Around three-quarters of readers in an online poll this week say that U.S. presidential candidates Donald Trump (78) and Joe Biden (81) should both leave the race.
Biden's below-standard performance in the campaign's first debate, and his slide in the polls, have alarmed Democrats and led to an angry, divisive debate about whether continuing with him would mean sacrificing the election.
Trump, for his part, has his own problems with incoherence: at a recent rally in Florida, he asserted that because Biden had (apparently personally) quadrupled the price of bacon “we don’t eat bacon any more,” that electric cars have to be charged for three hours for every 45 minutes of driving, and that Biden "doesn’t know what a synagogue is."
Against that backdrop, 74 per cent of you said Trump should drop out, and 70 per cent said Biden should drop out.
Broken down by age, however, interesting differences pop out. Younger readers were more likely to say that Trump should stay, and older readers were more likely to say that Biden should stay.
Originally, I asked about how readers would vote in November's election if they were able to. The poll had Biden, Trump, and 'another candidate,' by which I had in mind third-party candidates like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. or Jill Stein.
From the numbers, though, people seemed to interpret 'another candidate' as a replacement candidate for Trump or Biden, run by a major party, instead.
If we restrict the choices to Trump and Biden, it looks more like this:
Men and women do differ, but not dramatically:
Mashed up, we can see that Biden supporters (or people who would support him if he was still on the ballot in November) are much more open to an alternative than their Trump equivalents:
Mashed up with Canadian voting intentions, the general pattern is more or less what we would expect, other than that support for Biden among Conservative and PPC supporters is substantial. A modest majority of Conservatives say they'd vote for Biden, and half of PPC voters.
When we throw in 'another candidate' as an option, Liberals are most likely to discard it and back Biden.