How relevant is the "enthusiasm gap" between candidates? It depends on how one measures enthusiasm. If you measure enthusiasm as a direct question ("Are you enthusiastic about supporting Trump or Biden"?), it's not very revealing.
Perhaps more revealing is measuring "negative partisanship." Are you voting for Biden or against Trump? In a recent NBC News poll, "just 31 percent said it was more for Biden, while twice as many — 63 percent — said it more against Trump," reports the Washington Post.
A Gallup poll a week before the 2020 election showed that "69 percent of registered voters say that they are more enthusiastic to vote this year compared to previous elections."
Contrast that to the 2016 election, when enthusiasm to vote was relatively low. According to Gallup, which has asked voters about how enthusiastic they are to vote for at least the last two decades, only about half of registered voters said they were more enthusiastic to vote in 2016 than they had been in previous elections.
Translating that enthusiasm into votes is not always easy, but Biden is hoping to change the question from one of how enthusiastic are you to vote for Joe Biden to one of how fearful of Donald Trump you are. It's been a truism of American politics for decades that scaring the voter about what an opponent will do if elected works well if the opposing candidate is unknown. But Trump has been in the national political spotlight for more than a decade, and there are very few Americans who don't have a strong opinion of him.
A USA Today/Suffolk University poll last week asked primary voters from each party to rate how enthusiastic they were to vote for their respective front-runners, Biden and Trump, if they became the nominee.
While 44 percent of GOP primary voters gave Trump a 10 (“very enthusiastic”), just 18 percent of Democratic primary voters gave Biden a 10. Nearly half of Democratic primary voters were at a 6 or lower.
Also, the Post points out that an "AP-NORC poll last month showed 65 percent of Republicans were 'very' or 'somewhat' satisfied with Trump as their nominee, compared with 49 percent when it came to Democrats and Biden."
A Monmouth University poll in September "showed 47 percent of Republicans were 'very enthusiastic' about Trump, compared with 29 percent of Democrats who were 'very enthusiastic' about Biden," reports the Post.
But the most significant measurement of enthusiasm translating into probable voting is a recent Marquette University Law School poll showing that "60 percent of Republicans said they were 'very enthusiastic' about voting in the 2024 election, compared with 38 percent of Democrats" according to the Post.
There's no need for overconfidence. We're still 10 months from election day, and Biden's strategy to make Trump the bogeyman has only now gotten underway. But dispirited Democrats and excited Republicans less than a year from the 2024 election do not bode well for Joe Biden's campaign.
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