Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, facing a firestorm of global protest after his call to bar Muslims from entering the United States, has yet again surprised political circles, notably the Republican establishment, by hitting a new high in polls.
In a New York Times-CBS News national poll, released on Thursday, Trump has notched up 35 per cent of support among Republican primary voters, with the No. 2 candidate, Senator Ted Cruz, way behind at 16 per cent, followed by neurosurgeon Ben Carson (13 per cent) and Senator Marco Rubio (9 per cent).
Exploiting the continuing surge in his popularity, despite the outrage voiced by the White House and most political leaders over his anti-Muslim proposal, Trump has put the Republican establishment on notice, saying he could break away and run as an Independent if he was not treated “fairly”.
Trump told CNN that things might not come to such a pass in the final analysis, but he would keep the options open if the Republican leadership did not treat him with “a certain amount of decorum and respect”.
“If they don’t treat me as the front-runner...If the playing field is not level, then certainly all options are open. But that’s nothing I want to do...I’ll know that over a period of a couple months. We’ll go through the primaries. We’ll see what happens, and I’ll make a determination,” he said on a day when top Republican leaders joined others in denouncing his anti-Muslim rhetoric.
The NYT-CBS poll, conducted both before and after Trump’s controversial statement but mostly before it, pointed out that despite his expanding lead over his Republican rivals, nearly two-thirds of American voters still felt “concerned or frightened about the prospect of a Trump presidency”.
But another poll, released by Bloomberg Politics/Purple Strategies, said that nearly two-thirds of likely Republican primary voters supported Trump’s proposal to ban the entry of Muslims. “When told both sides of the argument, support for Trump’s proposal remained relatively unchanged at 64 per cent,” it said.
Apart from the national poll, Trump, who has been leading in Iowa and New Hampshire, has established a sizeable lead in the other important early primary state of South Carolina. In this poll, conducted by Fox News, Trump again leads with 35 per cent in South Carolina, followed by Carson with 15 per cent, and Cruz and Rubio, with each polling 14 per cent.