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What are the most important data points I'm following in 2024? The most important metric. The most important data point, I think. The data point that we have been watching the most closely. Really important numbers. So the one that everybody's going to be tracking. Cross tabs. By the way, I love this idea. This is so fun.
Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. We're going to do something a little bit different today, which I'm very excited about. While the primaries are not technically over, we are for all intents and purposes in the early weeks of the general election. And it's a unique one, a rematch between a sitting president and a former president, two people who are universally known and have been in the American consciousness in some way or another for decades.
And with the early end to the competitive part of the primary, it will be the longest general election in memory. And I'm sure it will also feel that way. So as we start this process, we wanted to lay down some markers of what to watch for in the year ahead. So we reached out to more than a dozen experts, pollsters, political scientists and data journalists, people who know their data, their politics and follow these things closely. And we asked them all one question.
What is the most valuable data point you're watching to understand the 2024 election and why?
Where you're going to hear today is their responses. There's a range of views with some overlap. In fact, one common answer in particular stuck out. And these data points don't just get it who will win. In fact, although we didn't give people any parameters for what they could pick, no one said the head-to-head polling average between Biden and Trump. Many of these answers get at the why. Why people might be drawn to one candidate or another.
So let's begin. Our first data point comes from a dear, dear friend of the podcast. In fact, a former 538-er himself that is senior political data reporter for CNN, Mr. Harry Enten. Take it away, Harry.
So I am looking at a question that a bunch of pollsters have asked in some form of another, but I'm just going to give you the NBC News question, which is essentially they wanted voters to compare Joe Biden and Donald Trump on a few issues and personal characteristics, one of them being being effective and competent. And this is a question that gets at one of the big sort of issues surrounding this campaign, and that is the age of the candidates. Obviously,
Joe Biden is the oldest president ever. Donald Trump, if he were in fact to win again by the end of his second term, would in fact be over the age of 80. And what we see, why this question is so important is because
Right now, Donald Trump is beating Joe Biden on this question by a 48% to 32% margin. This is a reversal of what we saw during the 2020 campaign in which Joe Biden, in fact, led Donald Trump on this question by a 47% to 38% margin.
And I think if Joe Biden is going to want to come back on the polls because he's trailing right now, he is going to have to be seen as somebody who can overcome the age issue. Right now, most Americans believe that Joe Biden is too old to competently serve another term as president, despite the fact that the economy is doing fairly well, despite the fact that voters prefer him on the issue of abortion, which, of course, was a major issue in the 2022 midterms.
If voters do not believe that Joe Biden can be competent and effective,
I'm just not really sure how he comes back in this race, despite all of the problems that Donald Trump is facing with the four criminal indictments, the questions over his character. Because at the end of the day, in a lot of voters' minds, if you're going to be the president of the United States, you have to be somebody who can actually go in there and do the job. And a lot of Americans at this point, simply put, do not believe that Joe Biden can be competent and effective for another four years.
So Harry coming out of the gate with one of the big issues of 2024, which is age. While Biden and Trump are similar ages, voters' perceptions of the two candidates based on age are pretty different. So in that NBC poll that Harry mentioned,
It actually gets at this explicitly as well. 76% of voters had major or moderate concerns when asked whether Biden has the necessary mental and physical health to be president for a second term. Only 11% had no real concerns.
When asked about Trump, 48% said they had major or moderate concerns. Now, the role of campaigns is to try to change perceptions about yourself or your opponent. So, you know, historically, maybe if you're seen as inexperienced on foreign policy or something like that, you try to go abroad during the campaign, beef up on your defense policy, maybe pick a running mate who has foreign policy experience. But can perceptions about age and therefore competence also be changed? And how? So.
So that is something that Harry and also we will be tracking over the coming year.
The next four responses we're going to hear fall into a category that we're calling the it's personal category. They emphasize voters' perceptions of whether this election will affect them personally. Starting us off is another friend of the pod, Kristen Soltis Anderson. You've almost certainly heard her before on the podcast. Kristen is a Republican pollster and a founding partner of the polling firm Echelon Insights, which scores highly on our pollster ratings. Kristen, take it away.
