While a number of candidates who were on the debate stage on Wednesday night for the final GOP debate might like to pretend that they still have a chance of getting elected president, the fact remains that former President Donald Trump still has a massive lead over all the other candidates, bringing in about 60 percent of the electorate’s support while they struggle to present anyone with double-digit polling.
What’s more, former President Trump is so much better liked than all the others that the Republican primary voters present for the third Republican primary debate were caught on camera loudly chanting in support of Trump before the debate even started.
Conservative Twitter personality Benny Johnson posted a clip of the video on X, captioning it by saying, “🚨 BREAKING: Trump chant just broke out in the crowd at the RNC Debate and NBC producer yelled at them to stop.” The crowd was chanting “Trump! Trump! Trump!” as the producer demanded they stop.
Watch the incident here:
The most recent polling shows that Trump holds a huge lead over his GOP rivals and even boasts a modest lead over current President Joe Biden. That poll, released by CNN on Tuesday, shows that Trump holds a four point lead, 49 percent to 45 percent, in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup with President Joe Biden.
The poll represents a modest shift in Trump’s favor, with the former president having gained two points since a CNN poll on the same matchup released in August. Biden has dropped one point since the August poll, so overall sentiment shifted about three points in Trump’s favor.
The result is largely similar when the other candidates are mixed in. When Green Party contender Cornel West and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., likely to run as an independent, are included in the matchup, Trump’s support drops to 41 percent, but Biden falls even farther, crashing down to 35 percent.
A Biden official, commenting on the poll, said, “Despite the ‘hair-on-fire’, ‘sky-is-falling’ tone we’ve seen from media coverage over the last few days, political predictions more than a year out tend to look a little different a year later.”
Biden, for his part, told Fox News White House Correspondent Peter Doocy, when Doocy asked about the president’s problematic polling results, “Because you don’t read the polls (inaudible). Ten polls. Eight of them, I’m beating him in those places. Eight of them. You guys only do two. CNN and New York Times. Check it out. Check it out. We’ll get you a copy of all those other polls.”
Among the GOP contenders involved, Trump sits at 61 percent, which is up three points since an early October poll from CNN. That puts him far ahead of the closest competitor, Ron DeSantis, who sits at 17 percent in that poll and is below 10 percent in some others. Nikki Haley is in third place at 10 percent, which is about in line with her other polling results.
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