It’s 2024 and that’s not the case at all.
Gallup recently asked Americans what role they think this year’s major party candidates will play as president. We need not recall that each of them held this office as president. About 3 in 10 respondents said they thought Biden would be the only good president. About a third said the same about Donald Trump. And about 3 in 10 said they would do neither.
Unsurprisingly, views differed between political parties. It turns out that Democrats were far more likely to say that only Biden would be a good president. Republicans were more likely to say only Trump would do that. However, the majority of each party said they supported neither, in fact one-fifth of each group.
Several independents share a similar opinion, with 4 in 10 telling Gallup they don’t think either candidate would make a good president. This isn’t all that surprising. Independents often make political decisions based on things they don’t like. But that doesn’t stop us from seeing how close the race is, and how close it will continue to be, and the fact that voters who disliked both Hillary Clinton and Trump had a decisive impact on the 2016 campaign. This is important considering that. Clinton took office in January 2017, eliminating Trump’s advantage over voters in the three states that Trump flipped that year.
But pre-election polls often run the risk of exaggerating the size of the “both-hat” segment of the electorate. After all, if you dislike both presidential candidates, you’re naturally more likely to stay home in November.
Gallup asked a similar question. What did those who answered “Neither is good” (approximately 6 out of 10 were independent) plan to do as voting day approached?
About a fifth said they were staying at home. Nearly half said they would vote for a third party.
This is what happened in the first election in 2016, when both candidates were largely unpopular. Millions of voters who voted for Barack Obama in the last election stayed home, and turnout was only slightly higher than in 2012. In that election, an unusually large number of voters chose third-party candidates.
But of course, 2016 and 2024 are different in other important ways. First, early polling suggests that the vote for both candidates, who are disliked, favors Biden over Clinton, as it turned out eight years ago. Another is that many of those who plan to vote for Biden this year are voting explicitly against Trump, something that was less common before Trump’s presidency.
However, one thing that is definitely similar between 2024 and 2016 is how people view the contest as a whole. Voters are once again being asked to choose between candidates that many people don’t particularly like. And, as happened after the 2016 and 2020 elections, when the winning candidate becomes president, his job performance will quickly come to be viewed negatively by most Americans.
