With only a few days to go before New York votes, the stop Trump movement is not looking quite like the solid bet it seemed after Ted Cruz’s smashing win in Wisconsin last week. Polls in the Northeastern states that are soon to vote all show Donald Trump with huge leads among Republican voters. Even if those polls are exaggerating his support because some of these states are closed primaries, Trump is clearly in position to change the narrative about the GOP race from one in which he is faltering in his effort to gain a majority of convention delegates back to one of inevitability. His road to get to 1,237 delegates is a hard one, but it may seem easier a couple of weeks from now after a few landslide wins.
That’s probably why some establishment figures like Karl Rove — who has been a bitter and accurate critic of the GOP front-runner — are beginning to make noises about being able to live with Trump. Politico reports today that Rove’s American Crossroads Super Pac is telling its donors that it can help Trump beat Hillary Clinton in November. That may have to do with a desire to pump up the GOP base in order to avoid a Goldwater/McGovern-style landslide in which the Republican majorities in Congress are erased along with Trump. But it’s also a clear sign that not everyone among Republican elites is so sure that Trump can be stopped either before the party’s convention in Cleveland or afterward.
But if Trump is about to win back the momentum in the race, causing some of the weaker-willed Republican operatives to start waving the white flag, those still unreconciled to his seizing control of the GOP need to look at the latest polling done about his candidacy before they even think about jumping on his bandwagon.
While it’s been clear that head-to-head matchups show Trump a certain loser against Hillary Clinton, the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll places his unpopularity in a historic perspective. Trump isn’t just deep underwater in terms of unfavorability; he’s the most unpopular major party presidential candidate in 30 years of polling. According to Langer Research Associates firm, which conducted the poll, the only presidential candidate to exceed his 67 percent unfavorable rating (with 31 percent saying they liked him) was Ku Klux Klan figure David Duke, who took an unsuccessful stab at the Republican presidential nomination in 1992. Duke was viewed unfavorably by 69 percent of Americans, though one would have to think that figure was so low because many people didn’t know who he was. The irony here, of course, is that at one point during the current campaign Trump refused to disavow Duke’s support for his candidacy — the racist figure said that for whites not to vote for Trump was “treason to your heritage” — and then subsequently condemned him.
The news for other presidential candidates isn’t that great either. The firm’s last poll of Democrats showed Hillary Clinton with a negative rating as well, with 52 percent unfavorable to 46 percent favorable. Ted Cruz also had bad numbers but not quite as awful as those of Trump. The Texas senator has 53 percent unfavorable with 36 percent favorable. John Kasich fared the best among Republicans, with 39 percent favorable and 39 percent unfavorable. However, Kasich had the highest percentage of those with “no opinion” of him, at 22 percent. Only two percent of respondents had no opinion about Trump.
What do these numbers mean?
It’s not rocket science. Trump may be winning large pluralities among Republican voters, but he would enter a general election campaign race with an enormous handicap. A net 36 percent unfavorable rating will not merely ensure the election of a Democratic candidate with serious problems of her own. It will transform the electoral map of the country. It will put red states like Georgia and perhaps even Mississippi into play and ensure a Republican collapse in purple swing states. The existing Democratic edge in the Electoral College will be turned into a stranglehold and likely create a cascade effect in races lower down the ticket. With numbers like those — fed by Trump’s horrific ratings among female voters and minorities — the Democrats become favorites to win back the Senate and even have a chance to seize control of the House of Representatives, something that no one imagined possible a few months ago.
While Cruz can’t celebrate his poll results, the difference between his numbers and those of Trump is the gap between a Mitt Romney-style loss and a Barry Goldwater party collapse.
Since he entered the GOP race, it’s been clear that Trump plays by different rules than other candidates and has the kind of following that makes him impervious to the impact of gaffes or damaging stories. His fans don’t care about his mistakes or ignorance, and that’s been enough to allow him to rise to the top of a divided field. The weakness of his opponents — in particular Cruz’s difficulty in consolidating the non-Trump vote and Kasich’s decision to hang around despite having no path to the nomination —may now be the factor that allows him to move closer to the nomination. But the notion that a little help from the right Super PAC can move the dial enough to make Trump electable must now be considered more a matter of magical thinking than analysis. GOP voters have been telling us that electability isn’t their priority. Unless Trump falters in the coming weeks, they’re about to see what not being electable looks like.
