December 14, 2023
The public is not looking forward to a potential Biden-Trump rematch in 2024. Fifty-eight percent would be dissatisfied if Donald Trump was the Republican nominee and 56% would be dissatisfied if Joe Biden was on the ticket for the Democrats. Sixty-eight percent of adults are pessimistic about the state of politics in the United States. About half lack confidence that either political party’s process for selecting their nominees will be fair.
Republicans are more satisfied about having Trump as their party’s standard bearer than Democrats are with having Biden as the party’s 2024 nominee. Independents’ satisfaction for either candidate falls in between Democrats’ and Republicans’.
Few have confidence that either party’s process for selecting their nominee for president is fair. Fifty-two percent have only a little or no confidence that the Republican nominee selection process is fair. Forty-seven percent say the same about the Democratic selection process. Less than half (43%) of Democrats have a lot of confidence in the fairness of their party’s selection process, and only 34% of Republicans have faith in theirs.
Less than half of adults think that votes from either party’s primaries or caucuses will be counted accurately. Republicans are more pessimistic than Democrats that primary votes will be accurately counted.
And Republicans are far more likely to lack confidence in the accuracy of the 2024 presidential vote count than Democrats.
Sixty-eight percent of adults are pessimistic about the state of politics in the United States. Only 19% are optimistic about the way leaders are chosen under the current political system. Forty-six percent are pessimistic. Fifty-four percent feel pessimistic about the future of the Republican Party and 45% are pessimistic about the future of the Democrats. Less than half of Democrats (45%) and Republicans (37%) feel optimistic about the future of their own party.
Neither party’s members are confident that their primaries will accomplish what they are meant to. Most of both Democrats and Republicans think that primaries should nominate candidates who can win the general election and who represent most Americans. Only a third have confidence that their party will satisfy these goals.
Twenty percent of the public has been paying a lot of attention to the 2024 presidential campaigns. Thirty-three percent have paid some attention and 47% have paid a little or no attention. Older adults are more likely to be paying attention than younger adults. Seventy-three percent of adults over the age of 60 are paying at least some or a lot of attention compared to 40% of adults ages 18-29. Republicans and Democrats are equally as likely to be paying attention.
Biden is the presidential candidate viewed most favorably by the public at 42%. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is at 38% with a very or somewhat favorable opinion of him and Trump is at 36%. Both Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley are at 28% favorable, though DeSantis has more name recognition than Haley.
Biden has a higher favorability rating among Democrats (78%) than Trump has among Republicans (70%).
The nationwide poll was conducted November 30-December 4, 2023 using the AmeriSpeak® Panel, the probability-based panel of NORC at the University of Chicago. Online and telephone interviews using landlines and cell phones were conducted with 1,074 adults. The margin of sampling error is +/- 4.0 percentage points.
- Suggested Citation: AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. (December 2023). “Public dissatisfied with Biden-Trump rematch” https://apnorc.org/projects/public-dissatisfied-with-biden-trump-rematch/
