A third of Republican voters who support Donald Trump could turn their backs on their party in November's presidential election if he is denied the nomination in a contested convention, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll....There's 66% support for a usurper among Trump voters in April? Let's compare that with May 2008:
"If it’s a close election, this is devastating news" for the Republicans, said Donald Green, an expert on election turnout at Columbia University.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted March 30 to April 8 asked Trump’s Republican supporters two questions: if Trump wins the most delegates in the primaries but loses the nomination, what would they do on Election Day, and how would it impact their relationship with the Republican Party?
Sixty-six percent said they would vote for the candidate who eventually wins the nomination, while the remaining third were split between a number of alternatives such as not voting, supporting a third-party candidate, and switching parties and voting for the Democratic nominee.
Meanwhile, 58 percent said they would remain with the Republican Party. Another 16 percent said they would leave it, and 26 percent said they did not know what they would do with their registration.
Just how badly is the Democratic Party divided?So Clinton supporters said they were less likely to vote for Obama six months before the 2008 general election than Trump supporters are to vote for Not-Trump seven months before the 2016 election.
According to the exit polls, half of Clinton's supporters in Indiana would not vote for Obama in a general election match up with John McCain. A third of Clinton voters said they would pick McCain over Obama, while 17 percent said they would not vote at all. Just 48 percent of Clinton supporters said they would back Obama in November.
Obama gets even less support from Clinton backers in North Carolina. There, only 45 percent of Clinton supporters said they would vote for Obama over McCain. Thirty-eight percent said they would vote for McCain while 12 percent said they would not vote.
And two months later, in early July -- even after Hillary Clinton conceded -- there was still more rancor among the Democrats than there seems to be now among the Republicans:
One week after Sen. Hillary Clinton made a public show of unity with Sen. Barack Obama, a new survey suggests supporters of the New York senator are increasingly less likely to follow her lead....You know how that turned out, right? Obama won -- and 83% of voters who said they'd backed Clinton voted for Obama. That was plenty. The election wasn't close.
According to a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released Friday, the number of Clinton supporters who plan to defect to Republican Sen. John McCain's camp is down from one month ago, but -- in what could be an ominous sign for Obama as he seeks to unify the party -- the number of them who say they plan to vote for Obama is also down, and a growing number say they may not vote at all.
In a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey completed in early June before the New York senator ended her White House bid, 60 percent of Clinton backers polled said they planned on voting for Obama. In the latest poll, that number has dropped to 54 percent.
In early June, 22 percent of Clinton supporters polled said they would not vote at all if Obama were the party's nominee, now close to a third say they will stay home.
Trump voters are going to express butthurt for a while -- and then they're probably going to lick their wounds and vote for whoever they think can beat the hated Hillary Clinton. Not-Trump is doing just fine.