Trump Change: Is ‘The Donald’ Losing His ‘Big Mo’?

Republicans are less certain this week that Donald Trump will be their party’s eventual presidential nominee.

The latest weekly Rasmussen Reports Trump Change survey finds that 81% of Likely Republican Voters think Trump is likely to win the GOP nomination. That’s consistent with findings since mid-February after his big win in the South Carolina primary.

But now that includes just 42% who believe Trump is Very Likely to be the nominee, down 11 points from 53% a week ago and a high of 59% the week before that. This is, in fact, the lowest level of Very Likely GOP voters Trump has earned since February 19.

Trump’s momentum appears to have been dulled over the last couple weeks with the absence of major primary wins to counter his continuing negative news coverage. Still, only 16% of Republicans now think Trump is unlikely to be nominated, with four percent (4%) who say it’s Not At All Likely. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Among all likely voters, 74% see Trump as the likely Republican presidential candidate, also in line with recent surveying. That includes 37% who say it’s Very Likely, but that’s down from 43% last week and a high of 46% two weeks ago. Twenty-three percent (23%) of all voters consider a Trump nomination unlikely, with nine percent (9%) who view it as Not At All Likely.

When Trump announced his candidacy in mid-June of last year, just 27% of Republicans – and 23% of all voters – said he was likely to end up as the 2016 GOP nominee.

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The survey of 1,000 Likely U.S. Voters was conducted on March 30-31, 2016 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,

All three remaining Republican candidates refused to say at a CNN town hall this week whether they would support the party’s eventual presidential nominee if they didn’t win. But most Republicans don’t care if they support the nominee or not.

The older the voter, the less likely he or she is to believe that Trump will be the eventual nominee.

Sixty-seven percent (67%) of Democrats and 76% of voters not affiliated with either major party still think the billionaire businessman is likely to win the nomination. These overall findings, too, are little changed.

Republicans (51%) attach slightly more importance to a candidate’s spouse than Democrats (47%) do when it comes to how they will vote this fall. Given the current spat between Trump and Ted Cruz over their wives, it will be interesting to see if this higher level of GOP concern has any long-term impact on the contest between the two.

The number of both men and women who say a Trump nomination is Very Likely is down from last week.

Rasmussen Reports’ latest monthly Hillary Meter finds that 89% of Likely Democratic Voters think Hillary Clinton is likely to be their party’s presidential nominee in 2016. That includes 60% who say it is Very Likely, the highest number of Democrats who consider Clinton’s nomination Very Likely in monthly surveys since last July.

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

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