Ann Coulter recently stated that Ronald Reagan was the last presidential candidate as unpopular as Donald Trump. She claimed to cite a Los Angeles Times poll from March 1980, close to the same period in which the current presidential campaign finds itself. And irrespective of the numbers, Trump defenders have argued that he and Reagan were both unpopular outsiders; Jeffrey Lord, for instance, said that “establishment critics said the exact-same things about Reagan” as they do about Trump, “down to the very words sometimes.” Part of this dismissiveness, of course, is rooted in doubt about the candidate’s viability.
To probe the notion that Reagan and Trump are similar in their acceptance by the public, Gallup took a deep dive into what polling data it could find from 1980. It couldn’t find any record of the poll Coulter mentioned. And it discovered that the relative poll standing of Reagan and Trump is entirely dissimilar:
Gallup also cited the prevalence of data from the New York Times/CBS poll, which also found Reagan’s positive favorability numbers consistently outstripping his negative ones. Only in September 1980 were the two figures even.
The pollster granted Lord’s premise, that there are similarities between the opinions of Reagan then and Trump now by more traditional political forces. “But in terms of image comparisons, the poll evidence shows that at this time in the 1980 campaign year, Reagan’s image was significantly more positive than Trump’s image is at the same time in the 2016 campaign,” the authors Frank Newport and Lydia Saad write.
According to a Huffington Post average of polls measuring favorability—it’s worth noting the polls are a mix of adults, registered voters and likely voters—Trump is underwater on average, with 30 percent viewing him favorably and 64 percent viewing him unfavorably.
