Mitch Perry
Donald Trump and Ben Carson continue to dominate in the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll of the GOP presidential race, while Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush continued to lag behind in third and fifth place, respectively.
Trump is at 25 percent – 4 points up from September. Carson is second with 22 percent, a slight bump from the poll taken a month ago. Rubio is in third place with 13 percent, the only other Republican to get into double-digits in the race.
Ted Cruz is next with 9 percent support.
And then there’s Bush, at 8 percent. That’s down 14 percentage points from June, when he led the poll with 22 percent support.
Carly Fiorina is next with 7 percent support.
The poll also included a broader measure of candidates’ acceptability.When asked whether they could imagine themselves supporting a candidate, more GOP primary voters said they couldn’t see themselves supporting Bush, at 44 percent, than Trump, at 36 percent. That’s a dramatic improvement for Trump. Back in the spring, when 74 percent of voters of GOP voters said they couldn’t see themselves supporting the New York City real estate magnate.
Full results of the new Journal/NBC News poll, which surveyed 1,000 adults, will be released on Tuesday.
Included in the survey were 400 Republicans who say they plan to vote in the primaries. The margin of error for that group was plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.
