Ohio Gov. John Kasich has a narrow lead over Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump in the final 24 before GOP voters cast their ballots in his home state, a new poll shows.
According to the latest Monmouth University poll, Kasich leads Trump 40 to 35 percent, a lead that is just outside the survey’s 4.4 percent margin of error. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz comes in a distant third with 15 percent support, while Florida Sen. Marco Rubio claims just 5 percent of the vote.
Kasich maintains a solid 16-point lead over Trump among political moderates in the Buckeye State, but the New York billionaire outperforms him among very conservative voters (37-26 percent) and voters whose annual income is less than $50,000 (44-34 percent). Wealthier voters prefer Kasich to Trump 48 to 28 percent and more than 80 percent of Ohio Republicans approve of the job he has done as Ohio’s two-term governor.
Fifty-seven percent of Ohio residents who give Kasich a positive rating plan to vote for him in the state’s March 15 primary, while 26 percent said they will vote for Trump. More than 60 percent of voters who disapprove of Kasich’s job performance plan to support his billionaire opponent on Tuesday.
Even if Trump wins Ohio’s winner-take-all primary, a big step for him to secure the GOP nomination, less than two-thirds of Ohio Republicans would support him as their’s party’s nominee. Sixty-four percent of GOP voters in the Buckeye State said they would back Trump next November, while 10 percent would vote for Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, and 12 percent would support a third-party candidate. Six percent of Republicans said they would stay home, while 7 percent were unsure what they would do in such a scenario.
Of Kasich’s current supporters, 19 percent said they would vote for Clinton in a general election matchup against Trump.
The Monmouth poll comes on the heels of back-to-back polls showing Trump and Kasich tied in Ohio. Kasich has previously said that he is likely to exit the 2016 race if he fails to beat Trump in his own backyard.
