By BILL BARROW and LINLEY SANDERS (Associated Press)

ATLANTA (AP) — Many Americans are unenthusiastic about a November rematch of the 2020 presidential election. But presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump appears to stoke more anger and fear among Americans from his opposing party than President Joe Biden does from his.

A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that Democrats are more likely to report feeling “fearful” or “angry” about the prospects of another Trump term than Republicans are about the idea of Biden remaining in the White House.

The emotional reaction Trump inspires may work in his favor too, though, since the poll also found that Republicans are more excited about the prospect of a Trump win than Democrats are about a Biden victory.

Seven in 10 Democrats say the words “angry” or “fearful” would describe their emotions “extremely well” or “very well” upon a Trump victory. A smaller majority of Republicans – 56% – say the same about a Biden triumph. About 6 in 10 Democrats cite both emotions when contemplating a Trump victory. Again, that exceeds the roughly 4 out of 10 Republicans who said they would feel both angry and scared about Biden prevailing.

The findings are notable in an unusual campaign pitting an incumbent president against his predecessor, with both men facing doubters within their own parties and among independents. Consolidating support from Republicans who backed Nikki Haley in the GOP primary could be a challenge for Trump. Biden faces disenchanted progressives to his left and concerns over whether his age, 81, is a liability in the job.

Excitement about the two candidates will be an important factor in a race where turnout from each side’s base will be key. But dislike can motivate voters as much as enthusiasm.

“If there was a third-party candidate who had a chance in hell I would vote for them,” said Austin Healey, a 26-year-old Democrat. Healey, who describes himself as “very liberal,” said his mixed reviews of Biden take a back seat to his concerns that Trump’s comeback bid “looks like a clear ploy for trying to abolish democracy.”

Though he is “not excited about it,” Healey said, that means a vote for Biden.

Derrick Johnson, a Michigan voter who identifies as a liberal independent, offered plenty of critiques against Biden, as well. But the 46-year-old caregiver and food service worker made his bottom line clear: “Donald Trump is a madman. I’m afraid he’ll have us in World War III. My message is anybody but Trump.”

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Democrats’ intense feelings about Trump account for the overall differences in how Americans view the two rivals. Altogether, about 4 in 10 U.S. adults say “fearful” would describe their emotions “extremely” or “very” well if Trump is elected again, while roughly 3 in 10 would fear a second Biden term. About 4 in 10 U.S. adults said they would be angered by Trump winning in November while 28% said the same about Biden.

The poll’s findings on negative emotions could be especially important for Biden given his other weak spots, including that Republicans remain more excited about electing Trump again than Democrats are about reelecting Biden. Slightly more than half of Republicans, 54%, said “excited” describes their feelings about another Trump term “extremely well” or “very well.” For Biden, that number was just 4 in 10 among Democrats.

“We know what we’re getting with Trump,” said Republican John Novak, a 54-year-old maintenance worker who lives in swing-state Wisconsin and counted himself among those GOP loyalists who would be excited by another Trump term.

“I knew who he was when he came down that escalator in 2015, and we were never getting Boy Scout material,” Novak said. “But he put conservatives on the Supreme Court, he was firm on immigration … and he’s a conservative who handled the economy.”

The latest AP-NORC poll showed Biden with an overall approval rating of 38%. U.S. adults also expressed discontent about his handling of the economy and immigration – and not all of the disapproval is driven by partisan loyalties. About 4 in 10 U.S. adults approve of Biden’s stewardship of the economy, roughly equal to his overall job approval rating.

On specific issues, about 3 in 10 Democrats disapprove of Biden’s handling of the economy; about 4 in 10 disapprove of his approach to immigration or border security.

“The situation at the border really bothers me,” said Johnson, the Michigan liberal. “The border crossings are just getting out of control.”

The president and his campaign advisers tout the Biden administration’s legislative record, especially on infrastructure, an improving economy and new spending intended to combat climate change. But the president and his allies are also unsparing in lambasting Trump as interested only in “revenge and retribution” for his defeat in 2020 and the pending criminal prosecutions and other legal troubles that have followed.

