Gallup Poll Finds Trump’s Convention Is A Historic Dud

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at the Greensboro Coliseum in Greensboro, N.C., Tuesday, June 14, 2016. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)
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Donald Trump’s efforts to make the Republican National Convention “unlike any we’ve ever seen” produced an unexpected first: the first time more voters came away from a convention less likely to vote for the party’s nominee than they were to support him or her, according to Gallup.

Gallup has surveyed on this question since 1984, and the 2016 GOP convention was the first time where a candidate ended up in negative territory.

The voters who felt less likely to vote Trump after the convention outnumbered those who felt even more motivated for the GOP nominee, 51-36, according to a Gallup poll.

The closest a convention came to such unfavorable closing percentages was the 2012 RNC, when 40 percent of adults felt more likely to vote for Mitt Romney and 38 percent felt more wary after the convention, according to Gallup.

In direct contrast, 45 percent say they are more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton based on what they saw of the Democratic National Convention, with 41 percent saying the opposite.

Clinton’s acceptance speech was better received by adults polled in the survey, with 44 percent describing the nominee’s speech as “excellent” and only 20 percent believing the speech she gave on the final day of the convention was “terrible.”

When asked the same of Trump’s speech given during the RNC, 35 percent considered it “excellent” and another 36 percent thought it was “terrible.”

Clinton closed the Philadelphia convention, accepting the role as first major party female presidential nominee, with calls to bring Americans together in the next four years in her acceptance speech, while attacking Trump’s dark portrait of the US in his acceptance speech in Cleveland one week prior.

The Gallup survey is based on two polls conducted via telephone July 23-24 after the RNC and July 29-30 after the DNC. The survey included 1,000 adults and has a margin of error of four percent.

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