Ted Cruz leapfrogs Donald Trump in latest Marquette Law School Poll

MATTHEW DeFOUR mdefour@madison.com, 608-252-6144 33 min ago 4

Less than a week before Wisconsin's presidential primary, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has leaped ahead of GOP frontrunner Donald Trump, according to the latest Marquette Law School Poll.

On the Democratic side, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders leads frontrunner Hillary Clinton, 49-45.

Cruz received support from 40 percent of likely Republican voters, Trump received 30 percent and Ohio Gov. John Kasich trailed with 21 percent support.

The last Marquette poll in February showed Donald Trump with a double-digit lead in the battle for the GOP nomination, but the landscape has changed immensely since then.

That poll was taken before Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson dropped out of the race, and comes as Trump, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich have begun campaigning in Wisconsin and outside groups have begun spending millions of dollars to influence the outcome of the race. Before the poll was taken, Trump and Cruz engaged in a pitched battle over the appearance of their wives.

Other polls out in the past week show a tightening race, though unlike the Marquette poll they use robocalls and don't attempt to call cell phones, according to Marquette poll director Charles Franklin.

The last Marquette poll showed Sanders with a small lead over Clinton within the poll's margin of error. Clinton has been steadily losing ground to Sanders over the course of several Marquette polls dating back over the past year.

Cruz and Sanders are holding events in Madison on Wednesday, while Trump is holding a rally in De Pere after slamming Gov. Scott Walker at a rally in Janesville on Tuesday. Walker endorsed Cruz on Tuesday.

The Marquette poll found Walker's job approval rating is trending upward above 43 percent. That's the highest it has been since he won re-election in 2014 and comes after a series of polls found his job approval rating below 40 percent. Since dropping out of the presidential election, Walker has been traveling extensively within the state.

The poll also showed in the contentious state Supreme Court race, Justice Rebecca Bradley is leading Appeals Court Judge JoAnne Kloppenburg 41-36 with more than one in six voters still undecided.

It's the first since reports surfaced of Justice Rebecca Bradley's 24-year-old college writings in which she called AIDS patients and homosexuals degenerates, compared abortion to the Holocaust and slavery, and wrote that an author legitimately suggested women play a role in date rape. Bradley apologized for some of what she wrote.

The poll was conducted March 24 to 28 with 957 likely voters in the April 5 primary and a margin of error of +/-4.1 percentage points. The GOP sample included 471 likely voters and a margin of error of 5.8 points. The Democratic sample included 405 voters and a margin of error of 6.3 points.

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