State of the 2016 race: One year out
Eight different Republicans have led polls since last year. "It's a mess," says one pollster.
By Shane Goldmacher and Annie Karni
11/08/15 04:22 PM EST
... Remarkably, eight Republicans have led respected national surveys since early 2014: Trump, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Mike Huckabee, Chris Christie and Rand Paul. In contrast, the Democratic contest has been the picture of stability. Clinton has led every national poll for two years running, and only twice by less than double digits.
“It’s a mess,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Poll. “The Republican schism is more serious and more recent — they have a fundamental outsider-establishment divide that we see in Congress, around the country and on the campaign trail. The only point of unity is their dislike for Hillary Clinton.”
Today, two outsiders with no political experience between them — Trump and Carson — combine to top 50 percent support in most of the recent GOP primary polls. Bush, the son and brother of the past two Republican presidents, wallows at a tenth of that. And the first candidates to drop out entirely were the longest-serving governor in Texas history, Rick Perry, and the Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker, who became a conservative folk hero for crippling the state’s unions.
That uncertainty led Karl Rove, the Republican uber-strategist, to speculate about the prospect of a brokered convention in the pages of The Wall Street Journal last week ...
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/2016-election-state-race-215631
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