A wide majority of Americans view Donald Trump as overly extreme, a new HuffPost/YouGov survey finds, with few saying he’s become less so since the start of the general election.
Fifty-seven percent of Americans say that Trump is “too extreme,” while just 41 percent say the same of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
In a direct comparison, Americans say by a 19-point margin, 53 percent to 34 percent, that Trump is the more extreme of the two.
Views of which candidate is more extreme divide generally along party lines, with 86 percent of Democrats naming Trump, 60 percent of Republicans naming Clinton and independents split between Trump and Clinton at 45 percent and 38 percent, respectively.
But although most Republicans are comfortable with Trump’s positions, 27 percent believe that he is too extreme ― considerably higher than the 11 percent of Democrats who say the same of Clinton.
Since Trump won the nomination, it seems every show of even modest restraint on his part has sparked a debate over whether or not he was “pivoting” to a more moderate position. Trump himself shot down that idea, telling a Wisconsin TV station last month that “I am who I am. It’s me. I don’t want to change.”
Thirty percent of Americans say Trump has gotten more extreme since becoming the nominee, while 27 percent say he’s gotten less extreme and 35 percent that he’s stayed about the same.
Members of Trump’s own party are the most likely to believe that he’s moderated. Forty percent of Republicans, compared to just 13 percent of Democrats, say he’s become less extreme since the start of the general election campaign.
The majority of Americans ― 53 percent ― say Clinton has stayed about the same since winning the Democratic nomination, with 29 percent saying she’s gotten more extreme and 9 percent that she has become less so.
The HuffPost/YouGov poll consisted of 1,000 completed interviews conducted Sept. 10-Sept. 12 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.
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularlyincitespolitical violence and is a