海角大神

The latest national poll of announced and expected Republican presidential candidates shows that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has unexpectedly surged ahead in the wake of his announcement, but聽former Florida Governor Jeb Bush remains in a firm lead:

As is always the case with early polling like this, these numbers should be viewed at least somewhat skeptically both because were are still some 10 months away from the first primaries of the 2016 season and because, as with all polling, these are merely snapshots in time of the current state of the race. Notwithstanding that, though, there are a few interesting things that we can take away from this poll and what it tells us about how the race stands at this early point in time. For one thing, it鈥檚 worth noting that Bush鈥檚 numbers are higher in this poll than they have been in any polling since the beginning of the year at the earliest. Generally, though he has led the field at least somewhat, Bush鈥檚 numbers have stayed between 16 percent and 18 percent.聽The fact that he's now hitting numbers above 20% tends to cast doubts on the arguments that have been made by some pundits, and by many conservatives inside the Republican Party, that Bush was somehow "too moderate" for the GOP or that his position on issues such as immigration reform and Common Core education standards were unacceptable to the base.聽Obviously, the real test of that hypothesis will be once the campaign begins in earnest this summer and in the wake of the debates that start in the fall. For the moment at least, though, there really doesn鈥檛 seem to be much evidence for the idea that Jeb Bush is聽per se聽unacceptable to Republican primary voters any more than Mitt Romney was.

One part of the poll that is receiving a lot of attention, of course, is what impact Ted Cruz鈥檚 announcement has had on his poll numbers. So far, at least it seems to be having a minor impact at most. Cruz comes in at 12 percent in this poll, which isn鈥檛 very much higher than the 8 percent he hit in聽the ABC/Washington Post poll conducted in January聽and is somewhat less than the 16 percent that Cruz got in聽the Public Policy Polling poll聽that was released last week. Presently, that puts聽his RealClearPolitics average at 8.6聽percent, placing him just outside the 鈥渢op tier鈥� candidates in double digits, Bush, Scott Walker, and Rand Paul. This is obviously better than the 4.7 percent that Cruz was at in the average when he announced his candidacy, but as Jonathan Bernstein argues,聽we really ought to ignore this surge:

Bernstein is exactly right. Cruz is getting a bump in the polls largely because of his announcement. The same thing will happen when Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, and whoever else ends up running gets into the race over the next several months. The question will be whether these candidates are able to maintain that level of support after the post-announcement 鈥渂ump鈥� has faded and how the overall race will be impacted once the campaign begins in earnest and candidates hit the road in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, and elsewhere. Those are are questions that we won鈥檛 be able to answer for several more months at least.

Doug Mataconis appears on the Outside the Beltway blog at http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/.