1 in 4 US voters say they don’t want Trump or Biden to win the election
- The number of so-called double-haters is at a historic high, new research shows, with nearly twice as many as in 2020
The ranks of the double-haters — voters who say they don’t like either major party presidential candidate — are at a historic high and make up one-quarter of the electorate, according to a new analysis from Pew Research Centre.
That’s nearly twice as many as at this point in 2020.
Biden and Trump are taking roughly equal measures of these disillusioned voters in battleground states, with Biden winning 25 per cent to Trump’s 22 per cent, a May Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll shows.
But the biggest threat to Biden and Trump is that voters turned off by them will simply stay home — or find refuge in an independent candidate like Robert F. Kennedy Jnr, who is polling at 24 per cent among those voters in the Bloomberg/Morning Consult survey.
Other third-party candidates are taking a combined 12 per cent.
Growing political polarisation is driving the unpopularity. The Pew analysis found that presidential candidates are only slightly less popular within their own party than they were three decades ago, but that voters of the opposing party are much more negative.