In this wacky playing field that has been the 2016 presidential campaign, this new finding in a poll released Thursday comes really as no surprise.
It seems both the Democratic and Republican parties have effectively failed at energizing voters overall, and now one of the main factors getting voters to the polls is that they only dislike a certain candidate more than the other.
The poll, conducted by Reuters/Ispos shows that nearly half of the voters who support either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump say it is because they simply don’t want the other party to win.
“This phenomenon is called negative partisanship,” says Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “If we were trying to maximize the effect, we couldn’t have found better nominees than Trump and Clinton.”
Negative partisanship is a result of the growing ideological gap between the people of the United States, a gap created by the American people’s fear of an opposing party.
For the billionaire real estate mogul it’s been an increasing fear of xenophobic policies of isolation that have many voters flocking to Hillary Clinton’s camp, with a recent surge in voter registration among Latinos as an example.
For the former Secretary of State a clear plan that shows Clinton continuing the policies of the Obama administration is what has caused many Republican voters to support Donald Trump.
Around 47 percent of Trump’s supporters said they backed him mainly due to to the fact that they don’t want Clinton to win. Another 43 percent say their motivation was that they agreed with Trump’s political positions.
About 46 percent of Clinton’s supporters say they would vote for her primarily because they don’t want to see Trump in the White House, while 40 percent said their motivation is her political ideology.
