Biden is ‘old,’ Trump is ‘corrupt’: AP-NORC poll has ominous signs for both in possible rematch

Report Issue

Please complete the required fields.

Your Name

Email

Reason (required)
This post contains broken linksPost has incorrect informationPost has spamCopyright IssueOther

Description

Submit

Old. Confused. Corrupt. Dishonest.

Those are among the top terms Americans use when they’re asked to describe President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, the Republican best positioned to face him in next year’s election.

Unflattering portraits of both emerge clearly in a new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, which asked an open-ended question about what comes to mind when people think of them.
For Biden, the largest share of U.S. adults — including both Democrats and Republicans — mentioned his age. At 80, the Democratic president is just three years older than Trump, but many Americans expressed real concerns about his ability to continue as president.
Trump, meanwhile, has been indicted in four cases featuring 91 total criminal counts and elicits words such as “corrupt” and “crooked” (named by 15%), along with “bad” and other generally negative comments (11%). Not far behind are words like “liar” and “dishonest” (8%). Another 8% offered generally positive comments like “good,” though.

A deeper look doesn’t improve things much for Biden or Trump. And while many of the criticisms reflect a familiar partisan divide, the poll shows neither man is immune to criticism from within his own party.

“He looks like he needs to be someone’s kindly grandpa on the arm, not someone at the wheel of power,” Justin Campbell, a 27-year-old Democrat and security guard in the Brookhaven area of Mississippi, said of Biden. He was even more negative about Trump, though, saying that the former president “acts like a kindergartner when people tell him ‘no.’”