The one number that should worry Republicans most about Donald Trump

But on the question of whether the candidates have the "right kind of temperament" to be president, there's a clear difference. Voters are largely split on the question when it comes to Clinton, with 48 percent saying she does possess the right temperament and 49 percent saying she doesn't. There's no such divide when it comes to Trump. Seven in 10 voters believe he does not have the right temperament to be president, with just 27 percent saying he does

That matters. A lot.

Trump ran a primary campaign based, in large part, on the brashness of his personality. He was the candidate willing to get personal about "Little Marco" and "Lyin' Ted," the one candidate who refused to apologize when he said or did something that rubbed some people (or a lot of them) the wrong way.

And Trump has insisted he has no plans to back away from that shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach in the general election. Trump, he insists, will continue to do Trump.

On one level, that makes perfect sense. Put yourself in Trump's shoes. He just beat 16 other people - many of them longtime and much-accomplished politicians - by being unapologetically himself. He did it amid all sorts of questions about whether he needed to moderate his tone or act more presidential. He acted like himself. And it worked. Perfectly.

But, it's hard to see any candidate - Democrat or Republican, Donald Trump or not - winning a general election for the most powerful and visible job in the country if 7 in 10 voters don't believe you have the temperament to be the nation's chief executive.

The Times-CBS poll doesn't delve into the specific issues people have with Trump's temperament. But it's not hard to imagine. His tendency to pop off at people and in the immediate aftermath of major world events doesn't comport with the careful approach most politicians seeking the presidency adopt.

For instance, Trump tweeted that the crash of an EgyptAir flight earlier this week was an act of terror before there was any official confirmation of that fact.

There has long been an expectation that presidents have a responsibility to wait until all (or most) of the facts are known before offering an opinion. The thinking behind that caution is that when you lead the free world, every little thing you say has impact and reverberations well beyond what you can even imagine them to be.

"His kind of unpredictable dangerous rhetoric and the policies thrown out there for whatever hope he has to get people to respond to him make us less like that we're going to be as effective as we need to be going forward," Clinton said in an interview with CNN on Thursday.

Trump's campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, has repeatedly emphasized - in both public and private - that Trump's temperament is adjustable, that the real estate billionaire doesn't have his rhetoric set on "fire hose" at all times. His "behavior can be changed," Manafort told a group of senior GOP staffers during a private meeting Thursday on Capitol Hill.

I believe that. But, two questions linger:

Does Trump WANT to change his behavior and his rhetoric to address the temperament issue?