Marquette Law Poll supplement: Open-ended answers offer insights on Trump favorability

MILWAUKEE — The December Marquette Law School Poll interviewed 1,063 adults nationwide, asking what they like and dislike about President-elect Donald Trump. This poll allows the Marquette Law School Poll to hear from respondents, in their own words, how they feel about the President-elect. People could write as much as they wished.

• Related: New Marquette Law School Poll national survey finds Trump approval at recent high and Biden approval at all-time low; policy issues also surveyed (Dec. 18, 2024)

 “Open-ended responses like these give real insight into how voters think about President-elect Trump, the good points and the bad points, and in their own words,” said Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law Poll. “Many see only one side, all good or all bad, but just over half see a mix of both. These comments tell us a lot about the complex feelings that go beyond a simple ‘approve’ or ‘disapprove’ poll answer.”

The responses can be viewed at this webapp, five random responses at a time, and can be filtered for types of voters.

What do voters and nonvoters really think about Donald Trump?

Trump is the most famous person in, arguably, the world. His name was googled more than any other in 2024, 2023, 2021, and 2019. To better understand how American adults feel about this ubiquitous figure, each of the 1,063 respondents in the Marquette Law School Poll national survey of adults, December 2-11, 2024, was asked to answer two questions in their own words:

• What do you like about Donald Trump?
• What do you dislike about Donald Trump?

The order of the two questions was randomized. Since the survey was conducted online, respondents could write as much as they wished. (These “open-ended questions” were part of a more traditional survey, the subject of separate news releases.)

In the 2024 election, 36% of our sample voted for Vice President Kamala Harris, 38% for Trump, 3% for a third-party candidate, and 23% didn’t vote. The sample gets the mix of Harris and Trump supporters right, though it overrepresents voters as a whole. Early estimates suggest that about 36% of eligible voters didn’t participate in the 2024 election.

Each of the respondents was classified by whether or not they answered both questions. A majority—51% of respondents—listed at least one thing they both liked and disliked about Trump. (We classified clearly sarcastic responses as non-answers.) Listing things they dislike about Trump but including nothing positive were 35%. Fewer adults, 12%, listed positive things about Trump but nothing negative.

Perceptions of Trump and vote choice

The table below shows how each of those groups voted in 2024. Trump and Harris each won equal shares of the adults (76%) with, respectively, only positive or only negative views of the former president. Among those listing both likes and dislikes of Trump, 55% voted for Trump, 17% for Harris, 4% for a third party, and 24% did not vote.

In other words, just over a third of adults held wholly negative views of Trump and just over 10% held wholly positive views. Their votes reflect those views. But Trump won the lion’s share of the vote among people with mixed views of him.

2024 vote of U.S. adults by their view of Trump
About Donald J. Trump	2024 vote choice
	n	% of total	Harris		Trump	3rd Party	Non Voter
Can name likes and dislikes	545	51%	17%		55%	4%	24%
Doesn’t dislike anything	126	12%	1%		76%	3%	20%
Doesn’t like anything	373	35%	76%		1%	1%	22%
No answer	19	2%	31%		18%	6%	46%
Total	1,063	100%	36%		38%	3%	23%

In the December 2024 sample, Harris defeated Trump by 3 percentage points among 2024 voters who also voted in 2020. Among 2024 voters who didn’t vote in 2020, she lost by 12 points.

“Our survey is just one data point in a sense, but it adds to the emerging body of evidence that Trump’s campaign successfully turned out infrequent, ‘low-propensity’ voters who like Trump but often stay home,” Franklin said.

Explore the data

There is no substitute for reading the words of voters themselves. This tool allows you to see 5 randomly* selected responses with each click of the button. Use the filtering options to limit responses as specified. Some of these responses contain profane language and many contain typos. We present them in unedited form.

Link to the app here: https://lubarcenter.shinyapps.io/dec-2024-trump-views/

Respondent	Sample random responses
	Vote in 2024	Vote in 2020		What do you like about Donald Trump?	What do you dislike about Donald Trump?
Male, 34, Hispanic	Donald Trump	Donald Trump		Business plans to bring back production to America, and border control	Grandiose attitude and speaking without thinking about the consequences.
Male, 27, Other/Multiple	Did not vote	Did not vote		Good president for economic purposes. In my opinion, prefer trump over kamala	Tariffs for other countries are too much
Female, 50, White	Donald Trump	Donald Trump	His policies of smaller gov’t and less regulations which will open America up to less restrictions on oil and gas. Also his policies on immigration and closing the border align with my views.		His mouth and some of the unprofessional things he says
Female, 44, Black	Kamala Harris	Joe Biden	He doesn’t care at all		Him personally
Male, 49, White	Donald Trump	Did not vote	Policies, strength globally, strong economy. Strong border security.		Nothing. Donald Trump was an excellent president before and will be excellent again.
Female, 51, Other/Multiple	Did not vote	Joe Biden	I feel like when Donald Trump was president we had peace with other countries and the fact it was no inflation and the crime was more controlled		N/A

About the Marquette Law School Poll

The survey was conducted Dec. 2-11, 2024, interviewing 1,063 adults nationwide, with a margin of error of +/-3.6 percentage points.

Interviews were conducted using the SSRS Opinion Panel, a national probability sample with interviews conducted online. Other data from this survey were released separately on Dec. 18 and 19. The detailed methodology statement, survey instrument, topline results, and crosstabs for this release are available at the Marquette Law School Poll website.

*  Technically, the tool uses a weighted random draw, so that responses are shown in proportion to their prevalence in the population of respondents.​​

NOTE: This press release was submitted to Urban Milwaukee and was not written by an Urban Milwaukee writer. While it is believed to be reliable, Urban Milwaukee does not guarantee its accuracy or completeness.