Despite resounding victories on Super Tuesday, there are indications that Donald Trump is still struggling to get strong, united Republican support, which he may need in the presidential election.
Speaking to CNN about the Super Tuesday results, columnist and political commentator Molly Jong-Fast said: "There is a real ‘Never Trump’ contingent, and remember, Trump is a primary candidate. He has only ever tried to appeal to Republican primary voters, and he cannot marshal that group together the way he needs to.
“Part of his trick in 2016 was, he got these low-frequency voters out, these people who almost never voted, which is why the polling was so off, and you’re just not seeing that same type of enthusiasm.”
You are comparing “approval” ratings with “favorability” ratings. Trump has no favorability ratings because he’s not in office. These are not the same.
Biden’s “favorability” is lower because there are people who want him to be more progressive. That doesn’t mean they won’t vote for him in a race against Trump.
You can’t use “favorability” to gauge whether people will vote because it compares the candidate to a mythical generic person. The ballot doesn’t ask “do you like what Joe Biden is doing?” it asks “do you prefer Biden or Trump?”
Those are very different questions. Biden will pull ahead once people actually think about Trump being president. It’s not a hypothetical like in 2016. He was president and he lost in 2020.
I wasn’t saying favourability ratings should be used to predict elections. For that you have polls (in which Trump has a substantial but not decisive lead). I was just responding to the comment about who is more unpopular.
I think that people who respond to pollsters overwhelmingly know that Trump was president before, and clearly it doesn’t bother them what a train wreck that presidency was. It’s not clear to me how they would suddenly start realizing that closer to election day.
I’ve seen a lot of them say they won’t. I’ve seen people who I know in the past have argued that we have to support Clinton or Biden in the general election, because Trump is worse, and even campaigned for the lesser-evil candidate, turn around and say they can’t support Biden this time. I don’t know if they will reconsider, as the election gets closer, or when faced with reality of a ballot in front of them - I certainly hope so - but I’m not taking any vote for granted in this election.
As an aside, while the violence against Palestinians has really caught people’s attention, I don’t know why people seem more mad at Biden this time than last time, or more mad than they were at Clinton. There hasn’t been a president in the last few decades at least who would have handled the situation better; on other issues, Biden has proven much better than I expected when I held my nose and voted for him last time; and Trump is a cornered animal, much more dangerous this time around.