Ann Coulter recently stated that Ronald Reagan was the last presidential candidate as unpopular as Donald Trump. She claimed to cite a Los Angeles Times poll from March 1980, close to the same period in which the current presidential campaign finds itself. And irrespective of the numbers, Trump defenders have argued that he and Reagan were both unpopular outsiders; Jeffrey Lord, for instance, said that "establishment critics said the exact-same things about Reagan" as they do about Trump, "down to the very words sometimes." Part of this dismissiveness, of course, is rooted in doubt about the candidate's viability.

To probe the notion that Reagan and Trump are similar in their acceptance by the public, Gallup took a deep dive into what polling data it could find from 1980. It couldn't find any record of the poll Coulter mentioned. And it discovered that the relative poll standing of Reagan and Trump is entirely dissimilar:

There are, in fact, a number of traditional, national poll results from 1980 which did measure Reagan's image. In general, these data show that Reagan enjoyed mostly positive net favorable reviews throughout 1980. Gallup's 10-point "scalometer" method of measuring favorability found 70% of Americans viewing Reagan positively in May and August of 1980. And while the scalometer rating tends to produce higher favorable scores than binary favorable/unfavorable scales, Reagan earned a 60% favorable rating in a January 1980 Gallup/Newsweek poll using the binary wording. A multitude of polls by other firms whose surveys are archived in the Roper Center polling database confirms Reagan's generally positive 1980 image. The Los Angeles Times national polls all show that Reagan's image was more favorable than unfavorable, including polls in the fall of 1979 and in June, September and October of 1980. There is no Los Angeles Times poll which can be located from 1980 that shows Reagan with a more unfavorable than favorable image, as is the case with Trump today.

Gallup also cited the prevalence of data from the New York Times/CBS poll, which also found Reagan's positive favorability numbers consistently outstripping his negative ones. Only in September 1980 were the two figures even.

The pollster granted Lord's premise, that there are similarities between the opinions of Reagan then and Trump now by more traditional political forces. "But in terms of image comparisons, the poll evidence shows that at this time in the 1980 campaign year, Reagan's image was significantly more positive than Trump's image is at the same time in the 2016 campaign," the authors Frank Newport and Lydia Saad write.

According to a Huffington Post average of polls measuring favorability—it's worth noting the polls are a mix of adults, registered voters and likely voters—Trump is underwater on average, with 30 percent viewing him favorably and 64 percent viewing him unfavorably.