Poll clinton vs trump

As Donald J. Trump weighs whether to open an unusually early White House campaign, a New York Times/Siena College poll shows that his post-presidential quest to consolidate his support within the Republican Party has instead left him weakened, with nearly half the party’s primary voters seeking someone different for president in 2024 and a significant number vowing to abandon him if he wins the nomination.

By focusing on political payback inside his party instead of tending to wounds opened by his alarming attempts to cling to power after his 2020 defeat, Mr. Trump appears to have only deepened fault lines among Republicans during his yearlong revenge tour. A clear majority of primary voters under 35 years old, 64 percent, as well as 65 percent of those with at least a college degree — a leading indicator of political preferences inside the donor class — told pollsters they would vote against Mr. Trump in a presidential primary.

Mr. Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6, 2021, appears to have contributed to the decline in his standing, including among a small but important segment of Republicans who could form the base of his opposition in a potential primary contest. While 75 percent of primary voters said Mr. Trump was “just exercising his right to contest the election,” nearly one in five said he “went so far that he threatened American democracy.”

Overall, Mr. Trump maintains his primacy in the party: In a hypothetical matchup against five other potential Republican presidential rivals, 49 percent of primary voters said they would support him for a third nomination.

The greatest threat to usurp Mr. Trump within the party is Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who was the second choice with 25 percent and the only other contender with double-digit support. Among primary voters, Mr. DeSantis was the top choice of younger Republicans, those with a college degree and those who said they voted for President Biden in 2020.

While about one-fourth of Republicans said they didn’t know enough to have an opinion about Mr. DeSantis, he was well-liked by those who did. Among those who voted for Mr. Trump in 2020, 44 percent said they had a very favorable opinion of Mr. DeSantis — similar to the 46 percent who said the same about Mr. Trump.

Should Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Trump face off in a primary, the poll suggested that support from Fox News could prove crucial: Mr. Trump held a 62 percent to 26 percent advantage over Mr. DeSantis among Fox News viewers, while the gap between the two Floridians was 16 points closer among Republicans who mainly receive their news from another source.

The survey suggests that Mr. Trump would not necessarily enter a primary with an insurmountable advantage over rivals like Mr. DeSantis. His share of the Republican primary electorate is less than Hillary Clinton’s among Democrats was at the outset of the 2016 race , when she was viewed as the inevitable front-runner, but ultimately found herself embroiled in a protracted primary against Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Mr. Trump’s troubles inside his party leave him hamstrung in a matchup against an unusually vulnerable incumbent.

The Times/Siena poll suggested that the fears of many Republican elites about a Trump candidacy may be well-founded: He trailed President Biden, 44 percent to 41 percent, in a hypothetical rematch of the 2020 contest, despite plummeting support for Mr. Biden , with voters nationwide giving him a perilously low 33 percent job-approval rating.

A growing anyone-but-Trump vote inside the party contributed to Mr. Trump’s deficit, with 16 percent of Republicans saying that if he were the nominee they would support Mr. Biden, would back a third-party candidate, wouldn’t vote at all or remained unsure what they would do. That compared to 8 percent of Democrats who said they would similarly abandon Mr. Biden in a matchup with Mr. Trump.

For Mr. Trump, bleeding that amount of Republican support would represent a sharp increase compared with the already troubling level of the party’s vote he shed during his last race.

In 2020, 9 percent of Republicans voted for someone other than Mr. Trump, while Mr. Biden lost just 4 percent of Democrats, according to AP VoteCast , a large study of the 2020 electorate by NORC at the University of Chicago for The Associated Press.

Kenneth Abreu, a 62-year-old pharmaceutical executive from Pennsylvania, said he had voted Republican for three decades but would support Mr. Biden instead of voting again for Mr. Trump.

“Unlike all these other people who believe every word he says, I’m done,” Mr. Abreu said. “All the garbage he’s been talking about, the lies, Jan. 6, the whole thing — I just lost all respect for him.”

Still, many Republicans who favor someone else in a primary would nonetheless rally behind Mr. Trump if he won the nomination.

Richard Bechtol, a 31-year-old Republican voter in Columbus, Ohio, said he would back either Mr. DeSantis or Senator Ted Cruz of Texas over the former president. Mr. Bechtol was disturbed by Mr. Trump’s behavior that led to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

“I hope he doesn’t run at all,” Mr. Bechtol said of the former president.

