If political prognostication is the fine art of reading the entrails, the read of the year is the Quinnipiac Poll that came out on Wednesday, with bad news for Jeb Bush, for Hillary Clinton, and perhaps for Donald Trump. The Donald, the bull who famously brings his china shop with him, is the runaway head of the teeming Republican field. The poll numbers for Bush and for Clinton show them both slipping, and the word clouds — the descriptions that spring into people’s minds when they think of the candidates — tend to be dire indeed.
Hillary leads her field with 45 percent, down 10 points since July, while Bush is at 7 percent, in a tie for third place with two others, down from 20 percent when he launched his campaign. If people see her as a crook, they see him as a nebbish who blends into the landscape, in his case the name of his family.
She is called a “liar,” “dishonest” and “untrustworthy” far more often than “strong” or “experienced,” and of Bush’s first eight mentions, five concern family matters (such as “brother,” “George,” “dynasty”) before addressing his own traits, such as “honest” and “weak.” But the most interesting parts concern Trump and his prospects, and shed some new light on the shape of his challenge, in ways seldom charted before.
The good news for Trump is that he leads the field at 28 percent, up eight points from a month ago, with his support spread out evenly among men and women, and all of his party’s constituent groups. The bad news is that he also leads the field when it comes to the strictly negative ratings, with 26 percent expressing an almost open hostility, that is spread out fairly evenly over almost all groupings as well.
Thirty-one percent of Republican liberals say they support him, and 32 percent say they are strongly opposed. In fact, over the entire range of the extended Republican family — Tea Party members, evangelicals, the very conservative, the somewhat conservative and the liberals — support for and opposition to him varies by ranges of 1 to 4 points. This means that this is a split entirely different than the usual ones that divide the party — between social conservatives and libertarians, between purists and RINOs, between the base and the establishment, or Tea Party members and the powers that be. This is not a cause like the peace or the Tea Party movements, with their focus on policy.
What it is was revealed in Fred Barnes’ account of a focus group of 29 Trumpies convened by pollster Frank Luntz that included Republicans, independents and a handful of Democrats. “I like his confidence. It makes me feel confident,” Barnes quoted one woman. “They love the Trump swagger and attitude,” Barnes added. “He’s a kind of political savior, someone who says what they think.”
The problem facing the Trump crowd going forward is that these so-intense feelings may not be widespread. The words in Trump’s word-cloud were two-to-one negative, with the negatives ranging from the dismissive to the scatological and then the obscene.
“Arrogant” got top billing at 58 mentions, “blowhard” was second at 38, “idiot” 35 and the neutral “businessman” tied at 34 for 4th place, with the contemptuous “clown.”
“Fool,” “jerk,” “obnoxious,” “ridiculous,” “moron,” “a–hole” and “nuts” were other choice entries. “Leader,” the Trumpies’ own word for their hero, was down on the list, with a mere 15 mentions. And worst of all, as Richard Starr noted, “winner,” Trump’s own self-description, clocked in with no more than 5 entries, at the very tail end of the list.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
