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The first Times poll of the 2024 election cycle shows a dead heat between President Biden and Donald Trump. If those two men are the presidential nominees next year, 43 percent of registered voters say they will support Biden, and 43 percent say they will back Trump.
But 43 plus 43 obviously does not equal 100. There are also 14 percent of registered voters who declined to choose either candidate. Some of them said that they would not vote next year. Others said they would support a third-party candidate. Still others declined to answer the poll question.
You can think of this 14 percent as the Neither of the Above voters, at least for now. In the end, a significant number of them probably will vote for Biden or Trump and go a long way toward determining who occupies the White House in 2025.
In today’s newsletter, I will profile this Neither of the Above — or NOTA — group, with help from charts by my colleague Ashley Wu.
Unhappy with Trump
Perhaps the most notable characteristic of NOTA voters is that they are highly critical of Trump. By definition, they are also unenthusiastic about Biden. But they are considerably less happy with Trump:
NOTA voters are more likely than all registered voters to say they believe Trump “has committed serious federal crimes” and more likely to say his behavior after the 2020 election “threatened American democracy.” On both questions, a majority of all registered voters give these anti-Trump answers, but an even larger majority of NOTA voters do:
These patterns are a reminder that most voters have never supported Trump. He won in 2016 despite losing the popular vote, and he generally became less popular during his presidency. His unpopularity helped Democrats retake control of the House in 2018, oust him from the presidency in 2020 and fare much better than expected in the 2022 midterms.
Both turnout and persuasion have played important roles. Trump and his closest allies in the Republican Party have alienated swing voters, especially in the suburbs. Trump has also helped inspire a continuing surge of turnout among Democratic-leaning young voters in swing states.
Most NOTA voters are part of the nation’s anti-Trump majority. More of them identify as Democrats than Republicans, and more voted for Biden in 2020 than for Trump. “Clearly it’s a better group for Biden than Trump,” Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, told me. “It’s relatively young and diverse.”
NOTA voters are disproportionately Catholic and disproportionately nonreligious. Many are between ages 30 and 44. About one in five is Hispanic. More broadly, the poll suggests that Hispanic voters — who still lean Democratic but have shifted right in the past several years — will be a crucial swing group in 2024: Biden leads Trump just 41 percent to 38 percent among Hispanic registered voters, with the rest undecided.
In several other demographic categories — gender, income, education — NOTA voters look similar to the rest of the country.
NOTA isn’t liberal
The anti-Trump quality of the undecided vote is one reason that Nate said he considered the race to lean toward Biden despite the headline 43-to-43 tie. But Nate also emphasized that Biden could still lose, including to Trump.
How? For one thing, many in the NOTA crowd mean it when they say that they don’t plan to vote next year. Only 62 percent of the group did so in 2020, according to election records that The Times and Siena College paired with the poll results.
Nate did a calculation in which he assumed that these voters would turn out at a similar rate next year and then assigned them to either Biden or Trump based on their reported vote in the 2022 midterms. In that scenario, Biden would receive 49 percent of the popular vote while Trump would receive 47 percent. The remaining 4 percent would support third-party candidates.
Biden’s margin in this scenario is clearly small and vulnerable. An economic downturn could narrow it further, as could a late campaign stumble by Biden. Or a third-party candidate — like a No Labels nominee or Cornel West, the scholar and activist who hopes to be the Green Party nominee — could steal more votes from Biden.
I also want to point out that most NOTA voters are not liberal. Many more identify as either moderate or conservative. It’s easy to imagine how some of them might sour on a Democratic president.
Even if Biden does win the national popular vote by two percentage points, he will not be assured of re-election, of course. He could lose the Electoral College if undecided voters in swing states like Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin drift toward Trump while Biden wins landslides on the coasts. That’s how Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016.
The bottom line
Biden enters a potential rematch with Trump as a modest favorite. He effectively has a small lead today, and Trump’s growing list of indictments may aggravate his problems with swing voters. Yet the race is extremely close. Anybody who assumes that the 2024 outcome is sure to repeat the 2020 outcome — even in a rematch campaign — is making a mistake.
More on the election
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In a shift from last year, Biden’s approval rating is inching upward and his party has broadly accepted him as its nominee, the poll found.
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More Republicans think Trump has committed “serious federal crimes.” But the charges against him seem to have cost him few, if any, votes going into 2024.
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The Biden campaign may need to work on mobilizing a winning coalition instead of relying on anti-Trump sentiment alone, Nate Cohn writes.
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