A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Thursday shows Donald Trump scoring his highest percentage in a national Republican primary poll, 33 percent, and more than doubling his lead.
[crscore]Ted Cruz[/crscore] came in second with 20 percent, [crscore]Marco Rubio[/crscore] followed with 13 percent and Ben Carson got 12 percent. Jeb Bush and Chris Christie are tied with 5 percent, no other GOP contenders got more than 3 percent. Trump has extended his lead over Cruz nationally from five points a month a ago, 27 to 22 percent, this marks an increase in his lead of 160 percent.
This isn’t the only significant increase in support the poll shows for the New York real estate developer, 65 percent of Republican primary voters said they could see themselves supporting Trump, only 23 percent said the same back in March 2015.
Both Senators Cruz and Rubio also saw an increased percentage of Republicans willing to support them compared to the results in March, Cruz has the highest support at 71 percent (was at 40 percent), and Rubio is at 67 percent (used to 56 percent). While the poll shows that both Carson and Bush have fewer Republican primary voters willing to support them, 42 percent and 60 percent, respectively. Seventy-five percent of GOP voters saw themselves supporting Jeb in June and 77 percent did for Carson in an October poll.
The NBC/WSJ poll of 400 primary voters was conducted from Jan 9-13 by Public Opinion Strategies and posed hypothetical match-ups between Republican frontrunners which showed the strength of the outsider in the current race. In a three way race between Trump, Cruz, and Rubio, Trump gets 40 percent, Cruz 31 percent, and Rubio 26 percent. Although Cruz beats Trump one-one 51 percent to 43 percent, while Trump beats Rubio by seven points, 52 percent to 45.