Two polls taken after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis dropped out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination show former President Donald Trump expanding his lead over former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, the last opponent left standing.
A Suffolk University/NBC10 Boston/Boston Globe tracking poll released Monday showed Trump at 57 percent support and Haley at 38 percent. Each candidate gained two points from the Sunday tracking poll.
The survey of 500 likely GOP primary voters was conducted from Jan. 20-21. The margin of error is 4.4 percentage points., according to WTBS-TV.
In the final tracking poll released Tuesday, Trump held a 60 percent to 38 percent lead, according to WTBS-TV. This survey of 500 likely GOP primary voters was conducted from Jan. 21-22 with the same margin of error as the previous day’s tracking poll.
A poll of likely voters in the Republican primary from Insider Advantage offered similar results to the Tuesday tracking poll, with Trump leading Haley 62 percent to 35 percent.
However, that was a massive,l double-digit difference over Trump’s previous 50 percent support in earlier polls, Insider Advantage Chairman Matt Towery said in a news release.
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“I have polled New Hampshire presidential primaries for many years and fully understand that this is a state that is hard to poll and where respondents sometimes are ‘playful’ in their answers to pollsters,” Towery said in the release.
“With that in mind, it appears that a major consolidation took place when Ron DeSantis’s name no longer was part of the survey. Of course, his name will still be on the ballot so there will be some minor difference in results.
“That said, Donald Trump accelerated his lead from the 50-percentile range in the majority of earlier polls, to the 60-percentile range in this survey.”
The RealClearPolitics average of polls as of Sunday, when DeSantis was still in the race, showed Trump at 50.3 percent support and Haley at 34 percent.
As of Tuesday, that had evolved to Trump at 55.8 percent with Haley at 36.5 percent.
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The website FiveThirtyEight which on Sunday had Trump at 48.9 percent and Haley at 34.2 percent now has Trump at 52.3 percent and Haley at 36.7 percent
As noted by the New York Post, New Hampshire’s primary system allows independents to cast ballots in either the Democratic or Republican primaries.
That means independents who lean Democrat will be able to vote in the GOP primary. That and the endorsement of Haley by New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu have been expected to give Haley a solid base of support in the primary voting.
Tiny Dixville Notch, which every four years gathers its handful of voters to cast ballots in a presidential primary, cast all six of its votes for Haley, according to the New York Post.
Although that gave Haley a lead as the sun rose, the Post noted that the last time the state went the way of Dixville Notch in the Republican primary was 2008, when then-Sen. John McCain won the GOP nomination.
via westernjournal