“These Go to Eleven.”
“These Go to Eleven.”
Intense hatred of both Biden and Trump is much higher than intense love.
The next examination of the recent TLP/Blueprint survey of 4038 registered voters, conducted with our partners at YouGov, explores our new “love-hate” index in more detail.
The “love-hate” index was created to gauge the depth of feelings for and against the major presidential contenders. The measure tries to go beyond traditional job approval questions to better assess voters’ emotional reactions to the candidates. Although trying to quantify gut-level emotions is not perfect—and many voters may not have particularly strong feelings one way or the other—the measure does provide some empirical evidence for how intensely voters may be feeling about these two men.
Respondents were asked: “Thinking about each of the following public figures, please rate on a scale of ‘1’ to ‘10’ how much you love or hate each of the following, or if you do not think much about them.” A response of ‘1’ indicates the most intense love for a particular candidate and ‘10’ indicates the most intense hatred.
As the chart below shows, intense hatred of both Biden and Trump is roughly twice as high as intense love for each one, with Trump receiving the highest level of intense hatred overall at 32 percent. Only 12 percent of voters express intense love for Joe Biden compared to around one quarter (26 percent) who express intense hatred of him. Looking at Trump, around one fifth of voters overall (18 percent) express intense love for him compared to around one third of voters who intensely hate him.
Interestingly, intense voter hatred of both Biden and Trump has declined slightly since we last tested these sentiments in September 2023. Late last summer, 37 percent of voters overall expressed intense hatred for Trump while 29 percent felt the same way about Biden. Intense love for each candidate is basically unchanged since last year, however.
Moving beyond overall numbers, partisan emotional reactions to the candidates remain highly charged as you might expect, with Democrats expressing more intense hatred of Donald Trump than Republicans do about Biden. As seen in the table below, a full 60 percent of Democrats say they intensely hate Trump (a ‘10’ on the scale) compared to half of Republicans who feel similarly about Biden. Conversely, less than one quarter of Democrats express intense love for Biden (a ‘1’ on the scale) versus more than one third of Republicans (35 percent) who feel that way about Trump.
Independent voters express very little intense love for either Biden or Trump—only 5 percent rate each candidate a ‘1’—with roughly four to eight times as much intense hatred emerging in their emotional ratings for both men (22 percent rate Biden a ‘10’ and 39 percent rate Trump the same).
What do these emotions tell us about the 2024 race? The election is tied in this poll and it’s not difficult to see why. American voters don’t hold many positive emotional attachments to either Biden or Trump while intense hatred outpaces intense love for each candidate by significant margins.
It's not clear at this point that either Biden or Trump could do much if anything to increase positive emotional sentiments among voters—few Americans seem to like either one of them with much intensity. More likely than not, whichever candidate manages to reduce the intense negative emotions coming from voters in their direction will end up in the electoral driver’s seat this fall.
This really is a “lesser of two evils” election for many voters who do not fall along strong partisan lines. And right now, voter disdain seems to be pretty evenly distributed between the two, with Trump doing slightly worse among voters than Biden on average.
Look, I understand someone not liking Biden or being unenthusiastic about him, but what I don’t understand about the electorate is their comparable “intense hatred” of him compared to Trump. Biden, even with his flaws, personal and political, is a good, compassionate, decent human being. Trump has proved himself a deeply immoral person a hundred times over.