Chris Christie leaps to second place in New Hampshire poll

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's support has doubled in New Hampshire since November, throwing him into second place behind frontrunner Donald Trump. According to a poll conducted by Boston's WBUR, Christie now holds 12 percent support with New Hampshire GOP primary voters, just ahead of Sen. Marco Rubio's 11 percent; Sen. Ted Cruz lags only slightly behind them both, at 10 percent. Trump maintains his wide lead in the state, with 27 percent of the likely voters' support.

"The presence of Christie I think makes things more complicated for, let alone Jeb Bush and John Kasich, but also Marco Rubio emerging as the Trump alternative. And that's a key question: One, will the Trump vote be there in the end? And two, will the so-called establishment vote split half a dozen different ways?" University of New Hampshire political scholar Dante Scala told WBUR.

The WBUR poll surveyed 402 likely voters between December 6 and 8 using both land lines and cell phones. The margin of sampling error for the full sample is plus or minus 4.9 percentage points with a 95 percent level of confidence.

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