Good thing Dwayne Johnson’s a Republican. We might have had a problem otherwise.
He … is still a Republican, isn’t he?
That’s from left-leaning PPP, the industry standard for troll-poll questions like this one. The gender split on a Rock/Trump contest is 39/42 among men but 45/32 among women, which is why Johnson leads overall. Go figure that a charming, handsome movie star would lead President “Access Hollywood” among that group.
The good news, if you want to call it good news, is that The Rock was the best match-up for Trump among those tested:
It’s very early, but Trump trails by wide margins in hypothetical match ups for reelection. He does particularly poorly against Joe Biden (54/40 deficit) and Bernie Sanders (52/39 deficit.) There’s significant defection from people who voted for Trump in November in each of those match ups- 15% of Trump voters say they’d choose Sanders over him and 14% say they’d choose Biden over him.
Trump also trails Elizabeth Warren (49/39), Al Franken (46/38), and Cory Booker (46/39).
When asked if they’d prefer Trump or Obama as president, 55 percent said O; when asked if they’d prefer Trump or Hillary, 49 percent said Clinton versus 41 percent who said Trump. (Interestingly, 18 percent of Republicans said Obama and 15 percent said Clinton, which gives you a sense of the size of the anti-Trump contingent within the GOP right now.) Maybe there’s a cautionary tale in those numbers for liberals who are eyeing Oprah, Tom Hanks, and George Clooney as potential challengers to Trump on the theory that celebrity nominees are the way to go now. That might be true in a year when an incumbent president isn’t running; in a year when he is running and is unpopular, you’re better off with a known political commodity whom you can sell as an upgrade in basic competence.
Speaking of which, I stand by what I said yesterday about polling on impeachment being overhyped, but even so, the trend lines aren’t great. In late March, PPP saw support for impeachment split evenly at 44/45. Today:
A slightly greater share of Republicans support impeachment than Democrats oppose it? Not terrific. Really not the best.
One more data point. PPP has Democrats ahead by 11 points(!) on the generic ballot, which points to a big midterm wave next year if it holds up, but they’re an outlier on that question (for now). The RCP average has the Dem advantage at 6.7 points; a YouGov poll taken a few days before PPP’s had it at just five. (A notable difference, though: PPP’s poll was taken after Comey was fired. YouGov’s wasn’t.) No reason to panic yet, but the consistently poor polling on the House GOP’s health-care bill is worrisome. The numbers have improved a bit since the worst period in March, but check out the overall split here and the split among the 46-65 group in particular when people are asked if they’re more or less likely to vote for someone who voted for the AHCA:
A lot of near-retirees have read the news about subsidies potentially being scaled back for older Americans before they reach Medicare age and are very unhappy about it. Senate Republicans will address that problem in their own bill — I hope. Otherwise things really might start looking wavy in 2018.
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