CARBONDALE – Republican businessman Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton are double digits ahead of their competitors in statewide polling conducted by Southern Illinois University's Paul Simon Institute.
Trump would receive 28% of the GOP primary vote, Ted Cruz 15%, Marco Rubio 14% and John Kasich 13%, with now-withdrawn Jeb Bush at 8% and Ben Carson at 6%. Others or undecided were at 15%, according to the poll conducted the week before the February 20th South Carolina GOP primary.
Former First Lady Hillary Clinton is polling at 52% of the Illinois Democrat vote and Senator Bernie Sanders at 33%, with 16% still undecided.
Charlie Leonard, a political scientist who helped supervise the poll, said, “Journalists always ask me if there is something surprising in a poll result. A part of me is surprised that Donald Trump leads significantly in a state known for its moderate Republicans, from Everett Dirksen to Jim Edgar to Mark Kirk. On the other hand, the ‘not-Trump’ vote, combined, swamps the pro-Trump vote, with somewhere around one in seven voters still up for grabs.
“The other thing that is somewhat surprising was the relatively weak showing of Jeb Bush versus the other so-called ‘mainstream’ Republicans,” Leonard said. A similarly weak showing on Saturday in South Carolina’s Republican primary led to Bush suspending his campaign after the polls closed.
David Yepsen, institute director, said, “While this is good news for Trump, the poll also illustrates a problem for him; there are 72 percent of Illinois Republicans who are for someone else or are undecided. If the non-Trump vote rallies around a single candidate, Trump could be upended.”
The sample of 422 Democrats has a margin of error of 4.7 percent. The sample of 306 Republicans has a margin of error of 5.6 percent. Each is reported at the 95 percent confidence level. This means that if we conducted the survey 100 times, in 95 of those instances, the result would be within plus or minus the reported margin for error for each subsample.
Live telephone interviews were conducted by Customer Research International of San Marcos, Texas. Cell phone interviews accounted for 40 percent of the sample. A Spanish language version of the questionnaire and a Spanish-speaking interviewer were made available.
