The ranks of the double-haters — voters who say they don’t like either major party presidential candidate — are at a historic high and make up one-quarter of the electorate, according to a new analysis from Pew Research Centre.
That’s nearly twice as many as at this point in 2020.
Double-haters were a key factor in Donald Trump’s upset win in 2016, when they broke for the Republican candidate over Democrat Hillary Clinton.
But President Joe Biden won many of those voters over on his way to winning the White House in 2020.
Biden and Trump are taking roughly equal measures of these disillusioned voters in battleground states, with Biden winning 25 per cent to Trump’s 22 per cent, a May Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll shows.
But the biggest threat to Biden and Trump is that voters turned off by them will simply stay home — or find refuge in an independent candidate like Robert F. Kennedy Jnr, who is polling at 24 per cent among those voters in the Bloomberg/Morning Consult survey.
Other third-party candidates are taking a combined 12 per cent.
Growing political polarisation is driving the unpopularity. The Pew analysis found that presidential candidates are only slightly less popular within their own party than they were three decades ago, but that voters of the opposing party are much more negative.
