The shopworn cliche about politics as a popularity contest has just been shredded.

A poll released this week shows four of the six remaining presidential candidates with net negative favorability ratings among voters, and Republican front-runner Donald Trump is leading a race to the bottom.

The Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll, which measured whether voters had a favorable or unfavorable view of a candidate, found that Trump has a -39 net favorability rating – the largest margin in the current field and down 8 points from just a month ago to set a record low in the poll's history for a major presidential hopeful.



At the same time, Hillary Clinton, the Democrats' front-runner, has an unfavorability rating of -13, a third of Trump's but well below the positive rating of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, her opponent for the party's nomination.

The high negativity ratings of the two leading presidential candidates has one of the poll's conductors scratching his head.



Decision 2016 U.S. News Covers the Election ]

"I've been doing this 1964, which is the Goldwater years. To me, this is the low point," said NBC/Wall Street Journal co-pollster Peter Hart, according to the network's First Read blog. "I've seen the disgust and the polarization. Never, never seen anything like this."

The net favorability scores are determined by subtracting the percentage of voters who have negative views of a candidate from the percentage of those who view the candidate favorably.

