Hillary Clinton holds a rally with Vice President Joe Biden in Scranton, Pennsylvania. (Getty)
A new USA Today/Suffolk University poll found that the majority of voters are driven more by fear of the other candidate winning than they are by excitement over their preferred candidate winning.
According to the poll, 80 percent of Donald Trump supporters say they are scared of Hillary Clinton being elected in November. Meanwhile, 62 percent of Clinton supporters say they are scared of Donald Trump being elected. Those polled were given four possible choices of how they felt, with “scared” being the most negative.
This number is significantly higher than the number of people who are excited about their own candidate winning. Just 27 percent of Hillary Clinton supporters said they would be excited about Clinton winning in November. On the other side, 29 percent of Donald Trump supporters said they would be excited about Trump winning. Most voters – 62 percent for Clinton and 52 percent for Trump – instead said they would be “satisfied” if the candidate they support won.
As well, about 30 percent of Hillary Clinton supporters said they were mostly voting against Trump, not for Clinton. And about 40 percent of Donald Trump supporters said they were mostly voting against Clinton, not for Trump.
The poll found that honesty continues to be an issue for both candidates. For Hillary Clinton, 59 percent of voters don’t feel she is honest and trustworthy, and that includes 25 percent of Clinton supporters. Surprisingly, in this poll Donald Trump actually performed worse than Clinton on this question, with 61 percent saying he isn’t honest and trustworthy. Most polls in the past have shown voters believing Trump is more honest than Clinton.
This high untrustworthy number for Clinton may be in part due to the Clinton foundation, and for Trump it may be related to the fact that he has not released his tax returns. Roughly 80 percent of voters said Trump should release his tax returns, and 54 percent said Hillary Clinton didn’t take proper steps to avoid a conflict of interest with the Clinton foundation. Only 30 percent said Clinton doesn’t deserved to be criticized for this.
This poll comes not long after another survey found that a majority of voters on both sides feel that the other candidate is evil. Among Trump supporters, 83 percent said they’d describe Hillary Clinton as evil, and 66 percent of Clinton voters would describe Trump in that way.
