New polls from NBC News and Marist out from New Hampshire and Iowa show that, once again, billionaire Donald Trump is winning a fight with yet another career politician: This time, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
Bush’s position in the all-important first-in-the-nation caucus state of Iowa has deteriorated significantly as he’s at a meager 6 percent—in a poll with a margin of error of 5.5 percent—meaning he’s slipping further and further into the lower tiers of candidates there. Trump, meanwhile, is at 29 percent in Iowa while fellow political outsider and conservative Dr. Ben Carson is at 22 percent. The two of them—Carson and Trump—combined earn 51 percent of the GOP primary electorate in Iowa. Throw in Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO who’s also never held political office and is currently at 5 percent, and Sen. Ted Cruz—another political outsider who’s only held office for two years in the U.S. Senate and is at 4 percent—and a strong majority of 60 percent of Iowa Republicans support a political outsider and not another Bush.
The concurrently released poll from the first-in-the-nation primary state of New Hampshire shows a nearly identical trend there. New Hampshire, which unlike Iowa is a pretty much must-win-state for Bush to be able to get the nomination or at least to get it early enough that there isn’t a convention feud later, clearly doesn’t like him. Trump tops the field again with 28 percent. Carson is in third with 11 percent. Bush has slipped back to fourth place with just 8 percent—a six-point slide from when Trump got in the race in July, when the same pollsters found him at 14 percent—an embarrassingly low number for the guy who is supposed to the frontrunner at this point. What’s more, in second place just ahead of Carson but still quite a ways behind Trump is Ohio Gov. John Kasich with 12 percent. That means Kasich—another establishment-minded Republican candidate—has moved Bush out of the way and essentially blown past him as the new establishment frontrunner.
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