I don’t know what’s going on with the polls, but now the second national GOP poll show Ben Carson pulling away from Donald Trump. Carson leads Trump 33% to 26%. Third is the new GOP-e golden boy Marco Rubio at 10% then Ted Cruz at eight percent. I don’t know if the GOP-e is starting to run anti-Trump ads or not. I haven’t seen any here.
| Second national poll (Reuters) shows Carson over Trump |
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Yep, that’s likely Republican voters who are born-again Christians. On October 17th, Trump and Carson were essentially tied among that group; 10 days later, Carson is blowing Trump out of the water, 45/25. It’s a very small sample so that lead may to some extent be the handiwork of a large MOE, but the trend over nearly two weeks is clear. Why born-again Republicans have suddenly decided in the last 10 days that they really, really prefer Ben Carson to Trump is a mystery, but there you go. The answers to “values” questions at tomorrow night’s debate probably deserve extra attention given how significant they may be in influencing who leads the race.
Three notes of hope for Trump fans here. One: As you can see in the first graph above, the tracker can be volatile. Two weeks ago, Trump was out to a sizable lead over Carson and the rest of the field. Things change fast in a field where most voters are still making up their minds. Two: The sample sizes of likely Republican voters used by Reuters over the last few days are conspicuously smaller than they were a few weeks ago, when Trump was cruising in first place. Today the sample was 277; on October 18, when Trump led Carson 38/19, it was 438. Two days later, when Trump led 34/20, it was 484. In theory, given the size of today’s MOE, Trump could actually be leading 32/27. That’s hard to believe given the trendlines towards Carson, but a bigger sample would be nice. And three: If anyone has both the means and motivation to expand the pool of likely voters by launching a drive to register unregistered Republicans, it’s Trump. I don’t know why he hasn’t made that a core talking point of his campaign, frankly. The script writes itself: “There are millions of blue-collar people out there who like what Republicans stand for in principle but don’t bother to vote because they’re disgusted with our leadership. The first step to making America great again is getting these people registered and voting again.” Getting Trump fans to the polls en masse would render a lot of these recent polls showing him trailing meaningless. But whether he’s willing to spend the money and build the organization required for that task, only he knows.