Colorado is the lone holdout, for no apparent reason. So notes that famous, fire-breathing #NeverTrumper.....Michael Barone:
In the RealClearPolitics.com average of recent polls, Trump trails [Mrs.] Clinton by six points, 47% to 41%.
Update: Herself has extended her lead, as of this morning.
Polling Data
| Poll | Date | Sample | MoE | Clinton (D) | Trump (R) | Spread |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RCP Average | 2/29 - 3/21 | -- | -- | 48.5 | 39.3 | Clinton +9.2 |
| Quinnipiac | 3/16 - 3/21 | 1451 RV | 2.6 | 46 | 40 | Clinton +6 |
| CBS News/NY Times | 3/17 - 3/20 | 1058 RV | 4.0 | 50 | 40 | Clinton +10 |
| CNN/ORC | 3/17 - 3/20 | 925 RV | 3.0 | 53 | 41 | Clinton +12 |
| ABC News/Wash Post | 3/3 - 3/6 | 864 RV | 4.0 | 50 | 41 | Clinton +9 |
| NBC News/Wall St. Jrnl | 3/3 - 3/6 | 1200 RV | 2.8 | 51 | 38 | Clinton +13 |
| Rasmussen Reports | 2/29 - 3/1 | 1000 LV | 3.0 | 41 | 36 | Clinton +5 |
Ted Cruz, in contrast, leads [Mrs.] Clinton 46% to 45%. Ex-candidate Marco Rubio and splinter candidate John Kasich have been running even better. [emphasis added]
Most likely because they're out of the race (Kasich just won't admit it, yet) and thus safe to tell a pollster that you'd vote for in a matchup that will never be anything other than hypothetical.
All at least equal the 46% that is the lowest percentage won by either party’s nominee this century. Against each of them [Mrs.] Clinton falls short of that. Trump’s poll performance is not just a momentary blip. In forty-nine polls conducted matching him against [Mrs.] Clinton starting last May, Trump led her in four, tied her in two, and lost to her in forty-three...His current [39]% is his lowest showing in the RCP average since last August, when people were just starting to seriously contemplate his candidacy. [emphasis added]
The better general election voters come to know Trump, the more they can't stand him.
Polls typically show 60-plus% of voters with unfavorable feelings toward him, even worse than [Mrs.] Clinton’s 50-plus% unfavorable rating. Trump’s standing could.... [emphasis added]
WILL.
....decline further if and when he is nominated.
Remember that last surviving vestige of federalism and State influence, the Electoral College? It's not Trump's friend:
Trump’s weakness is confirmed by polling in the dozen target States whose votes will, if current patterns hold, determine the outcome in November. Trump trails [Mrs.] Clinton in RCP averages in eleven of the twelve, including North Carolina, which Mitt Romney carried in 2012. The exception is Colorado, in a single poll conducted last November, in which Cruz still ran stronger...if you still have a product that 50% of the voters won’t buy, you lose the election. The addition of new voters might nudge Trump’s unfavorable numbers down to 60%. But that’s still a losing number, since [Mrs.] Clinton seems to be holding nearly 90% of Democrats, although one-third don’t consider her honest or trustworthy. [emphasis added]
i.e. They recognize their enemies' self-destruction and are getting out of the way.
Some may believe that Trump’s favorable numbers could improve and make him more competitive. That hasn’t happened so far. His celebrity helped him corral a lot of votes early, and he’s held on to them. [emphasis added]
i.e. the "Trump Movement".
Exit polls show his voters have been committed for months, with late deciders going mostly to other candidates. Trump has won [40]% of Republican votes and is regarded unfavorably by more than 60% of general-election voters. It’s hard to get from there to 270 electoral votes. [emphasis added]
Let's start with Mitt Romney's Electoral College map from four years ago. Which is to say, he lost eleven of those twelve battleground States as well with the exception of North Carolina. Exchanging North Carolina for Colorado, Trump's starting point is....two hundred Electoral Votes. Drop that to 193 if Tom Coburn decides to give himself something interesting, if strenuous, to do for the next few months. Then figure in that 60-plus% disapproval number, and the 35% #NeverTrump defection from GOP ranks (on which I will be riding shotgun) - which, even if it shrinks to, say, half of that level by the fall will still cripple any contrived Trump "party unity" gambit that doesn't involve automatic weapons - and his being "under-water" by 21% with women, 27% with independents, 65% with Hispanics and roughly half that with millennials, and with the white vote proportionately 22% smaller than it was thirty-six years ago. And Romney won that shrunken white vote by twenty percentage points (59%-39%); Trump only leads among white general election voters by seven (46%-39%)
Governor Romney lost the popular vote by three percentage points; if Trump loses it by three times that margin, I don't think he's going to come anywhere near two hundred Electoral Votes, do you?
