Hey, everyone. I'm Dylan Dreyer, co-host of the third hour of Today and mom to three wild boys. I've learned a lot in my years as a parent, mostly that I don't have it all figured out yet. And I'm not the only one.
This is my new podcast, The Parent Chat. Each week, I sit down with someone new for honest conversation and real-world advice about parenting. I am over here just like winging it. Hey, I'm trying not to screw my own kids up.
I'm not giving you advice on how not to screw yours up. Search The Parent Chat on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the lit for Meet the Press. I'm Carrie Dan.
You know that feeling when you have to pick between things that you just really don't like? You know, like when the two teams in the Super Bowl are the two that you hate the most. Or like when the seats left on the airplane are a middle seat or the aisle one right next to the bathroom door. Yeah, remember airplanes and sports?
I miss them too. But you get the idea. Choosing between a rock and a hard place. Lesser of two evils.
And that is a situation that a decent chunk of voters found themselves in, in 2016. According to exit polls at the time of the November election, about one in five voters said they had an unfavorable opinion of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. And that's a big chunk of the electorate, equivalent to the share, say, of voters under 30 or white men without a college degree, both the kind of groups you heard a lot about in the run-up to the election. So why do I bring up these people, people who didn't like either candidate in 2016?
It turned out they were really important swing voters, and they broke overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. Those same exit polls found Trump beat Clinton with voters who didn't like either of them by 20 points. And only about 20 percent of them actually voted for a third-party candidate. Trump's big success with those voters is probably a big reason why he's president today.
Which brings me to our latest NBC News Wall Street Journal poll. It came out on Sunday, and there is a ton in there. But one number that really stood out to us was how Joe Biden is doing with those same kind of voters. People who say they're going to end up choosing between two candidates that they just are not wild about.
Overall, in our poll, among all registered voters, Biden leads Trump in a head-to-head matchup, 49 percent to 42 percent. He's got a huge advantage with women, younger voters, and people of color, which, based on previous results, is not all that surprising. But what maybe is surprising is his big advantage among people who say they don't like him or Donald Trump. That group, made up about 10 percent of the voters in our poll, and they said they would pick Biden over Trump, despite not liking either of them, by 50 points.
60 percent choose Biden, just 10 percent choose the current president. And that is a big advantage and one that's a very good sign for the Democratic nominee. Now, that's not to say that it's all great news for Biden in this same poll. Remember how I said he's got a big advantage over Trump with young voters?
That is true, but he's also got particularly tepid favorability ratings with them, which could mean trouble if they end up just not turning out to vote at all. And in this age of coronavirus, four out of 10 voters say they're not really sure what Joe Biden has really said about the crisis at all. And that's maybe not optimal. COVID, after all, is the only news story that really seems to matter at all right now.
And Biden doesn't really seem to be breaking through as a definitive alternative to the current leader in the White House when it comes to dealing with all of that fallout. That's all for us. If you'd like to hear more of this free audio briefing, you can always download us on your favorite podcast app.