Fox News Poll: Carson only honest and trustworthy candidate

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Of the presidential candidates registering more than one percent support, only Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, has a majority of voters thinking he is honest and trustworthy.

A new Fox News national poll finds that 60 percent of voters say Carson is honest.  That’s more than twice as many as say he isn’t -- and nearly double the number that said he was honest six months ago.  At that time, many were unable to rate him:  32 percent said honest, 25 percent said not honest and 43 percent were unsure (April 2015).  Since then, the biggest movement has been into the “honest” column.

Carson’s current net honesty score is positive 34 (60 percent honest vs. 26 percent not).

CLICK TO READ THE POLL RESULTS

No other candidate comes even close to that.  The next closest are Bernie Sanders with a net honesty score of positive 12, John Kasich at positive 11 and Mike Huckabee at positive 10.

Majorities don’t trust the two current front-runners.

Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton’s ratings are record setting -- in a bad way.  Her net honesty score is negative 26.

Overall, 35 percent of voters think Clinton is honest and trustworthy.  That’s down from 45 percent in June and a new low.  And a record 61 percent say she is not honest, up from 52 percent (June 2015).

For Republican front-runner Donald Trump, 38 percent think he is honest and trustworthy, while 56 percent disagree -- giving him a net honesty score of negative 18.  That’s an improvement since June, when he scored negative 34 (30 percent honest vs. 64 percent not).

With an honesty score of negative 16, Chris Christie is also near the bottom on this measure (33 percent honest vs. 49 percent not).

Here are the remaining honesty scores:  Marco Rubio at +5, Rand Paul at +4, Carly Fiorina at +4, Ted Cruz at -2, and Jeb Bush at -4.

Ratings improve among the party faithful.  Eight in 10 Republicans think Carson is honest (82 percent), and majorities say the same about Huckabee (69 percent), Cruz (64 percent), Rubio (64 percent), Bush (59 percent), Trump (58 percent), Paul (57 percent), and Fiorina (53 percent).

More than six in 10 Democrats think Clinton (68 percent) and Sanders (64 percent) are honest.

Pollpourri

Before Clinton’s 11-hour testimony at the Benghazi Select Committee, by a 28-point margin voters said the former secretary of state had been dishonest with the American people about the State Department’s role in Benghazi (October 2015).  That’s dropped to a 20-point margin in the new poll: 37 percent say she has been honest, while 57 percent disagree.

The Fox News poll is based on landline and cell phone interviews with 1,230 randomly chosen registered voters nationwide and was conducted under the joint direction of Anderson Robbins Research (D) and Shaw & Company Research (R) from November 1-3, 2015. The full sample has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.  The honest and trustworthy questions were split sampled, which means each question was only asked of half the sample and the results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus four points.