Abstract
This chapter examines public opinion toward Melania Trump and Bill Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. The chapter documents the distinctive ways each candidate spouse shattered the new traditional expectations Americans have for presidential candidate spouses. On the Democratic side with Bill Clinton, not only was he the first male presidential spouse in the US history, he also happened to be a former US president with a very unique and controversial political record in his own right. The prospect of a man as a potential first spouse provoked great media attention, underscoring the degree to which expectations for this particular role remain highly gendered. For the Republicans, Melania Trump, a Slovenian immigrant with an extensive modeling career, which became a major flashpoint during the course of the Republican presidential nomination contest, cast a very different profile than her predecessors. The scandal over her plagiarized remarks at the Republican Convention as well as her markedly low key role in the campaign also signifies her role as distinctive. As a result, the 2016 candidate spouses were the least well liked of all candidate spouses over the past three decades. Melania Trump was the single most unpopular spouse on record.
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Notes
- 1.
YouGov/The Economist conducted poll during July 23–24, 2016. The sample included 1300 general population respondents with a margin of error of ±4.2 percent (4.5 percent for registered voters).
- 2.
Questions specifically about Bill Clinton historical role as former president were not included, for example, polls asking respondents to rank who is the best president of all time. Only questions regarding Bill Clinton’s role in the campaign or relationship to his presidential candidate spouse were included.
- 3.
This poll was conducted for CNN by ORC International, October 20–22, 2016, and based on 1017 telephone interviews. The sample consisted of national adults. It included 517 interviews of landline respondents and 500 interviews of cell phone respondents.
- 4.
This strategy employed by the Clinton campaign was in part driven by the urban-rural divide in the 2016 election. Bill Clinton’s roots in rural Arkansas led the campaign to give him a lead role in appealing to this demographic. Nevertheless, the Democratic Party has historically fared well among urban dwellers, while the Republicans have been the top choice among rural voters in most elections, and this urban-rural divide has become heightened in recent years (McKee 2008). The presidential election of 2016 was no exception as Hillary Clinton crushed Donald Trump among urbanites, while he trounced her with individuals living in rural areas (Scala and Johnson 2017). On the basis of this evidence, we expect a similar urban-rural divide in evaluations of the presidential candidate spouses, with Melania Trump viewed more favorably among rural citizens and Bill Clinton more popular among individuals in urban areas. These relationships are reported in the demographic sections of both the bivariate and multivariate analyses.
- 5.
While still very strong, Bill Clinton’s favorability rating among the youngest demographic was actually depressed by the fact that 23.5 percent had never heard of or had no opinion of Bill Clinton . A reminder that many of them were too young to have personal recollections of his presidency.
- 6.
According to the Gfk Omni survey (2017), a majority of young Americans feel it is appropriate for candidate spouses to speak about their own accomplishments on the campaign trail, whereas a majority of older Americans feel this is inappropriate.
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Elder, L., Frederick, B., Burrell, B. (2018). Breaking with the Past: Public Opinion Toward Melania Trump and Bill Clinton in the 2016 Election. In: American Presidential Candidate Spouses. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73879-6_5
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