COLUMBUS – Whatever Donald Trump is selling, Republican voters in Ohio aren’t buying it at the same rate as other states.
According to a poll by Quinnipiac University conducted right after the first GOP presidential primary debate in Cleveland and released Thursday morning, it is favorite son Gov. John Kasich who shows up first with 27 percent of Ohio Republicans polled saying they would vote for him in a primary, compared with 21 percent for Trump.
The two are running well ahead of the rest of the field in Ohio, with Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas getting 7 percent apiece, Dr. Ben Carson getting 6 percent, and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and businesswoman Carly Fiorina getting 5 percent each. No other candidate tops 3 percent, with 11 percent undecided.
While Kasich has a strong lead and a 55 percent favorability in his home state, he is still practically invisible in the other two states surveyed in the university’s Swing States Poll.
“Ohio is important, but if Gov. John Kasich is going to be a serious candidate for the Republican nomination he must broaden his appeal. In Pennsylvania and Florida more than half the voters don’t know enough about Kasich to have an opinion about him,” said assistant poll director Peter Brown.
The university polls voters in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania due to the impact those three states have been shown to have on presidential elections.
Ohio Democrats go for frontrunner Hillary Rodham Clinton who leads the poll with 47 percent, compared with 17 percent for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and 14 percent for Vice President Joe Biden and 12 percent undecided.
In head-to-head matchups with likely Republican opponents, Rubio shows up best among the GOP field, leading Clinton 42-40 percent, which is well within the poll’s margin of error. Clinton tops Bush, 41-389 percent and Trump 43-38 percent.
Ohio voters give Clinton a negative 36-54 percent favorability rating and 60 percent say she is not honest and trustworthy.
Among Republican voters in Ohio, Kasich has a 76 percent favorability rating while 54 percent view Trump unfavorably and 53 percent say he is not honest and trustworthy. Bush gets a 43 percent unfavorability rating while 54 percent of voters say he is honest and trustworthy. Rubio gets a 40-21 percent favorability rating and voters say, by a 45-24 percent margin, that he is honest and trustworthy.
The poll was conducted between Aug. 7th and 18th and has a margin of error of +/- 3 percentage points among all voters but of more than 5 percent in the polls of Democratic and Republican voters separately.