This IS normal folks….
But there are a whole bunch of Democrats running…
And only Donald Trump…. ALL alone with Republicans…
Contiually digging himself into holes….
Being well-liked matters for presidential candidates: Generally speaking, they need to be at least somewhat popular to win.
To that effect, Monmouth University and Quinnipiac University each released a poll this week that asked voters whether they had a favorable or unfavorable opinion of leading Democratic presidential candidates and President Trump, but what each pollster found was pretty different.
The Quinnipiac poll found that Trump received the worst marks overall — a net favorability rating (favorable rating minus unfavorable rating) of -17. This figure is 10 percentage points below the lowest-rated Democratic contender, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and 14 points worse than former Vice President Joe Biden, whose net favorability rating was -3. The Monmouth poll, on the other hand, put Trump’s net favorability at -6, which made him more popular than any of the Democratic front-runners, with the exception of Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana. Buttigieg was actually the most well-liked candidate in both polls, but his standing is more in flux considering far fewer respondents knew enough about him to have an opinion, compared with those who said the same about Trump, Biden, Warren or Sen. Bernie Sanders.
So what’s going on? We know that many of 2020 front-runners aren’t as popular as previous presidential contenders (at least at this point in the cycle), but among the general electorate, is Trump really as popular as many of the leading Democratic presidential contenders? To answer this question, we looked at all the national polls we could find since January (over 150 of them) that asked about how well-liked Trump and these candidates are. And as you can see in the chart below, despite one or two recent good polls for Trump, Trump remains really unpopular — far more than any of the leading Democratic presidential candidates….
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Democrats’ net favorability ratings have taken a hit. As you can see in the chart above, even though Biden, Sanders, Warren and Buttigieg are nowhere near as unpopular as Trump, their net favorability ratings have trended downward recently. This isn’t totally surprising, though, as my colleague Geoffrey Skelley noted a few weeks ago: Many presidential candidates’ net favorability ratings have been negative or close to zero since at least 2008, a sign, perhaps, of the polarized times we live in.
Of course, there is still time for public perception to change (in either direction) between now and November. But if the polls are any indication, opinions of the Democratic candidates seem much more likely to shift than opinions of Trump. That might be because people’s opinions of the Democratic candidates aren’t nearly as entrenched. Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, told me that if you look at the breakdown of “somewhat” and “very” favorable opinions for Trump and the Democratic candidates, “opinion about Trump is significantly more deeply held than opinion about any of the Democratic candidates right now.” The same is true if you look at the breakdown of “somewhat” and “very” unfavorable opinions for Trump and the Democratic candidates — Trump is much more actively disliked….