Does Trump Really Want To Win?
Watching Trump, I am moved to ask, does this guy really want to win this campaign?
This is a time when the polls are beginning to matter as a serious indication of who's going to win in November. Democratic frontrunner Hillary Rodham Clinton already is running TV ads that attack Trump as if he were the GOP nominee, though the ads don't name him. Meanwhile, Trump is still campaigning as though he were on a comedy tour and, by the way, learning the job as he campaigns for it.
More bad news for the Trumpster: A new Washington Post-ABC News poll released Thursday found that, instead of expanding the GOP's big tent, Trump has shrunk it.
If he wins his party's nomination, the Post reported, he would start the general election campaign as "the least-popular candidate to represent either party in modern times."
"Three quarters of women view him unfavorably," the newspaper reported. "So do nearly two-thirds of independents, 80 percent of young adults, 85 percent of Hispanics and nearly half of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents."
Even Trump's widely reported leads among white men, white evangelical Protestants and whites with a high school diploma or less has shrunk, the poll found. Slightly more than half of all three expressed unfavorable impressions of him.
Of course, polling numbers can change a lot before November, as can the frontrunners. But, for now, there's no question that Trump has drastically shrunk what GOP leaders hoped would be a big tent of racial, ethnic and gender diversity -- after losing five of the last six presidential elections.
I'm not going to count him out, but if he really wants to win, he still has a lot of homework to do.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)
(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
