Donald Trump is the most hated presidential candidate since David Duke


In three decades of ABC News/Washington Post presidential candidate favorability polling, only one candidate has performed worse on a national scale than Donald Trump is doing right now. That candidate is former Ku Klux Klan (KKK) grand wizard David Duke:
Trump's seen unfavorably by 67 percent of Americans in this poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates. That's unchanged from last month and slightly off his high, 71 percent unfavorable in an ABC/Post poll nearly year ago. A majority strongly dislikes him, also unprecedented for a leading candidate. Duke was rated unfavorably by 69 percent of Americans in an ABC/Post poll in February 1992. [Langer Research]
Trump's 71 percent unfavorability rating — which would have pushed him ahead of Duke's highest total — was measured in late May of 2015, before he was officially a candidate.
Where Trump and Duke's campaign paths significantly diverge, however, is in their vote totals: While Duke won just over 100,000 votes and zero delegates in 1992, Trump has more than 8 million votes and 700 delegates so far.
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Trump and Duke were linked in the news earlier this year after Duke told his radio audience it would be "treason to your heritage" to support anyone other than Trump. Trump's response was infamously jumbled, as he first said he would have to do more research on Duke and the KKK before ultimately disavowing both — and blaming his original equivocation on a bad interview connection.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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