It’s early, but polls show
most Republicans are willing to vote for Trump.
Donald Trump is
rising in the polls again. We’ve been here before: As the business mogul surged
in the Republican primary polls last July, analysts and pundits worked hard to
explain his rise while downplaying his long-term chances.
Now Trump is the presumptive
Republican nominee, and we’re looking at a similar pattern: Trump’s numbers are
creeping upward, and analysts
and pundits
are explaining why not to trust those numbers. Those criticisms are valid —
it is very early, and the Democratic nomination is still not completely
settled. A lot can and will happen between now and November.
But there are also indications
that the 2016 general election won’t be all that different from the early
polls. Republicans will vote for the Republican candidate, Democrats will vote
for the Democratic candidate and the election will come down to a handful of
battleground states. In short, Trump might fail — his polling bump could be
short-lived. He could lose in a close race. But he could also win this
election.
Despite the overarching
narrative of a fractured Republican Party
elite, most national and state-level general election polls are showing that
most Republican voters support Trump. The numbers are pretty similar to the
proportion of Democrats who indicate they will support Hillary Clinton.
The most recent national polls
show nearly identical degrees of support for Clinton and Trump from respondents
in their respective parties:
The Huffington Post
Trump is an unusual candidate
in many ways — particularly in his lack of political experience and use of inflammatory
rhetoric — but in a choice between Trump and Clinton, Republican voters
unsurprisingly
favor the Republican candidate.
Another common media narrative
that doesn’t play out well in the polls is the idea that a strong third-party
candidate would hurt Trump’s electoral chances. Many voters say they would
consider a third-party candidate — and respondents
say that every cycle — but in tests of that scenario, a strong third-party
candidate pulls
as many voters from Clinton as from Trump. That could be because the former
secretary of state is viewed almost
as unfavorably as the former reality TV star.
All of that said, there are
indeed substantial reasons to be skeptical of Trump’s chances in the general
election. The polls aren’t reflecting divisions in the party right now, but
those divisions do exist among donors
and high-level party leaders. If House Speaker Paul
Ryan (R-Wis.) refuses to back Trump and donors remain resistant,
voters might begin to pay more attention to the #NeverTrump wing of the party.
But it’s unclear
whether the #NeverTrump faction will hold — Sen. Lindsey
Graham (R-S.C.), who once called Trump a “race-baiting, xenophobic,
religious bigot,” is rumored to be privately encouraging Trump support.
Most of Trump’s other former
primary opponents have also caved, although no one in the Bush family is
willing to support him.
Trump’s lack of political
experience could matter as well. The last time we elected a president without
any previous electoral experience was in 1952 with Dwight Eisenhower, who was a
very well-known World War II general. Is a celebrity business mogul the new
Army general? Time will tell, but the general election campaign could shed more
light on Trump’s lack of experience than the primaries did.
Ultimately, whether the
general election looks like it usually does — with states splitting along their
usual party lines and a handful of battleground states determining the outcome
— depends on how strong Republican identity is. So far, it seems the Republican
label is serving Trump pretty well, and the voters, at least, are lining up
behind him.
If that continues, Trump has a
solid chance of winning in enough battleground states to win the presidency.
Betting markets, aggregated
on PredictWise, give him about a 33 percent chance to win the election, and
Clinton a 67 percent chance. That’s probably about right.
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