2016 Poll: Walker and Paul up in Iowa, Bush and Christie lag

Scott Walker and Rand Paul are ahead of the GOP pack in Iowa, while Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and Ted Cruz are lagging behind at single digits, according to a new poll released Saturday.

The survey conducted for Bloomberg Politics and the Des Moines Register showed Walker at 15 percent among Republican caucus-goers, Paul at 14 percent, and Mike Huckabee, the 2008 victor in Iowa, at 10 percent. Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson was the first choice of 9 percent of respondents.


Other big-name contenders fared poorly: Bush was the first choice of just 8 percent of Republican voters, while Cruz registered at 5 percent and Christie at 4 percent. Rick Santorum, who narrowly won the caucuses in 2012, notched 4 percent, and Marco Rubio and Rick Perry each garnered 3 percent.

Mitt Romney, who announced the day after the poll ended that he wouldn’t run again in 2016, was the top choice of 13 percent of respondents.

The poll, conducted a year out from the caucuses, shows that two establishment-favored favorites, Bush and Christie, have their work cut out to win over Republicans in the first-in-the-nation voting state. Bush’s ratings were just above water, with 46 percent of respondents saying they view him favorably and 43 percent unfavorably. But the former Florida governor’s unfavorable numbers have risen by 15 percentage points since the last Bloomberg-Register poll in October.

Christie’s unfavorability rating is even worse at 54 percent, up 9 percentage points from October. The New Jersey governor gets positive marks from just over one-in-three caucus voters.

Walker, meanwhile, has catapulted to the head of the field, with a commanding 60 percent of respondents giving him positive marks (up from 49 percent in October) and 12 percent offering a negative take (essentially unchanged from three months ago). The Wisconsin governor, one of the few contenders whose appeal spans the establishment and social conservative wings of the party, gave a well-received speech to Iowa conservatives last weekend.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton was the first choice of 56 percent of Democratic respondents, Elizabeth Warren 16 percent, Joe Biden 9 percent, Bernie Sanders 5 percent and Martin O’Malley 1 percent.

The poll, by Selzer & Co. of West Des Moines, was conducted Monday through Thursday. Questions testing the Republican and Democratic contenders have a margin of error of 4.9 percentage points. Read Bloomberg’s write-up here and the results here.