Donald Trump's meteoric rise in the polls appears to have halted or at least slowed after his widely panned remarks about Sen. John McCain. A new national survey from Public Policy Polling
shows Trump leading his Republican presidential primary competitors, but narrowly. Trump leads the poll with 19 percent to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's 17 percent and Jeb! Bush's 12 percent. The real question is about Trump's trajectory, and there we don't have the results to do more than guess:
Despite his overall lead there are some signs that Trump's comments may have hurt him. For one thing his favorability rating is back down in the 40s, at 48/39. Although it's not a perfect comparison, our state polls in Virginia (58/32) and North Carolina (55/32) over the previous two weeks had found him with numbers in the mid to upper 50's. And although it's an even more imperfect comparison to compare numbers with other polling organizations, Trump's 2 point advantage is a lot less than the 11 point one had in an ABC/Washington Post poll conducted largely before Trump's comments about McCain.
We'll have to wait for more polls that give us real trendlines to know what's happening with Trump. But it's significant that he still leads after the widespread negative coverage of his McCain comments, that the immediate effect of that was more to slow momentum than to burst a bubble. That's reflected in the details of the PPP poll:
Trump is doing well across the GOP electorate. He leads among voters who describe themselves as 'very conservative' with 20% to 17% for Walker and 16% for Carson. But he also has the advantage with moderates, getting 22% to 19% for Bush and 13% for Rubio.
Trump may not have the long-term discipline to run the campaign he'd need to run to win the Republican nomination against experienced politicians. But his boom in the polls has shown that his appeal to Republican voters can't be dismissed. Which is why his
threat of a third-party run has to have top Republicans sweating bullets.