Another day, another absolutely dismal poll for Donald Trump’s general election chances.
Donald Trump’s horrible general election numbers have somehow gotten worse
Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty
Andrew Prokop is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He’s worked at Vox since the site’s launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker’s Washington, DC, bureau.
A new national Associated Press/GfK poll finds that 63 percent of registered voters say they “definitely would not” vote for Trump this fall. That’s remarkable.
And that might not even be Trump’s floor. Another 19 percent of registered voters only said they’d “consider” voting for Trump. A mere 16 percent said they “definitely would” do so.
Some amazing new numbers from our @AP poll. pic.twitter.com/rpijIvyQ79
— Julie Bykowicz (@bykowicz) April 7, 2016
This is particularly dreadful news for Trump because, as I wrote last week, this is about the time when general election polls have historically started to look accurate.
According to work by political scientists Robert Erikson and Christopher Wlezien, general election polls back in January are basically worthless in predicting the eventual result. But by mid-April they start telling us something (though they can, of course, still change).
“Were this a few months ago, I’d say, ‘What’s the big deal?’” Wlezien, a political science professor at the University of Texas, told me last week. “But polls today are much more meaningful than they were 90 days ago. And the polls today are much less favorable for Trump.”
Check out AP’s story, by Julie Pace and Emily Swanson, for the poll’s full results, which they call “a devastatingly broad indictment of the billionaire businessman.”