And then there's the "fear factor":
Hillary's "fear factor" in the general? Just 35%, Cruz? 28%, Throw in the "concerned" category (i.e. scared people who aren't pissing themselves yet) and Trump's "fear factor" exceeds 70%.
And that gets us back to the conundrum that will live in infamy about the 2016 GOP primaries: With Mr. Tea Party Warrior himself on whose shoulders to "FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!" to victory, take back the country, and begin the long reconstruction after the Obamapocalypse, almost half the "Republican" grassroots have opted instead to give up, quit, and go after a cartoon caricature called the GOP "establishment" like a Walking Dead episode....
....at the behest of a liberal Democrat conman who is portraying the far-Left's cartoon caricature of a "Republican". And the only ostensible justification for this perfidy I've ever gotten from any Trumplican is that "Cruz was born in Canada!"
So what it amounts to is that the "Trump Movement" would rather follow their cult leader into the jaws of electoral extinction and take the GOP "establishment" down with them instead of "FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!"ing the good fight behind the man who stands for everything in which a lot of Trumplicans used to - or claimed to - believe.
No matter how hard any of you try, you'll never be able to make that mindset make any sense.
Exit quote from Guy Benson:
Add in voters who are "concerned" about what Trump would do in office, and you end up with approximately seven in ten voters worried or outright frightened by Trump. Yeah, let's nominate that guy, say a plurality of Republican voters, astoundingly.
UPDATE: Bloomberg Poll: [Mrs.] Clinton 'crushes' Trump in general election:
If he emerges as the nominee, the survey also suggests that Trump faces a difficult path to the White House. Hillary Clinton, his likely Democrat competitor, crushes him in a hypothetical general-election match-up. In another troubling sign, Trump is viewed unfavorably by 68% of Americans - well above the 53% who feel that way about [Mrs.] Clinton. If both make it to the general election, the race would feature two historically unpopular figures as the nominees.
“Trump’s numbers are bad and getting worse,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, who oversaw the survey. “A majority of Americans now describe their feelings toward him as very unfavorable. That’s a thirteen-point spike from November 2015.”
And don't give me the usual "those are liberal polls and they're always wrong" crap. Yes, they're liberal polls, and yes, they put their thumbs on the scale in the Democrats' favor as psy-ops to manipulate public perceptions in election races, but they can't wholly fabricate numbers this horrendously bad. Almost 70% unfavorables? A majority of "VERY" unfavorables? A candidate with numbers like this would (1) never rise above county sewage commission level and has, accordingly, no business running for president, and (2) has to be actively trying to generate such vehement public opposition. Nobody, not even Donald Trump, can be this much of a dick on just natural talent alone.
Why would he be sabotaging any remote chances he had of pulling a November upset? Read it and get ready to beg for my forgiveness, Trumplicans:
In the process, the "Republican" front-runner may also be tarnishing his party’s brand. Sixty percent of Americans view the GOP unfavorably, easily the highest level recorded in the poll since it was started in September 2009. The Democrat Party, in contrast, is viewed negatively by 43%. [emphasis added]
He's taken our best ideas and arguments and smeared, caricatured, and discredited them and rendered them radioactively toxic, and run as, again, the personification of every leftwingnut smear of the Right ever vomited upon us - "racist," "extremist," "violent," "fascist," etc. - and almost half of Republican voters have loudly proclaimed, "YEAH! That IS who we are! [BLEEP] sanity and responsibility and the Constitution and electability and persuasion and education and Republic Restoration and all that 'political correctness'! Let's go beat up protesters!"
What do you think 60% party disapproval numbers will do for our congressional majorities, hmm? "Teach them a lesson"? The last such "lesson" gave us the "stimulus," ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, and God knows what else. The next one will give us single-payer, cap & trade, a fossil fuel ban, Justice Merrick Garland (if we're lucky) - should I really have to go on?
Listen to me very carefully, Trumplicans: Politics is a zero-sum game. The alternative to what you indiscriminately sneer as the Republican "establishment" is the Democrats. And no, they're not the same thing. It's time for y'all to drop these annihilation fantasies and get aboard the Ted Cruz train before the Hillary Clinton Express runs us all over - with your cult leader as its engineer.
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