A few short months ago, Texas Gov. Rick Perry was moving to the front of the Republican primary, taking early state polling with him. The Nevada caucuses were no different — Perry had a five point lead there at the very end of August, with 29 percent of Republicans. Now that Perry’s campaign has fallen off nationwide, Nevada GOPers have followed suit: Perry is polling at just five percent there, nearly eight times less than Romney’s current 38.
Perry’s issue is much like his problems in other surveys: he was found to be extremely unpopular with GOP voters, where he was seen favorably by only 25 percent of the party faithful in Nevada, against 58 percent who see him unfavorably. Romney and current second place finisher, businessman Herman Cain with 26 percent support in the caucus trial heat, have sky-high favorability ratings, both men nearly hitting the nearly seventy percent.
Romney gets 79 percent of Mormon voters in the GOP caucuses, which the pollster, Republican outfit Magellan Strategies, said are anticipated to be about 16 percent of caucus-goers. Perry has embraced an endorsement from anti-Mormon Pastor Robert Jeffress.
Magellan’s analysis basically said that things are looking up for the “inevtiable candidate” in the state, who 40 percent of Republicans thought turned in the best debate performance last week, with the customary caution that there’s a long way to go:
Nevada is considered “Romney Country” by many political observers for reasons including his 51% performance in the 2008 Republican Presidential caucus, and a likely significant Mormon (16%) participation in the caucus. The fact is Mitt Romney is doing very well among major voting subgroups including women, seniors, and fiscal and social conservatives. More importantly, he remains competitive among Tea Party voters and likely “first time” caucus goers. Many political observers expected the latter voter subgroups would be less likely to support Mitt Romney particularly because of his Massachusetts health care plan.
Yet this survey shows that roughly 30% of those voters support him. If the Romney campaign can maintain support among these voter subgroups, he will be very difficult to beat in Nevada come next February. With that said, there is a lot of time before the caucus, and it will be interesting to see if the other candidates can effectively weaken Mitt Romney’s support in Nevada.
The Nevada poll used 673 automated interviews with likely GOP caucus-goers conducted October 19th and 20th. It has a sampling error of 3.77 percent.
