At some point in the coming months, America will almost certainly be presented with a scenario it hasn’t seen in more than a century: presidential candidates from both major parties who have experience serving as president. Should President Biden announce a reelection bid, he’ll join Donald Trump, who announced in November, in seeking his party’s nomination. The 2024 contest may simply be a rerun of 2020.
Polling released by The Washington Post and our partners at ABC News earlier this month suggests that most Americans aren’t enthusiastic about that prospect. Only 3 in 10 Democrats wanted to see Biden run again; just over 4 in 10 Republicans said the same of Trump.
There is some good news for the current president, though. Democrats are increasingly likely to embrace the apparent inevitability of his reelection bid, according to polling conducted for the Economist by YouGov. And given that he’s unlikely to face significant competition — unlike Trump — he’s much more likely to end up on the ballot in November.
When YouGov first started asking this question in July, the overall number of Americans who wanted either man to run for president was abysmal. Only about a quarter of respondents said they wanted Trump on the ballot; a fifth said the same of Biden. Within their parties, the presidents fared a bit better: About half of Republicans said they wanted Trump to run again, while about 3 in 10 Democrats said they wanted Biden on the ticket.
Since then, there’s been some movement within each man’s party, if not elsewhere. Trump saw support for a 2024 bid collapse soon after the 2022 midterm elections, a cycle in which the Republican Party underperformed — for which Trump was assigned a healthy amount of blame. He’s since rebounded. In the most recent YouGov-Economist poll (shown in the dotted box below), about as many Democrats said they wanted Biden to run as Republicans said the same of Trump.
That’s a first.
What’s interesting about this, of course, is that Biden is much more likely to actually be the nominee. Part of his improved position with his party may be the sense that he’s not the drag on the party electorally that he might have seemed before the midterms. Part of it, too, is probably that Trump’s announcement made the risk of a third consecutive Trump candidacy more tangible. Democrats would like someone other than Biden, but many aren’t that worked up about it — and they’d probably rather have Biden move into the general election without getting beaten up by other Democrats (or, say, an independent from New England).
This was Biden’s advantage in 2020 and one he is carrying over into 2024. Partisans don’t have terribly strong feelings about him. In our recent poll, Democrats were more likely to say they’d be angry at a Trump 2024 victory than Republicans were to say they’d be mad if Biden won again. They don’t want him to, but even two years into his term, 4 in 10 Republicans say they’d be at most dissatisfied if Biden won again.
The most recent YouGov poll could be an outlier. It may be the case moving forward that Republicans are more open to Trump running than Democrats are to Biden running. But again, only Trump is likely to face real competition. More than half of Republicans think he should run, but only about 4 in 10 told YouGov that he’s their first pick for the nomination.
Some Republicans, it seems, might want him to run and also to lose.