Who would'a thunk it? "Republican Voters Kind Of Hate All Their Choices" (538)
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So even though the battle between Donald Trump and the Republican “establishment” has been a story since the summer, we should still pause now and again to gawk at the spectacle. On Thursday, Mitt Romney, the previous Republican presidential nominee and the closest thing the GOP has to a party elder, denounced Trump in the strongest possible terms. Trump responded by making what sounded to me like a blow job reference.
This is really happening. At least I think.
But as spectacular as the clash between Trump and Republican “party elites” has become, the coverage of it tends to obscure another, perhaps equally important part of the story. Trump does not just divide rank-and-file voters from Republican poo-bahs. He’s also extremely divisive among Republican voters, much more so than a typical front-runner. In exit polls so far, only 49 percent of Republican voters say they would be satisfied with Trump as their nominee — remarkable considering Trump’s lead in votes and delegates. But compounding the GOP’s problems, Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz would leave only slightly more Republican voters happy.
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You might wonder whether this sort of thing always happens during a nomination campaign. The short answer is that it doesn’t. By comparison, 79 percent of Democrats this year have said they’d be satisfied with Hillary Clinton as their nominee, while 62 percent have said so of Bernie Sanders.
Eight years ago, the battle between Clinton and Barack Obama was much tenser. With a few notable exceptions in Appalachia, however, both Clinton and Obama were widely acceptable to Democrats in 2008. On average in the 35 states where the exit polls asked the question, 69 percent of Democrats said they’d be satisfied with Obama as their nominee, while 71 percent said so of Clinton.
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Not only is Trump’s 49 percent satisfaction rating lower than any recent party nominee’s, it’s also lower than almost all the losers’. Rick Santorum in 2012 was more widely acceptable than Trump, for example. The only exception was Ron Paul in 2012, although the exit polls asked about him in only two states.
No recent precedent for a front-runner as divisive as Trump
Campaign reporters perhaps ought to do more to distinguish between a candidate who is winning 34 percent of his party’s vote, as Trump has done so far, and one winning with 60 percent, as Clinton has. Clinton has a much clearer mandate than Trump does
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https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/republican-voters-kind-of-hate-all-their-choices/
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