Real estate mogul Donald Trump maintained a slight lead in Iowa in a Quinnipiac University poll released Monday afternoon, with rival Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) trailing him by just 2 points among likely Republican caucusgoers.
Trump polled at 31 percent to Cruz’s 29 percent. That’s a 3-point jump for Trump and a 2-point jump for Cruz since the last Quinnipiac poll in December.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) rose by a point to take third place at 15 percent.
Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, once a darling of Iowa’s crucial evangelical voting bloc, polled at 7 percent. That’s a 3-point decline since the December poll.
The Iowa caucuses are Feb. 1. Forty-six percent of those surveyed who picked a candidate said they weren’t firm in their choice.
The poll was conducted from Jan. 5-10 among 602 likely Republican caucusgoers in Iowa by live calls to landlines and cell phones. The margin of error was 4 percentage points.
