The poll shows that “no past candidate comes close to Clinton, and especially Trump, in terms of engendering strong dislike a little more than six months before the election.” Clinton racks up 37 percent in the truly radioactive category of “strongly unfavorable” while Trump is at 53 percent. It is the ultimate race between perceived evils and both parties will now work to make voters hate the other more as the strategy for winning the White House. Indeed, another polls shows that roughly half of voters supporting Trump are dong so to block Clinton and vice versa.
“No major party nominee before Clinton or Trump had a double-digit net negative ‘strong favorability’ rating. Clinton’s would be the lowest ever, except for Trump.”
Yet, there is no serious examination of our political system in producing such a disconnect from voters. It is not a problem of the Democratic and Republican parties producing widely disliked candidates. The problem is that the two parties largely control the choices through a system that discourages third parties or independent candidates. While some may be satisfied with this process, most Americans are clearly not happy with the choices. Yet, the view of the majority seem entirely irrelevant to this supposedly democratic process. In addition to the reforms that I proposed earlier, we need to address the dysfunctional reality of our system that can literally produce the two least popular candidates for voters to choose between (unless they are willing to support a distant third party candidate).