All the new polls tell the same story: Trump is in trouble

The latest batch of polling suggests that the presumptive Republican nominee is losing ground to Hillary Clinton, becoming even more unpopular among key demographic groups, and—perhaps most telling of all—facing a potential backlash to his hate-filled, xenophobic response to this past weekend’s mass shooting in Orland, Fla.

The caveats: General election polling this far out from November tells us far more about the present than it does the future. Clinton has her own serious popularity problem to deal with. And the public’s reaction to this past weekend’s domestic terror attack could still change as we learn more about it. But, even with those disclaimers, the numbers suggest that at this particular moment in time, Trump is in trouble.

Meanwhile, the latest RealClearPolitics rolling average has Clinton leading Trump, 44.1 percent to 38.6 percent. As National Review points out, in the three most recent presidential elections, no nominee of a major party ever averaged less than 40 percent at any point in an election year. Trump dipped below that mark last week for the first time since he became his party’s presumptive nominee last month.

Trump and Clinton remain the least popular major presidential candidates in modern history, so to that degree, we’re still in uncharted territory. But Clinton’s dismal favorability ratings are largely holding steady while Trump’s even-more-dismal scores continue to fall as he finds new ways to alienate large swaths of the country. He is currently doing that by demonizing Muslim Americans; he did it before by suggesting that an American-born judge was biased because of his Mexican heritage; he’ll do it again.

Trump wants his voters to see the world through an Us vs. Them lens, but he continues to define an increasing number of Americans as the latter. It’s not a shock, then, that in a new Washington Post/ABC New poll out Wednesday, 88 percent of nonwhites and 77 percent of women said they had an unfavorable view of Trump. (The poll was conducted over a five-day stretch ending this past Sunday.) More surprising—and heartening—is that Trump is also becoming less popular among those groups that he’s trying to rile up with his nativist bluster. His net-favorable rating in the survey was minus-20 among whites, minus-26 among men, and minus-36 among those who never attended college. As the Post’s Greg Sargent points out, one of the only subsets that viewed Trump favorably in the poll is noncollege white men, and even their opinions are mixed, with 52 percent saying they have a positive view and 46 percent saying the opposite.

[link to www.sun-sentinel.com]