Poll shows Trump with solid lead in Florida

For the fourth consecutive month, businessman Donald Trump leads the contest for the Republican presidential nomination, with his candidacy fueled by a powerful anti-Washington mood among GOP voters, according to a new national poll by The Washington Post and ABC News.

An average of polls that have been released since the day before the November 13 terror attacks in Paris shows that Trump has gained 3 percentage points while Carson has fallen nearly 5 points, the Washington Post reported. Other polls even found Carson with narrow leads in Iowa and nationally, shaking up a race Trump had dominated for months.

State polls can be equally indicative of candidates’ standings – and sometimes more so.

The poll of 500 New Hampshire Republicans and independent voters who said they intend to vote in the Republican primary was taken last Tuesday through Thursday and had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points. The senator, unlike his top rivals, appeals to two categories of voters: the 36 percent of respondents that prefer an experienced candidate and the 46 percent that would rather elect a political outsider. Cruz has 8 percent, with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Ohio Gov. John Kasich both at 7 percent. Carson stands a distant second at 22 percent. And Bush just continues to get more unpopular- only 27% of GOP primary voters see him favorably to 50% with a negative opinion.

The US presidential candidates are all looking to succeed President Barack Obama, who is limited by the U.S. Constitution to two terms in office and will leave the White House in January 2017.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) placed second with 13 percent, followed by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, 65.5 percent to 22.4 percent. On that crucial question, Bush trails Trump, Carson, Rubio and Cruz.

“That softness of support for Carson might put him in a similar category as Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum, all of whom rose to similar levels of support for several months, but then lost that support by the time voting started”, Wang said. But among those who do say the attacks matter “a lot”, Trump has an especially large lead over Carson – and the rest of the field.

It is clear that Trump’s in-your-face demeanor is winning over Republican primary voters. And while Trump still leads among a few of these groups, it’s Cruz who is ahead among the very conservative, and Trump leads Cruz by just two points among evangelical voters.