Voters trust the Republican Party to handle the economy and foreign policy, a new survey finds. They just don’t trust its presidential nominee.
A new GW Battleground poll, released Monday morning, asked half of the likely voters surveyed whether they trusted the Republican Party or the Democratic Party more to handle a slate of issues. The GOP led on most of the issues and lagged only modestly on the rest.
The other half of those surveyed were asked whether they trusted Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton more on the same issues. They preferred Clinton on every single metric.
Trump, in other words, seems to have taken the GOP’s advantage on issues like taxes and foreign policy and turned it into a striking deficit, while driving Republicans’ weakness on health care and the middle class even deeper.
Here’s a side-by-side comparison of Trump’s performance against Clinton and the GOP’s performance against the Democratic Party:
These findings ― which mirror the results of past Battleground polls ― offer both good and bad news for the GOP.
On one hand, they underscore exactly how bad Trump is as a candidate. Several election forecasts based on “fundamentals” ― factors like the length of the incumbent party’s tenure in office and the state of the economy ― suggested that a generic Republican candidate would have either even odds or the advantage in this year’s race. But at the moment, Trump has just a 7 percent chance of winning, according to The Huffington Post’s forecast.
On the other hand, the latest Battleground results suggest Trump’s weakness isn’t necessarily dragging down the party’s image ― a positive sign for the GOP’s chances in down-ballot races. The Republican Party’s numbers on the issues questions have remained largely stable over the course of the year, even as Trump’s have dropped.
Pollster Ed Goeas, the Republican half of the bipartisan team who conducted the survey, chose to take the glass-half-full route.
“Republican candidates across the country will be able to run with the advantage in the minds of voters on the key kitchen table issues and on one of the signature issues of the Clinton campaign, foreign affairs,” Goeas wrote Monday in a press release. “With or without the active assistance of Trump, Republican candidates will be able to run as their own independent entities, whose electoral fortunes will not be tied to the sinking presidential candidate of their party.”
The GW Battleground poll was conducted by a Republican firm, The Tarrance Group, and a Democratic firm, Lake Research Partners. It surveyed 1,000 likely voters between Oct. 8 and Oct. 13, using live interviewers to reach both landlines and cell phones.
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Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.