One of the most remarkable findings from Yahoo News\u2019s new poll is not exactly a new one.<\/p>\n
Respondents to the poll, conducted by YouGov, were asked whether they thought a set of concerns applied to President Biden or Donald Trump. Was either of the two general-election candidates too extreme on the issues to be president? Too corrupt? Too incompetent? Too dangerous?<\/p>\n
These are broad terms, certainly, allowing for those wanting to express distaste for a candidate to make them fit if they wished. But even given that malleability, it is striking that the difference in views of either candidate as \u201ctoo corrupt\u201d \u2014 not just corrupt, but disqualifyingly corrupt \u2014 is so modest.<\/p>\n
About 4 in 10 respondents said that was true of Trump, while a third of respondents said so of Biden \u2014 a single-digit gap, despite a much wider gap in the number of criminal indictments and impeachments applied to the two candidates.<\/p>\n
In general, Americans expressed more concern about Trump than Biden, albeit not by wide margins. Respondents were more likely to say that Trump was too extreme, too corrupt and too dangerous. Only on the \u201ctoo incompetent\u201d question did a larger percentage identify Biden.<\/p>\n
Interestingly, those patterns held even when looking at partisan subgroups. Trump was more likely to be viewed as \u201ctoo extreme\u201d even by his own party than Biden was by his. Biden was more likely to be viewed as \u201ctoo incompetent\u201d by the opposing party than Trump was by Democrats.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s also interesting is how these numbers have shifted over time.<\/p>\n
Yahoo and YouGov asked the same questions in May. Then, the gap between Biden and Trump on the \u201ctoo corrupt\u201d question was in the double digits, while \u201ctoo incompetent\u201d was in the single digits. Since then, the \u201ccorrupt\u201d gap narrowed and the \u201cincompetent\u201d gap widened \u2014 thanks largely to shifts among Republicans.<\/p>\n
The share of Republicans saying Biden is too corrupt jumped 12 percentage points, unquestionably because of the investigations and impeachment effort from congressional Republicans. That helped close the overall gap between the two candidates, just as the increase in Republicans saying that Biden is \u201ctoo incompetent\u201d helped expand the overall gap. Among Democrats, there was no change in the percentage saying Biden was too incompetent.<\/p>\n
On both \u201ctoo corrupt\u201d and \u201ctoo incompetent,\u201d the gap between Biden and Trump shifted by 10 points to Biden\u2019s disadvantage among all respondents.<\/p>\n
This has long been an obvious if quiet aim of the Republican effort to target Biden: convince Republicans dubious of Trump\u2019s indictments and actions that Biden isn\u2019t any better. In the new poll, 5 percent of Republicans say Trump is too corrupt to be president. Nearly 7 in 10 say Biden is \u2014 about the same as the percentage of Democrats who view Trump as \u201ctoo corrupt.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
One of the most remarkable findings from Yahoo News\u2019s new poll is not exactly a new one. Respondents to the poll, conducted by YouGov, were asked whether they thought a set of concerns applied to President Biden or Donald Trump. Was either of the two general-election candidates too extreme on the issues to be president? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":2174,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2173"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2173\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}