Normally, when we talk about candidate likability, we use favorability ratings, which combine “strongly favorable,” “somewhat favorable,” “somewhat unfavorable” and “strongly unfavorable.” But that didn’t work so well in the Republican primary, where Trump was able to win despite a relatively low net favorability rating because his “strongly favorable” rating with Republican primary voters was among the highest in the field. So let’s look at Trump and Clinton’s “strongly1 favorable” and “strongly unfavorable” ratings among general election voters.2
These are people who don’t just like or dislike the candidates, they really like or dislike them.
No past candidate comes close to Clinton, and especially Trump, in terms of engendering strong dislike a little more than six months before the election.
Part of the negativity voters feel toward Clinton and Trump probably has something to do with growing political polarization in our country. But polarization doesn’t explain everything. If Trump and Clinton’s strongly unfavorable ratings were simply a byproduct of polarized politics, you’d expect them to have high “strongly favorable” ratings too. They don’t. You can see this in their net strong favorability ratings (the “strongly favorable” rating minus the “strongly unfavorable” rating):
In previous cycles, the nominees of each party almost always had a strongly favorable and unfavorable rating within 10 percentage points of each other. The only exception was Michael Dukakis in 1988; only 19 percent of Americans felt strongly about Dukakis, either favorably or unfavorably. Over 50 percent of Americans give Clinton and Trump either a “strongly favorable” or “strongly unfavorable” rating, and most of that feeling is negative.
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