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This was not an unusual phenomenon, but its scale was large. The 2020 election was more of a referendum on one candidate than a contest between two candidates. And according to a new CNN poll, it will be the same in 2024.
A poll conducted by CNN partner SSRS found Trump with a narrow lead in a hypothetical face-off between the two men. (It’s hypothetical in the sense that neither has yet secured their party’s nomination, but it’s still a near certainty.) The former president has a four-point lead overall and a four-point lead among independents.
But notice the bottom two lines. Among those who approve of Mr. Biden’s job as president, Mr. Biden has a large lead of 87 points. Among them are DisAssessing Biden’s performance, Trump’s lead has shrunk by 64 points. Even within that group, Biden received 14% of the vote.
CNN provided The Washington Post with a breakdown of support for Biden’s job as president. Those who strongly support Biden overwhelmingly support him. Those who strongly oppose it overwhelmingly support Trump. However, those who approve only moderately, Also They overwhelmingly support Biden, but only moderate disapprovers (one-fifth of the total) support the Republican Party by a small margin.
This is noteworthy, if not surprising. This week, we reported on other polls showing Biden with an advantage among people who view both Biden and Trump unfavorably. Perhaps the voters mentioned above do too.
Why vote for Biden if you don’t approve of his approach as president? For many respondents, the answer is simple. Because he’s running against President Trump.
In fact, most Biden supporters in a CNN poll say their vote is more about opposing President Trump than supporting Biden. Among those evaluating Biden’s performance as president, a majority of his supporters say their vote is more anti-Trump than pro-Biden.
(A blank line below indicates that there are too few respondents in that category to elaborate on their opinion.)
But Trump supporters generally say their vote is positive, based more on enthusiasm for Trump than opposition to Biden. The exception is independents, who are often motivated primarily by passive partisanship, meaning opposition rather than support for a candidate.
Biden’s campaign team is reportedly counting on this. The other remaining Republican candidate in the party’s primary, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, often has an advantage over Biden, in part because she has received less hostile reactions from voters. The idea is that if Trump is placed against Biden, anti-Trump votes similar to those in 2020 could give Biden a second term.
Unless, of course, voters who dislike Trump and Biden (and there are even more of them this time around) decide not to vote at all.
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