Republican Race Status Quo in First Post-Debate Poll

October 31, 2015

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The first poll after the third Republican debate, by Investor’s Business Daily, shows no substantial change.

After taking a battering in last month’s poll, Donald Trump has re-emerged at the top of the Republican field in the latest IBD/TIPP poll.

Support for Trump among registered Republicans and those leaning Republican is 28%; support for Carson is 23%. Last month’s poll had Carson up by 7 points over Trump.

Marco Rubio comes in third at 11%, the same as last month.

No other GOP candidate reached double digits. Support for Jeb Bush dropped two points to 6%; Carly Fiorina collapsed to 3% from last month’s 9%. Ted Cruz held at 6%.

“Trump’s support in the last poll suffered somewhat because of his nearly weeklong boycott of Fox News, which has since been lifted,” said Raghavan Mayur, president of TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, which conducts the IBD/TIPP poll. “Carson has recently been under more scrutiny by both the media and other candidates.”

Mayur added, “Though our latest poll shows Trump leading Carson, the poll’s margin of error of +/- five points means that Trump and Carson are still running a close race.”

Here’s their graphic comparing the two polls:

The only movements outside the margin of error were Trump and Fiorina. But Trump’s plummet and Fiorina’s rise in the previous iteration would seem to have been flukes, as they weren’t sustained in the RealClearPolitics average for more than a few days. Rubio, Bush, and Cruz all remained within the margin of error in this poll.

It’ll be interesting to see if there’s significant movement in other polls as they’re released over the next few days. Certainly, though, there seems no obvious reason for any of the serious candidates to drop out at this juncture. Iowa is just around the corner now and I don’t see why anyone wouldn’t just ride it out and see what happens.

4 responses to “Republican Race Status Quo in First Post-Debate Poll”

Mark Ivey

October 31, 2015 at 8:51 am

“The Don” is back. :))
Slugger

October 31, 2015 at 11:09 am

I’m not surprised by this. All people tend to stick to loyalties that they have established and view the world through the lens of confirmation bias. By the time of a third event, it would take a huge gaffe for a candidate to lose supporters and a revolutionary brilliant remark to gather adherents.
The model for all of these debates is the long ago Kennedy-Nixon confrontation that resulted in a great deal of buzz and excitement. I suspect that all moderators since then have wanted to recreate a similar noteworthy event, but instead we have gotten fifty years of mostly vacuous recitals of sloganeering talking points.
JohnMcC

October 31, 2015 at 11:37 am

@Slugger: Your invoking the Nixon-Kennedy debates takes me back, my friend. I’m not going to research this (alert! alert! memory alert!) — but Theodore White’s epochal book (‘Making of the President – 1960’) pointed out that Mr Nixon was completely exhausted when that debate came around having promised to visit every one of the (then new total of) 50 states. And that he also was suffering from a very painful condition (phlebitis — a blood clot in the veins of his legs) caused by the hours and hours of air travel that kind of milage required at the dawn of the jet-airliner-age.

Totally off topic of course, but interesting to me. Republicans have been finding excuses for their debate performance my whole lifetime.
Slugger

October 31, 2015 at 5:25 pm

@JohnMcC: I was not of voting age at that time but was interested. Nixon was touted as deeply experienced with serious gravitas in foreign affairs. He had engaged Khruchshev in an informal back and fourth that was called a solid win by our media. Nixon was widely expected to wipe the floor with a callow junior senator with little experience. On TV, JFK turned out to be charming and full of charisma while Nixon came across as grumpy, poorly shaved, and sweating.
Those were the impressions of fourteen year old me. My view of both men is different now.
However, it was dramatic TV at a time when TV was young, and all of us were not hardened by overexposure.