A new national poll shows that Marco Rubio is fading fast among Republican voters, and is now in fourth place nationally.
Rubio fell 7 points over the last week, and won just 11 percent of the GOP vote in a new NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll. National polls aren’t as indicative of the race as statewide polls, but Rubio’s falling numbers coincide with his recent slip, and the new figures were released on the same day Rubio was expected to lose his home state of Florida to Donald Trump.
Trump, meanwhile, is up 5 points to 44 percent in the new poll, and is 20 points ahead of Ted Cruz, who got 24 percent of the vote. Cruz rose 4 points over the last week.
John Kasich rose 3 points, and sits in third place at 12 percent. Kasich is hoping to win his own home state of Ohio, and in some recent polls is ahead of Trump there.
Trump held leads among most voter groups, but Republican voters who consider themselves “very conservative” chose Cruz over Trump by a narrow margin.
Among Democrats, Hillary Clinton still has a comfortable lead over her only challenger, Bernie Sanders, although Sanders closed some of the gap. Clinton won 54 percent of the vote among Democrats, down 1 point from the week before, while Sanders rose 3 points to 41 percent.
While the former secretary of state leads Sanders among overall male voters with a small margin, she leads him by 20 points among women. Among women under the age of 30, however, Sanders bests Clinton.
The online poll was conducted from March 7-13 and surveyed 2,280 registered GOP voters and 2,597 registered Democratic voters. The margins of error were 3.1 points and 2.7 points, respectively.
