Voters strong for Clinton in 2016

The latest national poll from Public Policy Polling shows Mitt Romney with 54 percent of the vote in the GOP race for the presidential nomination.

Of the two other candidates in the running, Newt Gingrich has 24 percent and Ron Paul has 14 percent.

Romney’s net favorability is now plus-42, a 23-point improvement from a month ago, when Rick Santorum was still in the race.

Romney is now winning all of the groups that he had struggled with over the course of the primary season. He’s beating Gingrich for the Tea Party, evangelical and “very conservative” vote.

With Romney, long predicted to be the nominee, now almost guaranteed the Republican Party nomination, PPP also looked to 2016 in its most recent survey of voters.

The Democratic nomination is Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s for the taking if she wants it. Clinton has an 86/10 favorability rating with her party’s voters.

In a dream field for the nomination, Clinton gets 57 percent to 14 percent for Joe Biden, 6 percent for Elizabeth Warren, 5 percent for Andrew Cuomo, 3 percent for Russ Feingold, 2 percent for Mark Warner and 1 percent each for Martin O’Malley and Brian Schweitzer.

Clinton’s appeal is pretty universal in the party. She’s at 58 percent with “very liberal” voters, 56 percent with moderates, 60 percent with women, 52 percent with men, 59 percent with whites, 54 percent with African-Americans, 51 percent with Hispanics, 64 percent with seniors and 44 percent with young voters.

On the GOP side, minus Romney as a candidate, the top candidate for 2016 is Chris Christie of New Jersey, followed by Mike Huckabee and Jeb Bush, then Santorum, Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Rand Paul and Bobby Jindal.

Bush, in the polling, is the only Republican whose favorability rating is over 70 percent.

Download a PDF of the current issue of Wisconsin Gazette and join our Facebook community.