Mr. Bechtol, a lawyer, said he found Mr. Trump’s arrogance off-putting, saw Mr. Trump as a divisive figure in the party and believed that he bore responsibility for the violence.

But he said he would support Mr. Trump in 2024 in a rematch with President Biden.

“Biden is getting bullied by the left wing of his party and I worry about his cognitive function as well — actually, I worry about that with Trump, too,” he said. “It’s really a lesser-of-two-evils situation for me.”

It is too early to tell whether the challenges for Mr. Trump inside his party will result in anything more than speed bumps on his path to the Republican nomination. Underscoring his residual strength, he is viewed favorably by 65 percent of Republicans who said they would vote against him in a primary, compared with 33 percent who said they had an unfavorable view.

“Trump did a hell of a job on the economy,” said Marie Boyce, a New York Republican in her 70s. “There isn’t anything wrong I could say about him.”

David Beard, a 69-year-old retiree in Liberal, Mo., who said he mostly relied on Social Security for his income, said he was frustrated with both political parties and all levels of government. He plans to stick with Mr. Trump in 2024, betting that was the best chance to improve the economy.

“When Trump was in office, it didn’t seem like prices went haywire,” Mr. Beard said.

He said Democrats’ efforts to hold Mr. Trump accountable for the Jan. 6 attack had been a pointless distraction. “The government’s whole focus should have been on the people of the United States and the situation we’re in, instead of wasting time and money trying to impeach him,” Mr. Beard said. “Nothing is being done to help the people, and I believe that with all my heart.”

About 20 percent of all registered voters said they didn’t like either Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden. Mr. Trump also trailed his successor among these voters, 39 percent to 18 percent. One in five volunteered to pollsters that they would sit out such an election, though that option had not been offered to them.

“I never thought I would say this, but it if was Biden and Trump I don’t think I would vote,” said Gretchen Aultman, a 74-year-old retired lawyer in Colorado who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016. “I liked Trump’s policies, but he was so abrasive and unpolished, and having him as president was just tearing the country apart.”

Ms. Aultman said she didn’t see the current president as an acceptable alternative. “I can’t in good conscience vote for Biden,” she said. “I recognize the signs of being old, and his mental acuity is not going to last another two years.”

Between the large number of primary voters ready for another nominee, and the growing number who say they would not vote for the former president again under any circumstances, the poll suggests Mr. Trump’s biggest hurdle to winning a second term isn’t another Republican opponent — it’s himself.

John Heaphy, a 70-year-old retired software engineer in Arizona, said he voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 but planned to back Mr. Biden in 2024 because of the Capitol riot.

Mr. Heaphy said that Mr. Trump had incited an insurrection, and that he was shaken by the support the former president’s false claims have received from other Republicans. Indeed, according to the poll, 86 percent of Republicans who said they would support Mr. Trump in the 2024 primary said he was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election.

“Trump lost the election,” Mr. Heaphy said. “There are too many people out there that just don’t seem like they believe in reality anymore.”

While Mr. Trump has described election integrity as the country’s most pressing concern, just 3 percent of Republicans named it as the nation’s top problem. But Mr. Trump’s response to his 2020 defeat was a significant factor in how Republicans are thinking about 2024.

Among Republicans who said they plan to vote against Mr. Trump in a primary, 32 percent said the former president’s actions threatened American democracy.

Paula Hudnall, a 51-year-old nurse in Charleston, W.Va., said Mr. Trump was right to question the results of the election. She said she didn’t blame him for the violence at the Capitol.

“Anytime you have a large gathering you’re going to have people who get out of hand and are unruly,” said Ms. Hudnall, who identified the economy and infrastructure as her top issues.

Ms. Hudnall said she was interested in learning about other Republican candidates, but that Mr. Trump already had her vote again for 2024.

The Times/Siena survey of 849 registered voters nationwide was conducted by telephone using live operators from July 5 to 7. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 4 percentage points. Cross-tabs and methodology are available here .

Isabella Grullón Paz and Nate Cohn contributed reporting.

HOUSTON — Two years ago, the presidential election hinged in large part on a rightward shift among working-class whites who deserted Democrats.

Tuesday’s House election may turn on an equally significant and opposite force: a generational break with the Republican Party among educated, wealthier whites — especially women — who like the party’s pro-business policies but recoil from President Trump’s divisive language on race and gender.

