Presidential candidate Donald Trump is crushing rival Marco Rubio in his home state of Florida among Republican voters, according to the latest poll Thursday by Qunnipiac.
Trump leads Rubio by 16 percentage points with 44% of conservative Floridians showing support for the billionaire versus Rubio’s 28%. Meanwhile, Sen. Ted Cruz trails them both with only 12% support in the state.
“Florida is the single biggest prize of the primary season because it is the largest state to allocate its delegates on a winner-take-all basis,” Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, said in a statement. “If Sen. Rubio can’t win in his own home state, it is difficult to see how he can win elsewhere.”
Trump has picked up even more support across Florida as other Republican candidates have dropped out of the race. The last Qunnipiac poll in the state was from early October and showed Trump leading the pack with 28% support. Rubio had only 14% support at that point.
The Florida poll is a bit of an outlier in terms of Trump’s huge favor among Republican voters. Most nationwide polls show Trump polling closer to the mid-30s at most, including polls by CBS News, USA Today, and Fox News. Though, one mid-February poll by NBC News and the Wall Street Journal shows Cruz beating Trump by two percentage points.
The latest Qunnipiac poll was conducted from Feb. 21-24 across 705 likely Republican voters. The margin of error was 3.7 percentage points.