No candidates have been as loathed as Clinton and Trump this late in an election cycle

published 5 May 2016

Never before in the past 10 presidential elections has a candidate even come close to arousing the levels of dislike that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have evoked in the American people — and especially not this late in the election cycle. Harry Enten at FiveThirtyEight crunched the numbers and found that Clinton's unfavorable rating tops the previous record for Republican and Democratic nominees between 1980 and 2012 by a solid 5 percentage points; Trump, meanwhile, smashes the record with an unfavorable rating that's a whopping 20 points higher than the previous record.

Moreover, there's a big difference between the disdain voters felt for the previously most disliked candidate, 1988 Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis, and what they feel now for Trump and Clinton. Most Americans didn't feel that strongly one way or another about Dukakis, but voters now have very strong feelings about Trump and Clinton; while some people may really love them, more people really don't. Even when Clinton and Trump's "strongly unfavorable" ratings are subtracted from their "strongly favorable" ratings, the results are still well into the negatives.