By German Lopez
Donald Trump likes to say that everybody loves him. But that couldn’t be further from the truth: Americans don’t like the frontrunners for the Democratic or Republican nominations, but they really don’t like Trump.
Inspired by Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth, I put together a chart that uses NBC News and Wall Street Journal surveys to demonstrate this point. It shows the net favorability numbers for each candidate who hadn’t become president as of March or April of the election year, going back to the 1992 election:
Trump really sticks out here, with his numbers nearing -40 percent — simply unprecedented in recent history. But Hillary Clinton also fares poorly at -13 percent, although her husband’s net favorability numbers were nearly as bad at this point in the 1992 election.
Notably, Sanders’s numbers are positive — at 7 percent. (Although Republicans haven’t really attacked him yet, since Clinton has been the presumptive nominee for so long.)
But overall, the chart paints a pretty grim picture for the 2016 election: Americans may be forced to pick between two presidential candidates they simply don’t like.
As Trump would say, “Sad!”
