Carson closing on Trump in NH
Donald Trump has 22 percent support, to 18 percent for Dr. Ben Carson in a poll released Thursday by WBUR, the Boston public radio station. Carly Firoina is third with 11 percent.
Soft-spoken Dr. Ben Carson is closing in on the bombastic Donald Trump in New Hampshire, according to a new WBUR poll that the Boston NPR station released Wednesday.
Trump leads 22 percent to 18 percent among voters who say they are likely to cast ballots in the Republican primary early next year, the survey says. New Hampshire hosts the first primaries in the nation.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who has staked his candidacy on doing well in New Hampshire, is supported by 2 percent of likely voters, the poll finds.
Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, is running third, at 11 percent. One time frontrunner Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, is at 9 percent, even with Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
It is striking that nearly half the respondents chose a candidate who has never held elective office. (Fiorina ran for U.S. Senate from California in 2010 but lost). The WBUR survey finds that 87 percent of likely GOP voters say that it is very important to them that their choice "says what he or she truly believes." On the flip side, just 24 percent say it is very important for a candidate to have experience in political office.
The poll, conducted for the station by MassInc Polling Group, is based on telephone interviews conducted with 404 likely GOP primary voters Sept. 12-14, using both landlines and mobile phones. Results are subject to a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.
In New Hampshire, voters not registered with either major party are allowed to choose the primary in which they want to vote. Sixty-five percent of WBUR's sample were registered Republicans, and 35 percent were independent or unaffiliated.