Donald Trump Gallup, Highest Unfavorables

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Donald Trump: Gallup poll tags Trump as 'least favorable' candidate in 25 years - Donald Trump may be leading the polls as GOP candidate, but a recent Gallup survey shows the business and real estate mogul trumping all others in a particularly ignominious category – least liked. In fact, 60 percent of Americans view The Donald as “unfavorable.” No candidate in the past 25 years, from any party, has been viewed as disapprovingly as Trump currently is, the poll revealed.

According to the Gallup opinion poll, released on Jan. 30, only one-third of Americans have a favorable impression of Donald Trump. Ouch.

“Most political and media commentators have at this point installed Donald Trump as the GOP front-runner on the eve of the first actual voting set to begin on Monday in Iowa,” writes Gallup’s Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport. “But this narrative tends to obscure the fact that Trump is the most unpopular candidate of either party when the entire U.S. population is taken into account – and that he has a higher unfavorable rating than any nominated candidate from either of the two major parties going back to the 1992 election when we began to track favorability using the current format.”

The poll also tracked Trump’s running mates. Jeb Bush currently has a 45 percent unfavorable rating, Chris Christie is at 38 percent, Ted Cruz 37 percent and Marco Rubio 33 percent. The least unfavorable? Ben Carson, at 30 percent. On the democratic side, frontrunner Hillary Clinton currently has a 52 percent unfavorable rating among all Americans, while Bernie Sanders stands at 31 percent.

According to The Washington Post, the fact that Bernie Sanders and Ben Carson are coming in at the opposite spectrum of Trump could simply be that both of the men “are less well-known than Trump, meaning that fewer people have an opinion one way or the other.”

“The bottom line is that Trump now has a higher unfavorable rating than any candidate at any time during all of these previous election cycles,” Newport said. “That conclusion takes into account the fact that unfavorable ratings tend to rise in the heat of a general election campaign — as the barbs, negative ads and heightened partisanship are taken to their highest levels.”

Despite Trump’s emphatically fading likability, he remains on a clear footing to gain a number of early primary victories. Polling data by Real Clear Politics currently has Trump ahead of his closest competitor – Ted Cruz – by six points heading into this week’s Iowa caucuses.