A new Bloomberg Politics poll of U.S. adults found that Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are rising above their competitors in the Republican presidential contest, while Jeb Bush and Carly Fiorina are fading.
Trump is leading the poll with 24 percent of the vote, and he’s closely followed by Carson with 20 percent. A second-tier group of experience politicians follows: Rubio has 12 percent, and Cruz has 9 percent.
Trump’s numbers are up 3 points from Bloomberg’s September poll, while Carson, Rubio and Cruz are all up 4 points.
On the other side, Bush and Fiorina are fading fast. Fiorina is down 8 points from September at 3 percent, and Bush is down 7 points, and has 6 percent. Most of the rest of the field has minimal support and didn’t see any significant change since September.
When Trump and Carson go head-to-head, Trump is the choice among Republicans as the strongest candidate to fight the Islamic State (55 percent to 29 percent) and to handle Russian leader Vladimir Putin (52-38).
However, Republican voters are more likely to think Carson has a the better temperament to be president (68-25), as well as think he would work most effectively with Congress (62-30). Carson is also viewed as the most honest and trustworthy between the two, 61-25.
The telephone-based poll was of 1,002 U.S. adults was conducted Nov. 15-17 via telephone. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. The margin of error for the sample of 379 Republican voters is plus or minus 5 percentage points.
