Donald Trump is poised to do well in Arizona’s upcoming Republican presidential primary if early voting is any indication, a new poll shows.
The latest MBQF Consulting poll finds that 41.4 percent of Arizona Republicans who cast their ballots early voted for the New York billionaire, and 33.7 percent intend to vote for Trump on March 22. Last month, the same survey showed Trump leading the GOP field with 34.8 percent support in the Grand Canyon State.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has jumped to second place in the poll, the spot that Florida Sen. Marco Rubio had last month, and draws the support of 23 percent of voters who will wait until the mid-March primary to cast their ballot. Cruz has increased his support among GOP voters in Arizona by nearly 10 percentage points since February, while Rubio has plummeted nearly 15 percentage points.
In the prior poll, Rubio won 22.7 percent of the vote, but in the latest one, he drew just 7.5 percent, just a bit above where Ohio Gov. John Kasich was last month. That huge drop put him in fourth place, and Rubio was the chosen candidate of just 16 percent of respondents who’ve already voted.
Meanwhile, Kasich rose to 16 percent, enough for third, and 13 percent of early voters cast their ballots for the two-term Ohio governor.
Rubio’s downward spiral in Arizona follows a trend that’s occurred in other states and in the national GOP race. The first-term senator took heat last month for suddenly launching personal attacks against Trump and has struggled significantly in the nominating contests that have taken place since Super Tuesday, with the exception of Puerto Rico where he carried 74 percent of the vote last weekend. A handful of reports have suggested Rubio could drop out before Florida’s March 15 primary, though his campaign has dismissed those claims.
According to the same survey, nearly one in five Arizona Republicans (19.6 percent) remain undecided less than two weeks before election day.
MBQF consultant and pollster Michael Noble said the group also separated respondents into two groups, based on whether they support Trump/Cruz or Rubio/Kasich, and asked “if Republican party’s best days were ahead of them or behind them.”
“The survey found that the majority of those supporting Donald Trump and Ted Cruz felt the party’s best days were ahead of them while those supporting Marco Rubio and John Kasich felt the opposite,” Noble said in a statement about that findings.
Arizona’s winner-take-all primary is 12 days away and offers a prize of 58 delegates. The survey of 751 Republican primary voters was conducted March 8 and contains a margin of error plus or minus 3.5 percent.
