Americans are set for a presidential rematch they don’t want

The United States is quickly moving towards a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump in 2024. However, few Americans are happy about their potential choices based on the current data about the two prospective candidates. 

Both Biden and Trump have proven to be extremely unpopular candidates at a national level and polling over the course of 2023 revealed that most Americans wanted choices other than the two most probable 2024 candidates. 

Take for example an April poll from NBC News that found 70% of those surveyed didn’t want Biden to run for reelection while 60% reported they did not want former President Trump to run for a second term—and polls only got worse. 

A June CNN poll found that 31% of voters preferred neither Biden nor Trump when they were asked to choose between the two in a hypothetical presidential rematch while 33% would back Trump to win and 32% wanted Biden.   

Some of the most recent polling results on the opinion of voters in regards to Biden and Trump published in October discovered a shocking 65% of people didn’t want Biden to run again and 60% said they didn’t want Trump to run. 

What’s causing Americans to be so disenchanted with the two politicians who are most likely to be the Democratic and Republican choices in 2024 isn’t difficult to decipher but both men are problematic in their own unique way. 

“It’s a product of the fact that both of these candidates have very serious drawbacks and they have drawbacks of different natures,” explained the Director of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute at Syracuse University Grant Reeher. 

Reeher spoke with The Hill and revealed that independent voters don’t like either Trump or Biden and noted that Democrats were unlikely to give Trump any positive ratings in a poll while Republican respondents act just as similarly.

“I think the dynamic is a product of the depth of our polarization right now. It’s driving the general dissatisfaction, but it’s driving the tendency for the parties to lock in on whoever was or were their standard-bearers,” Reeher added. 

However, partisan politics on an individual level doesn’t explain why some Democrats and Republicans aren’t backing their candidates. Here again, polls revealed that there are people on both sides who want another choice in 2024. 

Democrats have been voicing their concerns for a long time and a CNN Poll published in September revealed that as many as two-thirds of Democrats and Democrat-leaning voters didn’t want Biden to run for office again. 

The overwhelming majority of respondents (82%) said they wanted someone other than Biden with roughly half of people noting that the President’s age was their biggest worry when it came to him running for office in 2024. 

Biden’s physical and mental competency also bothered 56% but it isn’t a very surprising finding. Polling has shown Biden’s biggest problem is his perceived age issue. However, Biden’s other polling numbers aren’t looking good. 

The President ended the year with a 39% job approval rating according to Gallup, which was up from his low point of 37% in October. But this still doesn’t bode well for Biden as he looks to face down Trump in the 2024 election. 

Trump faces an entirely different problem from Biden since most Republican voters are already locked. In October an NPR-Marist poll showed 43% of GOP and GOP-leaning voters would be “very satisfied” with Trump as their nominee. 

An additional 34% of GOP and GOP-leaning respondents reported that they would be “satisfied” with Trump as the Republican nominee, which gave the former president a 74% favorability rating in the Republican field. 

However, Trump’s problem is that independents don’t want the former president to run again. A poll from NPR/ PBS NewsHour/ and Marist in September revealed the majority of those in the middle (67%) didn’t want Trump to run. 

The main issue for independents appeared to be Trump’s divisive nature according to the interviews conducted by NPR. One independent noted: "I think we need someone who can start uniting the country," adding that neither Biden nor Trump could do it. 

How a rematch between Biden and Trump would play out is still anybody’s guess. But it is clear from the polling data that the country is ready for a fresh start. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that Americans will get that fresh start in 2024.