After a poll was taken by NBC News through SurveyMonkey, the numbers are clear that Donald Trump is still at the very top of the list of GOP Republican candidates.
The poll took place over 24 hours from Friday evening through Saturday. And even though Trump topped headlines across the nation, including for his negative remarks about Fox News Anchor Megyn Kelly and his dis-invitation by a huge conservative gathering in Atlanta, voters are supporting his candidacy.
Trump was at the top of the poll with 23 percent of the voters support. The second on the poll was only at 13 percent, Senator Ted Cruz, according to NBC News.
Trump was open about considering the possibility to run as an independent candidate, something none of the other Republican candidates said they would do. Even this remark didn’t change his large pool of supporters who said they would vote for him whether or not he won the GOP nomination. Only about one-fifth said they would jump ship to another candidate if he did in fact switch to being an independent candidate.
But Trump’s standing in the charts was not the only surprise the poll revealed. Businesswoman Carly Fiorina captured 22 percent of supports who agreed that she had won the debate over Trump, Senator Marco Rubio and Cruz. Although the poll still set her at fourth in overall support with only 8 percent of Republican primary voters saying they would support her.
Fiorina was able to gain support pre-debate as well in a “Happy Hour” debate that aired on Thursday which was before the prime-time event.
The survey that was conducted polled from a 3,551 people across the nation added 18 and over. This small amount of participants was chosen from over 3 million people who already take SurveyMonkey surveys on a daily basis.
According to the poll, there is a built-in estimated error rate of plus or minus 2.4 percentage points for the entire sample. There is also a 3.4 percent set just for Republican primary voters.
The survey was a combined effort from the Analytics Unit of NBC News and Penn’s Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies and the actual collection by the platform SurveyMonkey.
