When people talk about the polls in this GOP race, the focus is invariably on "who would you vote for?" I think this is misleading for a couple reasons. First, if favors personality over policy. People who support Trump, support him because he's Trump: they like him personally and there's nobody else quite like him in the field. People who support Jeb, however, may be just as likely to support Walker or Kasich, and so their vote gets split.
Granted, in our current electoral process, that is often enough to push one candidate over the top, which is why third-party candidates make people nervous. But because the primary elections are spread out over time, candidates are going to start dropping out, and support will begin to coalesce.
If we want to talk about which candidates have the most support from the GOP electorate, it seems to me that it makes a lot more sense to talk about favorables: not "who do you like best?" but "who would you be satisfied with?" If we look at the favorables in the recent Monmouth poll, the picture looks a little different.
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