Donald Trump regains lead over Ben Carson in new GOP polls

A new NBC News/SurveyMonkey online poll shows that Donald Trump is back in the lead (28%) among Republican primary voters. Tied for a distant second are Ben Carson and Ted Cruz (18%). Carson had briefly pulled ahead of Trump in polls conducted earlier this month. Support for Bush has dropped slightly in each NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll since April, when he held 12 percent of the vote.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., comes in at 11 percent in the latest poll, while the other candidates have support in the low single digits. Trump also took a more decisive lead in a number of state polls.

Ben Carson is still the preferred candidate of 25% of white evangelicals, but Donald Trump (23%) and Texas Sen.

Cruz now has the highest level of support among those who identify as very Conservative, with 40%, overtaking both Carson and Trump.

The survey also found Republican state lawmakers with only 31 percent approval compared to 60 percent disapproval, although that did not translate to goodwill for Democratic legislators.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton has a comfortable lead over Bernie Sanders, 51% percent among Democratic and Democratic-leaning independents vs. 33% for Sanders, who is himself a Democratic-caucusing Independent.

Sanders has maintained a substantial lead among young voters but trails Clinton among the other demographic groups.

The national poll, which surveyed more than 2,440 Republicans and Republican-leaning voters from November 15 to November 17 via SurveyMonkey, has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points. Overall results have an error estimate of plus or minus 1.9 percentage points and the error estimate for the leaned Republican voters is plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.