WASHINGTON (TND) — The 2024 presidential election will feature the least popular majority party candidate in decades.
A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 25% of Americans have an unfavorable view of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, the highest percentage since at least 1988. Just 3% of Americans have a favorable view of both Biden and Trump. The survey was conducted before Trump was convicted in New York in a hush-money case.
In 2020, 13% of Americans had an unfavorable view of both Biden and Trump, a number that has nearly doubled over four years.
At the same time during the 2016 presidential election, 20% of Americans had an unfavorable view of President Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
In 1988, only 5% of Americans had an unfavorable view of Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis and then-Republican presidential candidate George H.W. Bush.
Favorability rating
According to FiveThirtyEight, Trump has a 0.9 percentage point lead over Biden in national polls: Trump has 41%, Biden has 40.1% and third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has 9.2%. The Pew Research Center also found that Trump has a higher favorability rating than Biden. The data shows that 39% of Americans view Trump favorably, while 37% of Americans view Biden favorably.
The current favorability rating is at its lowest since 2016.
According to the Pew Research Center, in every election from 1988 to 2012, at least one candidate had more than 50% approval rating at this stage in the election cycle.
The partisan divide has grown wider every year.
Currently, 8% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents have a favorable view of Trump. That figure is even lower among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, with just 6% of that group having a favorable view of Biden.
Meanwhile, in 2008, then-Republican presidential nominee John McCain was viewed favorably by 27% of Democrats, and similar numbers for then-Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, with 27% of Republicans viewing him favorably.
