Trump and Clinton are the most despised candidates in history

No presidential candidate in polling history has
been as hated by voters as Donald Trump and
Hillary Clinton are now.
But a review of the last eight presidential
elections reveals that the most hated candidate
in the spring almost always ends up winning in
November.

This year’s top candidates have smashed all
records for voter disdain. Clinton is “strongly
disliked” by 37 percent of voters, topping the 32
percent who couldn’t stand George W. Bush in
2004.
And the disapproval of Trump has never before
been seen in presidential politics, with 53 percent
rating him “strongly unfavorable.”
The numbers were crunched by FiveThirtyEight,
which released a set of charts comparing the
“strongly unfavorable” ratings of presidential
candidates stretching back to 1984.
Blame the huge disapproval numbers on a
polarized electorate and the celebrity status of
the front-runners.
But such negative numbers at this stage do not
spell ballot-box doom.
Over the last 32 years, all but one of the major
candidates who had a strong-disapproval rating
higher than his opponent during primary season
went on to win the popular vote.
The sole exception was President George H.W.
Bush, who was more strongly disliked than the
then-relatively unknown Bill Clinton in the spring
of the 1992 election cycle.
While Trump might take heart from this historical
lesson, he shouldn’t go measuring the Oval
Office curtains just yet. There’s another set of
numbers to take into account.
It’s net favorability — or the difference between
the number of those who strongly disapprove
and strongly approve of the candidate.
Since 1996, the candidate with the higher net
strong-favorability number at this stage of the
campaign has gone on to win the election.
Trump and Clinton set records here, too: both
have the lowest net favorability numbers ever
measured. Clinton’s minus-20 would be by far
the lowest in history — if not for Trump’s, which
is even worse at minus-41.
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