Between the lines: Voting for or against?

Poll shows influence of “never him/her” voters

Almost half of the Arkansas electorate prefers Donald Trump as the next president, if a new state poll is to be believed.

While anybody's poll can be suspect these days, the results of this one pretty much mirror conventional wisdom.

Ever-reddening Arkansas should be expected to fall into the presumptive Republican nominee's column, even if that nominee is Donald Trump and his presumed Democratic opponent is the state's former first lady, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

This particular poll comes from Talk Business & Politics and Hendrix College and was conducted June 26 among 751 Arkansas voters. That's a solid sample size with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.8 percent.

Keep that in mind as you evaluate the usefulness of the poll.

Among those surveyed, 47 percent said they'd vote for Trump, the billionaire businessman who has totally rewritten the script for American politics in this election.

Just more than a third of the Arkansans surveyed (36 percent) said they'd prefer Clinton while 8 percent favored Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate for president. Another 9 percent didn't know for whom they would vote.

Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico, isn't the only other candidate for president besides Trump and Clinton on the Arkansas ballot, but he was the only one who registered in the poll. He presumably picked up support from the never-Trump and never-Hillary voters within the state.

There must be plenty of both in the Arkansas electorate, despite Trump's strong showing.

A second question in the Talk Business & Politics-Hendrix College poll asked this:

"No matter how you plan to vote for president, is your vote primarily a vote for your candidate, primarily a vote against other candidates, or an equal combination of the two?"

While 61 percent of the respondents said it was a vote for their candidate, 35 percent said it was a combination of the two and 18 percent admitted it was a vote against other candidates. Only 6 percent didn't know or didn't acknowledge their motivation.

Jay Barth, the respected political scientist from Hendrix College, in his analysis of the recent poll results broke down how the respective supporters of Trump and Clinton weighed in on that question.

Clinton's supporters were more apt to say that they were voting for her. Barth put the numbers at six in 10 of Clinton's supporters who really are for her.

Comparatively, just over one in three of Trump's supporters are for him while close to a quarter of his backers are voting against someone else, presumably Clinton.

Barth also concluded that most of Libertarian Johnson's supporters are driven to him wholly (40 percent) or partly (43 percent) by the other choices.

One other result from the poll can't be ignored.

President Barack Obama, despite a surge in his approval ratings nationwide, still draws strong disapproval in Arkansas.

While only 33.5 percent of those surveyed approve of the job he is doing, 60.5 percent disapprove and 6 percent don't know.

While Secretary Clinton faces her own negative demons with the electorate, her close ties to Obama undoubtedly add to her weaker showing in the poll.

Nevertheless, the president is popular among certain subsets of those polled, most notably African-Americans (88 percent approve of the president) and Democrats (75 percent approve of him).

Clinton obviously does well among those subsets, too. She, or her surrogates, will campaign to turn those voters out and hope to make up the difference between her and Trump.

It's still unlikely that she can win Arkansas but a lot can change before the general election.

A lot has changed already as Clinton fought off Bernie Sanders' bid for the nomination and Trump defeated a long list of Republican contenders and turned traditional American politics on its ear.

Keep in mind that the nominating conventions are yet to come and large parts of the electorate really won't get engaged in this election until Labor Day.

So take this poll for what it is -- a June snapshot in an unpredictable, constantly changing political environment.

A CORRECTION

Weapons used in the recent mass shooting in Orlando, Fla., were semi-automatic firearms. The description in Sunday's column was incorrect.

Commentary on 06/29/2016

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