Donald Trump has a narrow advantage over President Biden among voters who dislike both major-party frontrunners across three key battleground states, a Democrat-commissioned poll has found.
The former president leads the current president 51% to 48% among so-called “double-haters” in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to the survey conducted by Democratic firm GQR on behalf of pro-Biden super PAC Unite the Country, first reported by NBC News.
The pair are tied at 50% apiece among likely voters in the three states.
“Double haters” accounted for roughly 16% of the total sample of 3,000 likely voters — 1,000 in each state — and are more likely to be men with college degrees who consider themselves Republicans.
Of that cohort, 59% said they harbored a “very unfavorable” view of Trump, 77, while 49% said the same of the 80-year-old Biden.
“By identifying and understanding the specifics of these voters, as we did with Biden uncertain voters in 2020, we can strategically engage them through a mix of television and digital channels,” Unite the Country said in a memo.
“This will allow us to demonstrate why a vote for Biden, and consequently against Trump, is a crucial vote for the United States.”
Trump won all three states in upsetting Hillary Clinton to win the White House in 2016, the first Republican to pull off the sweep since Ronald Reagan in 1984 and the first to win any of the three since George H.W. Bush in 1988.
Biden flipped all three states back into the Democratic column in 2020, but Trump will return to the presidency if he wins all the states he won in the last election and repeats his feat from 2016.
Recent polling data from RealClearPolitics shows Trump ahead of Biden in Pennsylvania by an average of 1.6 percentage points and in Michigan by an average of 0.4 percentage points.
During last year’s midterm elections, Democrats kept hold of Pennsylvania’s governorship and flipped the Senate seat once held by the retiring Pat Toomey. In Michigan, Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer won re-election while Republican Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson narrowly won re-election over Democrat Mandela Barnes.
Trump also has a razor-thin 0.7 percentage-point edge over Biden in the national RCP aggregate of polls. No Republican has won the popular vote in a general election since 2004.
The poll found that reluctance among the “double-haters” to vote for Trump could be traced to his attempts to remain in power after the 2020 election and the four criminal cases against him.