President Joe Biden continues to be plagued by approval ratings well below 50%. Under normal circumstances, that might be worrying for an incumbent heading into his reelection year. But Biden likes to rely on a common refrain: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.”
In other words, Biden may not be the most likable guy, yet voters will prefer him to whomever Republicans put up.
There’s just one problem with Biden’s thinking: The polling shows he could be fundamentally wrong and it could cost him the election next year.
Right now, the likely Republican alternative to Biden in a hypothetical 2024 general election matchup appears to be Donald Trump. The former president leads every GOP primary poll by a wide margin, including our latest CNN/SSRS survey.
Trump, like Biden, is quite unpopular. His favorability rating in our latest poll is 35% among registered voters. That’s basically the same as Biden’s 36% favorability rating among registered voters.
Voters who like Trump favor him by more than 90 points over Biden, while those who like Biden favor him by more than 90 points over Trump.
This means the election will come down to the 29% of voters (according to our poll) who hold a favorable view of neither Biden nor Trump. (Note that this 29% includes the 9% of voters who hold an undecided view of at least one of the two men; when we concentrate on the 20% who hold an unfavorable view of both – sometimes called “double haters” – all of the following analysis still holds.)
If either of these large percentages (20% or 29%) sounds familiar, it’s because we had a similar dynamic in 2016, when nearly 20% of voters liked neither Democrat Hillary Clinton nor Trump. Trump won that group by 17 points – and with it, the election.
Earlier this year, Biden seemed to hold a…
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