Kenneth Vogel and Eli Stokols report at
Politico:
Karl Rove has publicly blasted Donald Trump as “a petty man consumed by resentment and bitterness” with little gravitas and almost no chance of beating Hillary Clinton.
But privately, the super PAC conceived by Rove is suggesting to its donors that it can help Trump win the White House and save Republican senators whose reelection bids could be jeopardized by having Trump at the top of the ticket.
The apparent warming of the American Crossroads super PAC and its sister groups to Trump has become evident in its recent communications with donors, including a Tuesday afternoon “investor conference call,” according to multiple sources familiar with the outreach.
At
The Washington Post, however, Scott Clement and Emily Guskin report data confirming Trump's toxicity:
Thirty-one percent of Americans have a favorable view of Trump while 67 percent are unfavorable -- nearly identical to an early March Post-ABC poll which found he would be the most disliked major-party nominee since at least 1984. Over half the public (53 percent) continues to see Trump in a “strongly unfavorable” light, ticking down from 56 percent last month.
Cruz fares better with 36 percent favorable and 53 percent unfavorable among the public at-large; his strongly unfavorable mark is 20 percentage-points below Trump’s level (33 percent for Cruz vs. 53 percent for Trump). Kasich receives an even split on this basic measure of popularity -- 39 favorable and 39 percent unfavorable, while over one-fifth report no opinion of him (22 percent).
Also at The Post, James Hohmann writes:
Morning Consult, which is constantly in the field with online polls, compiled all 44,000 responses it has collected since the start of the year. Dartmouth political scientist Kyle Dropp, the firm’s data guru, divided up the respondents by state. He concludes that HillaryClinton has a significant edge in the Electoral College against both Trump and Cruz. In hypothetical matchups, based on the average of state-by-state, head-to-head polling, Kasich is the only Republican who emerged with the most electoral votes against Clinton. Hillary, despite her own vulnerabilities, got 328 electoral votes to 210 for Trump. Clinton actually leads Cruz by a slightly larger margin (332-206). “It is important to note that while this model awards electoral votes to whoever has the plurality of the vote, a number of states are within the margin of error,” the Consult notes. About 20% of voters are undecided. (Read a white paper explain Kyle and his team's methodology here. See the state-by-state projections here.)
