Ted Cruz held onto his Iowa lead with Donald Trump still in second place, according to a new Fox News poll released Friday.
Cruz leads among Republicans at 27 percent. Trump follows at 23 percent, down three percentage points from December but still good enough for runner-up and within the margin of error. Marco Rubio is in third place with 15 percent. Nobody else is in double digits.
Ben Carson, who briefly took the lead in Iowa in October, is down to fourth place with 9 percent of the vote. Jeb Bush is at 7 percent and Rand Paul, who boasted of a strong Iowa ground game Friday, is at 5 percent.
Cruz dominates among likely Republican caucus-goers who consider themselves “very conservative,” taking 40 percent to Trump’s 22 percent, Rubio’s 12 percent and Carson’s 11 percent.
The Texas senator also leads among evangelical Christians, topping Trump 33 percent to 19 percent. These socially conservative voters delivered Iowa to Mike Huckabee in 2008 and Rick Santorum in 2012.
Trump has a one-point lead among voters without a college degree, but Cruz has a plurality of college graduates. Trump is also up by one percentage point among first-time caucus-goers.
Nearly one in three would never vote for Trump, one in four would never vote for Bush. Only 7 percent say they would never vote for Cruz.
The poll was conducted between January 4 and 7 with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent.
