President Donald Trump’s approval rating stands at 43 percent. | Mandel Ngan/Getty Images POLITICO/MORNING CONSULT POLL Poll: Trump trails generic Democrat by 8 points

President Donald Trump’s new campaign manager has his work cut out for him.

A week after naming Brad Parscale to run his reelection effort, Trump is 8 points behind a generic Democratic candidate, 44 percent to 36 percent, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll. Nearly one in five voters, 19 percent, are undecided.


Male voters are evenly split: 42 percent would vote for Trump, and 42 percent would back the Democratic candidate. Among female voters, the Democrat has a 15-point lead, 46 percent to 31 percent.

The results fall predictably along party lines: Democratic voters support the Democrat, 82 percent to 8 percent; Republican voters choose Trump, 79 percent to 7 percent. Among independents, the Democratic candidate leads, 35 percent to 29 percent, with 36 percent undecided.

Eighty-six percent of voters who say they backed Hillary Clinton in 2016 would choose the Democratic candidate in 2020, greater than the 80 percent of Trump voters who say they would vote for him again.

Other indicators also suggest Trump is in perilous shape at this early stage. The president’s approval rating in the new poll is 43 percent, down from 46 percent last week. And Democrats’ lead on the generic congressional ballot is up to 7 points, 44 percent to 37 percent.

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Despite Trump’s poor poll numbers, Republicans aren’t necessarily better off without him on the ballot. Asked for whom they would vote between a generic, non-Trump Republican and a generic Democrat, 42 percent of voters pick the Democrat, but only 28 percent choose the Republican. More than three in 10 voters, 31 percent, are undecided.

“Trump supporters are lukewarm about voting for any Republican presidential candidate other than Donald Trump,” said Kyle Dropp, Morning Consult’s co-founder and chief research officer. “Notably, 80 percent of Trump voters say they would vote for Trump over a generic Democrat, but only 54 percent of Trump voters say the same about a generic GOP candidate over a generic Democrat.”

The POLITICO/Morning Consult poll was conducted March 1-5, surveying 1,993 registered voters. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2 percentage points.

Morning Consult is a nonpartisan media and technology company that provides data-driven research and insights on politics, policy and business strategy.

More details on the poll and its methodology can be found in these two documents — Toplines: http://politi.co/2FwmDsC | Crosstabs: http://politi.co/2HcBNk5