They have seized on Trump’s praise of authoritarians like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Victor Orban and recirculated the former president’s statement that he would be willing to act like a dictator for a day to close the border and expand drilling for fossil fuel.

Trump has countered with searing attacks on Biden’s mental acuity and physical fitness for the presidency and even mocked Biden’s stutter. But the latest poll results suggest Trump has not yet maximized the potential benefits of those attacks — or perhaps that they simply have a lower yield for him.

Biden sometimes turns his version of the argument into a humorous quip he used often in 2020, when he was vying to unseat Trump: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.”

Indeed, that is what resonates with reluctant Democrats and some independents.

“I voted for Trump (in 2016) because I wanted somebody to shake up Washington,” said Neil Murray, a 67-year-old retiree in Jonesboro, Arkansas, who identifies as an independent. “He certainly did that, but he couldn’t do anything productive with it.”

Frustrated with Trump’s negative qualities that he overlooked in 2016, Murray voted for Biden in 2020 — but not enthusiastically. He called Biden “disingenuous on some things” and too close to his left flank on economic policy.

But in November, Murray said, he will have no reservations when casting a second vote for the Democrat, because, “Donald Trump is a screaming lunatic.”

Sanders reported from Washington.

The poll of 1,282 adults was conducted March 21-25, 2024, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.

By CHRIS MEGERIAN (Associated Press)

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday promoted their health care agenda in the battleground state of North Carolina, arguing that Democrats like themselves would preserve access to care while Republicans would reverse gains made over the past decade and a half.

Fourteen years after President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, the White House still sees health care as a winning issue during a campaign in which Biden has sometimes found himself on the defensive when it comes to immigration or the economy. Republicans have opposed Biden’s signature initiatives to lower medical costs, and they’ve seized opportunities to restrict abortion rights after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

“It’s sick. Now they want to quote, his words, terminate the ACA, as my predecessor says,” Biden said, referring to Republican former President Donald Trump. “If that were ever to happen, we’d also terminate a lot of lives as well. But we’re not going to let that happen, are we? We’re not going to let that happen.”

North Carolina was Biden’s final stop on a tour of battleground states after his State of the Union address this month, which jump-started a frenzied travel schedule as the Democratic president makes his case for a second term in a likely rematch with Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.

The state is also a health care success story for the president. The American Rescue Plan, a coronavirus pandemic recovery measure signed by Biden, included financial incentives for states to expand Medicaid coverage for low-income residents. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, used the money, which amounted to $1.8 billion, to persuade Republican lawmakers to support his plan. More than 600,000 residents are expected to qualify.

Biden and Harris visited hours after the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case about access to mifepristone, a widely used abortion pill. The justices appeared inclined to preserve access to the medication.

The White House has tried to make mifepristone more available as one of its few opportunities to protect women’s ability to end their pregnancies.

Afterward, Biden and Harris attended a campaign fundraiser in Raleigh that raised $2.3 million, said Cooper. Harris told supporters, “This is the most existential, consequential and important election of our lifetime.” Biden asked, “Does anyone here want to go back to 2020?” and the crowd shouted, ”No.”

Biden’s approval ratings on health care are among his highest on a range of issues, but he trails there, too, According to a February poll from The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 42% of U.S. adults approve of Biden’s handling of health care while 55% disapprove.

KFF, a health policy research firm, found in its own poll in November that 59% of U.S. adults trust the Democratic Party to do a better job addressing health care affordability issues. Only 39% said the same about Republicans. There was a similar divide in trust when it came to access to mental health care, prescription drug costs and the future of the Affordable Care Act, Medicare and Medicaid.

Trump has never detailed his health care proposals despite campaigning since 2016 on a promise to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. After Biden landed in North Carolina, Trump denied in a new social media post that he wants to “terminate the ACA,” even though he had promised to do just that as recently as last week in Arizona. Trump pledged Tuesday, without providing any details, that he would make the Affordable Care Act better, stronger and less expensive.

However, health care has not been a prominent issue in his 2024 campaign as Trump instead focuses on immigration, inflation and the wars in Europe and the Middle East.

