DONALD TRUMP HOLDS STRONG LEAD IN NATIONAL POLL

Real-estate mogul Donald Trump leads the Republican field by a 17 percent margin, according to this week’s NBC/SurveyMonkey online tracking poll.

Support for the three leading GOP candidates was virtually unchanged since last week’s survey, with Trump, at 38 percent of support, comfortably beating out Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) at 21 percent and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) at 8 percent.

The NBC/SurveyMonkey poll was consistent with most other polling of the Republican primary field, and reflects many of the salient qualities of the GOP contest. Trump’s wide national lead has proven almost impossible for other candidates to dent, and appears to have held despite recent bitter clashes with Cruz and tightening poll numbers in Iowa. Cruz, for his part, has been unable to break substantially away from support in the 18-20 percent range, as this poll reaffirmed, and certainly remains unable to approach Trump in national polls even as he has held ahead of the other GOP candidates, as he has in nearly all polling conducted since mid-December.

The NBC/SurveyMonkey poll was conducted online from Jan. 11-17 among 11,578 adults, with a margin of error of 2.3 percentage points