Yes, it’s one for the records: Donald Trump had an unprecedented political rise — and now he is experiencing an unprecedented political collapse:
Donald Trump has had one of the quickest rises and falls in the history of Presidential politics. Last month we found him leading the Republican field with 26%. In the space of just four weeks he’s dropped all the way down to 8%, putting him in a tie for fifth place with Ron Paul.
Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney are at the top of the GOP race with 19% and 18% respectively. Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin are further back at 13% and 12%, followed by Trump and Paul at 8%, Michele Bachmann at 7%, and Tim Pawlenty at 5%.
As Trump got more and more exposure over the last month Republicans didn’t just decide they weren’t interested in having him as their nominee- they also decided they flat don’t like him. Only 34% of GOP voters now have a favorable opinion of Trump to 53% who view him in a negative light.Trump really made hay out of the ‘birther’ issue and as the resonance of that has declined, so has his standing. In February we found that 51% of Republican primary voters thought Barack Obama was not born in the United States. Now with the release of his birth certificate only 34% of GOP partisans fall into that camp, and Trump’s only in fifth place with that now smaller group of the electorate at 9%.
It’ll be interesting to see if Trump now announces he’s going to run or — as many analysts believe — in the end doesn’t run which would suggest this was indeed all a stunt to promote his TV show.
If so, that too flopped.
His recent three hour “Celebrity Apprentice” was down 23 percent from the year before and the show ranked last among networks.
In pandering to the GOP’s Twilight Zone birthers in the Republican base, he forgot about his TV show’s base: research by The Atantlic spotted the nosediving ratings as Trump got way out there and noted that the show has a liberal audience higher than any other demographic on the NBC evening schedule. It sounds like many people had seen enough of Donald Trump.
It’s further hard to imagine that that some people would wear Donald Trump’s made-in-China clothing.
Even Osama bin Laden probably left instructions he wouldn’t want to be caught dead in it.
SOME OTHER REACTIONS:
The Donald went up, and then The Donald melted down.
In what automatic Democratic survey shop Public Policy Polling described as “one of the quickest rises and falls in the history of presidential politics,” Donald Trump has plummeted from a field-leading 26 percent in the polls to a mere 8 percent.
Boorish heretical flap-jaw Donald Trump was regularly leading Republican presidential polls about this time last month, mostly by juicing up the birther segment of the GOP electorate. Then, over the course of one magical week, Barack Obama released his long-form birth certificate, made wicked fun of Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner, and announced the death of Osama bin Laden. Now Donald Trump’s fake campaign appears to be over, if things that never really existed can ever be considered “over.”
What this shows, of course, is that Trump’s rise in the polls was almost fully a result of his celebrity, and they started to collapse once people actually paid attention to the nutty things he was saying, which went beyond his bizarre obsession with the President’s birth certificate. Trump has been saying that he will announce his plans after the May 21st finale of his reality show, and that it will surprise everyone. My guess is that the “surprise” will be that he isn’t running.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.