Donald Trump surges in the polls after Paris attacks

Contrary to what political pundits thought might happen, American voters aren't suddenly throwing their support behind candidates with foreign policy experience in the wake of last week's terror attacks in Paris, which left 129 dead. Instead, outsider candidates Ben Carson and Donald Trump have remained atop polls of the GOP field.

A Bloomberg Politics survey out Thursday shows Trump leading the Republican primary field with 24 percent support. Carson comes in second with 20 percent, and Marco Rubio comes in a distant third place with 12 percent support. Trump similarly gained ground in a WBUR poll of New Hampshire, jumping four points since the beginning of November.

The trend sticks outside of the horse race polls, too. A Reuters poll out Tuesday found that 36 percent of Republican voters saw Trump as the candidate who would be "best-suited to deal with the threat of terrorism," followed in second place by "none," a category that got 17 percent. Only 10 percent of those surveyed said they were less confident in Trump's leadership abilities after the attacks.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Since the Paris attacks, Trump has called for U.S. mosques to be closed and expressed concerns over Syrian refugees coming to the U.S. "It's true that his supporters see him as strong and they are not paying a lot of attention to the specifics of what he is saying," GOP strategist Matt Mackowiak told The Hill. "I think people are fearful. They don't know what to believe but they certainly want a stronger response than Obama has offered."

Another Republican strategist contended that it was precisely because Trump was not getting into specifics of how he would combat terrorism that he's doing so well in the polls. "He's the one who is speaking in the simplest language that is most understandable to the average voter," strategist John Feehery told Reuters. "He’s not talking about 'no-fly' zones. He's not getting into policy. He's talking about, 'Lets go kill ISIS.'"

The Bloomberg Politics poll's margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points; the Reuters poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 5.4 percentage points.