When all Americans are polled, it's no surprise that Marco Rubio has a positive favorable rating, or that the ratings are very negative for Jeb Bush (who's disliked by both liberals and conservatives) and Donald Trump (who's Donald Trump, and is therefore loathed by everyone who doesn't regard him as a god). It's not surprising that Ben Carson is in favorable territory, either, although his numbers have clearly slipped.
No -- what's surprising is that more people like Ted Cruz than dislike him -- and let me remind you that this is among all the poll's respondents, not just the Republicans.
That's worrisome if you're rooting for a Democratic victory in November and you think a ticket including Cruz, as either the Republican nominee or a running mate, would be doomed to failure. Cruz isn't a Trump clone, as far as the general public is concerned. Cruz, to the public at large, is an okay guy.
Trump has a very high favorable rating among Republicans (70%) -- but apart from that, most subgroups don't like him. He has unfavorable ratings in all age groups. Independents dislike him (40% favorable, 57% unfavorable). Even men dislike him (45%-54%), though not as much as women (34%-61%).
Cruz, however, has favorable ratings in every age group except 18-34, and even in that group he's at 36% favorable, 39% unfavorable. Cruz is in positive territory with independents (45%-36%) and with both genders (men, 48%-39%; women, 41%-38%).
People are clearly watching the debates and coming to the conclusion that Ted Cruz is a decent chap. He's still lagging on other measures with the general public (has the right experience to be president, shares your values, is someone you'd be proud to have as president) -- but Trump and Rubio also fail on all of those questions, and I wonder how Hillary Clinton would do. For now, at least, people like Cruz personally.
Now, maybe we don't really have to worry about having Cruz at the top of the ticket -- CNN polled just Republicans and found that Trump is still crushing the competition, with 39% of the vote. (Cruz is a distant second, at 18%.) But other polls, such as Quinnipiac's, have the race much closer, and Cruz is on the rise in polls of states with early primaries or caucuses. And in that Quinnipiac poll, Cruz ties Clinton, 44%-44%, and beats Sanders 44%-43$%. So be careful about wishing for a Cruz surge in the primaries.
And in that Quinnipiac poll, Cruz ties Clinton, 44%-44%, and beats Sanders 44%-43$%
ReplyDeleteTaken together with the 45% favorable rating, what that suggests to me is that 45% of the country is... Republicans.
A minority.
DeleteWhat we can hope for, is that outside oF Evangelicals, Fascists and other haters (but, I repeat myself) - lIke the morons in the TX electorate - once people get to see more of Teddy-Cruz-ader, and know him, the more they ome to loathe and despise him.
ReplyDeleteW. Bush had a gift to be a lesson to hide his smirk for just enough time to fool enough people to let the 2000 election go to the SCOTUS. *
I don't think Cruz will be able to do the same thing.
But, we are a nation with enough imbeciles, bigots, and people who don't pay attention to the news - or too much, to the wrong people and cable TV networks - so, who the fuck knows...
If he can sell this transformation, he and his people will have done a hell of a marketing job.
And it's not like there's any shortage of people in the US who'll line-up to buy a two pieces of bread smeared with shit, and a small bowl of urine, if they believe they're getting an Angus roast-beef sandwich, with au jus.
* And, of course, his brother's help 8n FL.
As for 2004 - without mentioning the questionable elecronic voting machines in OH and NM, among other states - what got W "reelected," was fear.
And that's what the GOP is selling - AGAIN!!!
Hey, never sell "New Coke," when regular Coke is still selling.
It's only the people who have met Ted Cruz that hate him.
ReplyDeleteIf he were to become the nominee. He would have to come out swinging, not pulling his punches like he has been concerning Trump. Hopefully, once he shows his true nasty self, those favorability ratings should plummet.
One word: Nixon.
ReplyDeleteThe Cruz hating in DC doesn't apply to most people. So far he seems like an ordinary guy, with a nice Texas drawl you weren't expecting, with typical evangelical christian views, and the usual hankering for the good old days of America in the 50's. Nothing unusual so far, and he is smart enough not to look like an idiot.
ReplyDeleteThat will change if he starts getting delegates or becomes the GOP candidate.
In the Pollster aggregates, Ted's favorable/unfavorable rating is 34.4/39.9 to Hillary's 41.5/51.6.
ReplyDeleteYou can consider Hillary swell, or maybe just tolerable in preference to a Republican, but people do not like her.
The Real Unknown to the Intruder Unknown: Yeah, we're not even at the first caucus in primary season, so ...
ReplyDeleteThe whole idea of two major parties and their primaries and then nominations and finally elections is that we take our friggin' time getting to a decision, which in the end comes down to picking between two people who we may very well know a heckuva lot better by the first Tuesday in November next than we know now. Until we get to that 2-person contest (or 3: I don't think Trump, or anyone with much support, will end up running an independent campaign, but as Reinhold Priebus would say, How the living F am I supposed to know with that egomaniac?)
Consider, if you will, that underwater number you point to for HRC. You can remove 45% of that immediately because those are Republicans and R-leaners who, if they vote at all, would never vote for her against even Vladimir Putin.
So now you're at 3 in every 4 non-R potential voter being generally approving of HRC. The rest we can, I suggest, safely ascribe to the presence of Bernie Sanders in the D nomination contest. Partisan cheering can do that: it can turn otherwise sane people into thinking apocalyptically; but recall in June 2008 how many kabillions of women Dem voters were going to refuse to vote in November for Obama. Like that was a real thing that happened, in the sense that yes, so they said, and no, so they did not act accordingly.
The elements in the countervailing number for Cruz is very different. As someone up-thread has noted, to know him is to hate him, and boy howdy will, if he's nominated, the Dems do their level best to acquaint every wriggling piece of humanity with the overly pious Canadian-born Cuban-American Dominionist priest Rafael "Ted" Cruz and his many subhuman policies. THEN we can talk about the "durability" of his current metrics.
Again, it's a process Intruder Unknown. At this same point in the 2008 cycle, hardly anyone outside the political fans knew WTF Obama was.
The last election (2012) had a total of 127,000,000 votes nation wide. This poll had 927 respondents. That's .0007 %. Let's talk after election day.
ReplyDeleteI think you also need to take into account the "Never heard of" and "No opinion" statistics. Those statistics likely provide an indication of how deep the unfavorable/unfavorable opinions are. If a candidate's "Never heard of"/"No opinion" numbers are high (and Cruz's are in the high range), then I think that that indicates the candidate is not well-known, both by the never-heard-of people and the people with favorable/unfavorable opinions.
ReplyDeleteIf you look at the numbers, only Trump and Bush have low no-recognition/no-opinion numbers and I would guess that the people's opinions are stronger with respect to those two. The other candidates' numbers are higher, suggesting that the people's opinions of them are probably as weak as their recognition of the candidates is vague.