Gov. John Kasich, who has made his electability in battleground Ohio central to his campaign for president, has seen his home-field lead evaporate.
If Ohio’s Republican primary were held today, 23 percent of GOP voters would vote for real estate mogul Trump, 18 percent for retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, according polling results released Wednesday by Quinnipiac University.
Kasich is now a distant third, at 13 percent. And close behind are Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas at 11 percent and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina at 10 percent.
In the two other states Quinnipiac polled — Florida and Kasich’s native Pennsylvania — the Ohio governor doesn’t register higher than 3 percent.
“Gov. John Kasich’s big card was his enormous popularity in Ohio, generally considered the most important swing state in the November election,” observed Peter A. Brown, the Quinnipiac poll’s assistant director. “But with Trump zooming well past him in the Buckeye State and Kasich’s numbers in Florida and Pennsylvania in low single digits, the Ohio governor’s campaign is going in the wrong direction.”
In late August, when Quinnipiac last polled in Ohio, Kasich led Trump 27 percent to 21 percent. No other Republican candidate received more than 7 percent then.
Quinnipiac polled 1,180 voters, including 433 Republicans, between Sept. 25 and Oct. 5. The GOP sample has a margin of error of 4.7 percentage points.
This is the second bit of rough polling news this week for Kasich. In the first primary state of New Hampshire, where he and his allies have focused much of their time and money, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll showed him slipping from second place to seventh, behind Trump, Carson, Fiorina and others.
If there’s good news for Kasich, it’s that his favorable rating in Ohio is at 52 percent, though that’s a slight drop from an all-time high of 55 percent six weeks ago.
And, in a sign that Trump’s support here is soft, 29 percent of Ohio Republicans said they definitely would not support him, making him first by a wide margin on that question. By comparison, 7 percent say the same for Kasich, 4 percent for Carson.
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