Following Donald Trump’s latest round of primary wins on Tuesday, more Republicans than ever believe he will be their party’s presidential nominee this fall.
The latest Rasmussen Reports weekly Trump Change survey finds that 87% of Likely Republican Voters nationwide now think Trump is likely to win the GOP nomination, with 59% who say it is Very Likely. This is up from 80% and 48% a week ago and represents new highs for both numbers. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
The previous highs among Republican voters, both recorded in the past month, were 80% overall and 50% who said a Trump nomination is Very Likely.
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Trump now matches the latest findings in Rasmussen Reports’ monthly Hillary Meter: 89% of Likely Democratic Voters think Hillary Clinton is likely to be their party’s presidential nominee in 2016. That includes 60% who say it is Very Likely, up 17 points from last month and the highest number of Democrats who consider Clinton’s nomination Very Likely in monthly surveys since last July.
Among all likely voters, 76% believe Trump is likely to be the Republican presidential nominee, including 46% who view his nomination as Very Likely. That’s up from 74% and 39% respectively a week ago and also represents the highest findings since Rasmussen Reports began the weekly Trump Change survey last August.
Just 10% of Republicans still think Trump is not very or Not At All Likely to win the nomination. Seventeen percent (17%) of all voters share this view.
Rasmussen Reports will release new numbers on the three-way Republican primary race at 10:30 a.m. Eastern today.
(Want a free daily email update? If it’s in the news, it’s in our polls). Rasmussen Reports updates are also available on Twitter or Facebook.
The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on March 16-17, 2016 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.
The problem all along for the Republican elites opposed to Trump is that they have no second act planned, and things got worse for them this week after his latest collection of primary wins.
Men are more confident than women that Trump will be the eventual nominee. Those under 40 share that belief slightly more than their elders do.
Whites are much more likely than blacks and other minority voters to expect Trump to win.
But sizable majorities across nearly every demographic category think Trump is likely to end up as the GOP nominee.
Seventy percent (70%) of Democrats believe Trump will win the nomination, up slightly from last week. Seventy-two percent (72%) of voters not affiliated with either major party agree, but that’s down from 79% a week ago.
Voters strongly believe candidates should tell it like it is, but most expect an increase in political violence this year, thanks in large part to Trump’s unvarnished populist message.
Trump has responded to critics of his abrasive campaign rhetoric by saying he would “gladly accept the mantle of anger” because the government is being run by “incompetent people.” Two-out-of-three voters (67%) are angry at the current policies of the federal government, and even more (84%) are angry at Congress.
Trump boasts that he is largely self-funding his campaign because he thinks big contributors have too much influence over elected officials. Most voters agree that presidential candidates are more concerned with what their big donors think than with the concerns of the voters.
Additional information from this survey and a full demographic breakdown are available to Platinum Members only.
