<div dir="ltr"><div class=""><div class=""><p class="">New York Times, April 2</p><p class="">D<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/donald-trump-on-the-issues.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Donald J. Trump." class="">onald J. Trump</a>’s presidential candidacy has stunned the <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/republican_party/index.html?inline=nyt-org" title="More articles about Republican Party" class="">Republican Party</a>.
But if he survives a late revolt by his rivals and other leaders to
become the party’s standard-bearer in the general election, the
electoral map now coming into view is positively forbidding.</p><p class="">In
recent head-to-head polls with one Democrat whom Mr. Trump may face in
the fall, Hillary Clinton, he trails in every key state, including
Florida and Ohio, despite her soaring unpopularity ratings with swing
voters.</p><p class="">In
Democratic-leaning states across the Rust Belt, which Mr. Trump has
vowed to return to the Republican column for the first time in nearly 30
years, his deficit is even worse: Mrs. Clinton leads him by double
digits in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.</p><p class="">Mr.
Trump is so negatively viewed, polls suggest, that he could turn
otherwise safe Republican states, usually political afterthoughts
because of their strong conservative tilt, into tight contests. In Utah,
his deep unpopularity with Mormon voters suggests that a state that has
gone Republican every election for a half-century could wind up in
play. Republicans there pointed to a much-discussed <a title="Deseret News article." href="http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865650513/Poll-Utah-would-vote-for-a-Democrat-for-president-over-Trump.html?pg=all">Deseret News poll</a> last month, showing Mrs. Clinton with a narrow lead over Mr. Trump, to argue that the state would be difficult for him.</p><p class="">Horse-race
polls this early are poor predictors of election results, and
candidates have turned around public opinion before. And the country’s
politics have become so sharply polarized that no major-party contender
is likely to come near the 49-state defeats suffered by Democrats in <a title="The American Presidency Project page." href="http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showelection.php?year=1972">1972</a> and <a title="The American Presidency Project page." href="http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showelection.php?year=1984">1984</a>.</p>
<p class="" id="story-continues-1">But
without an extraordinary reversal — or the total collapse of whoever
becomes his general-election opponent — Mr. Trump could be hard-pressed
to win more than 200 of the 270 electoral votes required to win.</p>
<h2 class=""><span style="font-size:small;font-weight:normal">Mr.
Trump has become unacceptable, perhaps irreversibly so, to broad swaths
of Americans, including large majorities of women, nonwhites,
Hispanics, voters under 30 and those with college degrees — the voters
who powered President Obama’s two victories and represent the country’s
demographic future. All view him unfavorably by a 2-to-1 margin,
according to a </span><a title="The poll results." href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/03/21/us/politics/times-cbs-news-poll-2016-race.html" style="font-size:small;font-weight:normal">recent </a><font size="2">polls.</font></h2></div><div class="" id="supplemental-1"><div class=""><div class="">
<div class="">
<div class="">
<h2 class=""><span style="font-size:small;font-weight:normal">In
some states, Mr. Trump has surprised establishment-aligned Republicans
with his breadth of support beyond the less-educated men who form his
base. Even so, his support in the nominating process, in which some 30
million people may ultimately vote, would be swamped in a general
election, when turnout is likely to be four times that.</span><br></h2></div></div></div></div></div></div><div class=""><div class=""><p class="">“We’re
talking about somebody who has the passionate devotion of a minority
and alternately scares, appalls, angers — or all of the above — a
majority of the country,” said Henry Olsen, a conservative analyst.
“This isn’t anything but a historic election defeat just waiting to
happen.”</p><p class="">What
could ensure a humiliating loss for Mr. Trump in November are his
troubles with constituencies that have favored Republicans in recent
elections. Among independents, a group that Mitt Romney carried even as
he <a title="Times coverage of 2012 election." href="http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/results/live-coverage?action=click&contentCollection=Politics&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=Marginalia&pgtype=article">lost to President Obama in 2012</a>,
Mr. Trump would begin the fall campaign at a considerable disadvantage:
19 percent have a favorable opinion of him, but 57 percent view him
unfavorably, the Times/CBS survey found. Given his loathed standing
among Democrats and the possibility that many in his own party would
spurn him, Mr. Trump would need to invert his numbers among independents
to even be competitive in November.</p><p class="">With
white women, a bloc Mr. Romney easily won even in defeat, Mr. Trump is
nearly as unpopular: 23 percent view him favorably, while 54 percent
have an unfavorable opinion of him. And that was before Mr. Trump <a title="Times article, March 23, 2016." href="http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/03/23/donald-trump-threatens-ted-cruzs-wife-elicting-angry-retort/">attacked Senator Ted Cruz’s wife</a>, ridiculed a female reporter against whom Mr. Trump’s campaign manager was <a title="Times article, March 29, 2016." href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/30/us/politics/trump-campaign-manager-corey-lewandowski.html">charged with committing battery</a>, and suggested that women who have abortions <a title="Times article, March 30, 2016." href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/31/us/politics/donald-trump-abortion.html">should face criminal punishment</a> before reversing himself.</p><p class="">Mr.
