Donald Trump Isn't A Joke To Republican Voters Anymore
Donald Trump Isn't A Joke To Republican Voters Anymoreby Ariel Edwards-Levy at the Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/07/13/donald-trump-poll_n_7787770.html
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Donald Trump's blusterous presidential campaign has earned him untold hours of TV mockery and cost him quite a few business partners. It's also succeeded in turning around his image in the GOP.
When he entered the race, he stood out for, among other reasons, the sheer awfulness of his ratings among his own party.
But a new HuffPost/YouGov poll is just the latest of several to show that Republicans are changing their minds about the business mogul. In June, voters who identify as or lean toward the Republican Party -- for the sake of brevity, let's just call them Republican voters -- said by a 19-point margin that Trump wasn't a serious candidate. Today, they're about evenly split.
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Who are these Trump backers? As the accompanying table shows, they are disproportionately white. Favorable views of Trump among African Americans are minimal, and Hispanic boosters are at a higher level than blacks but well below that of whites. Older voters (those age 65 and over) undoubtedly form his core; in fact, the 65+ group is the only age cohort to view him favorably, 59% to 39%, virtually the opposite view of all other age groups. Trump has particularly little appeal among younger, more diverse voters: 20% of those under 30 rate Trump favorably (versus 60% unfavorably). Trump also fares somewhat better with men than women, and those with lower incomes ($40,000 and less).
How does the Trump profile compare to Ross Perot ...? ... there are significant similarities in the support profile of Trump and Perot, as shown in Table 2. Perot’s vote was disproportionately white, male, and Republican or Independent. However, there is one notable difference: Perot fared best not with the oldest cohort but with voters between 25-29 years, and more generally with voters under 50 — not the retirees attracted to Trump.
The other modern candidate bearing some resemblance to Trump also comes from 1992. Populist conservative Pat Buchanan challenged President Bush in the Republican primaries, and ran fairly strongly in the New Hampshire primary (37% to Bush’s 53%). ... Buchanan trailed Bush 18% to 77% nationally among Republicans; still, the former Richard Nixon aide and TV personality ran better with men, younger voters, and those with less than a high school education (and presumably, those with lower incomes).
It’s easy to conclude that Donald Trump isn’t going to help the GOP’s image with Hispanics and many swing voters, but it’s also impossible to know how much Trump will actually injure the Republican brand in this cycle. How long will he stick around? If Trump drops out before the voting begins in early 2016, or even midway through the primary season, voters will have many months to forget and move on. Yet Trump could stick it out, get his slice of votes all the way to June, and deliver a raucous, memorable address to a huge TV audience at the national convention. In the short term, Trump takes up a huge amount of media oxygen. There’s only so much coverage to go around, and if television segments and news stories continue to focus on Trump, that’s airtime that candidates with less name recognition — like Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, John Kasich, and many others — are not getting.
In the worst nightmare for the eventual Republican nominee, Trump might run as an independent in November once the primary process has concluded. “Sore-loser” laws that exist in 44 states do not generally apply to presidential candidates, and even in the few cases where they do, a court challenge by Trump might well be successful. In part, this is because the “candidates” on the ballot in a general election for president are the electors, not the politicians to whom the electors are pledged.
http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/
