The average voter’s ideologies are closer to President Donald Trump than any democratic candidate, according to a recent poll conducted by the University of Southern California and LA Times from Aug. 12 to Sept. 8th.
Also, The Los Angeles Times reports that former Vice President Joe Biden is the closest democratic candidate to the average voter’s opinion on a scale of 0 (most liberal) to 100 (most conservative).
The poll was conducted on a group of 5,367 eligible voters. A little under half are registered Democrats and roughly a quarter are independent/not aligned with any political party. The average score the voters rated their own political views at on the scale of 0 to 100 was 54. The voters gave Donald Trump a 66, a 12-point difference. Yet voters gave Joe Biden a 40, which is a 14-point difference.
Harris, Warren, and Sanders all got 31, 30, and 25, respectively. The same trend is evident in the independent voters, rating their own views at 52, Trump at 60, Biden at 41, Harris at 34, Warren at 33, and Sanders at 28. (RELATED: Most Dem Voters Want To See A Major Change, Poll Shows. Candidates Largely Ignored It Over The Debates)
Registered Democrats identify as closer to Biden, while registered Republicans identify as closer to Trump, but the average voter is more nonpartisan.
Several other media outlets that reported on this only include the democratic rating, and not many mention how Trump was rated as closer to the average voter than Biden, albeit it by a small margin. The director of the Center for the Political Future at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Robert Shrum, seemed to ignore the statistic when he said, “one of Biden’s big advantages seems to be that people thought he was the most likely candidate to beat Trump.”
“This ideology rating suggests that he has a second advantage,” he continued, “which is that he is pretty close to where Democratic voters are ideologically.”