Most Republicans (and members of the general public) still expect Donald Trump to be the eventual presidential nominee of the Republican Party. A new Rasmussen Poll shows that 84% of Republicans (and 74% of all likely voters) think Trump will win the nomination.That has many Republican leaders scared -- and they are desperately searching for a way to keep that from happening. Their current plan is to keep him from going to the convention with a majority of the delegates, and then snatch the nomination away from him in that brokered convention.
I don't know if they can be successful in that effort (in fact, I doubt it), but I do understand why they want to do it. They can read the polls, and those polls tell them that Donald Trump is a very unpopular candidate -- and if nominated, would be the most disliked candidate to ever run for the presidency on either party's ticket.
The Gallup Poll has realized a new survey showing Trump growing unpopularity with the public. The survey was done between July of 2015 and March of 2016 of a random national sample of between 3,648 and 7,302 adults, and has a 2 point margin of error.
It shows Trump has only a net favorability rating of +25 points among Republican men. Among Republican women that net favorability rating drops to only +3 (which means nearly as many GOP women dislike Trump as like him).
Among the general public, the numbers get far worse. Among men, Trump has a net favorability rating of -22, and among women his favorability rating is -47. Those are terrible numbers -- not the kind of numbers a political party wants their nominee to enter the general election with.
The two charts below show the favorability numbers for Trump among both women and men. Note that among both men and women the favorability number is going down with each passing month, and the unfavorability numbers are rising.
(NOTE -- The caricature of "The Don" above is by DonkeyHotey.)
