You will not be surprised to hear that President Biden is not viewed very positively by Americans. Yes, some people like him very much personally and some people think he is doing a very good job as president. Those things were true of Donald Trump back in 2019 as well. It is not impossible for some people to like someone but most people not to — as has been the case with each of America’s last two presidents.
A function in part of the increased polarization of presidential approval, it is also a particularly important issue in the moment because of how the next presidential contest is shaping up. It seems quite likely that the 2024 contest will be a repeat of the 2020 election, pitting Biden and Trump against each other to see who gets inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2025. And that means an election in which Americans are asked to choose between two candidates that polling shows America doesn’t particularly like.
Consider the question — a fairly unusual one for presidential candidates! — of whether Americans even want Biden and Trump to run. The Associated Press published new polling Friday, conducted by NORC, showing that more than 7-in-10 Americans don’t want Biden to run for reelection. About the same percentage doesn’t want Trump to, either.
We reached out to the AP to see what percentage of the country preferred that neither man run for the presidency next year. The answer? Nearly half.
We’ve seen an election in the past where Americans were deeply apathetic about the candidates. It was held in 2016 and brought Donald Trump to the White House.
That year, exit polling shows that nearly 1 in 5 voters disliked both Trump and his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. Among that large chunk of the electorate, Trump won about half of the votes. About 2 in 10 voted third party, meaning that Trump beat Clinton by 20 points with those who disliked both candidates.
State exit polling showed a similar effect, meaning that Trump’s victory could be attributed to the fact that people who didn’t really like him very much still voted for him in states such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
As the 2020 election approached, Biden led Trump among those who disliked both candidates. Monmouth University polling conducted in August that year found that about a fifth of voters disliked both candidates but preferred Biden by a nearly 40-point margin.
When the election rolled around, that’s not what happened. Trump actually won a majority of votes among those who disliked both candidates — but there were far, far fewer of them than there had been in 2016. About half of the electorate liked Biden and disliked Trump and they backed Biden by a 95 point margin. Trump won those who only liked him by a similar margin, but there were a lot fewer of those voters.
It’s more than a year until the general election — far enough out that we don’t even know whether Trump and Biden will be the nominees. Should they be, though, it’s safe to assume that the percentage of people who dislike both candidates will be higher than in 2020, if only because Biden’s favorability is lower. How will those dislike-both voters vote, should this be the contest?
A new Wall Street Journal poll offers an assessment: They’ll back Biden by a wide margin. Among those who disapprove of both the Biden and Trump presidencies, Biden is the preferred choice of more than half of voters.
This is the thing about a Biden-vs.-Trump rematch. In 2016, Trump was the beneficiary of not only Clinton’s unpopularity but uncertainty about what kind of president he’d be. He was, to some extent, given the benefit of the doubt.
That’s gone now, as it was in 2020. It’s also gone for Biden. But with each having shown what sort of president they’d be, Biden has a hefty lead. That, too, sounds familiar: In 2020, Biden benefited less from people not knowing what kind of president he’d be than their knowing exactly what kind of president Trump would be.
Hence the question a lot of Republicans are asking: What if Biden were to run against someone besides Trump? It’s a fair question, and one to which we may never get an answer.
