Republican Voters Kind Of Hate All Their Choices

If we woke up one day and found that the daytime sky had permanently turned from blue to orange, we’d eventually get used to it. That wouldn’t make it any less strange, however.

So even though the battle between Donald Trump and the Republican “establishment”¹ 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.

Sean Trende, at Real Clear Politics, wrote about these satisfaction numbers earlier, so my goal here is not to duplicate his work but to provide some additional context. Specifically, it’s to point out that what we’re seeing among the Republican electorate this year is not remotely normal.

The exit polls have asked Republican voters in seven states — here’s Tennessee, for example — whether they’d be satisfied if each of Cruz, Rubio and Trump won the nomination. Remember, these are actual voters — voters who gave Trump a win in six of the seven states where the exit poll asked this question — and not some hypothetical universe of “likely voters.” On average, just 49 percent of these actual Republican voters said they’d be satisfied with Trump. The numbers for the other two candidates were better, but not by much: 53 percent of voters said they’d be satisfied with Rubio, and 51 percent with Cruz.

Many Republicans would be dissatisfied with Trump, Cruz or Rubio
		SHARE OF REPUBLICANS SATISFIED WITH CANDIDATE AS NOMINEE
DATE	STATE	CRUZ	RUBIO	TRUMP
2/9/16	New Hampshire	38	41	51
3/1/16	Alabama	49	47	56
	Arkansas	57	58	46
	Georgia	55	55	53
	Tennessee	50	54	53
	Texas	68	59	43
	Virginia	43	59	44
Average	7 states	51	53	49

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:

In 2008, most Democrats were happy with both their choices
		SHARE OF DEMOCRATS SATISFIED WITH CANDIDATE AS NOMINEE
DATE	STATE	CLINTON	OBAMA
1/26/08	South Carolina	77%	83%
1/29/08	Florida	80	70
2/5/08	Alabama	70	69
	Arizona	74	70
	Arkansas	83	47
	California	76	70
	Connecticut	72	73
	Delaware	70	69
	Georgia	64	79
	Illinois	60	78
	Massachusetts	78	70
	Missouri	67	74
	New Jersey	73	66
	New Mexico	73	72
	New York	78	67
	Oklahoma	67	49
	Tennessee	76	61
	Utah	68	78
2/9/08	Louisiana	63	64
2/12/08	Maryland	69	79
	Virginia	64	82
2/19/08	Wisconsin	68	82
3/4/08	Ohio	73	66
	Rhode Island	75	63
	Texas	70	66
	Vermont	70	82
3/11/08	Mississippi	58	69
4/22/08	Pennsylvania	73	64
5/6/08	Indiana	67	66
	North Carolina	63	69
5/13/08	West Virginia	74	42
5/20/08	Kentucky	76	43
	Oregon	70	79
6/3/08	Montana	67	74
	South Dakota	76	69
Average	35 states	71	69

How about the Republican race in 2012? The exit polls posed the satisfaction question in only four states, and Romney’s numbers weren’t great. But they were still much better than Trump’s. On average, 63 percent of Republicans said they’d be happy with Romney as their nominee.²

Republicans were relatively satisfied with Romney in 2012
		SHARE OF REPUBLICANS SATISFIED WITH CANDIDATE AS NOMINEE
DATE	STATE	GINGRICH	ROMNEY	SANTORUM
1/10/12	New Hampshire	35%	61%	38%
1/31/12	Florida	54	65	53
3/13/12	Mississippi	66	57	67
4/3/12	Wisconsin		67	60
Average	4 states	52	63	55

I also looked up these numbers for the 2004 Democratic and the 2008 Republican races, elections that bear some similarity to this year’s Republican race because there was no clear front-runner early on. Although it took a while for John Kerry and John McCain to catch on with voters, they eventually became very popular. In 2004, an average of 79 percent of Democrats said they’d be satisfied with Kerry as their nominee, while 77 percent of Republicans said so of McCain in 2008.

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	CANDIDATE	STATES POLLED	SHARE OF PARTY’S VOTERS SATISFIED WITH CANDIDATE
2004 Dem.	Kerry	16	79%
2016 Dem.	Clinton	8	79
2008 Rep.	McCain	6	77
2008 Dem.	Clinton	35	71
2008 Dem.	Obama	35	69
2012 Rep.	Romney	4	63
2016 Dem.	Sanders	8	62
2004 Dem.	Edwards	9	57
2012 Rep.	Santorum	4	55
2008 Rep.	Huckabee	4	54
2016 Rep.	Rubio	7	53
2012 Rep.	Gingrich	3	52
2016 Rep.	Cruz	7	51
2016 Rep.	Trump	7	49
2012 Rep.	Paul	2	33

So how is Trump winning? Partly it’s because the field is so divided, as Trende wrote. 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. But it’s also partly because Rubio and Cruz leave many Republicans dissatisfied. Maybe if Romney had run himself?

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Footnotes

See here for why we usually use scare quotes around “establishment.”
The table below excludes Ron Paul, whom the exit polls asked about in only two states. His numbers were poor in those states, however: 42 percent of New Hampshire Republicans said they’d be satisfied with Paul as their nominee, while 23 percent said so in Mississippi.

Footnotes

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