Huckabee makes gains in new poll

WASHINGTON – Mike Huckabee, the ascendant Republican presidential candidate in Iowa, is enjoying a surge of support across the country – and Rudy Giuliani seems to be paying the biggest price, a new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found.

Huckabee has pulled into second place, close behind Giuliani, in the national survey of Republican-leaning voters. The results signal that Huckabee’s candidacy is catching fire beyond Iowa – where several recent polls have shown him with a slight lead or in a virtual dead heat with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who long had led in the state where the nomination process officially starts.

In the Times/Bloomberg poll, Huckabee was preferred by 17 percent of likely GOP voters – up from 7 percent in a similar October survey.

Support for Giuliani, the former New York mayor who once enjoyed a commanding lead in national polls, slid 9 percentage points over the past two months – to 23 percent.

Support for other GOP candidates remained largely unchanged.

Analysis of the results and interviews with poll respondents show that Huckabee is drawing on conservatives and churchgoers who like his open embrace of religious values – a faction of the party that is skeptical about Giuliani.

Among likely Democratic voters, the Times/Bloomberg poll found that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York has maintained a solid lead, even as polls in Iowa show she remains locked in a tight three-way contest there with Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina. Clinton was favored by 45 percent of those polled; 21 percent chose Obama and 11 percent were for Edwards.

The survey, was based on interviews from Friday through Monday of 1,245 registered voters, including 529 who expect to support a Democrat and 428 who expect to support a Republican.

The margin of error was plus or minus 4 percentage points for the Democratic sample and plus or minus 5 percentage points for the GOP group. For the entire group, the margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.