A potential rematch between President Biden and Donald Trump is tied among likely voters. That’s according to a new Siena College Research Institute poll conducted for the “New York Times,” which shows both 2024 hopefuls with 43 percent support. Biden has a slight edge over Trump in terms of favorability, although both candidates’ numbers are underwater. "Times" political reporter Reid Epstein spoke with WAMC's Ian Pickus.
So, we're speaking at the beginning of August. How does the race look to you right now, especially in light of these poll results?
Well, what the poll shows us is that there's a broad discomfort among the American people with both President Biden and Donald Trump. President Biden's approval rating is at 39%, which is historically low for an incumbent president seeking reelection. But what he has going for him is that Donald Trump is liked even less and his is viewed even less favorably by the American people. But the tight nature of the race, a neck and neck race, is really striking for President Biden given that Trump has been indicted twice and is likely to be indicted a couple more times before the summer is over.
A separate poll by Siena showed President Trump far outpacing his closest rival for the nomination, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. That being said, rematches are pretty unusual in modern American politics. From where we are today, is a Trump-Biden rematch the most likely outcome as you see it?
Well, it’s certainly what the poll indicates is the most likely outcome. It's a long time between now and when the Republican primaries begin in January, but history has shown us that the when the presidential frontrunner has a lead like the one that Trump commands at the moment over DeSantis and the rest of the field, almost always becomes the nominee. Trump leads DeSantis in every conceivable demographic in the Republican primary field. We tested a one-on-one matchup with Trump, just Trump against DeSantis without the other candidates, and Trump won that one by an almost two to one margin as well. And so, it's really hard to conceive at the moment of a way short of some sort of natural disaster or health disaster for Trump, how he would could lose the nomination at this point at DeSantis or anyone else in the field.
In other words, these mounting legal troubles are really not hurting him with Republican voters, it seems.
Not yet. We've heard sort of a wishful thinking among Never Trump Republicans and some Democrats over the course of the last several years of this something that will happen. They'll say this will finally be the episode that will lead Trump's base away from him and that just hasn't happened. We've seen even a universe of voters who believe that Trump has committed federal crimes, and even they still think that they prefer him to be the next president against Joe Biden. And so, Trump said when he was running for president the first time that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his most supportive base of voters would stick with him and that seems to have been prophetic.
Let me ask you what is probably a loaded question. I'll acknowledge Biden has already beaten Trump. So, it's not entirely a hypothetical matchup. How come that's not hurting Trump with his supporters? I mean, we've seen this play out once. It was close, but not that close. We've kind of been through this once before.
Well, I mean, there's an array of reasons why. Certainly, the poll indicated that Republicans who care the most about electability and the most about winning, they prefer Trump too. They don't necessarily see that as a negative for Trump that he lost. We didn't ask this question, but we know from reporting over the last couple of years that certainly a lot of those Republicans don't believe he lost the 2020 election. That's another, as pervasive as that sounds, thing that Trump has going for him, is that he has never conceded the election and for Republicans who think that winning is the most important thing, he has argued to them that the election was stolen from him, even though we of course know that it was not.
Let's talk about President Biden's support now. He has shored things up a bit from where he was a year ago. How does President Biden look to you as a first-term incumbent who has gotten a lot of his agenda done seeking a second term? Is he under-performing? Is he over-performing? How does it look?
It depends on what the baseline is. You're right that he is in better shape than he was a year ago, when nearly two-thirds of the Democratic electorate didn't want him to be the nominee. Now, it's about 50/50, between those who would like him to be the nominee and those that would not. He is a historically weak incumbent at this point in a reelection campaign. There's no question about it; for an incumbent president to have something like 40% of his own party thinking that he's too old to be the nominee is not what you want when you're running for reelection. We talked to voters, Democratic voters all over the country, who volunteered in interviews that they believed he was too old. That's just something that that Biden has had to deal with since the 2020 campaign and through his presidency, that if you ask voters what they think of him, open-ended questions, that's often the first thing that comes up. And so, that's not something that Biden and his aides and his campaign can change. It's not like a policy that he could shift. It's very personal to him and who he is. At this point, it's not something that we've seen a lot of movement about; what voters think about it, what their option is, and what we've seen the Biden campaign, and really the White House do is stress how much worse the Republican alternatives would be. They've talked in recent weeks about the MAGA Republicans really branding the entire Republican Party, under the sort of the banner of Trump and magnetism. We've heard Joe Biden talk of going back decades, 'Don't compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.' And that's really the mantra that we are seeing him and his party push when it comes to the reelection campaign.
