Americans agree! We don't like Trump OR Biden!

Trump and Biden are both equally unliked by the voters. Will Americans be choosing the candidate for President they hate least?

In a rare moment of bipartisan agreement, many Americans are ready to say Bye-Bye to Biden and to Dump Trump.

Finding things in today's hyper-partisan political environment that most voters agree on isn't easy — except when it comes to whether they approve or disapprove of Donald Trump and Joe Biden. According to the latest polls a large majority of Americans agree, they dislike both.

Vote for ME! The other guy is WORSE!

It used to be common wisdom in politics that to be successful you should strive to make people like you. Political elections have often been criticized for being “popularity” contests. But the upcoming 2024 Presidential election is, however, looking more like an “unpopularity” contest – where the winner will be the candidate who has the fewest voters holding their noses. The winning campaign slogan might wind up being “Vote for Me…the other guy, he’s even worse!”

Trump’s and Biden's approval ratings consistently hover around 40% -- making them the two most disliked major party Presidential candidates, maybe ever. And according to a recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center “about half of voters would like to see both Biden and Trump replaced on the 2024 ballot.” Even many who say they support Trump or Biden say they’d prefer someone else.

Biden's popularity has never recovered since the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan — and high inflation, concerns about his age, and the crisis at the southern border continue to nag at his presidency. Indictment after indictment, not much seems to impact how some voters view Trump. Though most voters disapprove, he still has the support of a loyal group of Republicans.

“A defining characteristic of the contest,” according to Pew, “is that voters overall have little confidence in either candidate across a range of key traits, including fitness for office, personal ethics and respect for democratic values.”

Voters are almost always skeptical of politician’s ethics, and unfortunately rightfully so — I knew that many voters think of Trump as unethical — but I was surprised to see that 65% of voters believe that Biden will act unethically in office, or is only somewhat ethical. Though with Trump fending off at least four indictments, and the House conducting an impeachment inquiry into Biden — and the tax, gun and influence peddling charges against his son Hunter — maybe I shouldn’t be surprised at all.

Pew found large divides in voters’ candidate preference by age, education, and race and ethnicity. “As was the case in 2020, younger voters and those with a four-year college degree are more likely to favor Biden than Trump. Older voters and those with no college degree favor Trump by large margins.” We’ve written about this before.

According to this most recent poll, White voters favor Trump (56%) over Biden (42%) by a wide margin, and again, perhaps surprisingly 18% of Black voters surveyed said they supported Trump. Hispanic voters are more evenly divided (52% Biden - 44% Trump), while 59% of Asian voters report supported Biden.

Could the election get any crazier?

And just when we thought the election couldn’t get any crazier, Democrat Robert Kennedy Jr. has confirmed that he will be running for President as an Independent. In what promises to be a down-to-the-wire race for the Presidency, both the Biden and Trump campaigns have something to fear from a Kennedy campaign.

A candidate siphoning even one or two percent of the vote from either candidate in a battleground state could be enough to decide who sits in the oval office. The Kennedy campaign recently announced the he will be on the Presidential ballot in Michigan — a key battleground state where Biden has been struggling.

“Both sides have valid reasons for concern,” according to ABC News, “there's some evidence to suggest that Kennedy would take more votes away from the Democratic presidential nominee, and some evidence to suggest that he might take more votes away from the Republican nominee.”

While Kennedy is a registered Democrat, he has been a critic of COVID vaccines, opposes most gun control and does not support helping Ukraine – stances that are more popular with the right than with the left.

Your guy was a terrible President. No! Your guy is a terrible President.

Pew also reports that 42% of voters overall say Trump was a good or great president, while 11% say he was average — 28% of voters say Biden is a good or great president, while 21% say he is average. Not surprisingly 67% of Trump supporters say Biden is a “terrible” President, while 70% of Biden supporters say Trump was a “terrible” President.

“With the election still more than six months away,” the Pew Research Center survey “finds that the presidential race is virtually tied: 49% of registered voters favor Donald Trump or lean toward voting for him, while 48% support or lean toward Joe Biden.”

So it all may come down to the candidate that voters hate the least. My advice? Get ready to hold your noses.