Trump Change: Trump Treads Water This Week

Confidence that Donald Trump will be next year’s Republican presidential candidate is down slightly following the last GOP pre-primary debate of the year.

The latest Rasmussen Reports weekly Trump Change survey finds that 66% of Likely Republican Voters still believe Trump will end up as their party’s 2016 nominee, with 27% who say it’s Very Likely. But that’s down from 70% and 31% respectively last week. Unchanged from a week ago are the 27% who say he is unlikely to be nominated, but that includes only 10% who say it’s Not At All Likely. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Overall belief among GOP voters that Trump will be the eventual nominee has run as high as 74% in late October after running in the 50s for most weeks after Rasmussen Reports began the weekly Trump Change feature in mid-August. Following the terrorist attacks in Paris last month, however, this belief climbed into the 60s.

Among all voters, 55% believe Trump is the likely nominee, including 21% who say it’s Very Likely. Thirty-seven percent (37%) see a Trump nomination as unlikely, with 17% who believe it is Not At All Likely. This is little changed from the previous survey.

Is the GOP Trump’s party now? Rasmussen Reports will release post-debate numbers on the overall Republican race at 10:30 a.m. Eastern today.

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The survey of 1,000 Likely U.S. Voters was conducted on December 16-17, 2015 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.

Just before the Democrats’ third pre-primary debate Saturday night, Hillary Clinton remains comfortably ahead in the expectations game, according to our latest monthly Hillary Meter survey.

Men remain more confident than women that Trump will be the Republican nominee. The older the voter, the more likely he or she is to say that it’s Very Likely.

Forty-four percent (44%) of Democrats and 56% of unaffiliated voters think Trump is likely to win the nomination.

Only 35% of voters who Strongly Approve of the job President Obama is doing see Trump as the likely GOP nominee, compared to 72% of those who Strongly Disapprove of the president’s performance.

Trump has been roundly criticized by his political opponents for his call for a temporary ban on Muslim immigrants to this country until the government improves its ability to screen out potential terrorists from coming here. But 66% of Republicans – and a plurality of all voters – like the idea of a Muslim ban.

Following the recent massacre in San Bernardino, California by radical Islamic terrorists, belief that the terrorists are winning the War on Terror is near its highest level ever in regular surveying since 2004.

A lot of voters claim to be following the debates between the presidential candidates from both major parties but don’t feel they have learned much about those candidates so far.

Additional information from this survey and a full demographic breakdown are available to Platinum Members only.

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