Presidential candidate Ben Carson has edged past Donald Trump for the lead in the Republican nomination in the latest nationwide CBS News/New York Times poll:
Twenty-six percent of Republican primary voters back Carson, giving him a four-point edge over Trump (22 percent). Support for Carson has quadrupled since August.
The rest of the Republican presidential candidates lag far behind in single digits. Marco Rubio is now in third place (eight percent), followed by Jeb Bush (seven percent) and Carly Fiorina (seven percent). All other candidates are at four percent or lower.
Carson has been leading the pack in Iowa in several recent polls, but this is the first time in months that a national poll has shown someone other than Donald Trump in the lead.
Carson is seeing an increase in attacks now due to his higher profile. Left-leaning critics have presented Carson as a dangerous person due to some violent transgressions as a youth (“Carson’s violent past: Bricks, bats, hammers“) and have also revived the “War on Women” narrative due to his opposition to abortion even in cases of rape or incest. Carson is also receiving substantive policy attacks on his positions coming from the right.
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