Biden, Trump run again for President. Most Americans don’t want them to
Earlier this year, Donald Trump announced his bid for the White House, further polarising a deeply-divided Republican Party and conservative Americans alike. Yesterday, incumbent Joe Biden declared that he is running again for president in 2024. Political pundits may be excitedly pontificating on the outcome of a Biden-Trump rematch, but American voters are far from enthused.
An opinion poll conducted by Reuters/Ipsos has found that about two-thirds of respondents do not want either Biden or his predecessor Trump to compete for a second term. Those surveyed cited Biden’s advancing age, and Trump’s controversial presidency and his string of legal troubles thereafter for their misgivings.
Among their own parties, 44 per cent of Democratic respondents said 80-year-old Biden should not seek a second term, compared to 34 per cent of Republicans who said Trump should not run again.
Sixty-one percent of Democrats surveyed in the poll said Biden was too old to work in government. He would be 86 at the end of a second four-year term. By comparison, only 35 per cent of Republicans said Trump, 76, was too old.
Since taking office in January 2021, Biden has been dogged by high inflation and low approval ratings. Just 41 per cent of poll respondents – including 74 per cent of Democrats and 10 per cent of Republicans – approved of his performance as president.
Biden, who scored big domestic legislative wins and leads the Western coalition helping Ukraine resist Russian invasion, has no real challenger from within the Democratic Party at the moment.
A poll by NBC News found that 88 per cent of Democratic respondents said they would “definitely” or “probably” vote to re-elect Biden if he is the Democratic nominee next year, with 83 per cent saying they currently approve of his job performance.
Trump, despite becoming the first former or serving president to be criminally indicted — and still facing probes into his attempt to overturn his loss to Biden in the 2020 election — is the overwhelming Republican frontrunner.
Almost half (46 per cent) of Republicans said they would support Trump as their first choice in what is expected to be a crowded field in the GOP presidential primaries, according to the NBC News poll.
