Joe Biden and Donald Trump are extremely unpopular. This puts a large swath of voters in a quandary: If I hate both candidates, whom do I choose?
It's a question occupying the campaign staff of both candidates as the first debate approaches on June 27. That debate and the way that answers are spun and questions framed could bring either candidate a "breakthrough moment" and badly needed momentum.
The race has become stagnant. Trump is ahead, especially in battleground states, but not by much. The former president is winning within the margin of error nationally and in six of the seven battleground states.
But buried in the latest Siena poll is the startling information that there are more "never Biden" voters out there than "never Trump" voters. This is the exact opposite of the situation in 2020.
The poll found 52% of respondents said they would never vote for President Joe Biden, while 46% said the same for former President Donald Trump.
With so much negativity in the electorate, how does a campaign flip the dynamic and get large numbers of people on its side?
Surprisingly, not through TV advertising.
An NBC survey last month found that interest in the election was not only at the lowest level at this point in a presidential election year since 2012, but also had actually declined since September. A late-April CNN poll found a seven-point falloff since August among voters with the highest level of motivation to vote.
Viewership of politically oriented cable TV is down, Nielsen reports. An average of 2.5 million viewers watched CNN, the Fox News Channel and MSNBC nightly during prime time in the January-to-April period this year, down from three million in the same period of 2016 and 4.7 million in 2020, just as the Covid-19 pandemic was beginning.
That same Siena poll found that 61% of voters see Biden's presidency as a failure while 55% see Trump's presidency as a success in retrospect.
The problem for both candidates is that this is far beyond a "hold your nose and vote" election. Half the electorate won't vote for the other guy under any circumstances. Aside from being unprecedented, it makes the election even more of a tossup.
No one is paying much attention. But Trump drew 100,000 last weekend in Pennsylvania and Biden has raised hundreds of millions of dollars mostly in small donations of $200 or less.
Candidate partisans are primed and enthused about the election. But the vast middle of the electorate is not engaged, and the challenge for the campaign staffs is to find the right combination of messages that will strike a chord in people's hearts.
“Let’s be clear who the audience is. They’re really for the folks in the middle, who aren’t quite sure, who really haven’t started to pay attention,” said Karen Finney, who was a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.
The fast-approaching debate will kick off a calendar that includes the Republican and Democratic nominating conventions in July and August, respectively, followed in September by a second debate, to be hosted by ABC. A senior Biden campaign aide argued that the goal is to “create moment after moment” and to tee up the contrast with Trump as soon as possible. Biden’s team wants to remind voters of his legislative achievements, economic gains and the chaos of Trump’s presidency.
Biden’s aides and allies have long argued that many Americans aren’t fully dialed into the race and that when they recognize that it is a choice between Biden and Trump, the incumbent’s approval ratings will rise. Gallup found Biden had the lowest approval of any president dating back to Dwight D. Eisenhower for an equivalent January-to-April quarter in office.
That's the cry of the desperate candidate: If only the people would pay attention they'd see how great I am and how rotten the other guy is. It's a forlorn hope. Biden has been saying all along that once people see how great the economy is and how much he's accomplished, he'll be fine.
So why has Trump been so anxious to debate him?
“That contrast for us is a win all day long, every day of the week. Whether it’s the economy that is crushing the bank accounts of working families, the porous border, whether it’s chaos abroad—all of these ways Biden is weak and failing,” said senior Trump adviser Brian Hughes.
Once the reality sets in for Biden, he may finally see how much trouble he's in.
