No presidential candidate in polling history has been as hated by voters as Donald Trump and ... But a review of the last eight presidential elections reveals that the most hated candidate in the spring almost always ... May 8, 2016 | 2: 47am.
The year of the hated: Clinton and Trump, two intensely disliked candidates, begin their face-off
'Trump effect' threatens Republicans in Congress
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Some
Republicans in Congress could be at risk of losing seats, in part
because of the party's controversial presidential candidate Donald
Trump. These are some of the Republicans feeling the “Trump effect” the
most. (Deirdra O'Regan/The Washington Post)
In
the end, it was the voters of Indiana last week who effectively gave
the country the outcome that had loomed for months. The 2016 election is
likely to pit Hillary Clinton, who is disliked by a majority of voters,
against Donald Trump, disliked by a greater majority of voters.
If
the rise of Trump has no obvious precedent, neither does an election
like this. Clinton, whose buoyant favorable ratings in the State
Department convinced some Democrats that she could win easily, is now
viewed as unfavorably as George W. Bush was in his close 2004 reelection
bid. Trump is even less liked, with negative ratings among nonwhite
voters not seen since the 1964 campaign of Barry Goldwater.
“In
the history of polling, we’ve basically never had a candidate viewed
negatively by half of the electorate,” Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) wrote in a
widely shared note that asked someone, anyone, to mount a third-party
run. “There are dumpster fires in my town more popular than these two
‘leaders.’ ”
According to RealClearPolitics averages, Trump has an unfavorable rating of 65 percent. Clinton has 55 percent.
Democratic
front-runner Hillary Clinton meets staff and volunteers at her Oakland,
Calif., field office. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post)
You
wouldn’t know it from talking to each candidate’s supporters, who see
only one reality — they hate the other choice — and who seem oblivious
that much of the nation is defining this election by watching with
dismay and deciding whether to bother to participate.
“Everybody
likes her,” said Pamela Hatwood, 51, a nurse on disability leave who was
fanning herself with an extra Clinton sign in a sweltering gym in
Indianapolis last week — one of many supporters who shrugged off
questions about whether Clinton’s appeal was too narrow.
“I think
she’s such a strong woman that people get afraid,” said Stephen
Yanusheskhy, 40, a health insurance salesman. “I’m not worried about the
polls. They’re good one week, they’re bad the next week. I feel like
they poll the people they want to get a certain result. But once she
actually gets the nomination, people will come out in droves. You’ll see
more involvement from the gay community, from women and from people of
color.”
Trump
is a big motivator for these voters. Clinton’s crowd was never as rapt
as when she asked how embarrassing it was to see violence break out at
Trump rallies.
“You see it on TV, and you assume it’s some place
far away, don’t you?” she said. “You hear this hateful talk about women,
and you want to say: Enough, enough! That’s not who we are.”
A
few hours later, up the highway in Fort Wayne, thousands of voters
decided differently. Yes, this was who they were: They were Trump
voters. And none of them could look around the room, an arena packed as
if a Top 40 band were playing it, and imagine that Trump was unpopular.
Corey Fuller, 41, voted for Barack Obama in 2008, one of the optimists
who helped him win Indiana.
“When he first announced, I kind of
rolled my eyes, too,” Fuller said about Trump. “But I got it soon
enough. I don’t worry about him losing, but I worry about the
establishment trying to steal it from him, and that’s sad. I joined the
Republican Party this year for this.”
From
the stage, Trump meandered his way toward a discussion of why he could
win. He has spoken more about poll numbers, in his set speeches, than
any candidate in the same position. He tends to focus on the numbers
that show him competitive — and to ignore the ones that show him to be
the least popular candidate to win a party nomination.