Polls show a tight race between Biden and Trump, and Democrats hope to create another potential path to victory in North Carolina.

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Although Democrats have failed to win a U.S. Senate seat or a presidential race there since 2008, Trump beat Biden in North Carolina by just 1.3 percentage points in 2020. The White House has repeatedly highlighted federal injections of funds for transportation, rural broadband and other initiatives while dispatching top administration officials to the state.

Democrats also want to exploit what they view as weaknesses among Republican candidates for statewide offices. For example, the party’s nominees for governor and state schools superintendent, Mark Robinson and Michele Morrow, respectively, have a history of inflammatory comments.

“We’re seeing a Republican slate at the statewide level that is filled with MAGA extremists that ultimately is going to hurt the Republicans’ chances of winning the state again,” state Sen. Jay Chaudhuri of Raleigh, the chamber’s Democratic whip, said Monday in an interview, using the acronym for Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan.

Democrats hope unaffiliated voters, the largest category in North Carolina, will cool to Trump in part based on worries that his election along with Robinson and Morrow could make businesses question relocating to a state that is currently riding an economic boom.

Associated Press writers Gary Robertson in Raleigh, North Carolina, Jill Colvin in New York and Darlene Superville, Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Matt Brown in Washington contributed to this report.

By STEVE PEOPLES (AP National Political Writer)

NEW YORK (AP) — In his bid to retake the White House, few states hold as much promise for Donald Trump as Michigan.

The former president has already won the state once and President Joe Biden, who reclaimed it for Democrats in 2020, is confronting vulnerabilities there as he seeks reelection. Trump’s campaign promises an aggressive play for Michigan as part of a robust swing-state strategy.

But, at least for now, those promises appear to be mostly talk. The Trump campaign and its partners at the Republican National Committee haven’t yet made significant general election investments in the state, according to Michigan Republican Party Chairman Pete Hoekstra. The national committee, he said, hasn’t transferred any money to the state party to help bolster its operations heading into the general election. There are no specific programs in place to court voters of color. And there’s no general election field staff in place.

“We’ve got the skeleton right now,” Hoekstra said. “We’re going to have to put more meat on it.”

It’s much the same in presidential battleground states across the country, according to Republican operatives and party officials involved in campaign planning elsewhere.

Widely praised for its professionalism and effectiveness throughout the primary phase of the 2024 election, Trump’s political operation has been slow to pivot toward the general election in the weeks after executing a hostile takeover of the Republican Party’s national political machinery. In fact, the former president’s team has rolled back plans under previous leaders to add hundreds of staff and dozens of new minority-outreach centers in key states without offering a clear alternative.

Indeed, just six months before the first early votes are cast in the general election between Trump and Biden, Trump’s Republican Party has little general election infrastructure to speak of.

Officials on the ground in top swing states are not panicking, but the disparity with the Biden campaign is stark.

This month alone, Biden opened 100 new offices and added more than 350 new staffers in swing states from Arizona to Georgia to Pennsylvania, according to campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa. That’s in addition to the Democratic president’s existing battleground-state staff of 100 that was already in place.

Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita, who is now also running operations at the RNC, declined to detail any of the Republican campaign’s plans.

“By combining forces, the Trump campaign and the RNC are deploying operations fueled by passionate volunteers who care about saving America and firing Joe Biden,” he said. “We do not feel obligated, however, to discuss the specifics of our strategy, timing, or tactics with members of the news media.”

Trump may be discussing strategy with some state Republican officials behind closed doors.

Hoekstra was among a handful of Michigan Republican leaders who trekked to Florida last week to meet privately with Trump and members of his senior campaign team about plans for the general election. The conversation, Hoekstra said, left him optimistic about the former president’s commitment to his state.

“I feel good about where we are,” he said. “The Trump team is engaged.”

Earlier this month, Trump replaced Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel with his new hand-picked leadership team, including daughter-in-law Lara Trump, who is now RNC co-chair. LaCivita, who took over as the committee’s chief of staff, promised sweeping changes in the GOP’s political infrastructure across the country.

In the days since, more than 60 Republican staffers across the country were issued layoff notices. They included virtually all the people who staffed the RNC’s minority outreach community centers and others inside the committee’s department of State Parties Strategies.

