Amid a swirling row over a series of anti-Muslim comments in recent days, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump has widened his lead over immediate rival Ben Carson and other party aspirants.
A new ABC News/Washington Post poll shows the billionaire businessman ahead of neurosurgeon Carson by 10 per cent (32-22), with other Republican hopefuls trailing far behind – Senator Marco Rubio (11 per cent), Senator Ted Cruz (8 per cent) and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush (6 per cent).
A Fox News poll, released simultaneously on Sunday, also gives Trump a 10 per cent advantage over Carson (28-18), with Rubio and Cruz each receiving 14 per cent and Bush just 5 per cent. The other eight Republicans in the fray have polled around 3 per cent each or even less.
Trump stepped up his anti-Muslim rhetoric after the Paris attacks on November 13, when he was more or less tied with Carson.
In the wake of the attacks, Trump has talked of closing down “some mosques”, monitoring the American Muslim population by creating a database and requiring the community to register and carry IDs.
Although nobody wants to shut down religious institutions, the United States may have “no choice” but to close down some mosques where “some bad things are happening”, Trump said in an interview to Fox News about a week ago and followed it up at campaign appearances and in comments to other news outlets.
Trump has also been claiming that when the terrorists brought down the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11, 2001, “thousands and thousands of people” cheered the destruction in New Jersey, adding the place has “large Arab populations”.
After this assertion at a campaign rally on Saturday was dismissed as baseless, Trump repeated it on ABC News on Sunday, claiming: “It was on television. I saw it…There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations.”
The ABC/Washington Post poll said that although a larger percentage of Republican voters regarded Carson as more honest than Trump (34-23) and Bush as more experienced (33-21), as many as 47 per cent of those surveyed viewed Trump as the best bet to bring change to Washington.
The Fox poll reported that while Trump has widened his lead, Carson might lose his No. 2 spot with Senators Rubio and Cruz fast closing their gap with him.