Fifty-three percent. That's the share of registered Republicans who named Donald Trump as the president they most admire, according to data CNN's own chief data analyst Harry Enten presented on air this week. Ronald Reagan pulled 18%. Abraham Lincoln — the man who literally held the Union together — got 8%.
CNN ran the numbers and accidentally built a Trump monument.
The data, drawn from an Elon University survey of registered Republicans, doesn't leave much room for interpretation. Trump's support isn't a plurality squeaking past a crowded field. It's almost triple Reagan's number and six times Lincoln's. In a party that spent decades calling itself the "party of Reagan," the Gipper now sits at less than one-fifth of the vote in his own category.
Enten laid it out on air with a straight face, because what else can you do when your own network's graphics package turns into a Trump campaign ad? "53% of Republicans named Trump as the president they most admire," Enten reported. "Reagan trailed at 18% and Lincoln was at a distant 8%." CNN's Berman couldn't resist noting the obvious: "I feel like this slide might end up on a printout on his desk sometime soon if he hasn't seen it already."
Safe bet.
The poll captures something the political class still hasn't absorbed. Reagan won 49 states. Lincoln won a war. Trump got impeached twice, indicted four times, survived two assassination attempts, and came back to win a second term by a wider margin than his first. Republican voters didn't just notice. They ranked that story above every other president in the party's 170-year history.
When CNN has to report that their least favorite president is the most admired Republican of all time, the number does the talking. Fifty-three percent against a field that includes Lincoln and Reagan isn't a poll result. It's a closing argument.