Donald Trump has the highest disapproval rating of any major party candidate since 1992, a remarkable achievement for a candidate who is also a party front-runner, according to Gallup.
“I wanted to see how Trump’s unfavorable played out in the context of previous elections, so I went back to look at the unfavorable ratings of the major-party candidates from 1992 through the current election,” said Gallup Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport in a blog post.
#Trump‘s Negative Image… https://t.co/eVTWk1iaQ4
— Gallup (@Gallup) January 30, 2016
“The bottom line is that Trump now has a higher unfavorable rating than any candidate at any time during all of these previous election cycles, and that conclusion takes into account the fact that unfavorable ratings tend to rise in the heat of a general election campaign as the barbs, negative ads and heightened partisanship are taken to their highest levels,” he added.
Gallup’s two week average for Trump reveals that 33 percent approve of the boisterous candidate and 60 percent disapprove.
For comparison, said Newport, “Hillary Clinton currently has a 52 percent unfavorable rating among all Americans, while Jeb Bush is at 45 percent, Chris Christie 38 percent, Ted Cruz 37 percent, Marco Rubio 33 percent, Bernie Sanders 31 percent and Ben Carson 30 percent. Trump’s 60 percent is clearly well above all of these. Putting his favorable and unfavorable ratings together yields a net favorable of -27 for Trump, far above the -10 for Clinton and for Bush, the next lowest among the major candidates.”
Now, high disapproval numbers are not election killers, but high ones can be. Bill Clinton won his first election in 1992 with a 49 percent. He beat former George H.W. Bush who had a 57 unfavorable rating in Gallup’s tracking.
Read the full Newport posting here.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
