The Republican 2016 Presidential sweepstakes now has a new front runner: Ben Carson, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll:
Ben Carson has surged into the lead of the Republican presidential race, getting support from 29 percent of GOP primary voters, according to a brand-new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
That’s the highest percentage any GOP candidate has obtained so far in the survey.
Carson’s 29 percent is followed by Donald Trump at 23 percent, Marco Rubio at 11 percent, Ted Cruz at 10 percent and Jeb Bush at 8 percent. These findings are similar to a New York Times/CBS poll released last week, which also showed Carson in first place in the national GOP contest.
If past polling has been about Trump leading the GOP field, “then this survey is about Dr. Ben Carson, who is currently the man to beat for the Republicans,” says Democratic pollster Fred Yang, whose firm Hart Research Associates conducted this survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff.
And there’s even more good news for Carson:
In addition to leading the GOP field, Carson also becomes the first GOP candidate in the NBC/WSJ poll to get majority support as either a first or second choice among GOP primary voters.
A combined 50 percent of Republican voters pick Carson as either their first or second choice in the GOP presidential race — followed by 35 percent for Trump, 24 percent for Rubio and 23 percent for Cruz.
Carson “has broad support, but we don’t know yet the depth and commitment of that support,” Yang says.
“It doesn’t mean it is enduring,” but it’s still noteworthy that a majority of Republicans pick Carson as either their first or second choice, adds GOP pollster McInturff.
And while there’s still plenty of time for an establishment GOP candidate to beat Carson or Trump, Democratic pollster Peter Hart wonders if the 2016 Republican race is shaping up to resemble 1964, when Barry Goldwater won the GOP nomination.
An election which didn’t wind up too well for the Republican Party because Goldwater became an easy target to due many of his past statements– and because he was widely seen as being outside of what was then the political mainstream of the United States.
graphic via shutterstock.com
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.