The most important metric that I'm watching through this election season is whether or not voters think that it actually makes a difference to them personally whether Joe Biden or Donald Trump wins the election. Now, for people who follow politics closely, it should seem obvious, right? These are two very different candidates. And yet for a not insignificant portion of voters, there right now is such dissatisfaction with both of these candidates that
that if people get to November and they think, you know what, it doesn't really matter, then maybe they stay home. The reason why that's such a big deal is on the one hand for Republicans, they now increasingly rely on low propensity, low turnout voters. So people who are more marginally attached to the process, they need high turnout. If people think the stakes aren't really that high in this election, who cares? This is just two old guys. That could hurt Trump.
But I actually at this point think there's even a bigger risk of it hurting Biden. In my latest polling, I've asked this question. Assuming the 2024 election is between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, which of the following do you agree with more? 74% say whether Trump or Biden wins really would make a difference to me personally. Among voters who are Republican, who are older, who are white, who are the types of demographics that are already kind of in Trump's coalition, they are sky high on that.
But for the other option, whether Trump or Biden wins really would not make a difference for me personally. 14 percent of respondents chose that. Another 12 percent chose unsure. And this is higher among young voters, voters of color, precisely the types of voters that Biden has maybe struggled to connect with a little bit more in the Democratic coalition as of late.
So I'm going to keep watching this number. I don't know that the top line number is going to move a ton between now and November. And I do think you're going to see more voters think, oh, yes, the stakes are very high in this election. But if things stay a bit lower among those younger voters, voters of color, the types of folks who are perhaps most likely to be disappointed in both candidates, that could spell real trouble for Democrats in the election.
It's an important point that Kristen makes, you know, here in our little world on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast. It may seem like everyone is clued in and cares one way or another who wins the 2024 election. But I'll just say from my personal experience,
going out in the field and talking to folks, especially when you're not at a political rally for a Republican or Democrat and say in a park or at a grocery store or whatever, you find people all the time who are not clued in and will tell you straight up they don't really care and may not even plan on voting. The United States has one of the lower turnout rates amongst developed democracies. And actually, to Kristen's point, I want to cite some polling from Axios comparing intention to vote between 2019 and now.
Now, 49% of 18 to 29-year-olds definitely plan on voting for president in 2024. That's down from 57% who said the same in 2019.
38% of young black Americans say they will definitely vote this year compared with 50% in 2019. And 40% of Hispanic Americans say they will definitely vote in 2024 compared to 56% in 2019. So Axios polling comparing the difference between now and four years ago and some striking numbers in terms of the parts of the coalition that we generally think vote for Democrats.
Next up, we're going to hear from Ruth Igelnik. She's editor for news surveys at The New York Times and, of course, The Times-Siena College. Polling operation is one of the very best in the country. Actually, the very best in the country, according to our pollster ratings. Before she was at The Times, she spent eight years at the Pew Research Center, so she definitely knows her stuff. She shared two data points with us, one that probably everyone is keyed into and another that is probably more specific to her own research.
So the one that everybody's going to be tracking is views of the economy. I think that that's going to be incredibly valuable this election. There's no question that if how people perceive the economy, not how the economy is actually doing, but how people perceive the economy is doing gets better, that's going to change the tide for Joe Biden. If it continues to be very negative, then that's good news for Trump, for people who want a change.
The data point that I think is most interesting that people probably won't be tracking as much is we have this great question that we asked on our battleground poll in the fall of last year. So one year out from the 2024 election about whether Donald Trump's policies helped or hurt you personally and whether Joe Biden's policies helped or hurt you personally. And in that poll, we saw the majority of people saying that Trump's policies helped them and the majority of people saying Biden's policies hurt them.
That is a really interesting number to watch. If that stays the same, I think that's generally good news for Trump. If more people start to look back and think that Biden's policies helped them, I think that that's good news for Joe Biden. But right now, we have a majority of people saying Trump's policies helped them, and I
Even among groups that are sort of more traditionally Democratic, you have 30 percent of Black voters saying Trump's policies help them. Forty plus percent of Hispanic voters, Hispanic voters about evenly split saying Trump's policies helped or hurt them. Women are about evenly split saying Trump's policies helped or hurt them. So that's a really interesting number to be watching.
