For months, as Donald Trump lurched from controversy to controversy, commentators marvelled that his voters remained loyal: Trump is impervious to political attack, some said.
Not so. Trump wasn’t immune; analysts were just failing to look at the whole board.
While Trump’s polarising campaign did not dent his standing with core supporters in the Republican primaries, it took a punishing toll on how the rest of the electorate views him. Trump’s image, which was poor even before he ran for president, has plunged to an unequalled low. Among scores of major political figures measured in polls over the last 30 years, Trump’s numbers are the worst.
If Trump were to win the GOP presidential nomination with his current public image, he would be the most unpopular nominee in the history of US opinion surveys, veteran Democratic pollster Peter Hart said in an email.
“By a lot,” he added.
The share of Americans with an unfavourable view of Trump is extraordinary: 68 per cent in the most recent Bloomberg poll, 67 per cent in the CNN/ORC survey, 67 per cent in the ABC/Washington Post poll, 65 per cent from Gallup. The 57 per cent unfavourable rating he received in the most recent CBS/New York Times survey looks mild by comparison.