(NewsNation) — Voters don’t want President Joe Biden to seek re-election, but they don’t want to see former President Donald Trump on the ticket, either, according to the latest NewsNation/Decision Desk HQ poll released Thursday.
More than 60% of all voters said Biden shouldn’t run for president. Among the Democrats polled, 30% said he should sit out 2024.
Similarly, about 57% of total voters said Trump should not run for president. Twenty-six percent of polled Republicans want someone else as the nominee. As of Wednesday, Trump had not officially declared his candidacy.
It could be memories of the contentious 2020 presidential election turning voters off from both the current and former president, The Hill White House columnist Niall Stanage said.
“Part of it, honestly, I think has to do with the bitterness and enmity of that election,” Stanage said. “I would suspect that there are a lot of voters, particularly in the middle ground or the more moderate voters in each party, who just don’t want that whole process re-litigated because it was such a divisive election.”
The next most popular choices among Democratic and Republican candidates were Vice President Kamala Harris (16%) and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (23%), respectively.
It’s too early, however, to tell how the election might play out, Decision Desk HQ Senior Data Scientist Kiel Williams said. It’s also possible that four months out from the midterm election, many potential candidates simply haven’t become household names yet, Williams said.
“I think what a lot of that reflects is just a lack of name recognition among most voters,” Williams said.