While the 2000 election was heavily contested and ended in a dramatic Supreme Court ruling that Democrats have bemoaned for decades, the 2020 Election Day just might top it.
A new poll released by the Pew Research Center shows a strong divide between Biden and Trump voters going into election day. Whether it’s on voting, core American values, and goals, or election results, the split shows a divided electorate in method and on issues.
When it comes to presidential candidates, most people who claim to be voting for former Vice President Joe Biden say that they are doing so to vote against incumbent President Donald Trump.
“Trump voters remain considerably more likely than Biden voters to say their choice in a candidate is more of an expression of support ‘for’ their preferred candidate. In contrast, Biden’s voters are considerably more likely to say their choice is mostly against Trump,” the poll concludes.
These results seem to support the fact that 54 percent of Biden supporters claim they would be “angry” if Trump wins the election and 57 percent of voters say Trump winning would elicit personal “negative reactions.”
While nearly 90 percent of both Trump and Biden supporters say that the opposing candidate’s win would cause “lasting harm,” 89 percent of Biden supporters and 86 percent of Trump supporters claim that whichever candidate is elected should “focus primarily on the concerns of all Americans, even if it means disappointing some of his supporters.”
These concerns, however, appear to differ drastically. Eighty percent of those who prefer Biden and 77 percent of those who prefer Trump claim that they “fundamentally disagree about core values” and that these disagreements extend far beyond political beliefs.
The divide furthers as over half of the voters surveyed claimed that “they think about politics as a struggle between right and wrong, while about as many (48 percent) say they don’t think about politics this way.”
Because of these convictions, it appears that 95 percent of voters are somewhat to extremely motivated to vote. How these voters are choosing to vote, however, also differs. The poll demonstrates that there are more early voters at the polls (55 percent) and through mail-in ballots (69 percent) willing to vote for Biden than Trump, but 63 percent of the people planning to vote in person on Election Day prefer Trump.
Voters’ views on the state of the economy are up from June with 67 percent of Trump supporters, 16 percent more than in June, and 11 percent of Biden supporters, 2 percent more than in four months ago, claiming the economy is “excellent or good.”
For total presidential candidate preferences, the survey found that 52 percent of registered voters prefer Biden, but 42 percent were planning on voting for Trump.
Pew administered the survey to 11,929 adults in the United State, 10,543 of which were registered voters, between Sept. 30-Oct. 5.