I really like this point that Ruth brings up because it's unique to the fact that we have a former and current president both running in 2024, which a lot of people have called, you know, basically having two incumbents running.
And what makes that so unique is that we can look at the records of both presidents. Oftentimes, one of the advantages of being an incumbent is people can see what your record actually is. You can point to things that you've really done instead of perhaps the harder job of asking people to imagine what you might be like as president.
Again, as I've traveled around the country covering the primaries and the debate, you hear time and time again people pointing to specific data points or, you know, ways that they perceived the Trump presidency. They can talk about gas prices. They can talk about global conflicts.
They can talk about the border and what it was like during Trump's presidency. And so in some ways, Trump doesn't have to get people to imagine what it will be like for him to be president. People already know. And whether that's perceived through rose-colored glasses or not may be another question. But really, folks are going to be comparing these two candidates based on what they already know about them being president.
Next up is Carlos Odio, the co-founder of Equis, an organization which uses polling and research to better understand Latino voting trends. You heard him on the podcast as recently as last week. Previously, Carlos served in the White House Office of Political Affairs under President Obama. Here's what he had to say.
My favorite question is, who cares more about people like you? That's at the center of what campaigns are trying to do, convince you that I'm looking out for you, I'm caring about you, and the other guy's not. But there is a tug of war between cares on one side and delivers on the other.
So who cares about me? But then who do I think is better for American workers? Who do I think gets things done? And that's where you see, especially in this election, in this environment, with these two candidates, Biden and Trump, that tug of war playing out. Among Latinos who we study, the baseline perception of the parties is that Democrats care more, but maybe have a harder time delivering on the things that they are promising you. And that Republicans maybe can deliver more, especially on the economy, but don't really care about you or your life.
And you can really understand campaigns better when you understand each party trying to rectify or move the line on that particular question. So you have Democrats in the midterms proving that they can deliver, talking about actions they have taken over the summer in advance of the election.
On the Republican side, you can think of classic example, George W. Bush, compassionate conservative saying, not only do I deliver, but I care about you. And in this election in particular, I think we have reason to believe that people believe Biden cares more. But then when they think through a different lens, the lens of me as a worker, me as someone providing for my family, sometimes that moves to Trump or Republicans advantage.
As Carlos suggests, this is going to be a particularly salient question when it comes to Latino voters. And now Latino voters are the group that swung the most of any racial or ethnic group between 2016 to 2020. That was eight points in the direction of Trump in 2020.
And one of the things that Carlos is getting at here is, are folks voting based on group identity or some of their preferences on policies overall? We know for a long time that there are conservative Latino and black voters who vote for Democrats in some ways because of that group identity, that sense that this is the party that is watching out for people like me.
We've seen some of that break down over the past several years. And one of the big questions for 2024 is whether it's going to continue to break down. Now, on that topic, Terrence Woodbury is a Democratic pollster at Hit Strategies, which focuses on surveying young voters and voters of color in particular, groups that, as we know, Democrats rely on. Here's what he told us.
The data point that we have been watching the most closely are perceptions of political power. Pollsters and election observers are always trying to find ways to measure turnout ahead of elections. Vote likelihood and voter enthusiasm have often served as polling metrics to say which groups are more or less likely to participate in upcoming elections.
But both metrics, vote likelihood and voter enthusiasm, grossly misrepresent the political participation of the voters that his strategies focuses on, that emerging electorate of young and diverse voters that often engage politics less consistently. In polls, this emerging electorate, due to high social pressure, they are over-representing their vote likelihood.
And they often under-represent their voter enthusiasm because, well, how many young people and people of color do you know have been enthusiastic about recent elections? In fact, a young man in Philadelphia 2022 focus group said to me, voting to him is like taking out the trash. He doesn't always want to do it, but if he doesn't do it, then s*** will start to stink around here. That doesn't sound like a whole lot of enthusiasm to me, but it also doesn't sound like that young man is not going to vote.
And so Hitch Strategies has discovered another proxy. Instead of measuring vote likelihood and voter enthusiasm, Hitch Strategies measures perceptions of political power, which we have discovered much more accurately predicts who will and will not vote. What does that mean?
