CBS News Poll: Trump maintains dominant lead, as GOP candidate field narrows

With just 10 weeks until the presidential primary season kicks off in Iowa, the Republican race looks much the same as it has for months. Former President Donald Trump retains a commanding lead nationally, with GOP primary voters still seeing him as best positioned to beat President Biden. Most would back Trump enthusiastically, were he to be renominated.

One of the few notable changes is that Nikki Haley has gained consideration and now comes in third in current support, behind Ron DeSantis but ahead of Vivek Ramaswamy. Still, Haley's support is still in single digits. And so far, Haley and others haven't converted a sizable share of voters considering them into actual departures from the Trump camp.

With Mike Pence and other candidates dropping out, there's been speculation about what could happen as the field consolidates. Which candidates might voters coalesce around, and would this threaten Trump's lead? We explored this question by having voters imagine a smaller field and rank a shorter list of candidates, measuring their second and third choices.

First of all, it would not change the fact that Trump leads. After that, it's DeSantis, not Haley, who stands to gain the most from a hypothetical consolidation at the moment: nearly half the electorate picks him second over the next two candidates in the standings. In a ranked-choice voting simulation, Haley quickly runs out of potential backers and remains in distant third. That said, DeSantis only gains on Trump by a handful of points in this simulation, ending up with just a third of the vote in the final round to Trump's two-thirds.

Trump's continued dominance

While formidable, the six in 10 Republican voters backing Trump is unchanged from his support level in August and June. As far as the various charges brought against him, most Republican voters aren't following the news very closely. And most say it doesn't matter to their evaluation of the former president, making them think neither better nor worse of him.

Nor is there evidence that the recent spate of legal hearings and trials have made Republicans more concerned Trump would be a liability in the general election. To the contrary, seven in 10 say Trump would definitely beat Biden in a rematch next year. If anything, that's a bit more than said so this summer, and no other GOP candidate comes close on perceived electability.

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