Friday’s update to the CNN/WMUR tracking poll of likely Republican primary voters finds Donald Trump holding on to an 11-point lead and the widespread expectation that he will win Tuesday’s primary.
Overall, 28% back Trump, 17% Marco Rubio, 13% each for Ted Cruz and John Kasich, 9% for Jeb Bush, 5% for Carly Fiorina and 4% for Chris Christie.
These results represent the first three nights of interviewing conducted after Iowa’s caucuses, held Monday night. The University of New Hampshire’s Survey Center, which completed the interviews, will be calling voters each day between now and Monday, and CNN and WMUR will release updates to the numbers based on the most recent four nights of dialing on Sunday morning and Monday evening.
According to Friday’s results, nearly two-thirds say they expect Trump to prevail on Tuesday, 11% see a Cruz victory in the offing, 8% a Rubio win, and the rest of the field merits 1% or less.
The final GOP debate before voting on Tuesday will be held Saturday night, and ahead of that face-off, fully 30% of likely Republican voters say they are still trying to decide whom to support. Another 26% say they are leaning toward a candidate and 45% say they have definitely made up their minds.
Of the candidates vying for second place, John Kasich remains the one with the most room to grow. The poll finds just 2% have ruled him out as a possibility, compared with 14% who have ruled out Cruz, 9% Bush, 5% Rubio, and 3% each for Christie and Fiorina. More than a third (36%) say they’ve ruled out Trump.
On the Democratic side, things are largely holding steady.
Bernie Sanders continues to top Clinton by about a 2-to-1 margin, 61% to 31%. Nearly two-thirds of likely Democratic voters say they have definitely decided whom to support, so the two remaining Democratic candidates are battling over a small share of the likely electorate.
Most still expect to see a Sanders victory on Tuesday, with 24% thinking Clinton will come out on top. The pool of likely voters remains generally content with the field, with 55% now saying both remaining candidates are acceptable, while 18% say they’ve ruled out a vote for Clinton, 7% have crossed Sanders off their list.
The poll was completed in the evening on February 4, so the vast majority of interviews were conducted before Thursday night’s debate between Clinton and Sanders.
The CNN/WMUR poll was conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center by telephone from February 2-4. The poll includes interviews with a random sample of 751 adult residents of New Hampshire, including 312 who say they plan to vote in the Democratic presidential primary and 287 who plan to vote in the Republican presidential primary. For results among the sample of likely Democratic primary voters, the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 5.5 percentage points, it is 5.8 for likely Republican primary voters.
