Trump jumps to 47-point lead over GOP rivals in national poll

A poll released Wednesday shows GOP presidential hopefuls will need to ramp up their messages to voters if they want to catch up to former President Trump in the 2024 primary.

The Emerson College poll found that Trump expanded his lead to 47 points over his GOP rivals — marking his largest lead since the pollster started tracking it in June 2022. Support for the former president’s 2024 bid jumped up by 9 points to 59 percent since last month’s poll.

The increase comes amid his ongoing legal woes and his decision to skip the first Republican debate.

“The Trump voter remains resilient, and despite a dip in August’s post-debate poll, Trump has now expanded his lead and has improved his position from before the first debate,” Spencer Kimball, the executive director of Emerson College Polling, said.

Support for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis remained stable at 12 percent since last month, while conservative entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy fell 2 points to 7 percent. Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Vice President Mike Pence each received 5 percent; former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley received 3 percent and Sen. Tim Scott (S.C.) garnered 2 percent of support.

An additional 5 percent of GOP primary voters said they were undecided on who to vote for.

Sixty-three percent of GOP primary voters said they will definitely support their chosen candidate, but another 36 percent said their minds are open and they can choose someone else, according to the survey. Overall, 75 percent of those who selected Trump said they would definitely support him in the upcoming primary — showing little room for GOP rivals to make a dent in the front-runner’s base.

The poll also shows that Trump and President Biden are neck-and-neck in a hypothetical general election, with each front-runner garnering 45 percent of the vote. This is in line with the YouGov/Yahoo News poll also released Wednesday that showed Trump and Biden locked in a dead heat.

The poll was conducted Sept. 17-18 among 1,125 voters and has a margin of error of 2.8 percentage points.