Buried deep within the exit polls from New York’s primary last night was a mind-boggling result. As Republicans in Donald Trump’s home state handed him an easy and resounding victory, 56 percent of them expressed the belief that Trump has “the best chance” to defeat Hillary Clinton in November.
If this seems strange, it’s because it is. In the real world, Trump trails Hillary Clinton by large margins in the polls — not just some polls, but every recent poll, and even in polls of some very Republican-leaning states like Utah. Both Ted Cruz and John Kasich do much better against Clinton, despite the fact that both trail Trump in the Republican primaries.
Recommended Stories
One poll even suggests that Trump would struggle against Clinton in deep-Red Mississippi, whereas the other Republican candidates — both of whom got fewer votes in Mississippi’s primary — would beat her there effortlessly.
This points to a deeper mathematical truth about American elections. An argument that Trump supporters often cling to is that Trump is doing better than other Republicans in the primaries, and therefore it follows that he will do better than they would in general elections.
But this doesn’t follow at all. What people fail to consider is that relatively few Americans vote in primaries, and they aren’t representative of the general voting population. The difference of scale between these two types of elections renders the primary results insignificant in divining general election results, which will depend on completely different factors.
Trump has won about 8.8 million votes right now (37.9 percent) in the GOP primaries, and he will finish this year’s primary season with something like 12 or 13 million votes. Now consider: This number represents about one-fifth of what a candidate in this year’s general election will need just to lose respectably, by a Romney-like margin. After all, about 130 million people will likely cast votes for president.
Now, there’s no reason in principle why a candidate who wins “only” 12 or 13 million votes in the primaries (or even just five or six or seven million) could not win a general election. That depends entirely on the candidate and his campaign. But the point here is that even a terrific primary performance offers zero evidence that a candidate actually can win a general election. As all of the head-to-head polling illustrates, it isn’t even a sign that that said candidate would perform better in a general election than other candidates who got fewer votes in the primaries.
This is especially true in Trump’s case. His hard-core supporters fail to comprehend just how deeply unpopular he is with everybody else outside their relatively small group. According to the last eight polls taken on the question, Trump has an unfavorable rating of between 60 and 70 percent among the general population that will vote in the 2016 election. He is not that much more popular than the ebola virus. (Although no virus has ever tried to run for president, so we cannot be sure.)
One can quibble with a poll here or there, but to deny that Trump would be the most unpopular person ever nominated for president requires the belief that all current polling is wrong — and not just a bit wrong (as some polls were in 2012 in 2014) but completely, uniformly and entirely wrong in a way it never has been in any modern presidential election. Yet in reality, the polls from April and even March of 2004, 2008, and 2012 were, on aggregate, reliable indicators of the eventual winner in those years.
What’s more, unlike conventional candidates — former President Ronald Reagan, for example, who had a perfectly manageable 44 percent unfavorable rating in April 1980 — Trump already has universal name recognition, which means there aren’t many persuadable people left. No matter how many thousand times Trump takes to Twitter and calls Clinton “Crooked Hillary” — which appears to be his general election strategy — it isn’t going to make him much less unpopular than he is now.
But don’t let such political subtleties distract from the simple math. Primary elections and general elections are very different animals. They take place on different orders of magnitude. To project a candidate’s viability in a general election based on a primary performance is like noticing that the Sun and Moon appear roughly the same size in the sky, and concluding that they must be about the same size and mass in reality.
When you look, on the one hand, at the number of voters Trump has inspired (about 8.8 million) and compare that with the probable number of November voters who already hate his guts (in theory, between 78 and 91 million), you begin to see the importance of scale. Also, the idea of nominating a virus for president seems a bit less crazy.
