Friday, July 10, 2015

SMART PEOPLE SAY REPUBLICANS DON'T REALLY LIKE TRUMP. IS THAT TRUE? NOT ANYMORE.

Yesterday on Twitter, the Huffington Post's Ariel Edwards-Levy wrote this:



Bloomberg's Jonathan Bernstein essentially agreed: In one response, he wrote, "~12% for Trump w/100% name recognition, media frenzy? Unimpressive." Subsequently, he wrote, "he's net -40 (un)favorable among conservative Republicans."

That's been the conventional wisdom about Trump -- that it's easy to shoot to the top in a really crowded field, and it doesn't matter in Trump's case because the vast majority of Republicans really, really hate him.

Right-wing commentators like to put this in the form of a comparison. Here's Peggy Noonan today:
[Trump] is not as popular with Republicans as Bernie Sanders is with Democrats.
And Ben Shapiro last week:



Is it true that Trump is really disliked by Republicans? Well, it used to be. Chris Cillizza wrote this last month, citing April polling data:
Here's all you need to know about Trump's seriousness as a candidate, in 1 simple chart:



Among Republicans -- you know, the people who decide the identity of their party's presidential nominee -- Trump has a net negative 42 rating. As in 23 percent of Republicans had a favorable view of Trump while 65 percent(!) had an unfavorable one.
But go to the new Economist/YouGov poll -- the one that has Trump in first place nationwide among Republican voters, 4 points ahead of his closest rivals for the presidential nomination. Check the crosstabs. You'll see that Trump has a 49% favorable rating among Republicans and a 43% unfavorable rating. His favorable numbers are steadily improving:



And among self-described conservatives, his favorable/unfavorable ratio is 54%/40%.

(By the way, Bernie Sanders has only a 46% favorable rating among Democrats in this poll, although his unfavorable ratings are very low -- a lot of people just don't have an opinion on him. So Sanders's favorable rating in his newfound party is lower than Trump's in his party. His numbers in early states are higher because the Democrats have a much smaller field.)

Public Policy Polling recently conducted a survey in North Carolina, and not only did Trump come in first among Republicans there, but conservatives love him:
Trump's favorability rating in North Carolina is 55/32, much higher than we were finding in national polls prior to his entry into the race. Trump's really caught fire with voters on the far right- 66% of 'very conservative' voters see him favorably to only 24% with a negative view of him.
Trump was unpopular among Republicans -- but he's winning them over. And maybe that's not surprising, because it seems as if their resistance to him was never insurmountable. YouGov notes that in an earlier poll, "when they were asked to give a one-word description of Trump, Republicans more often cited negative than positive assessments." But let's look at the word cloud YouGov generated for that survey question:



Yes, there were a lot of negative words.But what's the most popular answer? "Rich." Um, "rich" is a "negative assessment"? For Republicans?

Maybe there's still some solid resistance to Trump among GOP voters. But he's winning them over, at least for now. The surge is real.

7 comments:

  1. I thought "Bigoted ASSHOLE" would be in that word-cloud!

    Oh well...

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  2. Disgusting that they equate Bernie Sandrs to Trump. Sandrs isn't a racist buffoon. They do this all the time. Find some egregious example if their point of view and pretend hat someone on the left is the equivalent. Like saying that Micheal Moore is the leftwing version if Rush Limbaugh or that MSNBC is the lefty version of FOX.

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  3. Steve,
    Not surprise he is doing well
    I’m not too much into party affiliations…I just know that in order for a system to prosper there needs to be redistribution from top to bottom…the rest is just fine tuning.
    Trump is exploiting this weakness…if he can make a deal with Adelson on Israel and make a deal with some wall street bankers related to the government pensions and they accept…he will be hard to beat given the journalistic structure in the US…His goal will be to pivot to the center with his economic message leaving his nativism message in the background…let’s see if he has the discipline not to over expose himself on petty battles.
    Again JEB Bush is a terrible candidate..frekin walking zombie the media will have to help him
    I was wrong …his brother was the much better politician even though he was incompetent as an administrator (president)

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  4. Professor Chaos is exactly right on this.

    On the other hand, most people in the country still think the New York Times and Washington Post are "liberal" media sources, despite their constant water-carrying for the wealthy elite and corporate America, and the fact that they continually provide platforms for obviously conservative opinion writers.

    So I don't think it's just the Right-wing that engages in false equivalence. It's everyone. We're just not well-informed enough to know the difference.

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  5. I think Trump is benefiting from being seen as embattled. Trump's opponents are going to use his past words/positions that are decidedly un-Republican to bring him down a notch, or several. I think the reservoir of sympathy for Trump will dry up in the face of his pro-choice, pro-tax, and pro-gay rights comments from the past. He'll try to walk them all back, probably, but the magic will be gone. I still think we are seeing peak Trump which may continue for a time but I wouldn't be surprised to see Trump fall far and fast enough to end up in the Kiddie Debate. The reports of him meeting with Roger Ailes, I admit, militate against this, but I think that is as likely to have been about preparing a soft landing for Trump when his run for the nomination inevitably fails as it was about Fox going in the tank for Trump.

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  6. mlbxxxxxx,
    i disagree
    Trumps past means nothing to the republican ID…he doesn’t go at them rationally but emotionally so the past doesn’t matter…Inconsistencies don’t matter…logic doesn’t matter that’s why he is such a good messenger.
    If asked…He will just swipe the question aside and talk about jobs jobs jobs with no specifics…and they will love him for it…again he won’t get out if he gets financing…I think Rubio and Walker are screwed there big donors will switch if the polls remain…they have no brain or charisma to just move the base from just talking on TV…looking at Lindsey Graham (who is pretty much just a defense contractor for anyone buying crying about Trump and how he hurts the brand is so pathetic

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  7. This is too funny. Shorter Republicans: Donald Trump is not a serious candidate, but he's so gosh darn right about these illegals!

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