Public Policy Polling (PPP) is a Democratic polling firm with a good track record (Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight gives it a B+ rating) and an idiosyncratic sense of humor, and Rachel Maddow had some new results she was excited to share on Monday night's Rachel Maddow Show. "I can now report, this year's Republican presidential nominee is less popular than middle seats on airplanes," she said, and she meant it literally. According to PPP's latest poll, American voters prefer getting stuck in the middle seat to Donald Trump, 45 percent to 43 percent, and Trump only beats bedbugs by 22 percentage points — though among black and Latino voters, not only bedbugs beat Trump, but also the bubonic plague, mosquitoes, Ryan Lochte, and carnies.
Now, maybe this isn't great news for Hillary Clinton, since she is only beating Trump by 5 points among likely voters, 48 percent to 43 percent, "but you know, the whole story isn't just the topline result, right?" Maddow said. "Obviously, the demographic breakdowns are interesting as well." Here, the big number was Trump's popularity numbers among black voters — 97 percent unfavorable, 3 percent unsure, and 0 percent favorable.
Maddow also was tickled by some of the "demographic groups you did not know could exist in nature," like the 2 percent of black voters who agree that Trump "cares about African-Americans and Latinos," and the 4 percent of Donald Trump voters who agree he "cannot be trusted with nuclear weapons." "Every year you have a new demographic," she said. "Sometimes it's soccer moms, this year it's the apocalyptically suicidal." The PPP poll was conducted Aug. 26-28, and has a margin of error of ±3.3 percentage points. You can watch Maddow giddily dig into the details below. Peter Weber
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