Gallup: Romney breaks 40%, opens up national lead over GOP rivals
Following a solid victory in Illinois' Tuesday primary and an endorsement from former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney is seeing higher-than-ever support in the polls, a new Gallup daily tracking poll shows.
The survey shows Romney breaking 40 percent support among Republican and Republican-leaning voters for the first time in the election cycle - a threshold that neither he nor any of his competitors had previously breached.
Until this point, Romney had not scored above 38 percent support in the Gallup tracking poll.
The poll also shows the former Massachusetts governor expanding his national lead over Republican rival Rick Santorum, with 40 percent support to Santorum's 26 percent support, lending some credence to the idea that the candidate is finally eclipsing his competitors on the way to sealing up the Republican nomination.
As recently as March 20th, the same tracking poll showed Romney with just a 4 percent lead over Rick Santorum.
As Romney continues to rack up primary victories, it looks increasingly unlikely that his competitors will be able to overtake him in the battle to earn the 1,144 delegates needed to clinch the nomination.
According to CBS News estimates, Romney has more than 500 delegates while Santorum has only 228. Newt Gingrich, who is currently in third place, has 120 delegates. At this point, Romney's competitors seem to have more hope of simply preventing him from accumulating the necessary delegates to become the nominee rather than actually getting the delegates themselves.
Still, the battle for the nomination is not over yet: Romney has seen similar leads fall away before, and this weekend he will go up against Santorum and Gingrich in the Louisiana primary - where a new ARG poll shows Santorum leading Romney by 16 points.
