Greg Sargent draws attention to a finding from a new Pew survey:

Fifty-six percent of Republican and GOP-leaning voters nationally think Donald Trump would make a great or good president. That’s higher than it is for any other GOP candidate.

There is still a ceiling on how much Republican support Trump will receive during the primaries, but it is much higher than most observers believed. This Pew finding suggests that most Republicans aren’t horrified by the prospect of a Trump nomination. On the contrary, it indicates that most would welcome that result. There is a group in the GOP (22%) that believe Trump will be a poor or terrible president, but it is not that much larger than it is for most of the other candidates and it is smaller than it is for some. While I agree that Trump would be a bad president, most of his party believes the opposite.

The assessment of what kind of president a candidate will be seems to be mostly a function of favorability ratings. For example, Bush is now widely disliked by Republicans, and so more of them (36%) think he would be a poor or terrible president. Candidates that are viewed favorably are seen as potentially good or great presidents regardless of their qualifications: 43% say this about Carson and 44% say it about Rubio. Just a few months ago, Trump’s poor favorability rating among Republicans seemed to back up the idea that there was a low ceiling on his support, but as the campaign has gone on that rating has steadily improved. Most arguments from anti-Trump Republicans lean heavily on the assumption that he is obviously a disaster for the GOP if nominated and would be even worse for the country if elected, but most Republican voters don’t believe it. That helps to explain why there is not that much resistance to Trump’s candidacy inside the GOP, and it suggests that there probably won’t be much more in the weeks and months to come.

The problem for the GOP is that Trump is so unpopular overall that most Americans (52%) think that he would be a poor or terrible president, and that does make him an especially bad choice for nominee. It’s hard to see how Trump would win if a majority of the voters already thinks he’d do a lousy job.