Trump’s penchant to offend and his household-name celebrity are a
potentially lethal combination, as most voters have both firm and deeply
negative opinions of him. His incendiary comments about minorities and
the disabled, and proposals <a title="Times article, Dec. 9, 2015." href="http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/12/09/idea-behind-donald-trumps-plan-to-bar-muslims-has-some-deep-roots/">to bar Muslims</a> from entering the United States or to <a title="Times article, Feb. 25, 2016." href="http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/02/25/2-ex-presidents-of-mexico-say-no-way-theyre-paying-for-donald-trumps-wall/">force Mexico to pay for a wall</a>
on the southern border, have resounded so widely that half of all
voters said they would be scared if he were elected president, according
to the Times/CBS poll.</p><p class="">“There
is no precedent for this,” said Neil Newhouse, a veteran Republican
pollster. “In the modern polling era, since around World War II, there
hasn’t been a more unpopular potential presidential nominee than Donald
Trump.”</p>
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/03/09/us/politics/how-trump-could-be-blocked-at-a-contested-republican-convention.html">
<div class="">
<div class="">
<img src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2016/03/09/us/politics/how-trump-could-be-blocked-at-a-contested-republican-convention-1457502157866/how-trump-could-be-blocked-at-a-contested-republican-convention-1457502157866-master180-v3.png">
</div>
<div class="">
<i class=""></i>
</div>
</div>
<h2 class="">
Graphic: How Trump Could Be Blocked at a Contested Republican Convention </h2>
</a>
<p class="">Stan
Greenberg, the longtime Democratic pollster, released a survey Friday
summing up Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities under the headline, “Earthquake?”
Mr. Trump trails Mrs. Clinton by 23 points among women in Mr.
Greenberg’s poll, suggesting the possibility of a gender gap of historic
proportions. (The Times survey last month had Mrs. Clinton leading by
20 points among women.) The largest gender gap in the last 36 years was
Bob Dole’s <a title="Women’s election voting, Center for the American Woman and Politics, pdf." href="http://www.cawp.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/resources/ggpresvote.pdf">11-point loss</a> among women against Bill Clinton in 1996.</p>
<p class="" id="story-continues-4">“His
gains with men have been neutralized with women,” Mr. Greenberg said of
Mr. Trump. “There’s no play here. The math just doesn’t work.”</p><p class="">Nationally,
Mrs. Clinton leads Mr. Trump by about 10 percentage points in most
head-to-head polls — the widest margin at this point in a presidential
campaign in 16 years.</p><p class="">If
Mrs. Clinton somehow loses the Democratic race — unlikely given her
delegate advantage — Mr. Trump could fare even worse in a general
election against Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who has higher
margins than Mrs. Clinton in head-to-head polling against Mr. Trump in
most swing states.</p><p class="">Even
among the working-class whites, who have been the foundation of his
success in the Republican primaries, Mr. Trump would enter the general
election with substantial difficulties. He is viewed unfavorably by a
majority of whites without college degrees, according to an <a title="The poll results." href="http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/politics/washington-post-abc-news-national-poll-march-3-6-2016/1982/">ABC News/Washington Post poll</a> early last month.</p><p class="">It
is possible that Mr. Trump could improve his standing with blue-collar
voters who are crucial in Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania and
Wisconsin, where polls now show him faring worse than Mr. Romney did in
2012. But doing so would not be cost-free.</p><p class="">“By
leaning into white grievance politics, you give back whatever gains you
made as you move up the economic scale,” said Liam Donovan, a
Republican strategist who has written extensively on Mr. Trump’s
vulnerabilities. “There just aren’t enough votes left in the places
where Trump could be strong, like rural areas, to offset the vote-rich
places where Trump repels.”</p>Or,
as Mr. Olsen put it, referring to Michigan: “If you bring in 30,000
blue-collar voters from Flint, but you lose 50,000 from suburban
Detroit, you’ve not helped yourself very much.”
<p class="" id="story-continues-5">This
losing trade-off has been largely overlooked because of Mr. Trump’s
success so far and the failure of more affluent Republican primary
voters to unite behind any of his rivals.</p><p class="">But
the general-election universe is vastly larger and more diverse than
the Republican primary electorate. There are likely to be around 30
million votes in this year’s Republican primary once all 56 states and
territories finish voting in June. In the 2012 contest between Mr. Obama
and Mr. Romney, about 129 million voters cast ballots.</p><p class="">“You’re
talking about a significantly more conservative, partisan, older and
whiter group of voters than the general electorate,” Mr. Newhouse said.
“It’s like night and day.”</p><p class="">Mr.
Trump’s hopes rest largely on his energizing a coalition of the
disaffected: millions of people who have not voted in recent elections
but who have found in Mr. Trump someone giving voice to their anger.
High primary turnouts have fed speculation that Mr. Trump could lure
back the so-called missing white voters — populist-minded Americans
thought to have skipped the 2012 presidential election, and who,
depending on their numbers, offer a glimmer of hope for many
conservatives in an era of unfavorable demographic shifts.</p><p class="">But
Mr. Trump cannot count on such a surge. The actual number of missing
white voters is quite low in the closely contested states, where turnout
remained high or even rose in 2012.</p></div></div>
<p class="">Moreover,
there is scant evidence that white voters who did stay home would be
inclined to support Mr. Trump. In fact, they were far younger and much
more likely to be registered Democrats than the white voters who did
turn out, according to the census and data from L2, a nonpartisan voter
file vendor.</p><div><br></div>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div> <div style="height:auto;width:auto"> <div> <div><div><br></div></div></div></div></div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><font size="2"><span style="font-size:10pt"><div><span style="font-size:13.3333px">A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. </span><br style="font-size:13.3333px"><br style="font-size:13.3333px"><span style="font-size:13.3333px">-Greek proverb</span></div><div><br>
“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.
Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance
from another. This immaturity is self- imposed when its cause lies not
in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it
without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! ‘Have courage to use your
own understand-ing!—that is the motto of enlightenment.<br>
<br>
--Immanuel Kant<br>
<br><br></div></span></font></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
</div>