Donald Trump begins the general election phase of the campaign facing the prospect of a near-historic blowout defeat. And pollsters think he might be so far in the hole that he can’t dig himself out.

He’s trailing Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders by margins not seen in a generation.


Despite Trump’s frequent claims to the contrary, he trails Clinton, his most likely opponent, in nearly every hypothetical general-election poll thus far — often by wide margins. Overall, the HuffPost Pollster average of public polls gives Clinton a 7-point edge, 47 percent to 40 percent. A CNN/ORC International poll conducted just before Tuesday’s Indiana primary found Clinton leading Trump by 13 points among registered voters nationally, 54 percent to 41 percent.

That CNN/ORC poll came even as Trump is experiencing a bump in his poll numbers, a mini-surge that began before he vanquished his final two rivals for the Republican presidential nomination.

One serious problem confronting Trump is the fact that he enters the general election more defined than the party’s last nominee, Mitt Romney — meaning Trump has less room to grow in the polls and describe himself to voters on his own terms.

Romney was able to rally previously ambivalent Republicans to his side after clinching the nomination. But in Trump’s case, even though his numbers among Republicans have improved, a significant number seem dead-set against him.

"Can he get close to that 92 [percent] or 93 percent of Republican votes that he needs to win this thing, or is he stuck in the high 70s or low 80s?" asked Neil Newhouse, Romney's lead pollster in 2012, who added that Trump is "much more sharply defined right now among independent voters or swing voters than Romney was four years ago."

Even in a best-case scenario where Trump unifies all Republicans, some GOP pollsters say that won’t nearly be enough. The same demographic changes that have propelled Democrats to popular-vote victories in five of the past six presidential elections, and Trump’s history of alienating the groups that are growing as a share of the electorate, imposes a ceiling on him that appears almost unbreakable.

“I don’t see how he, all of a sudden, becomes this magnanimous unifier,” said Republican pollster Jon McHenry, whose firm, North Star Opinion Research, polled for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. “Does he get a bump? Probably. But he’s starting from such a low position that this small bump he gets from being the presumptive nominee I don’t think is enough to overcome the demographic challenges or the character challenges that Trump faces.”

The latest CNN poll does show an uptick in Trump’s favorable rating: It’s up to 41 percent now, an improvement from 33 percent in March. That’s mostly driven by Republicans getting more comfortable with him —74 percent have a favorable impression of Trump in the new CNN poll, up from 63 percent last month — and among independents, the percentage has increased from 31 percent to 39 percent.

But that still means Trump has large unfavorable ratings among a number of key voting blocs: independents (57 percent), women (64 percent) and nonwhite voters (74 percent).

McHenry outlined some back-of-the-envelope math, starting with a number of assumptions, to outline Trump’s uphill path. First, he assumed 3 in 10 voters this fall are nonwhite — a modest increase from 28 percent in 2012, according to exit polls. He then gave Trump a vote share of 10 percentage points greater than his average favorable rating for a number of demographic groups.

If Trump’s vote share among white women was 50 percent, McHenry said — which would be down from Romney’s 56 percent four years ago — that would mean Trump would have to win about 85 percent of white men to win, an astounding percentage and dramatically better than Romney’s 62-percent share.

Trump also faces a near-historic deficit for this point in the election cycle. According to Gallup data, the last candidate to face a deficit larger than Trump’s 7-point average gap was then-Sen. Bob Dole when he clinched the GOP nomination in the spring of 1996. Dole trailed 10 points or more through the spring and into the summer, before narrowing the race somewhat after the national party convention in San Diego that August.

A big deficit at the start of the general election campaign isn’t insurmountable. Michael Dukakis led George H.W. Bush by double digits in the spring of 1988 — and lost the popular vote by nearly 8 percentage points. Ronald Reagan trailed Jimmy Carter by a high-single-digit margin after Reagan finally dismissed Bush in the late spring of 1980.

Dukakis was effectively defined by Bush's campaign during that 1988 race before the then-Massachusetts governor was able to define himself. Trump's high unfavorables mean he needs to persuade large numbers of voters who don't like him now to vote for him this fall.

"Trump’s challenge is to change people’s minds," Newhouse said. "That’s a significantly harder thing to do."

With a different nominee, Republicans would likely be poised to take advantage of what is, in many ways, an advantageous electoral environment. Demographic changes and President Barack Obama’s improving approval ratings would seem to favor Clinton. But overall dissatisfaction with the direction of the country (the pollster average is 28 percent right track/66 percent wrong track) and Clinton’s low image ratings (42 percent favorable/54 percent unfavorable) point to Republican opportunities.

The problem is the GOP is poised to nominate a candidate with even lower favorable ratings than Clinton.

“There’s plenty to go after Hillary Clinton about,” McHenry said. “She would be the least popular major-party presidential candidate — if she wasn’t running against Donald Trump.”

But that doesn’t mean Clinton — or Sanders, if he can somehow overcome the virtually insurmountable delegate math facing his own campaign — can expect to stay solidly in front all the way to November. Even Democrats concede the polls will tighten over the course of the campaign.

“Of course this race will narrow, because these races always narrow,” said Democratic pollster Margie Omero. “There will be a time when [Trump] is up for a couple days, or for a week, or even a couple of weeks. We should be prepared for the horrible day when they are consistently tied in the general election match-ups.”

But Omero, like most pollsters in both parties, believes Trump ultimately will fall short.

“In the end, he’s just too extreme and too unprepared to win,” she said.