Most Americans Don't Consider Donald Trump A Serious Candidate

Most People Still Aren't Ready To Take Trump Seriously

Donald Trump's bid for president is now official, but Americans still aren't quite ready to take him seriously, a new HuffPost/YouGov poll finds.

Just 21 percent of Americans, including about a third of Republicans and independents who lean Republican, say they consider Trump a serious candidate for president. That's basically unchanged from the 23 percent who took him seriously in 2011, when he briefly threatened to run before deciding against it.

"I regret that I didn’t stay in. I would’ve won the race against Obama. He would’ve been easy," he told The Des Moines Register this January, before setting his sights on Democrat Hillary Clinton, whom he called "very beatable."

Few Republicans, though, see Trump as the ideal GOP answer to Clinton. He's currently averaging less than 2 percent in national surveys, although he's fared somewhat better in state polls. In the HuffPost/YouGov survey, 49 percent say they'd be dissatisfied or angry to end up with Trump as the party's nominee, a higher negative tally than any of the six leading Republican candidates received. Fifteen percent say they'd be enthusiastic, and 30 percent that they'd be satisfied with Trump as the GOP's choice.

Twenty-two percent of Republicans and those who lean Republican say Trump is the candidate they'd least like to see chosen as their nominee, with another 18 percent naming former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush as the worst possible option, and 10 percent picking New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

Despite the lack of support for Trump's candidacy, many in the GOP want to see him face off with his Republican rivals. By an 11-point margin, 47 percent to 36 percent, Republicans and those who lean Republican say Trump should be one of the 10 candidates included in this cycle's first primary debate.

The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted June 15-17 among U.S. adults using a sample selected from YouGov's opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.

The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls. You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov's nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be found here. More details on the poll's methodology are available here.

Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some, but not all, potential survey errors. YouGov's reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample, rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate. Click here for a more detailed explanation of the model-based margin of error.

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