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Republican presidential candidate John Kasich speaks at the Women's National Republican Club in New York on April 12. | AP Photo Poll: No native-son bounce for Kasich in Pennsylvania

John Kasich speaks often about his hardscrabble upbringing in McKees Rocks, a down-on-its-luck mill town outside Pittsburgh.

He's made growing up the son of a mailman in the tough blue-collar community central to his political identity, telling an interviewer in January, ”You screw with me, you’re screwing with the wrong guy. ... In McKees Rocks, you come in our town, you beat us in football, we’ll break every freakin’ window on your bus. You don’t want to mess with us.”

But a new poll shows that the Ohio governor is getting little or no native-son bounce in Pennsylvania, not even in his hometown region.

Instead, it's Donald Trump who leads his rivals by double digits in the latest Monmouth University poll of likely Republican primary voters in Pennsylvania, far outpacing Kasich and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

Trump took 44 percent to Cruz's 28 percent, followed by 23 percent who said they would vote for Kasich. Another 6 percent said they were undecided among those candidates. The results are largely in line with recent polling. In a Fox News poll conducted last week with a larger sample size, Trump earned 48 percent, followed by Kasich with 22 percent and Cruz with 20 percent. And Trump was surging in the RealClearPolitics average of Pennsylvania polls, even before the Monmouth survey is taken into account.

On a regional basis, Trump performed strongest in the rural areas of the state from northeast to central Pennsylvania, taking 48 percent, compared with 24 percent for Cruz and 20 percent for Kasich. On the western side of the state, Trump leads Cruz by a slightly narrower margin, 43 percent to 29 percent, while Kasich received 25 percent. In the Greater Philadelphia area, the race is closer, with Trump at 40 percent, Cruz at 31 percent and Kasich at 23 percent.

About four in 10 — 43 percent — said they had completely decided on the candidate they will support, while 29 percent indicated a strong preference. Just 9 percent said they had a slight preference, and 16 percent said they were still undecided about their choice.

With each remaining Republican matched up against Hillary Clinton and a generic independent in a general election, roughly seven in 10 said they would vote for Trump, Cruz or Kasich.

Only a little more than half — 56 percent — said they knew Kasich, despite his frequent paeans to McKees Rocks and his sometimes perilous shoutouts to the Pittsburgh Steelers. Of those people, 95 percent said it would have no impact on whether they would vote for the Ohio governor.

As for Trump, even a strong performance in the April 26 public vote might not translate into a delegate victory in Pennsylvania, whose 17 at-large delegates are winner-take-all but whose 54 congressional-district delegates are directly elected themselves.

Monmouth conducted the poll from April 10-12 via landlines and cellphones, surveying 303 likely Republican voters drawn from a list of those who participated in either of the past two primary elections or both of the past two general elections or who had registered to vote since 2014. The margin of error is plus or minus 5.6 percentage points.