Mitch Perry
Jeb Bush is the front-runner for the nation’s first primary election to be held next January in New Hampshire.
The WMUR Granite State Poll by the University of New Hampshire shows Bush with 17 percent support, followed by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker with 12 percent, and Chris Christie, Rand Paul and Mike Huckabee are at 9 percent.
If Mitt Romney was still in the contest, however, he’d be the dominant favorite. The poll shows that the former Massachusetts governor actually earned 22 percent of the vote to Bush’s 15 percent. Romney dropped out of the contest officially on Jan 30 after flirting with running for a third time. The pollsters say that in order to understand what kind of support potential candidates have without Romney in the race, they took the second choice of those respondents who said Romney was their first choice, and allocated these second choice votes to the appropriate candidate.
In terms of favorability, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul ranks higher than Bush, with 53 percent approval rankings. Bush is second at 47 percent.
However, all of this must be taken with a grain of salt. Only 6 percent of likely GOP voters say they have definitely decided who they will support. Nine percent are leaning toward a candidate, and 85 percent have yet to decide.
The 348 randomly selected likely 2016 Republican primary voters were interviewed by landline and cellular telephone between Jan. 22 and Feb. 3, 2015. The margin of sampling error is +/- 5.3 percent.
