Americans Trust Bernie Sanders Most With The Economy, Donald Trump The Least [Poll]
Bernie Sanders is standing out on yet another front.
According to a new Gallup poll, Americans trust the Vermont senator more with the economy than they do any other presidential candidate left in the race.
Almost 47 percent of Americans expressed a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in Bernie Sanders to recommend the right thing for the U.S. economy, giving weight to the Vermont senator’s claims that voters have gravitated to his campaign because they are getting increasingly tired of the nexus between political power and fraudulent money in American politics.
Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton came within striking distance of Sanders, with 43 percent of those surveyed saying that they had confidence in the former Secretary of State when it came to questions of the economy. Republican front-runner Donald Trump appeared to fare the worst among all the remaining candidates, coming a sorry fifth in the poll, with only 30 percent Americans appearing to place their faith in him.
The result of the Gallup poll could be cause for consternation particularly for Trump, as it busts the myth that his business background places him in a sound position to tackle the economic problems plaguing America. If anything, the current poll provides striking proof that most Americans are not convinced by the real estate mogul’s simplistic solutions to the complex economic hardships that America faces today.
Ted Cruz and John Kasich, the other Republican candidates in the presidential race, outperformed Trump in the poll.
Even as Bernie Sanders struggles to maintain pace in the Democratic race for the nomination, having fallen behind Hillary Clinton significantly after last week’s New York primary defeat, the Gallup poll results will no doubt encourage him to continue his campaign on the same lines. His campaign call for a $15 minimum wage, his detail-limited call to break up large banks, and his promises to fight for free college tuition at public colleges and universities seem to have resonated with a majority of Americans, especially with the millennials.
Furthermore, in the wake of the Panama Papers revelations that implicated some of Clinton’s close financial associates, Bernie Sanders’ 2011 stand to oppose the Panama Free Trade Agreement has already been much discussed, and it could have been another factor that led to Sanders’ strong showing in the poll.
“I was opposed to the Panama Free Trade Agreement from day one,” Sanders had said after the revelations came to light. “I wish I had been proven wrong about this, but it has now come to light that the extent of Panama’s tax avoidance scams is even worse than I had feared.”
According to the poll, while Clinton followed Sanders closely behind in the number of people who trust her economic decisions, the number of Americans who place “no” to “little confidence” in Hillary Clinton’s economic leadership is overwhelming. Fifty-six percent of those surveyed expressed “only a little” or “almost [no]” confidence in Clinton to recommend the right thing for the U.S. economy, significantly worse than her performance in 2008 when she unsuccessfully vied for the Democratic nomination against President Barack Obama.
With Bernie Sanders facing some daunting polling going into today’s five primary races in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island, he would hope that Americans in those states place as much confidence in his overall leadership as they do on the economic front.
[Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images]
