Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz appear poised for victory in Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary, but Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are still in good shape nationally.
That’s the finding from Public Policy Polling‘s latest survey, released on March 31. In Wisconsin, Sanders leads Clinton 49-43 in the Democratic primary; on the GOP side, Cruz has a narrow 38-37 lead over Trump, with John Kasich a distant third at 17 percent.
See the Wisconsin numbers here.
PPP director Tom Jensen says the Republican numbers are a little deceiving, though. He says about a third of Kasich supporters say they may change their minds on election day – and they favor Cruz over Trump by a wide margin, so Cruz may end up with a bigger victory than the poll indicates. (Donald Trump remains the frontrunner in PPP’s national poll, though, with a 42-32 lead over Cruz.)
See PPP’s national numbers here.
On the Democratic side, Jensen says Sanders leads Clinton partly because Wisconsin is an open-primary state, where non-Democrats can vote as well. Clinton leads Sanders among registered Democrats, 50-42, but Sanders has a big lead among independents, 62-31, giving him the overall edge. (Jensen says this doesn’t bode well for Sanders in the long run, though: after Wisconsin, most of the biggest remaining states are closed-primary states, and that’s an advantage for Clinton.)
Looking ahead to the general election, PPP’s latest national survey suggests that Sanders and Clinton would perform equally well – what matters is whom the Republicans nominate. In hypothetical head-to-head matchups, Sanders and Clinton both beat Donald Trump by 7-8 point margins and trail John Kasich by 3-4 points. Both Democrats also lead Ted Cruz – Clinton by 3 points, Sanders by 7. (Could the Republicans benefit by nominating a dark horse like Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan at a contested convention? Jensen says no: both candidates would still lose to whomever the Democrats nominate. In fact, in this week’s national poll, Romney performs even worse than Trump.)
Tom Jensen spoke Thursday with WCHL’s Aaron Keck.
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