f you want to get an idea of how bad Donald Trump's political standing was by the end of his abortive run for President consider this- a national poll we conducted last week found that he would trail Dennis Kucinich 40-36 in a hypothetical contest. On that poll we found that there were more Republicans (15%) willing to vote for Kucinich than there were Democrats (14%) willing to vote for Trump. And Kucinich took independents by a 40-38 margin as well.
Trump was already unpopular when he started testing the Presidential waters. In February we found that his favorability was a -29 spread at 27/56. But he managed to make himself more unpopular over the course of the last three months and in our final national poll including him he was at a -41 spread at 24/65. He did improve his popularity with Republicans over the course of that time from -22 (31/53) to -8 (39/47). But with Democrats he cratered from -40 (21/61) to -70 (11/81) and he had a dramatic decline with independents as well from -22 (30/52) to -40 (26/66).
For all of that Trump is not the weakest Republican in the two hypothetical match ups we tested with Dennis Kucinich. Kucinich's lead over Sarah Palin if they were to face off would be 43-36. In that scenario Kucinich gets 16% of Republicans to Palin's 12% of Democrats and leads her by 10 points with independents at 42-32.
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