On every single poll, we asked the question, regardless of how often you vote, how much power do you believe your vote has to make a difference in your community? The higher they perceive their political power, the less likely they are to waste that political power by not voting. In 2022, we were asking this question in Georgia, and 55% of Black voters in Georgia told us that they felt extremely powerful, 55%.
In that same election, 54% of Black voters in Georgia voted. That's almost a one-to-one correlation.
But since 2022, we have seen erosion in those perceptions of political power. Because of lack of perceived progress, hyper-partisanship, or just frustration with the political system, these perceptions of power have dropped tremendously. That means that campaigns that want to mobilize this emerging electorate of young voters and diverse voters in this election cycle are
They need to make these voters the heroes of the story with the messages that demonstrate how their votes are making their communities better.
In an environment where neither of the two major party candidates are particularly popular, the turnout question is noteworthy. People often say that an enthusiastic vote and an unenthusiastic vote are worth the same. And of course, that's right. But the candidates still have to get people over that line to go and vote. And this also segues nicely into our next bucket of responses.
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This was the most common response amongst people that we asked for their valuable data point for 2024. In fact, some people started to give this answer. And then I said, wait, do you have any other data points? This can't just be a whole podcast about the double haters.
This group of voters is often called the double haters. The double haters. Unfaithful. Voters that dislike both of them. Whenever a poll has crosstabs, that's what I want to look. The people who don't like either candidate, who are they going for and how many of them are going third party?
At least five people told us that they were focused on these double haters or double negatives. I personally prefer double negatives. So let's hear from these experts. Lakshya Jain does election modeling and data analysis at the website splitticket.org, which is a great website, by the way. We had him on the show in the fall as part of our brain trust of election data nerds, a label that I use with lots of affection. Here's Lakshya.
This isn't going to be won by which candidate is the one that voters like the most. It's going to be which candidate is the one that voters dislike the least. The ones that disapprove somewhat of Biden in 2022 per the ANES pilot study, 21% of them said Biden, 29% of them said Trump, and 44% of them said someone else.
voters that didn't approve or disapprove of Biden, 42% said that they would back Biden and 21% said that they would back Trump. So to me, what that suggests is that the traditional presidential approval disapproval axis that we tend to see is not as useful as it would have been in the past.
If a voter dislikes both candidates, we see that in 2022, a lot of them back the president's party, even though they disliked Biden and disliked his performance in office. And given how unpopular Donald Trump is, what Joe Biden will be looking for is can he get voters that dislike him but also dislike Trump to pull the lever for him once more?
Now, when it comes to that question of how the double negatives are feeling today, we have some polling, some recent polling from a pro-Biden super PAC, Unite the Country, which focused specifically on the battlegrounds in the upper Midwest. Well, we don't need to get into the debate about whether Pennsylvania is the upper Midwest, but anyway, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And what they found was Trump leads Biden 51% to 48% amongst voters who have negative feelings about both of the candidates. Now,
If this question of how the upper Midwest will vote in an election where both candidates are pretty disliked reminds you of another recent election, you are not alone. Adam Geller is a Republican pollster. He also said double negatives. In particular, he said we should look beyond head-to-head polling among these voters and look at how they perceive the candidates on the issues and their fitness for office.
Adam isn't affiliated with the Trump campaign this cycle, but he was a pollster with Trump's 2016 campaign. And he said this election reminds him of 2016. I was doing some of the Trump campaign polling in some of the Midwestern states like Michigan and Wisconsin. And that crosstab of unfavorable to Hillary Clinton and unfavorable to Trump was
was pretty telling. It didn't necessarily manifest in the ballot. We weren't looking at the ballot. We were looking at different attributes. And so, for example, the recent NBC poll that just came out where they test how each candidate, Biden or Trump, how voters trust each of the guys on the following issues. And it was the economy, the border, and then having the mental and physical capacity to be present.
