As Donald Trump faces yet more legal troubles and gears up for another presidential run in 2024, new polling finds that he is now more unpopular than he ever was during his presidency — during which he was rated the most unpopular president in nearly 100 years.
Polling of over 1,600 adults, including over 1,400 registered voters, released Wednesday by Quinnipiac University, finds that a mere 31 percent of registered voters view Trump favorably, while 59 percent have an unfavorable opinion of him. This is the lowest favorability rating that Quinnipiac has recorded since July of 2015, just weeks after Trump announced his presidential campaign.
Even Republicans view Trump more unfavorably than they have for years, despite the fact that he remains the de facto leader of the Republican Party. The poll found that 70 percent of Republicans have an unfavorable opinion of Trump, with 20 percent viewing him unfavorably — meaning that the former president is the most unpopular he’s been since March of 2016.
He is also extremely unpopular with Democrats and independents, the poll found, with only 3 percent and 25 percent approval, respectively.
This represents a low point for the former president. Even throughout his presidency, in which Gallup found that he had the lowest average favorability ever recorded for a president, his favorability still didn’t hit such a low point in polls.
Similarly to previous polls, Quinnipiac found that voters overwhelmingly don’t want Trump to run again, with 70 percent of voters polled holding this view. A majority of voters, 51 percent, said that he should be outright disqualified from running for office after calling for the “termination” of the U.S. Constitution.
The findings show that Trump’s recently-announced 2024 presidential campaign will be rough for the former president, who now comes with far more baggage than when he ran in 2016 or even when he ran in 2020.
Indeed, one of the reasons for his new unfavorability may be the myriad of legal and public relations issues that Trump and his closest allies are now up against.
Just in the past month, Trump lost his bid to keep his tax documents from Congress; hosted neo-Nazis Nick Fuentes and Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago; acknowledged for the first time that he took classified documents now seized by the FBI from the White House to his private residence; and called for the constitution to be abolished so that he could be reinstated as president.
Meanwhile, in recent months, the Trump Organization has been found guilty of 17 counts of tax fraud; the Department of Justice has asked a federal judge for Trump’s legal team to be held in contempt of court; and Trump’s former chief political strategist Steve Bannon was indicted for money laundering, conspiracy and fraud. And this list is just scratching the surface of Trump’s current troubles.
Another reason for Trump’s unpopularity, however, could be that there is a split emerging in the GOP that is seeing some Republicans move even further to the right than the already extremist former president. Early polls on the 2024 presidential primary show that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a more competent fascist than Trump, has become more popular than the former president among parts of the Republican base.
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