Political outsiders Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina dominate the GOP presidential field's top tier, but their favorability with voters varies widely, a new poll finds.
In the Washington Post-ABC News
survey released Wednesday morning, retired pediatric surgeon Carson gets a better overall positive rating, 45 percent favorable to 27 percent unfavorable, while Trump has a 35 percent favorable and 60 percent unfavorable split, and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Fiorina comes in with a 35 percent favorable and 30 percent unfavorable rating.
Carson is more popular than Trump with self-identified Republicans, the new polls shows; he has a 68-14 favorability split, while Trump nearly matches that with 62 percent favorability – but gets swamped with an unfavorability rating of 34 percent.
Fiorina gets a 47-27 split with Republicans, the poll shows – though over 25 percent of GOP voters still have no opinion of her.
When it comes to conservatives, Carson scores the best of the three: 82 percent are favorable and just 10 percent are unfavorable.
The survey also finds:
- Trump's image hasn't changed much since July among Republicans or the public at large, but he's losing ground among independents. Last month, he had a 41 percent favorability compared with a 54 percent unfavorable view from independents; now it's 33-62.
- Trump's image among Hispanics is deep underwater, with an 82 percent unfavorable rating – but he's gaining with African Americans, whose unfavorable view last month was 81 percent and in this survey fell to 68 percent.
- Carson's popularity among African Americans is slightly more negative than positive at 50 percent unfavorable to 36 percent favorable. Fiorina's ratings are 33 percent to 40 percent with those voters.
- Among women, Fiorina gets a 31 percent favorable to 29 percent unfavorable rating, while four in 10 women don't give her a rating at this point. Carson scores 4o percent favorable to 29 percent unfavorable with women.
The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
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