Iran Press/ America: The survey of 1,638 US adults, which was conducted from July 13-17, goes a step further than previous soundings by both Yahoo News/YouGov and other outlets, which have tended to ask whether Biden and Trump should run again — and have tended to find that most Americans would rather they didn’t.
Instead, the new poll asked a more pointed question: Whether the two human beings most likely to occupy the Oval Office come January 2025 are worthy of the position.
A full 55% of Americans say Biden is not. A statistically identical 53% say the same of Trump.
Partisanship and polarization, as usual, play a starring role here. A near-unanimous 94% of Trump’s 2020 voters say Biden is not fit to serve as president again; 91% of Biden’s 2020 voters say the same about Trump.
Among Biden’s detractors, 20% say he is unfit because he is “incompetent”; 12% say it’s because he’s “too old”; 10% say it’s because he’s “corrupt”; 9% say it’s because he’s “doing a bad job”; and 3% say it’s because he’s “dangerous.”
Trump’s numbers, meanwhile, are nearly reversed, with 21% of his detractors saying he’s unfit because he is dangerous, 17% saying it’s because he’s corrupt, 6% saying it’s because he’s incompetent, 5% saying it’s because “he did a bad job during his first term”; and just 2% saying it’s because he is too old.
Trump’s ongoing legal woes may be contributing to these shifts. The current survey was conducted before the former president announced Tuesday that he expects to be indicted by special counsel Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 grand jury, citing a “target letter” he received a few days earlier.
But the results show that a sizable — and growing — majority of Americans now see the kind of Jan. 6 charges that could be brought against Trump as “serious crimes”:
● 70% now consider “inciting or aiding an insurrection against the federal government” to be serious crime, up 6 points from 64% in late May.
● 70% now consider “conspiring to overturn the results of a presidential election” to be a serious crime, up 4 points from 66% in late May.
● 67% now consider “attempting to obstruct the certification of a presidential election” to be a serious crime, up 4 points from 63% in late May.
Similarly, just 24% of Americans now think Trump should be allowed to serve as president again in the future “if convicted of a serious crime in the coming months,” down from 28% in June (when a similar question specifically referred to a possible conviction in the classified documents case).
All told, 60% of Americans think Trump should drop out of the presidential race if convicted of a “serious crime”; only 27% say he should not drop out.
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