Rather than seeking to coax voters like these back into the Republican coalition, Mr. Trump appears to have all but written them off, spending the final days of the campaign delivering a scorching message about preoccupations like birthright citizenship and a migrant “invasion” from Mexico that these voters see through as alarmist.

In Republican-leaning districts that include diverse populations or abut cities that do — from bulwarks of Sunbelt conservatism like Houston and Orange County, Calif., to the well-manicured bedroom communities outside Philadelphia and Minneapolis — the party is in danger of losing its House majority next week because Mr. Trump’s racially-tinged nationalism has alienated these voters who once made up a dependable constituency.

One of those disenchanted voters is J. Mark Metts, a 60-year-old partner at one of this city’s prestigious law firms. Mr. Metts had never voted for a Democratic presidential candidate until 2016. Now he and some of his neighbors in the moneyed River Oaks enclave of Houston are about to oppose a Republican once again, to register their disapproval of President Trump.

“With Congress not really standing up to Trump, this election is becoming a referendum,” Mr. Metts said, explaining why he would no longer support the re-election of Representative John Culberson, an eight-term Republican.

Mr. Culberson is now running roughly even with the Democratic candidate, Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll last week — an extraordinary development in a district that has not elected a Democrat since before an oilman named George H.W. Bush won here in 1966, and one that illustrates how difficult Mr. Trump has made it for his party to retain control of the House.

The president amplified his fear-peddling Wednesday night with an online video that is being widely condemned as racist, showing a Mexican man convicted of killing two California deputies with a voice-over saying “Democrats let him into the country.”

Traditional Republicans warn that Mr. Trump’s conduct is further narrowing his party’s appeal on the eve of the election, catering to a rural base in conservative states like Missouri, North Dakota and Montana that will decide control of the Senate at the possible expense of the Republicans’ House majority and crucial governorships.

“ The divisiveness may play well in some parts of the country but it doesn’t play everywhere,” said the speaker of the Texas House, Joe Straus, who has sought to keep his party from drifting too far right. “It’s hard to grow a party when your whole approach is to incite the base.”

To see incumbent Republicans like Mr. Culberson or Representative Pete Sessions, whose district is in an affluent part of the Dallas area, locked in difficult re-elections “would have been unthinkable just a few years ago,” said Mr. Straus.

More ominous for the G.O.P. is that the desertion of educated whites following Mr. Trump’s 2016 win could establish a new Democratic coalition in future elections, one that would certainly return to the polls in 2020. That would represent the mirror opposite of 1964, when Barry Goldwater lost the presidential race but made inroads into traditionally Democratic precincts among culturally conservative and economically prosperous voters — presaging Republican success further down the ballot in the years to come.

Just as Goldwater began unmooring conservative whites away from their Democratic roots, it is easy to see which demographic could shift most fundamentally on Election Day: college-educated white women, who were once fairly reliable Republican supporters. The impact of Mr. Trump with these voters is unmistakable: they supported Mitt Romney over President Barack Obama by six percentage points in 2012, before backing Hillary Clinton by seven points four years later.

College-educated white women now say they prefer Democrats to control Congress by 18 points, according to a survey by Marist College and NPR.

In moderate areas, the Republican coalition has long depended on upscale whites casting aside their more liberal views on issues like gun control and abortion to support G.O.P. economic policies. Mr. Trump’s national message does virtually nothing to accommodate those voters.

“I’m not hearing anything helpful at all,” said Gene DiGirolamo, a moderate Republican state legislator from Bucks County, outside Philadelphia, where Republicans are struggling to hold on to a House seat and hold back Democratic gains in state races.

In his area, Mr. DiGirolamo said, Mr. Trump’s support “among independents has slipped dramatically from when he was first elected.”

Perhaps nowhere has Mr. Trump’s persistent use of inflammatory language become as much of an issue as in Pennsylvania, where Republicans were already bracing to suffer losses in some newly drawn House districts before a gunman fixated on immigration massacred 11 worshipers at a Pittsburgh synagogue Saturday.

At a gathering in a tavern outside Philadelphia on Monday evening, supporters of Scott Wallace, a Democrat running in the state’s most hotly contested House race, denounced Mr. Trump for his “cruelty” and alluded repeatedly to the president’s rhetoric on race and national identity. Addressing a tightly packed crowd, former Representative Patrick Murphy, a Democrat who used to represent the area, warned that “people who hate feel so emboldened to act on it.”

