Trump Change: Most Still See ‘The Donald’ On Track

Most Republicans still believe Donald Trump is the man to beat for their party’s presidential nomination in 2016.

The latest Rasmussen Reports Trump Change national telephone survey finds that 56% of Likely Republican Voters think Trump is likely to be the GOP nominee, with 30% who say it is Very Likely. Thirty-four percent (34%) disagree, including 10% who feel a Trump nomination is Not At All Likely. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Overall belief among Republican voters that the billionaire developer is likely to win the nomination spiked to a high of 74% last week, but that may have been a statistical hiccup since the latest finding is more in line with those for the several weeks prior.

Rasmussen Reports will release new numbers on the overall Republican presidential race at 10:30 a.m. Eastern today, our first since the latest GOP debate Wednesday night.

Among all likely voters, 47% think Trump is likely to be the Republican nominee, but 45% consider that outcome unlikely. This includes 22% who say it’s Very Likely and 22% who feel it’s Not At All Likely. With the exception of last week, this, too, is consistent with recent surveying.

Trump and Hillary Clinton continue to be the national leaders in the Republican and Democratic presidential contests, but most voters don’t trust either one of them.

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The survey of 1,000 Likely U.S. Voters was conducted on October 28-29, 2015 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.

As long as the GOP race remains competitive, Rasmussen Reports will continue tracking Trump’s surprisingly successful run for the White House in a weekly Friday feature we’re calling Trump Change.

Men continue to feel that a Trump nomination is a lot more likely than women do. Middle-aged voters are the most confident age group that he will eventually be the GOP standard-bearer.

Whites and other minority voters believe more than blacks do that “The Donald” will win the nomination.

Most Democrats (53%) still think Trump is unlikely to be nominated by the GOP, a view shared by 45% of voters not affiliated with either major party.

The majority of voters who don’t like the job President Obama is doing remain confident that Trump will win. Most voters who approve of the president’s job performance view that as unlikely.

The budget plan negotiated by Democrats and GOP congressional leaders and passed yesterday by the House despite strong conservative opposition is just the kind of thing feeding Republican voter support for outsider candidates like Trump and Ben Carson, the ones who haven’t held office before.

Just over half (52%) of Republicans believe the candidates who are now running for president are a representative cross-section of the party’s voters.

The latest GOP presidential debate was a textbook example of the media bias voters have complained about in surveys for years.

Additional information from this survey and a full demographic breakdown are available to Platinum Members only.

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