The closer Donald Trump gets to the Republican presidential nomination, the worse his position in the general election appears. His unfavorable ratings are spiking, he is collapsing among female voters and he is unpopular with the young people and minorities who twice helped elect Barack Obama president.
In match-ups with likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, Trump is down but not out. If Trump is the Republican nominee, he will face a difficult path to the White House, but not quite an impossible one.
Let's not treat the current polling as if it is written in stone. When Trump announced he was running in June, the two most recent national polls were a Monmouth survey that showed him at 2 percent and an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that found him at 1 percent.
None of the nationwide polls of Republican voters included in the RealClearPolitics average for the first six months of 2015 had Trump in double digits. That changed almost immediately after he got into the race. Less than a year later, he averages better than 40 percent of the national GOP vote and the occasional polling has him hovering around 50 percent.
When Trump was getting ready to throw his hat into the ring, FiveThirtyEight's Harry Enten cited an average of three national polls to claim a "whopping 57 percent of Republicans have an unfavorable view of Trump" in a story titled "Why Donald Trump isn't a real candidate, in one chart."
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12.23.2024