four, but he’s becoming more and more unpopular with Republican voters overall. Just 34 percent have a favorable opinion of him to 49 percent with a negative one. His struggles continue to be fueled by strong distrust from voters who identify themselves as “very conservative” – his favorability with them is 26/56 and only 2 percent support him for the nomination.
Most interestingly, Republican primary voters are more liberal than all of the candidates when it comes to gun control and the economy.
Eight-two percent of primary voters support background checks on all gun purchases, to only 13 percent opposed. Supporters of all 15 GOP hopefuls are in support of expanded background checks, including 82/18 support for them from Bush voters. There’s also 54 percent support among GOP voters for increasing the minimum wage to at least $10 an hour. Only 26 percent support keeping it where it is right now and 18 percent support eliminating the federal minimum wage altogether.