The suburbs around Philadelphia used to be a reliable Republican bastion. But Shelley Howland, a Republican who attended the pro-Wallace event, said Mr. Trump represented a breaking point.

A supporter of abortion rights and gun control, Ms. Howland voted two years ago for Hillary Clinton over Mr. Trump, but stayed loyally Republican in the congressional election, supporting Mr. Wallace’s opponent, Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, who is now seeking his second term. She said she would not support Mr. Fitzpatrick again.

“This year, it’s going to be a straight Democratic ticket,” said Ms. Howland, 65, lamenting “this whole movement to the alt-right, Steve Bannon in the White House, Trump in the White House.”

Mr. Wallace, an investor whose grandfather served as vice president, cast his campaign as an opportunity for Bucks County to repudiate a president who has unleashed a “Pandora’s box” of dangerous social turmoil.

“The tone that the president has set is absolutely toxic to relations between people of different faiths and different races and different sexual orientations,” Mr. Wallace said.

Mr. Fitzpatrick, whose campaign did not respond to emails and phone calls seeking comment, has sought distance from Mr. Trump and brands himself as an “independent” lawmaker in campaign materials. Like other Bucks County Republicans, he has collected support from labor unions and endorsed policies like gun control that break with the national Republican agenda.

But former Representative Phil English, a Pennsylvania Republican, said his party was now grappling with what amounts to a mortal political threat. Alluding to “challenges right now with the brand,” Mr. English said his party would likely face painful setbacks in precincts that evoke silk stocking Republicanism, such as Philadelphia’s Main Line.

“Southeastern Pennsylvania has clearly made the transition from being one of the mainstays of the Pennsylvania Republican statewide base, and a significant part of the national Republican source of support, to being an enormous challenge,” Mr. English said, noting that national cultural divisions had driven away swing voters.

In Mr. Culberson’s well-heeled district, where even the restaurants with ample parking offer valet services, Mr. Trump is as polarizing as he was when he narrowly lost the seat in 2016.

“I’m staying focused on John Culberson and who I am,” Mr. Culberson said in an interview when asked whether Mr. Trump was an asset or liability here, repeating a variation of the same phrase multiple times.

But the lawmaker acknowledged that this year is “unusual” because of what he termed the “infinite” amount of money flowing in for Ms. Fletcher, who has raised nearly twice what he has.

Ms. Fletcher, a corporate attorney who grew up attending the same Episcopal Church as George H.W. Bush, said voters here were attracted to the G.O.P. that the former president exemplifies.

“They were people who saw Republicans as the party of good government and moderation and I think they’re not seeing that now,” she said, scorning Mr. Culberson for not standing up to Mr. Trump.

Like every race in Texas, this House contest has been overshadowed by Representative Beto O’Rourke’s challenge of Senator Ted Cruz. And Mr. Cruz’s allies quietly concede that having Mr. Trump come to Houston last month hurt them, and by extension Mr. Culberson, with moderate voters in Harris County, where the president was trounced. (The congressman was notably absent from the Trump rally.)

But the deeper structural problem for Texas Republicans, one that may outlast this year’s Senate race, is that their long-running fears about Hispanics consolidating behind Democrats may prove to be less worrisome than the prospect of an even more reliable bloc of voters finding a new political home.

“The more explosive element is college educated white women,” said Democratic strategist Paul Begala. “They are not itinerant voters like a lot of the Democratic base — they’re rooted and they always vote.”

It is almost eerily symmetrical, the possibility that Texas Republicans could see their iron grip on the state loosened because of a political realignment in the state’s population centers. That was where Texas Democrats first saw their own supremacy challenged.

“The areas that were the first to break away from the Democrats decades ago are now showing signs they could break away from Republicans now,” said Mr. Straus, whose family helped build the modern Republican Party in San Antonio. And he did not hesitate to identify the proximate cause of the shift.

Mr. Trump, he said, has “changed the Republican Party in ways that are just less appealing to the traditional Republicans and independents we’ve always relied on.”

William F. Weld, the twice-elected former Republican governor of Massachusetts, who was last seen campaigning in the 2006 Republican primary for governor of New York, now hopes to be on a national ticket as the vice-presidential nominee of the Libertarian Party.

