WASHINGTON — Step aside, Donald Trump.
The brash billionaire must now share frontrunner status in the US
Republican presidential nominations battle with retired neurosurgeon and
fellow political outsider Ben Carson, fresh polling showed on
Wednesday.
The conservative Carson, the only African-American in the
2016 White House race, is virtually tied at the top with Trump, trailing
him by one percentage point, according to the Quinnipiac University
survey released on Wednesday.
But their trend lines are dramatically
different. Tuesday’s NBC/Wall Street Journal poll has Carson surging
into a six-point lead, quite a showing for a candidate who has largely
shunned traditional campaign strategies and refused to play rough and
tumble campaign politics with his rivals.
That follows a New York Times/CBS News poll from last
week, just before the most recent Republican primary debate in which
Carson remained largely on the margins, that showed Carson edging ahead
of Trump nationally.
Americans are still a full year from electing the man or
woman who will succeed President Barack Obama, but the first state-wide
primary votes to determine the Democratic and Republican nominees are
less than three months away.
Carson, who has shown strength with evangelical Christians
as well as independent voters, is a soft-spoken but controversial
political neophyte.
To date he is the only Republican who has shown an ability
to muster enough support to knock Trump off is perch, or at least share
the top spot.
Trump leads with 24 percent support compared with Carson’s
23, according to Quinnipiac, with Florida Senator Marco Rubio next at
14 percent followed by Texas Senator Ted Cruz with 13 percent.
No other candidate tops three percent except former
Florida governor Jeb Bush, the son and brother of two presidents, who
was languishing at four percent.
Nine percent of voters remain undecided, according to the
poll of 502 registered Republicans, with a margin of error of 4.4
percent. In a telling sign of how topsy-turvy the Republican race still
is, a full 63 percent of respondents said they might change their mind.
“With the election one year away, Ben Carson has
surgically cut away all but one GOP opponent and taken a scalpel to
Hillary Clinton’s lead,” assistant Quinnipiac poll director Tim Malloy
said, referring to survey figures showing Carson besting the Democratic
frontrunner by 10 points in a head-to-head matchup.
“But a year is an eternity in presidential campaigns and this race already has left some former front-runners on life support.”
Clinton edges Trump 46 to 43 percent in a hypothetical
general election matchup, but she loses 46 to 41 percent in matchups
against both Rubio and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. —AFP
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