As mentioned in yesterday’s post, Trump has some strong feelings about the recent alliance between Ted Cruz and John Kasich. His press release is a fascinating read, complete with some numbers that seem to be made up out of whole cloth:

“Senator Cruz has done very poorly and after his New York performance, which was a total disaster, he is in free fall and as everyone has seen, he does not react well under pressure. Also, approximately 80% of the Republican Party is against him. Governor Kasich, who has only won 1 state out of 41, in other words, he is 1 for 41 and he is not even doing as well as other candidates who could have stubbornly stayed in the race like him but chose not to do so. Marco Rubio, as an example, has more delegates than Kasich and yet suspended his campaign one month ago. Others, likewise, have done much better than Kasich, who would get slaughtered by Hillary Clinton once the negative ads against him begin. 85% of Republican voters are against Kasich.”

It is unclear where these numbers are coming from. By any measure, 80% of the Republican Party is not against Ted Cruz, nor 85% against Kasich. We’ll start with vote totals.

Trump leads with 8.7 million votes, followed by Cruz with 6.4 million and Kasich with 3.1 million. While Trump has a commanding lead, of the 21,735,860 votes cast for the top four candidates in the Republican primaries, Ted Cruz got 6,389,500 of them, or 29.4%. Not great, but that is pretty far from “80% of the Republican Party is against him.” Clearly at least 29.4% of the voters in the primaries are for him. If we use favorability polls, Trump’s claim is even more blatantly false. According to Huffington Post, which aggregated 221 polls from 30 pollsters, has Cruz with a 31.5% favorable rating and 54.8% unfavorable rating. These polls for the public at large, presumably the unfavorable rating in the GOP would be much lower.

Moving on to Kasich, the Trump campaign claims that Kasich has only won one state out of 41, his home state of Ohio. Which seems strange, as there have only been 36 primaries and caucuses held so far, with 15 to go. It seems like someone on the Trump team would know how many primaries are left, but, hey, organization and fact checking are not really their strong suit.

Trump is actually pretty close on Kasich, though it would probably be more accurate to say that 15% of Republican voters voted for him, as opposed to 85% are against him. He has currently received 14.6% of the votes cast for the top four candidates. Using the latest favorability polls from HuffPo, which aggregate 97 polls from 17 pollsters, Kasich has a 38.9% favorability rating, with only a 34.1% unfavorable rating, the lowest of the three remaining candidates. Quite a bit better than 85% unfavorable. Again, these polls are from the public at large, likely to be less favorable than just the Republicans that Trump is claiming.

In comparison, Trump has received about 40% of the votes cast for the top four candidates. His favorability rating, using 137 polls from 24 pollsters at Huffington Post, is at 29.9% percent, the lowest of the three remaining candidates. His unfavorability rating is 63.6%, far and away the highest of the three candidates.

Sources:
Sarcastic Random Number Generator: http://www.wolframalpha.com/widgets/
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/response-to-cruz-and-kasich
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/republican_vote_count.html
http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/ted-cruz-favorable-rating
http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/john-kasich-favorable-rating
http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/donald-trump-favorable-rating