Those are really telling. Voters tend to be a little bit more honest when it comes to which candidate they trust more on this particular attribute or that particular attribute. When it comes to the ballot, people get a little bit defensive, get a little bit, I'd rather not say I'm still undecided. They may not be undecided. If you look at
the crosstabs of some of those undecided voters, you can pretty much figure out how those undecideds are going to distribute. That's going to be the key piece of data I'm looking at. That's not to say that things like presidential job approval are less important. Job approval is always important. It really does correlate with reelection. Vote enthusiasm is always important and can be very, very telling, although with me, I
I look at vote enthusiasm as a little bit different these days because we're no longer in a country where everything is an election day vote. There's so much vote by mail and so much ballot collection tactics that are done. So I think enthusiasm waters down a little bit.
There's going to be a lot of voters who are not satisfied with their choices. We always hear the lesser of two evils and all that. But this large swath of voters who is not crazy about Joe Biden, not crazy about Donald Trump, they're going to vote anyway. What I want to know is among unfaved both where they see these candidates on the economy, on border, on foreign affairs, on the war, and who has the mental and physical capacity to be president.
Not to do the both sides thing here, but you just heard from a former Trump pollster. Now you are going to hear from a former Biden pollster. So Linda Lake was one of Biden's two main pollsters in 2020, and her firm is called Lake Research Partners. She gave two answers, one of them being the double negatives and the other being a particular group of voters that may fall into the category of double negatives, but is particularly key for Democrats.
Right now, the best news for Democrats is that we are winning the double haters by six to ten points. And that's a number we need to keep and expand on. These are voters who are lower information. They are hard to break through because they don't like either candidate.
And they often vote character as much as issues, and they're economically insecure. So that leads to an obvious roadmap to winning them. The second number, if I may, is the enthusiasm gap. Right now, Trump voters are more enthusiastic. Not all Republicans, but mega-Republicans,
are more enthusiastic than Democrats. Enthusiasm relates to turnout. We have very high turnout among our activists, but we are looking at some real problems with turnout with cross-pressured voters, younger voters over the war in Gaza, young African-American men targeted by the Trump campaign, young Latinos.
There's a group of voters that I think no one is talking enough about that is the secret sauce to breaking through on this enthusiasm gap. And that is what I would call the low-income wage, low-working wage voters, the raise-the-wage voters, if you will. These are voters who come out for initiatives, for example, that increase minimum wage or do one fair wage. And those initiatives are on in a number of states, including key states like Michigan and Arizona.
These are voters who often feel that they are not being talked to, that no one's in touch with their lives. These are not voters that you can do a victory lap about how great this economy is because they're still really struggling.
And these voters number in the hundreds of thousands in every key swing state. Hundreds of thousands of raise-the-wage voters do not turn out to vote in states where the margin is 10,000 to 20,000. If we can get them out to vote, and when they do vote, they vote Democratic, then we can ensure a victory in this election.
And just to put some numbers to that point about enthusiasm amongst voters, USA Today's Suffolk University asked in a poll from January of 2024, on a scale from 1 to 10, 1 being very unenthusiastic and 10 being very enthusiastic, how do you feel about your party's candidate? 44% of Republican primary voters gave Trump a 10.
18% of Democratic voters gave Biden a 10. Nearly half of Democratic primary voters were at a 6 or lower. So definitely an enthusiasm gap there. We will see how that progresses. But let's move on to somebody who gave us an answer that was in a similar vein to this double negative trend, but slightly different.
Amy Walter is the publisher and editor-in-chief of the Cook Political Report and a frequent contributor to PBS NewsHour. She's been doing political analysis for more than 25 years. You have likely heard of her or from her before. She said she's looking at the close cousin of double haters, which is the somewhat disapprovers.
voters that I've called the meh voters. They don't really like Joe Biden, but they don't hate him either. And what we saw in 2022 is that those folks, people who say they somewhat disapproved of Biden, actually went for Democrats by a couple of points. Are those somewhat disapprovers going to show up again? Are they going to show up for him?
Just to give you a comparison, you know, I looked at mayor's polling from 2020. Donald Trump, at this point in the campaign, was losing those somewhat disapprovers, those MAP voters.
By about 60 points, he ended up losing them overall, according to exit polls, by about 85 points. Right now, again, according to Marist, Biden's losing those voters, but by a much smaller margin. This fall, he was losing them just by about 15 points.
Why does this matter? Well, because we use job approval rating sometimes as a sort of stand in for whether or not that incumbent president has enough support to take him over the finish line, anything else.
