President Donald Trump: Polls Show It Won’t Happen — Reasons He Can’t Beat Clinton Or Sanders
Despite the dedication of his supporters and his significant lead in Republican polls, the 2016 election will probably not end with a President Donald Trump, according to numerous polls that show significant weaknesses in Trump’s appeal to voters outside the narrow confines of the Republican primaries. In fact, according to one recent poll, more voters believe that Trump would make a “terrible” president than feel that way about any other candidate in either political party.
While an averaging of national polls by the Real Clear Politics election analysis site shows a close national race between Trump and likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, with Trump trailing by 2.7 percentage points — while Trump trails Clinton’s Democratic rival, Bernie Sanders, by a more significant 5.3 points — other polling shows a high level of negative opinion toward Trump, the type of opinions that political experts say are extremely difficult to change.
For Trump, those negative opinions could be even more difficult to alter than for a typical candidate, because Trump has been a nationally famous celebrity for three decades, meaning that new information that could cause people to soften opinions of him is unlikely to emerge.
In the following video, Trump discusses his polling numbers with CNN correspondent Wolf Blitzer.
A Pew Research Center poll published January 20 showed that more than half of all registered voters in the country — 52 percent — believe Donald Trump would make a “poor” or “terrible” president. The next most unfavorably viewed candidate, Hillary Clinton, was viewed as a “poor” or “terrible” potential president by 44 percent of voters.
But the poll looks even worse for Trump when the results of the Pew study are broken down. A whopping 38 percent of voters, nearly four of every 10, believe that Trump would be “terrible” as president. That’s a full 10 percentage points more than saw Clinton as “terrible.”
More bad news for Donald Trump emerged in a Washington Post/ABC News poll made public on January 28 — a poll that showed the prospect of a President Donald Trump makes Americans very nervous.
The poll, conducted from January 21 to January 24, asked Americans about their level of comfort or anxiety with each candidate, if he or she were to become president.
By a wide margin, more Americans said that President Donald Trump would make them either “very anxious” or “somewhat anxious,” than felt that way about any other candidate. A whopping 69 percent — nearly seven out of every 10 Americans, according to the survey — said the idea of Donald Trump as president makes them anxious, and more than half of Americans, 51 percent, say they feel “very anxious” about the idea of Trump as president.
When asked which candidates make them “comfortable” as a possible president, Bernie Sanders leads the field in both parties with 50 percent — 29 percent “somewhat comfortable” and 21 percent “very comfortable.”
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Next in line was Clinton, with a 46 percent total “comfortable” response. But Donald Trump, at only 30 percent, ranked behind Republican rivals Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, who made 43 percent and 41 percent of Americans “comfortable,” respectively.
Trump also suffers a serious problem with women who vote. Women comprise 53 percent of American voters, and according to a recent CNN poll, 64 percent of women voters say they do not like Donald Trump. In fact, according to a Fox News poll, when asked whether Donald Trump or sex-scandal plagued former President Bill Clinton was “more respectful” toward women, 55 percent of American women, and 50 percent of all Americans, said that Clinton was more respectful toward women than Trump.
[Photo by Dennis Van Tine/Associated Press]
