With only thirty days until the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump is not only swirling the bowl in the eyes of the American people, he’s now somewhere between half in and half out of the sewage pipe.
Politico’s Steven Shepard has a good analysis of all the recent polling that makes two basic points. First, the polls now “unanimously” show that Hillary Clinton is building a real lead over Trump. And second, a look at all the recent polls showing him upside down — which are detailed at length in the piece — reveals that Trump’s personal unfavorable numbers are not just bad. They are actually “setting modern records for political toxicity.”
Americans were particularly unimpressed with his self-congratulatory reaction to the Orlando shootings. While post-Orlando polling out this weekend showed a slight, likely temporary uptick in his numbers (he’s now down11 points instead of 14) they were not nearly enough to compensate for the overwhelmingly negative reaction of the public to his bombastic, Twitter-centric “response” or the neo-Fascist tenor of his entire campaign.
As Greg Sargent writing for the Washington Post explains, there’s even more to these polling numbers than meets the eye. He quotes Steven Shepard’s analysis of Trump’s polling swan dive which highlights the unusual intensity of the public’s disdain for Trump:
It’s not just the overall unfavorable numbers — it’s the intensity of the antipathy toward Trump, and the lack of enthusiasm for him. In the ABC News/Washington Post poll, 56 percent of respondents had a “strongly unfavorable” opinion of Trump, compared to just 15 percent who had a “strongly favorable” opinion. In the Bloomberg poll, 51 percent had a “very unfavorable” opinion of Trump, with only 11 percent having a “very favorable” opinion.
Trump’s negatives are now “without historical peer in the modern era of presidential campaigns.” Sargent cites for comparison purposes the constantly touted “unfavorables” of Hillary Clinton and points out that Hillary is nonetheless regarded in a far better light compared to Trump, a fact which “cuts against one of the punditry’s cherished narratives, that both parties have fielded candidates that the public dislikes:”
Crucially, note that in the WaPo and Bloomberg polls, a majority of Americans has a strongly unfavorable view of Trump. But the WaPo poll shows only a minority of 39 percent has a strongly unfavorable view of Clinton.
Americans’ feelings towards Hillary, whose negatives have been carefully cultivated and ginned up—literally for decades—by a right-wing media (and its complacent stenographers in the “mainstream” press) which practically lobbied for her nomination in 2008, now pale in comparison to the revulsion brought on by the sheer offensiveness promoted by Trump and propagated by his fanbase. As Shepard notes in the Politico piece, that kind of “gut sense” people have matters a great deal when millions of votes are at stake:
Voters with a strongly unfavorable opinion are "obviously more difficult to move than people who are undecided or just unfavorable," said Quinnipiac University pollster Peter Brown. "The stronger the dislike, the more difficult it is to change that person’s view."
A panicked group of RNC delegates is organizing what is likely to be a futile effort to oust Trump from the nomination by undermining its own rules to allow Trump’s delegates to abandon their pledged votes, an action that would likely spark a civil war at the Republican Convention or prompt Trump to run as a third-party candidate. For those of us concerned that Trump may take his ball and go home, leaving the field open for a more viable Republican contender, we can take solace in the fact that he has never publicly admitted to committing any strategic errors in this campaign. To the contrary, this appears to be a point of pride for him, and making that kind of admission would probably doom him in the eyes of his supporters, something he could not personally cope with.
In fact, Sargent points out that despite the walls beginning to crash all around him, the candidate himself seems oblivious to the damage he’s caused, not only to his own prospects but to the entire Republican Party, which because of him is now viewed more negatively than at any time in recent memory:
[A]ll indications are that Trump is still so caught up in the glow of his GOP primary victories that he may not even be capable of acknowledging what’s happening right now.
Indeed, just this week Trump was telling audiences in Dallas that the polls are underestimating him because people are “embarrassed” to tell pollsters they intend to vote for Trump. It never seems to enter his mind that the real embarrassment Americans feel is at his candidacy in the first place.
