A cancelled Chicago rally last Friday may have given Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump the boost he needed to get to 50 percent of the conservative vote.
Since the March 9 incident in which protesters forced the Manhattan billionaire to suspend a University of Illinois at Chicago event, Republicans appear to have flocked to the GOP front-runner.
Trump is now less than one percentage point away from having the majority of the party back him, and is also boasting his highest level of support since the beginning of the year, when he had peaked at 48 percent, according to a new Reuters poll.
One week ago, 40.4 percent of conservatives backed Trump in the poll. By March 15, that number had grown to 49.2 percent, more than double the 20.7 percent of support Texas Sen. Ted Cruz received.
The poll, taken on Tuesday before Florida Sen. Marco Rubio dropped out following his home state loss, put Rubio in third place with 12 percent and Ohio Gov. John Kasich in fourth place with 9 percent. Slightly more than 8 percent of respondents said they did not know which candidate they would support.
Cruz has slipped since March 10, when he peaked at 25 percent. But Trump has consistently grown his support, likely due to the nearly $2 billion of free media he has earned since the onset of the campaign, significantly higher than other Republican and even Democratic presidential candidates.
Trump, ranked first in the latest Washington Examiner presidential power rankings, is more than halfway to securing the 1,237 GOP delegates necessary to win the nomination. He has been awarded 673 delegates based on his primary performances.
				
