Reuters national poll: Trump now leads by … 23 points

As Republican presidential candidate John Kasich intensified his attacks on Sunday on Donald Trump, two national Republican consultants have developed “aggressive, outside-the-box strategies” to “defeat and destroy” the NY billionaire’s candidacy.

That survey showed Trump maintaining his healthy lead over the field, with 32% of likely Republican voters preferring the real-estate tycoon.

In a Bloomberg Politics poll was taken November 15-17, Trump kept his front-runner status with 24 percent, ahead of retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who polled 20 percent. Bernie Sanders of Vermont up by 1 percentage point over former secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a statistical tie that’s mostly in line with previous surveys which have shown the race up for grabs. Ted Cruz and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Marco Rubio and, for many, making Carson an afterthought. No other candidates gathered more than five percent of the vote.

30% likely Republican caucus goers in Iowa name Trump as their choice for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. But instead, the opposite has happened, with the real estate mogul cementing his place atop the polls and holding off the expected charge from more “established” candidates like Bush and Rubio. While Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson are outsiders, their personas don’t really satiate the most angry and fearful among GOP voters. The victor in that category is Trump, with 25 percent, followed by Rubio, 13 percent; Texas Sen. And importantly, after Trump, no one comes across as angry as Cruz, and no one has outflanked him on the right.

Republican men and women also prefer Trump by seven points to his nearest competitor.

“Donald Trump’s suggestion that we use a database to track Muslims is deeply troubling and reminiscent of darker days in American history when others were singled out for scapegoating”, the ADL said in a statement Friday. According to a new Florida Atlantic University poll, Trump is strengthening in Florida, with 36 percent of GOP voters backing him thus far.

In the Washington Post/ABC News survey, 52% of respondents said the attribute most important to them personally in selecting a candidate was that the person would bring change needed to Washington, while 28% said they prefer the most honest candidate and 11% said experience is most important. The margin of error was plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.

The new poll indicates that Dr. Carson is the preferred candidate of 25 percent of white evangelicals, which is a decline of 8 percent points since last month.