Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump continues to maintain his domineering lead in the 2016 race for the GOP nomination.
With now less than 60 days to the Florida primary, Trump is leading by 32 points in the state.
In a new FAU/BEPI poll released today, the billionaire real estate mogul and part-time Palm Beacher pulls a whopping 48 percent among likely Republican primary voters in Florida.
Trump’s next-nearest competitor among the Republican candidates, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, takes 16 percent while the junior senator from the state, Marco Rubio, received 11 percent and the former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush carries only 10 percent in his own home state.
The poll was conducted from January 15 to January 18.
It comes one day after Trump received what his campaign called a “coveted and influential endorsement” from former Alaskan Governor and 2008 Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin at a campaign event in Ames, Iowa, just two weeks before the Iowa Caucuses begin. Palin will travel to two events with Trump on Wednesday.
Earlier this week, Trump spoke at Liberty University, the largest Evangelical Christian university in the world, and the largest private, non-profit university in the U.S.
Liberty's president Jerry Falwell Jr. gave Trump a glowing introduction, calling him “one of the greatest visionaries of our time,” likening him to his own father, Dr. Jerry Falwell, the late founder of the university, outspoken political commentator, and founder of the Moral majority in the late 1970s. Falwell Jr. even compared Trump to the character of Jesus Christ, saying that he "lives a life of loving and helping others as Jesus taught in the great commandment.”
Appealing to the evangelical base, Trump sought to distance and differentiate himself from Cruz, who announced his candidacy at the university last March.
Leading national polls, on average, for all but three days since announcing his campaign back in June, Trump now looks ahead to only 54 more days of holding his dominating lead in the state until the Florida primary on March 15.
Trump leads by an average of 18 points in the latest New Hampshire polls and by 14 points in recent South Carolina polls.
Nationally, his lead is not small. In the latest national polls, Trump leads by an average of 16 points over fellow GOP contenders.
The next two months will certainly be interesting to watch. On this day in 2008, Hillary Clinton led the Democratic field still by eight points. She held that lead for 24 more days before ultimately falling to then-Sen. Barack Obama.
If there is a Republican candidate who will replace Trump and knock him from his lofty tower, now would be the time to see that rise. But, up to this point, there’s surely been no sign of that significant climb by another candidate, nor has there been what some political pundits have predicted to be Trump's inevitable fall.
Even on social media, Trump has proven himself king with no sign of slowing down any time soon. In the last 30 days, Trump has gained nearly half a million new Facebook followers — more than all Republican presidential candidates combined during the same period, and more than the Clinton and Bernie Sanders total put together.
Also during that period, Trump has received 17,374,441 likes, comments, and shares on Facebook, also more than all GOP candidates combined and greater than the Clinton and Sanders total combined.
There is, of course, still plenty of time for Trump to slide and other candidates to take his place. But if Trump can secure victories in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida, while picking up wins in several other primary states on Super Tuesday, there may be just no stopping the Trump train that could steamroll into Cleveland for the Republican National Convention in July.
