Mitt Romney's plea last week for Republican voters to reject Donald Trump marked one of the strongest intraparty attacks yet on the front-runner, but that doesn't mean it'll necessarily change anyone's mind.
Romney's position as the party's former standard-bearer actually matters least to the voters he was hoping to reach, a new YouGov poll shows.
Republicans' opinion of their 2012 nominee is middling overall, with just 47 percent holding a favorable view of Romney. But only 21 percent of Trump supporters say the same, making Romney barely more popular with them than among Democrats.
Asked directly about the impact of a possible Romney endorsement, Trump supporters say overwhelmingly that either it doesn't matter or it would actually turn them against a candidate.
Given that the survey was taken after Romney's speech, it's impossible to say how much of the antipathy Trump supporters feel for Romney was pre-existing, and how much comes from his disparaging their chosen candidate. But either way, it certainly suggests that they're not likely to be receptive to his message.
"The problem for establishment Republicans like Romney is that they, as much as the Democrats, are the enemy to Trump supporters," YouGov's Doug Rivers wrote.
The YouGov poll consisted of more than 2,000 completed interviews conducted March 4-5 among U.S. adults, using a sample selected from YouGov's opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population.
Most surveys report a margin of error that represents some, but not all, potential survey errors. YouGov's reports include a model-based margin of error, which rests on a specific set of statistical assumptions about the selected sample, rather than the standard methodology for random probability sampling. If these assumptions are wrong, the model-based margin of error may also be inaccurate. Click here for a more detailed explanation of the model-based margin of error.