Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio continue to struggle in the polls — this time in a new Quinnipiac survey of voters in Iowa, the site of the first election in the Republican race for president.
As has been the case in recent polls, Donald Trump and Dr. Ben Carson lead the field. Trump is at 27 percent in the Hawkeye State, while Carson is just six percentage points behind with 21 percent. Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz is next with 9 percent.
Then comes Bush in fourth place with 6 percent. Rubio follows next with 5 percent, where he’s tied with former Hewlett-Packard executive Carly Fiorina and Ohio Gov. John Kasich. Kentucky U.S. Sen. Rand Paul and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee both are at 4 percent.
Then the shocker: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is down to just 3 percent in the survey. That’s a 15-percentage-point drop in two months in the Quinnipiac survey. Walker has been at the top of many Iowa polls for most of the year, but no candidate appears to have suffered more from the rise of Donald Trump than Walker, who had been predicted by many pundits before the campaign to be one of the most promising candidates to win the nomination.
“The Iowa Republican Caucus looks like a two-man race in which the Washington experience that has traditionally been a major measuring stick that voters have used to choose candidates is a now a big negative, ” says Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, speaking of the rise of Trump and Carson.
However, 25 percent of likely caucus-goers also put Trump at the top of the list of candidates they would definitely not support, followed by Bush at 23 percent and Chris Christie at 14 percent.
Trump has a 60-35 percent favorability rating among likely GOP Caucus participants, but Carson has a 79-6 percent favorability rating.
Quinnipiac polled 1,038 likely Republican caucus-goers in Iowa via landlines and cellphones, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
