Last week the pollsters at Gallup revealed that Donald Trump’s Republican National Convention keynote was the most poorly received of any such speech since they began keeping data on the subject in 1996. On Monday, Gallup released another Trump-related finding that’s also bad news for the GOP nominee.
Gallup notes that decadeslong trends toward inflexible partisan polarization have reduced the degree to which a convention can win over voters. You’ll see, for example, that Barack Obama’s 2008 convention was considerably less well-received than those of losing candidates Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale in 1988 and 1984. Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters are less open-minded to Republicans these days than they used to be. Still, a -15 point net is, to put it technically, a lot.
Also of note: 44 percent of respondents rated Hillary Clinton’s DNC keynote as excellent or good, Gallup says, versus 20 percent who called it poor or terrible. (By contrast, Trump’s speech was in the red: 35 percent called it excellent or good and 36 percent said it was poor or terrible.) Unsurprisingly, given the above, FiveThirtyEight is reporting that initial post-convention polls indicate that Clinton will get a bigger post-convention bounce than Trump. The GOP nominee has also spent the past three days getting denounced by his own party for his petty reaction to Khizr Khan’s DNC speech. There’s a long way to go until the election, but for now at least Trump’s chances are not looking great.