Close to where Joe Biden sits right now would seem to be a certain political disaster. But what if the job approval rating we're seeing isn't telling us the whole story, especially if some of those people who right now, you know, they're pretty meh on Biden, decide that they'd rather support him than they would Donald Trump?
Meh voters might break for Biden, but he would be in a much better position if he turned some of those somewhat disapprovers into actual approvers. Bill McInturff is the co-founder of Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican-aligned research and polling firm that has represented governors, senators, and members of Congress for over three decades.
To me, the most important question and data to track in 2024 is Joe Biden's job approval. He's an incumbent president, he's running for reelection, and job approval is the best predictor of the final result. Since 1992, we have a last final weekend number in terms of job approval. In five different incumbent reelects, the final NBC number compared to the final actual number for the president
has been within a close margin of error.
And so right now, Joe Biden in our data is at 37%. He's around 40% in the RCP or the 538 average. That's too low. He can't win a reelection in a two-way race, even with some third-party vote, with that kind of job approval. He's got to be back up, at least in the mid-40s. There's always a chance between Trump's troubles. You have a Democratic convention. You may or may not have debates. There are certainly episodes.
where an incumbent president can try to watch your job approval go up. But if Joe Biden's job approval is still hovering around 40 percent, I'm sorry, I don't say how he gets reelected. If his job approval is up around 48, I think he's the favorite. But that's a lot of difference in between. So to me, incumbent reelect, most important thing, job approval.
To be clear, there is some debate today over how much significance we should be placing on approval ratings. The argument is that people are pretty down on politics. And as we know from past recent elections, some people may disapprove of a candidate but may still end up voting for that candidate
or that candidate's party. Now, that's a caveat, but if you do look back at history, there is no precedent for a president with Joe Biden's approval rating winning re-election. He is currently at about 39% in our polling average and has not significantly improved in months.
Now, we heard from Democratic pollster Celinda Lake that she is particularly interested in one group of voters. That is people who are motivated by economic issues like minimum wage and will turn out for a referendum on that issue.
The next pollster that we talk to, Brent Buchanan, is also interested in one particular group within the electorate that is key for Republicans. He's the founder and president of Signal, a polling and predictive analytics firm serving Republican candidates. According to FiveThirtyEight's pollster rating, Signal is the most accurate private polling firm amongst those in our sample.
Here's what he had to say. Well, it starts with educational attainment level. If you go back 20 years, non-college educated voters, working class folks were the base of the Democrat Party. With Trump really solidifying it has become more the base of the Republican Party.
And so we're not just looking at educational attainment. We're actually looking at gender within educational attainment. And if you look at where do Republicans do the best, it's non-college educated males. And then where do they have room for improvement? It's non-college educated females. And this group of voters tends to be much more inflation economic oriented.
crime, other things you've seen Republicans talk about. They're much more sensitive to those topics. And college-educated women have kind of become a complete inopportunity for Republicans. So that's why we're really looking at what are non-college-educated female voters doing.
To again put some data to that, according to the American Enterprise Institute, non-college-educated white women supported the Republican Party in the 2022 midterms by a 61-37 split. That's compared to college-educated white women who supported the Democratic Party by a 56-42 split. All right, we are now at the final expert that we reached out to for this project, and you may have noticed something.
Not many of these folks talked about the issues. Now, that's where friend of the podcast, Julia Azari, comes in. She's a professor of political science at Marquette University and a frequent contributor to FiveThirtyEight. Her research focuses on American political parties and the presidency. And here's what she had to say.
I will be looking at the responses to the Gallup poll question about the most important problem facing the United States. I think we're in a campaign where it's really up for grabs what the main issues and questions are. Most presidential campaigns are kind of a referendum on the incumbent, and that tends to come down to the economy.
But right now we're in kind of an unusual situation, partly because we have two sort of incumbent presidents with Trump running as the most recent past president.
That list is topped by issues like immigration, government and leadership, and even the state of American democracy. All of these have different implications for the terrain on which this campaign will be fought. I think both parties may think that they have some advantage in the immigration issue, but certainly I think Republicans will see that as an advantage for them to emphasize that issue.
