The 2024 presidential election campaign season remains several months away, and while much can change, the latest PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll shows both Democrats and Republicans are already sizing up potential candidates.
Both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have maintained large shares of support among their respective bases. But there is still room for competition to erode the shaky certainty of their 2024 presidential bids, and "we should be very wary of just assuming we know how things are going to play out," said Amy Walter, editor of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter.
"The degree that both candidates are viewed skeptically by the party's base is quite remarkable," she said.
Chart by Megan McGrew/PBS NewsHour
For Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is emerging as the candidate to beat. DeSantis is "aggressively pursuing" policies that aren't intended to unite the country around him, but instead the Republican Party, said Andrew Seligsohn, president of the Public Agenda, a nonpartisan think tank.
"So far, the evidence suggests he's really been successful at establishing himself as that alternative," Seligsohn said.
Who Democrats want to nominate for president
About half of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents said they would support Biden if his party nominated him for another presidential bid in 2024. That's up 12 percentage points from December, when inflation had hobbled the economy and midterm election votes were still being counted. Since then, the Republicans saw their "red wave" hopes to take full control of Congress diminish to merely a narrow margin in the House, and inflation-fueled price spikes have somewhat calmed.
But that doesn't mean Biden — or Democrats — can rest easy yet. In this latest poll, 45 percent of Democrats and like-minded independents said they would rather see someone other than Biden run for the White House.
Brian Mazzarella of Thomaston, Connecticut, is one of them. The 43-year-old Democrat said he supports the president's work on infrastructure, but "everything's hinged on" Biden. If something happened to the 80-year-old president, Mazzarella said, "It'd be a lot of chaos."
While Biden has forged support among his base, "there's not really an obvious alternative," Seligsohn said. He said the tepid support Biden has at this point is "not insignificant," considering his administration's accomplishments and the fact that he has already defeated Trump once.
Biden's approval
Days after his State of the Union address, Biden enjoyed a post-speech boost in public opinion. The boost brought Americans to an even split in their approval of the president, with 46 percent saying they support what he's done so far in office and another 46 percent saying they are not pleased with Biden.
Chart by Megan McGrew/PBS NewsHour
While his approval numbers could be better, a few factors are positively influencing the public's perception of the president, Walter said. Those include: a better-than-expected midterm outcome for Democrats, an improving economy, positive coverage of his State of the Union address and the potential for a showdown among Republicans for their presidential nominee.
These latest approval numbers reveal a significant improvement over what Biden has seen for much of his presidency. But Seligsohn said it remains to be seen how sustainable those improvements truly are.
Who Republicans want to nominate for president
Among Republicans and like-minded independents, 42 percent said they would like to see the Grand Old Party nominate Trump to run in the 2024 presidential race, in this latest poll. That's up from 35 percent of Republican voters who supported a Trump nomination in November.
While Trump gained some support, a majority of those core voters, 54 percent, has not wavered in their opinion that someone else would be a better nominee.
Chart by Megan McGrew/PBS NewsHour
Trump never impressed Gerry Kaufhold, a 51-year-old registered Republican from Kearny, Arizona. In fact, he compared Trump to another Republican icon who leveraged his pop culture influence to serve in the White House — Ronald Reagan.
Trump "rode his celebrity status. There was no there there," said Kaufhold, who calls himself a "disappointed Republican" who supported the party when he said it stood for small government, fiscal responsibility and national leaders who allowed local people to solve local problems.
"I don't think there's any adults running the Republican Party," he said.
PBS NewsHour, NPR and Marist Poll conducted a survey between Feb. 13 and Feb. 16 that polled 1,352 U.S. adults with a margin of error of 3.3 percentage points and 1,210 registered voters with a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.