Q-Poll: Hillary Trails Republicans in Three Swing States, Rubio Strongest

Guy Benson | August 20, 2015 1:05 PM

Katie touched on these results in her 'Biden vs. Trump' post, but I thought I'd put a finer point on it. While it's extremely, almost hilariously early to be drawing too many conclusions from hypothetical general election surveys about a race that will be decided fifteen months from now, there are some trends and nuggets worth underscoring. First, the top line numbers:

Florida:
Rubio 51, Clinton 39
Bush 49, Clinton 38
Trump 43, Clinton 31

Ohio:
Rubio 42, Clinton 40
Clinton 41, Bush 39
Clinton 43, Trump 38

Pennsylvania:
Rubio 47, Clinton 40
Bush 43, Clinton 40
Clinton 45, Trump 40

In all three swing states -- including Pennsylvania, the GOP's white whale -- Marco Rubio fares best against Hillary. He's positioned himself as a capable and informed candidate of the future, contrasting his forward-looking

youth and vigor with Hillary's Clinton's decades within the political system and stale, predictable statist agenda. Head-to-head numbers are fleeting and will bounce all over the place in the months to come (and there are reasons to be wary of the Keystone state data, given a sample that seems unrealistically generous to Republicans). What's more interesting at this stage are favorability levels among registered voters and other indicators of how people intuitively feel about various presidential contenders. In the new Q-poll, Hillary Clinton's favorables are significantly underwater, just as we saw in the outfit's previous survey of three different battleground states:

Donald Trump, who leads the Republican field in all three states -- narrowly in Florida, comfortably in Ohio and Pennsylvania -- shares Hillary's double-barreled problem. His overall favorability with the general electorate is quite bad, with near-universal name recognition. Attitudes have been set:

Q-poll: Trump (leading GOP field in all 3 states) also has big problems w/ gen electorate favorability: FL: 36/50 OH: 32/54 PA: 34/55
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) August 20, 2015

In case you're curious, the four Republicans who consistently hold the strongest general election favorables across all three states are: Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and John Kasich. Of those four, Rubio is by far the best known candidate. Jeb Bush's favorables are strong in his home state of Florida, but slightly underwater in both Ohio and Pennsylvania. In 2012, Mitt Romney got destroyed by Barack Obama on the "caring" or empathy question. From today's poll:

#QPoll: Marco Rubio cares about you. pic.twitter.com/ch5d9iL7fU
— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) August 20, 2015

As opposed to Hillary:

Q-poll: Hillary underwater by double digits on "caring" metric, which Obama crushed. pic.twitter.com/ISPgU6TkHN
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) August 20, 2015

I'll leave you with two data points from this national survey that would be deeply worrying to each party's current frontrunner: