The division onstage at this week’s Republican National Convention is mirrored among GOP voters, many of whom remain lukewarm about the outcome of the primary, according to a poll taken midway through the convention.
In a HuffPost/YouGov survey conducted Tuesday and Wednesday, 48 percent of Republican voters said that Donald Trump was the best option for a nominee this year, while 40 percent said the party could have done better.
By a 4-point margin, 32 percent to 28 percent, Republican voters say that this year’s election has made them feel worse, not better, about their party. Another 36 percent say their feelings haven’t changed.
Still, that doesn’t mean GOP voters plan to abandon the party en masse in November. Eighty percent of Republicans already plan to vote for Trump, according to HuffPost Pollster’s average of survey data, with just 6 percent planning to support Hillary Clinton. (A comparable 81 percent of Democrats currently support Clinton over Trump.)
But the survey also suggests the GOP’s image may have taken a hit among U.S. voters more generally.
Sixty-two percent of the electorate as a whole, including a 56 percent majority of independent voters, say that Trump was not the Republicans’ best option. Half of all voters, including 48 percent of independents, say this year’s primary election has left them feeling worse about the GOP.
The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted July 19 through July 20 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.
The Huffington Post has teamed up with YouGov to conduct daily opinion polls. You can learn more about this project and take part in YouGov’s nationally representative opinion polling. Data from all HuffPost/YouGov polls can be found here. More details on the polls’ methodology are available here.
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.
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