UW Survey Finds Donald Trump Remains Popular in Wyoming
Written by Caleb Nelson on November 29, 2022
Former President Donald Trump remains popular among the people of Wyoming, according to a recent University of Wyoming survey.
Trump speaking at CPAC 2011
Roughly 30 percent of people who responded rated Trump’s performance as president as “excellent,” while another 28 percent rated his performance as “good.” The Wyoming Survey and Analysis Center’s Survey Research Center at UW conducted telephone interviews with “524 Wyoming residents” selected at random between Oct. 22 and Nov. 7. The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.3 percentage points.
Jim King, the survey’s director and a professor of political science, says this year’s poll results concerning Trump fit patterns found in polls conducted in previous years.
“This year, we see 58 percent of Wyomingites giving positive ratings to Trump’s performance as president. In 2020 and 2018, those figures were 59 percent and 56 percent, respectively,” King says. “The differences across the years can be attributed to the margin of error that is present in any survey.”
There are substantial differences across political affiliations in the latest survey, according to King.
“Four out of five Republicans, 82 percent, rated Trump positively compared to 42 percent of independents,” King notes. “As expected, almost nine out of 10 Democrats, 88 percent, characterized Trump’s presidential performance as ‘poor.’ Almost identical partisan differences were seen in the earlier surveys during Trump’s presidency.”
Trump’s durable standing among Wyoming Republicans extends to the upcoming presidential campaign.
“We asked survey respondents if they would support Trump or another candidate for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination,” King says.
A majority of Republicans, 54 percent, said they would support the former president, while 32 percent favored another Republican candidate, and 14 percent were uncertain. Not surprisingly, Republicans who rated Trump’s presidential performance as “excellent” overwhelmingly supported him for the GOP nomination, King says. Republicans giving Trump a “good” rating were split, with 42 percent favoring him for the nomination and 37 percent preferring another candidate.
“There is no question that Republicans will rally behind Trump should he win the Republican presidential nomination — 82 percent of Republicans in the survey indicated that they would cast their ballots for Trump over the Democratic Party’s nominee, including a majority of those preferring another Republican for the nomination,” King says. “This coalescing behind the nominee is to be expected. We see, in both political parties, a pattern of disagreeing about the choice of a nominee but uniting to defeat the nominee of the other party.”
UW’s School of Politics, Public Affairs and International Studies conducts biennial surveys of Wyoming residents in partnership with the Wyoming Survey and Analysis Center and Wyoming Public Media. The questions focus on attitudes toward government, elected officials, candidates for office and contemporary policy issues.