And he is already on the attack.

In his first interview since accepting an invitation to be the running mate of former Gov. Gary Johnson of New Mexico, Mr. Weld assailed Donald J. Trump over his call to round up and deport the 11 million immigrants in the country illegally.

“I can hear the glass crunching on Kristallnacht in the ghettos of Warsaw and Vienna when I hear that, honest,” Mr. Weld said Thursday.

Mr. Weld, 70, was not uniformly critical of the presumptive Republican nominee. “I don’t consider myself part of the Never Trump movement,” he said, expressing admiration for Mr. Trump’s success in the primary contest.

“I’m not horrified about everything Mr. Trump has done at all,” he said, adding: “I think he’s done a lot. But when I think about some of the positions, I think they’re way out there.”

Where he differs with Mr. Trump most sharply is on Mr. Trump’s call for mass deportations.

Asked if he believed Mr. Trump was a fascist, Mr. Weld demurred. “My Kristallnacht analogy does evoke the Nazi period in Germany,” he said. “And that’s what I’m worried about: a slippery slope.”

After a circuitous answer, he eventually came to a conclusion. “No, I wouldn’t call Mr. Trump either a fascist or a Nazi,” Mr. Weld said. “I’m just saying, we got to watch it when we get exclusionary about people on account of their status as a member of a group.”

Mr. Weld also objected to Mr. Trump’s repeated threats to impose tariffs on goods imported from Mexico and China. “That’s a pretty good prescription to having China be the only superpower in about 10 years,” he said, leaning forward to make sure a reporter understood him. “China — not the U.S.”

Mr. Weld’s best known previous turn on the national stage was in 1997, when he resigned as governor to focus on his appointment by President Bill Clinton as ambassador to Mexico.

That did not go well: He was blocked by Senator Jesse Helms and withdrew his nomination after a heated battle in which Mr. Weld, a pillar of what was left of the moderate northeastern Republican establishment, loudly assailed Mr. Helms and the archconservatives who stood behind him.

A former prosecutor, Mr. Weld could appeal to some disaffected Republicans on a ticket alongside Mr. Johnson at a time when other efforts by Republicans to recruit a third-party candidate — in part in the hopes of keeping anti-Trump Republican voters from staying home and costing the party’s lower-tier candidates — are close to fizzling.

Mr. Weld said Mr. Johnson, the Libertarian presidential candidate in 2012 who is seeking the party’s nomination again, spoke to him last weekend about running. Their hope is to amass enough support in national polls to be included in the presidential debates. If that happened, Mr. Weld said hopefully, it would not be impossible to envision a minor-party ticket winning the White House.

But he also did not protest too much when asked how he would reassure those who, mindful of his willingness to roll the dice in politics, might question his level of commitment to a national run.

“There’s some truth in that,” said Mr. Weld, who now works at a law firm, Mintz Levin , and its lobbying arm, ML Strategies . “I do like to climb mountains in politics, and I do enjoy running for office.”

The Libertarian Party says it already will be on the ballot in 32 states and is working on the rest. It will pick its presidential and vice-presidential nominees at a convention over Memorial Day weekend in Orlando, Fla.

Mr. Weld suggested that the Libertarian message, which emphasizes civil liberties and small government, could appeal to younger voters.

Discussing foreign policy, he spoke critically of the Iraq invasion of 2003 and of putting “boots on the ground” in the Middle East to project American strength. But he was supportive of the Obama administration on the Iran nuclear deal that Republicans frequently criticize.

“I thought the game was worth the candle there, and that’s politically incorrect in almost all circles — certainly in Republican circles — but I think I do feel that way, and I followed that closely,” Mr. Weld said, adding, “I know John Kerry quite well and I saw his going back and forth, and rather admired it.” (Mr. Weld unsuccessfully challenged Mr. Kerry in the 1996 Senate race.)

Asked about Hillary Clinton, Mr. Weld noted that he had known her since they were both in their 20s. “I’ve always just thought of her as a really great kid,” he said.

Mr. Weld said he possessed a deep libertarian streak, and pined for a time when that was more widespread in the Republican Party. He complained about the polarization in Congress and remembered his early days working on Capitol Hill, before law school, for Senator Jacob K. Javits, Republican of New York.

“It was a totally different era and a wonderful era,” he said. “It was wonderful to be in Washington in those days. And things absolutely got done.”