A quartet of recent polls have found that Donald Trump’s popularity has soared among the Republican Party’s far right wing to push him into the top tier of 2016 presidential contenders.
National and regional polls—by the Washington Post/ABC, USA Today/ Suffolk University, Monmouth University and Public Policy Polling—find Trump’s rise has followed his attacks on undocumented immigrants, especially from Mexico, as he’s called for tighter border controls.
“Mexico—they’re taking our jobs. They’re taking our manufacturing. They’re taking our money. They’re killing us at the border,” he said at a rally in Phoenix, Arizona, last weekend to a nearly all-white audience. “We’ll take our country back.”
Trump is now hovering around 11 percent in RealClearPolitics.com’s nationwide polling average—although the USA Today poll put his support among GOP primary voters at 17 percent. More tellingly, the Washington Post/ABC and Monmouth University polls found his popularity has flipped among Republican voters since May. The Post said “57% of Republican primary voters had a favorable view of Trump, compare[d]… with The Post’s May poll, which showed that only 16%… held a favorable view.”
The Monmouth poll was more revealing, finding that Trump’s biggest boost came from the GOP’s Tea Party wing. “He has also made an incredible surge [since June] among the Tea Party supporters – flipping his decidedly net negative 20% to 55% rating with this group to a decidedly positive 56% favorable to 26% unfavorable rating now,” it reported.
“It looks like Tea Party voters are really responding to Trump’s aggressive illegal immigrant message,” said Patrick Murray, Monmouth University Polling Institute director.
Trump’s surge has upended the Republican presidential field, where his candidacy has been viewed by pundits and party officials as more of a lark than a serious bid for the White House. However, it appears that Trump’s strident focus on illegal immigration has tapped into an issue that’s very much on likely Republican voters’ minds.
USA Today’s nationwide poll, with more than a third of respondents from the “South,” found that voters’ top four issues were economic inequality (62.10%), immigration (60.50%), Obamacare (60.40%) and deploying more troops to fight ISIS (58.50%). That underscores why Trump is moving the GOP’s far right wing with his remarks on immigration.
Still, that same USA Today poll also found that Trump was offending larger numbers of more moderate voters in both parties than apparent Trump supporters.
More than 48% said Trump’s nasty comments on “Mexican immigrants” mattered “a lot” in their vote, but only 14.80 percent said the comments were “more likely” to make them vote for him. In that poll, only 11.50% called themselves “very conservative”—which is about where Trump is hovering in national polling averages—while an additional 25.80% called themselves “conservative.”
The PPP poll, which was conducted only in North Carolina, is where a federal trial began this week over a Republican-drafted law that intentionally rolled back many voting options popular with Blacks and students. It’s accompanying analysis said that Trump’s surge was among the same Republicans who typically are Tea Partiers and support more restrictive voting laws.
“Trump’s really caught fire with voters on the far right,” PPP found. “Sixty-six % of ‘very conservative’ voters see him favorably to only 24% with a negative view of him. Trump is polling particularly well with younger voters (29%) and men (20%).”
However, outside of far right circles, there is still a wide perception that Trump is not in the race to win. Thirty-nine percent of Monmouth’s respondents “named Donald Trump as a candidate who is in it more for the publicity.”
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