Trump still leads NH, but Christie rising

The New Jersey governor and Republican presidential candidate is in second place in the early voting state of New Hampshire with 12% support, according to a new WBUR poll of likely GOP primary voters.

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida came in third with 11 percent, followed by Sen. The latest Rutgers-Eagleton Poll, released Thursday, shows that Christie’s overall job approval now stands at just 33 percent among New Jersey voters. Fourteen percent identified Christie as the candidate with the right experience to be president, double the total from September. An Associated Press-GfK poll taken before Trump’s remarks showed three-quarters of Republican voters think the United States is taking too many immigrants from the Middle East.

Christie is seeing his candidacy pick up steam in the first primary state, in part because of the new national focus on security and terrorism in the wake of attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California.

Dean Spiliotes, a political professor at Southern New Hampshire University, said Christie is successfully “playing by the classic New Hampshire retail politics playbook, and the thinking is that typically those candidates get rewarded in the end”. The Union-Leader endorsement spike won’t last long unless Christie can convert it into real growth in support. So while Christie may have edged past Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina, he’s no closer to the lead and 23 points off Trump’s pace. Rubio dropped two points among leaners but otherwise is in roughly the same position as in the last two iterations of this polling series. Voters were more split about Trump, who had 46 percent favorable to 43 percent unfavorable. He was at 7 percent in the poll. Corzine’s unfavorable rating, however, was a lower 45 percent at that time. He rose to 8 percent in October, and appeared to be fading at just 6 percent in November.

The latest poll found that among New Jersey Republicans and Republican-leaning voters, Christie ranks second in the presidential field with 14 percent while Trump leads with 30 percent. “Well, not here. He’s never here”, said Christie, referring to Rubio’s sparse visits to New Hampshire, “but in Iowa or NY at hedge fund places raising money and whatever it is he’s doing”.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., used a relentless schedule of town hall meetings in New Hampshire to pull a massive upset on George W. Bush in 2000 and save his slipping bid in 2008. But there have been preliminary discussions about what to do if four or five of those candidates finish within a few percentage points of each other in New Hampshire and all want to stay in the race.

The telephone survey was conducted among 402 likely Republican primary voters from December 6-8 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.