So, in those conversations with voters, but also in the poll results, to what extent are people not thrilled about Biden, but still likely to vote for him on that November day, when it comes down to it?
I mean, that's really the largest plurality that we've seen. Only 20% of Democrats are enthusiastic about Biden being the nominee. Another 50% would be satisfied, but not enthusiastic, 30% of Democrats who said they would vote for Biden would prefer to have somebody else as the nominee. He's really the, 'OK, I'll vote for him' candidate as opposed to a candidate like Barack Obama or Bernie Sanders, or even Hillary Clinton, who inspired a sort of fierce loyalty from large segments of the electorate. Joe Biden is a different kind of Democratic candidate. He's one that is much more of a consensus candidate that people can agree on, even if they're not excited about.
What does this poll show us about the Democratic primary contenders RFK Jr., Marianne Williamson, who are attempting to take the nomination from President Biden? I mean, do they have a real shot at that?
Not really. They’ve not raised significant money. This poll has shown of Democrats who will plan to participate in the primary, Biden got 64%, which is soft for an incumbent president. Kennedy got 13% and Williamson got 10%. But if you narrow that down to Democratic poll respondents who have actually voted in a primary, Biden's lead gets bigger, up to 74%, compared to 8% for Kennedy, and among Democrats who actually voted in the 2022 Democratic primary, the most recent one, the president goes up 92% to 4%. And so, there's not much window for Kennedy or Williamson to put much of a scare into Joe Biden.
Do we have any idea of how a one-on-one matchup with President Biden and Ron DeSantis would go?
We didn't ask that question in this poll. But you know, given how much weaker DeSantis is against Trump, it's hard to hard to see where DeSantis would get more support. But we did hear from a lot of voters who are not thrilled about Biden, but would vote for him against Trump because they think Trump is quite bad. And so, it would be a really a different type of election if it was Biden against DeSantis or really any of the other Republicans, given that Biden in his campaign would not have the argument to make the people that about how terrible Trump is and wanting to avoid a repeat of his presidency.
So, what has President Biden's reelection message been? What's the theme of his seeking another four-year term? Which according to this poll, I mean, it's not exactly resonating yet.
Well, it's really been on two tracks. One has been just reminding people about Donald Trump, and trying to brand the entire Republican Party as acolytes of Trump and Trumpism. And the second is what Biden campaign in the White House as the Bidenomics, which is an amplification in defense of his economic record and the legislation that he has signed into law, which by all reasonable measures, has been very impressive. The problem for Biden is voters, particularly the sort of voters that swing election, aren't terribly familiar with Biden’s record. It's not something that has resonated, it's not in sort of the diffuse media environment that we live in. It's not something that people know about. A lot of has been based around infrastructure, either in sort of traditional kind of roads and bridges, but also information technology, battery, green energies, and those are projects that Biden signed legislation to fund and all of those things take years to come into people's lives. And so, what they might be seeing in the meantime, is, frankly, road construction. Those are things that can be economic benefits for towns and cities, but it may take a while for it to become a net plus in people's lives and even longer for them to connect it back to President Biden in the White House.
Yeah, everybody hates a detour. So just one last thing, Reid. If former President Trump is on trial, or on multiple trials, during the course of this election, have you given a lot of thought to how he might go about campaigning, given that kind of split attention?
I mean, that's a really good question. It's an unprecedented scenario that we haven't encountered in not just in modern politics, but in American politics altogether. There's never been a former president facing a criminal trial. There's certainly never been a major presidential candidate facing a criminal trial during the year of the election. We just don't know. One thing about Trump is that he is able to command attention wherever he is, particularly among the conservative media outlets that speak to the Republican base. And so, we'll see how he manages if indeed, these trials are taking place, next summer and fall. It'll be quite the spectacle, and they'll certainly be a ton of attention on it. And that, frankly, for the Biden campaign is good news for them. Even though they are working to try to educate people about what Biden has done in the White House and why they think his record is beneficial to people, if the nation's attention is driven to Donald Trump and his criminal trials, the Biden people think that's good for them.
