Americans are so dissatisfied with the presidential candidates from the two major parties that a third party independent effort is truly viable for the first time since Abraham Lincoln’s election helped the Republicans replace the Whigs. That’s the shocking result of a new national poll, released to Heat Street this morning.
Data Targeting, Inc., a polling company based in Gainesville, Florida that has been involved in investigating the viability of a third party effort since February, conducted the nationwide poll using live telephone surveys of 997 active registered voters from May 12th to 15th, 2016.
According to the poll, 58% of respondents are dissatisfied with the current Republican and Democratic candidates for President. Fifty-five percent favor having a third party independent candidate for president, including a stunning 91% of voters under the age of 29.
A total of 65% of voters are at least somewhat, pretty or very willing to support a candidate for President who is not Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, the presumed Republican and Democratic nominees, respectively.
When the survey respondents were given a ballot test between Trump, Clinton, and a third party independent candidate, Trump received 34%, Clinton 31%, the independent 21%, and 13% unsure.
The key to these results can be found in the poor favorability ratings for both Trump and Clinton, combined with their nearly universal name recognition. Trump gets a favorable rating from only 32% of voters, 55% have an unfavorable opinion of him, 11% have no opinion, and 1% said they never heard of him. Clinton’s results aren’t far off: 38% favorable, 56% unfavorable, 6% no opinion, and less than 1% said they never heard of her.
In other words, American voters all know Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and they’ve decided they don’t like them. And among voters who have an unfavorable opinion of both Trump and Clinton, 56% of them would vote for an independent candidate.
Data Targeting CEO Joel Searby told Heat Street in a phone interview Wednesday morning that he actually was not surprised by the poll results. “We’ve been seeing these underlying fundamentals since March,” said Searby, and with the majority of national polling ignoring the possibility of an independent candidate, “we felt it was important to inject some quality research into the issue of an independent candidacy.”
The poll also surveyed what Searby described as “a little sampling of interesting names,” several prominent politicians and celebrities whose names have been discussed in relation to a third party bid, including Speaker Paul Ryan, Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, billionaire Mark Cuban, and “Dirty Jobs” television star Mike Rowe. None of them have the name recognition of Trump or Clinton, but also don’t start out with underwater favorability.
“The real important question,” Searby emphasized, “is the generic candidacy,” acknowledging that any independent candidate would start out with a name recognition deficit to Trump and Clinton, but thinks that would be remedied quickly. A third party candidate “would achieve near universal name recognition within weeks simply because the press is hungry for these stories right now,” he explained.
“The most important thing we learned here is that there is a significant number of voters who are not satisfied with these two choices [of Trump and Clinton], and that story has been way underreported,” said Searby.
Data Targeting conducted the poll using a live telephone survey of both landline and mobile numbers. The responses from a total of 997 respondents were drawn from active registered voters who voted in either the 2008 or 2012 general elections, or who registered to vote after the 2012 election, and were weighted by party and geographic region based on the 2012 general election results. The margin of error is +/-3.1%.
