Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry has a large lead in South Carolina, the state with the South’s first primary election, according to a poll released Tuesday by Public Policy Polling.
The Texas governor is the first choice of 36 percent of South Carolina Republican primary voters, according to the poll. His closest competitor, Mitt Romney, is supported by only 13 percent. Sarah Palin is the only other potential candidate to break double digits, polling at 10 percent. Herman Cain placed fourth in the poll with 9 percent.
If Palin opts not to run, Perry’s share of the vote remains unchanged, while Romney’s grows to 16 percent. Bachmann would jump into third place with 13 percent. With Palin in the race, Bachmann gets only seven percent of the vote and is tied with Newt Gingrich for fifth place.
Jon Huntsman, despite several endorsements from prominent South Carolinians in the past weeks, has made little progress in the polls. He gets two percent of the vote, with or without Sarah Palin in the race.
Even without other candidates in the race, Perry handily trounces Bachmann and former frontrunner Romney. In a three-way race, Perry gets 50 percent of the vote, while Romney gets 25 percent and Bachmann 16 percent. That means that just three percent of voters have Bachmann as their second choice if Romney and Perry are in the race.
The results are similarly devastating if Perry takes on either Bachmann or Romney in a head-to-head match up, with Perry taking a majority of the vote in either case. If Perry crashes and burns before the primary, however, a Romney against Bachmann race would be fairly close, with Romney taking 45 percent of the vote to Bachmann’s 40 percent.
Perry’s success in South Carolina is not entirely due to the fact that he is a southerner himself, the poll finds, as three-quarters of primary voters there say that having a candidate from the South is not important. (RELATED: Perry’s camp defends ’93 HillaryCare praise)
Perry does have high popularity with the tea party, and 41 percent of those with a favorable opinion of the tea party would vote for him, with or without Palin in the race. Those with an unfavorable opinion of the tea party, however, much prefer Romney, who gets 27 percent of the vote from that group, which constitutes just 13 percent of the population of South Carolina Republican primary voters.
When PPP last polled South Carolina in June, Romney had a lead with 27 percent of the vote, followed by Sarah Palin at 18 percent.
Perry has also unseated Romney in PPP’s polling of first-in-the-nation caucus state Iowa, while the most recent New Hampshire poll by Magellan Strategies showed that Romney was holding onto his lead there.
Each candidate saw a bump in the polls following their official entrance into the race. Michele Bachmann, for instance, saw a “surge,” that has since slowed. It remains to be seen how long Perry will maintain such high numbers.
PPP surveyed 750 South Carolina likely Republican primary voters from August 25 to August 28 using automated phone calls. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.