Government and leadership could also be a referendum on the incumbent administration, on the Biden administration. But on the other hand, if, as it seems the Biden campaign wants to do, they're able to frame the issue of the election around democracy, that could be more favorable for them. So I think I'm going to be watching that issue to see what types of campaign frames and emphases are landing with the American people.
While according to Gallup, the economy is still the number one most important issue facing the country for Americans, issues like immigration and democracy and leadership, like Julia mentioned, have risen a lot. And in some polls...
the economy is actually no longer number one. So according to a Quinnipiac University poll from February 2024, amongst Republicans, 38% say that immigration is the top issue, while only 29% say the economy. Amongst Democrats, 39% say preserving democracy is the top issue, while 12% say the economy.
You can look at this perhaps in two different ways. On one hand, the economy has materially improved and not just it has improved on the ground, but perceptions of the economy, according to consumer sentiment data, have also improved. So that's perhaps the good news for Joe Biden. But maybe the bad news for Joe Biden is the things that have supplanted it are not
particularly to his advantage, at least amongst independents and Republicans. That is to say, immigration. It's one of the issues that Americans have scored him the worst on throughout his presidency. Now, as we know, there have been ongoing discussions in Congress about how to address border security. They seem stalled at the moment. But this is one of the issues that we are certainly going to be watching over the
the coming year. And on top of that, one of Biden's biggest pitches to folks within his own party and perhaps independents as well is that democracy is on the ballot. Now, to what extent do voters end up feeling that way? It's quite clear that Democrats, many of them are already there. But can he win over independents with that message?
That may be key. I'm going to add just one more data point that I will be watching before we conclude this episode. And it relates to the double negatives or double haters question. For these folks who have an unfavorable view of both Biden and Trump, they can do one of four things. They can not vote. They can reluctantly vote for Biden. They can reluctantly vote for Trump or
or they can vote third party. We haven't heard from any of the folks that we reached out to about that third party number. And amongst politicians,
political analysts, you oftentimes hear, oh, you know, third party candidates get a lot of support early on because people are somewhat cynical or whatever. But when the rubber hits the road and after months of campaigning, it sets in for folks that one of these two major party candidates is going to win the race. And that's when you see a third party candidate's numbers drop precipitously. And ultimately, they get support that ranges in the low single digits. Now, that does oftentimes happen, but that does not always happen.
1992 with Ross Perot is, of course, a prime example. But even in 2016, we saw a uniquely high percentage of voters vote third party or leave the top of their ticket blank, even if they were voting down ballot. As we heard, there are some comparisons between 2016 and 2024. Support for RFK Jr. ranges around 15% today.
As we progress through this process, I'm going to be watching how much support he maintains along with some of the other potential candidates or people who have already announced. And this gets at also the point about Biden's approval rating. You know, he is at around 39 percent in our polling averages. In the polls where RFK Jr. gets about 15 percent, Biden's support is right at around 39 percent.
When you take RFK Jr. out, then you get more of those people who have an unfavorable view of both Biden and Trump holding their nose and just picking one. So this all comes down to what options these double negatives are going to have. Will they not vote? Will they reluctantly vote for Biden, reluctantly vote for Trump, or will they vote third party? And with that
It's a wrap for our most valuable data point, at least for the beginning of 2024. Maybe we will come back to these folks and ask them again throughout the year, most especially after the election is over. We can come back and see how these data points performed. But that is it for today. So thank you.
To everyone that we talked to for this episode, Harry Edden, Kristen Soltis Anderson, Ruth Egelnik, Carlos Odio, Terrence Woodbury, Lakshya Jain, Ramesh Purniru, Adam Geller, Celinda Lake, Amy Walter, Bill McInturff, Brett Buchanan, and Julia Azari.
My name is Galen Druk. Tony Chow is in the control room. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Trotavian. And our intern is Jayla Everett. They all worked very hard on this episode. So a special thank you to them. It was a lot of work reaching out to all of these folks. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcast at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple podcast store or tell someone about us.
And also, if you have a data point that was not mentioned here that you want to throw out that maybe we can bring up on a future episode, please email us, podcast at 538.com. You can also tweet at me at Galen Druke. Thank you for listening, and we will see you soon.
