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 Trump led the pack of candidates seeking the Republican Party's
nomination in the 2016 election with 35 percent of support from
Republican voters, the opinion poll released on Friday found, the
same lead he held before Monday, when he said Muslim immigrants,
students and other travelers should be barred from entering the
country.
Most Republican voters said they were not bothered by his remarks,
though many said the comments could still hurt Trump's chances of
becoming president. Twenty-nine percent of Republicans, who will
pick the party's nominee for the November 2016 election, said they
found Trump's remarks offensive against 64 percent who did not.
"He's really saying what everybody else is feeling," said Donna Fee,
57, a personal caregiver from Missouri. Fee, a Republican, said she
supports Trump and agreed with his proposal to bar Muslims. But she
said his bluntness could hurt him with other voters.
 "I really think he needs somebody to calm him down, you know. I
really think he needs to learn to use a filter."
Still, in a sign of how Trump's rhetoric has polarized the
electorate, 72 percent of Democrats and 47 percent of voters overall
said they were offended by Trump's comments.
Forty-one percent of Republicans polled said Trump's remarks could
hurt his chances of becoming president; that figure was higher among
all respondents.
Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson came in second among Republicans
with 12 percent in the Reuters/Ipsos poll, and U.S. Senator Ted Cruz
of Texas and former Florida Governor Jeb Bush tied with 10 percent.
http://bit.ly/1SSSD7e
Trump's statement was by far the most dramatic response of a U.S.
presidential candidate to last week's shooting spree in California
by a married couple whom the FBI later said had become Islamist
militants some time ago.
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Leaders in Britain, France, Israel and Canada denounced him, and the
fallout hurt the real estate mogul's global brand. A Dubai firm
building a $6 billion golf complex stripped Trump's name from the
property.
But Trump's standing in opinion polls of Republican voters was
unchanged in the data released on Friday, which covered responses
from Dec. 8-11. He had more than double the support of his nearest
rivals in the online poll of 481 Republicans. The poll had a
credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 5 percentage points.
"He said stop letting them in temporarily until Homeland
Security...can get a hold of what in the heck is going on and give
us a little more protection," said Ardith Forrest, 76, of Georgia.
She agreed with Trump's proposal. "Americans don’t seem to
understand what danger is."
Alan Abramowitz, a political science professor at Emory University,
said Trump's comments on Muslims were not that different from
previous statements, pointing to Trump's idea to establish a
registry of Muslims in the United States as an example.
"There's clearly a large segment of the Republican electoral base
that responds very positively to the things Trump has been saying,"
Abramowitz said.
(Editing by Paul Thomasch and Grant McCool)
[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.]
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