“I won
every debate,” Trump said. “I started off at 4 [percent], and they all
said, ‘Well, that is his plateau. He won’t go higher.’ ” Trump’s
imitation of a pundit was stuffy and nasal, like some king ordering a
fresh pillow. “The next week, I went to 8. Then I went to 12. Then I
went to 18. Then I went to 20. And every week, these idiots said, ‘That
is his plateau!’ Then I went to 68!”
For
many of those listening to him that day, the idea of Trump losing an
election was preposterous. Republicans who have nervously studied the
party’s future worry that Trump is too alienating to women and nonwhite
voters to even get close to victory. Another theory is that his support
could be so robust from white voters — who have steadily trended
Republican — that he could capitalize on Clinton’s unfavorable numbers
and win.
“Hell, I could beat Hillary,” said John Hook, 50.
The
last open election for the White House felt bitter at times. It was not
half as bitter as this. In exit polls from November 2008, just
24 percent of voters said they would be “scared” if Barack Obama won the
election; just 28 percent said the same of his rival, Sen. John McCain
of Arizona. Both candidates were viewed favorably. When asked how they
would have voted had Clinton won the Democratic nomination, those polled
said they would have picked her, by 11 points.
Clinton’s
strategy assumes she has lost voters’ esteem since then. Even before the
unexpectedly stiff challenge of Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont — who,
supporters point out, polls better than she — the former secretary of
state was building a campaign that could grind out majorities in swing
states and maximize the growing nonwhite vote.
Eight years ago,
both she and Obama campaigned on “clean coal.” This year, she has said
that “we’ve got to move away from coal” and put “a lot of coal miners
and coal companies out of business” as the economy gets greener.
(Sanders has roughly the same position but has not received the same
backlash.)
Eight years ago, she won Indiana in the primary; Obama
became the first Democrat in 44 years to carry it in the general
election.
Indiana ended the campaign of Trump’s last serious
rival, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), another candidate who was navigating
soaring unfavorable ratings. In his final days, Cruz regularly made four
or five campaign stops, out-hustling every other candidate, silently
aware that his poll numbers were not recovering.
At Cruz’s
rallies, his supporters insisted that his unfavorable ratings, past
50 percent, were a result of the candidate’s media coverage.
“You
can actually poll somebody and get the result that you want,” said Joe
Stack, 37, who had backed Cruz since his 2012 campaign for Senate and
drove an hour to see him in La Porte. “Maybe in the Hillary Clinton
camp, he’s unpopular. Maybe among some of these other Republicans like
John Boehner — they’re not going to like him, because he’s a principled
guy. The perception is that he’s unpopular, but people perceive what
they’re told in the media.”
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At
a larger rally in Fort Wayne, Mary Lynn Hamrick, 46, showed up in a
shirt that the tea party group FreedomWorks had given her. It was
ridiculous, she said, that Cruz was portrayed as an extremist. The
current president had earned that status, because a permanent class of
agitators, the class that produced him, was determined not to allow the
country to enjoy peace.
“Look at what went on at the Trump
rallies just this week. They were the socialists, the communists, NARAL,
Occupy Wall Street. Those people are going to exist, and a lot of them
are paid protesters.”
The
irony, which Hamrick and Cruz would learn one day later, was that the
“socialists” would cross the finish line and Cruz would not. Sanders won
Indiana, helped in many primaries by the ability of independent voters
to cross into the Democratic primary. Hillary Clinton won Democratic
votes by 6 points; Sanders won independents by 44 points.The night
he won Indiana, Sanders rallied in Louisville, the biggest city in a
state that had given Clinton one of her biggest 2008 primary landslides.
The Sanders rally took up the larger portion of a park on the Ohio
River, with Indiana in the distance, and he got applause for a carbon
tax, a tax on stock transactions and a condemnation of the media that
had called his candidacy fringe.
“The
establishment, the big-money interests, corporate media and all the
rest want you to believe that change is not possible,” Sanders said.
Within
24 hours, with both Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) out, the
socialist from Vermont was the only candidate for president not disliked
by a majority of voters.
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