“There was never a fully cohesive bond between the Trump campaign and the RNC in the past, and we are now operating as one entity,” Lara Trump said Tuesday on David Webb’s SiriusXM Patriot channel program. “We have cut a lot of fat.”

Facing internal pushback on some of the cuts, Lara Trump has vowed that the committee’s half-dozen existing community centers would remain open. But it’s unclear whether Trump’s team will follow through on McDaniel’s plans to open an additional 40 community centers in the coming months.

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The centers were seen as a critical resource in boosting the Republican Party’s relationships with minority groups who have traditionally voted Democratic, but may be open to the GOP’s populist message. Advocates suggest that such investments have made a significant impact in recent years, especially in competitive House districts where several thousand votes can make a difference.

“It seems that there’s a consensus that community centers are vital for the Republican Party in general,” said Shawn Steel, a RNC member from California who credits a community center in Orange County’s Little Saigon with helping his wife, Rep. Michelle Steel, R-Calif., win her seat.

Democrats, Steel said, have been effectively engaging in minority communities since New York City’s Tammany Hall more than two centuries ago. “We’re trying to catch up,” Steel said. “I’m optimistic.”

Amid such optimism, however, there is also a deep sense of uncertainty as Trump’s team rewrites the party’s 2024 battleground-state strategy after burning the previous playbook.

Trump’s lieutenants have already postponed plans in place before McDaniel’s ouster that would have begun adding hundreds of Republican staffers in presidential battleground states beginning this month, according to people with direct knowledge of the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private conversations.

It’s unclear if or when the field staff will eventually be in place. Recently laid-off staffers have recently begun interviewing for new positions, although some have been told they must relocate to Florida or new states.

Georgia GOP Chair Joshua McKoon said he has had several meetings with RNC leadership about “the deployment of additional resources” to his state, although there is no set timeline.

“What wins elections is having the staff necessary to carry out your get-out-the-vote plan, so that’s what I’m most interested in,” McKoon said. “I certainly expect to have further discussions in the very near future about the timeline and having some more specifics.”

He added, “I feel like we’re going to have what we need.”

Aware of a building sense of urgency, newly elected RNC Chair Michael Whatley issued a memo to party officials over the weekend promising that the committee is “building on our existing programs and expanding our outreach at the RNC.”

He vowed to “re-engage America’s working voters,” continue to engage rural voters, and grow Trump’s support “with demographics who have not traditionally voted for our candidates…”

Whatley did not offer any specifics, however, aside from mentioning a new battleground-state program that would direct officials within the committee’s State Parties Strategies department to work with “auxiliary Republican groups and other grassroots organizations” in addition to state parties.

Trump’s team did not clarify, when asked, which grassroots organizations Whatley meant, although the chairman before his recent election had aggressively courted leaders at Turning Point USA, a leading group in Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement that had been a driving force in McDaniel’s ouster.

On Tuesday, Lara Trump wrote “Awesome!” in sharing a social media post from Turning Point founder and CEO Charlie Kirk that highlighted the group’s efforts to organize “full-time ballot chasers” in Arizona and other states.

Meanwhile, Biden’s campaign earlier in the month launched a $30 million six-week advertising blitz targeting swing-state voters with a particular focus on Black and Hispanic-owned outlets and “culture and sports programming such as Comedy Central and ESPN.”

Biden is also hitting the campaign trail with more intensity.

He has campaigned in Pennsylvania, Georgia, New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Michigan in recent days. He was in North Carolina on Tuesday, signaling the president’s ambition in a state that Trump narrowly won in 2020.

Trump, by contrast, has been hardly seen in public this month aside from his court appearances.

Moussa, Biden’s spokesman, slapped Trump for embracing a general election strategy focused on “apparently hiding at his country club.”

“Meanwhile, the RNC fires staffers, shutters community centers and shuts down their minority outreach programs. Not exactly how to win the hearts and minds of the American people — or get to 270 electoral votes,” Moussa said.

This story has been corrected to show the California congresswoman’s surname is Steel, not Steele.