The Clinton campaign was also tracking double haters and, to its horror, saw the same thing. “We saw those fickle, Republican-leaning voters that we’d been successfully attracting off and on throughout the general election revert back to Trump at the end,” Brian Fallon, a top Clinton official, said then. The shift to Trump proved decisive.

Earlier this week, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found Joe Biden leading Trump 49 percent to 42 percent among registered voters—roughly the margin by which Clinton led Trump in 2016, once it was clear she’d be the Democratic nominee. NBC News shared data with me from the poll on voters who had negative opinions of both Trump and Biden: the new double haters. These voters were clear in their preference. Biden was winning them 60 percent to 10 percent…

Biden also has other advantages Clinton didn’t have. Sexism won’t be a problem for him, as it was for her. He’s perceived as a moderate. He hasn’t been the focus of decades of right-wing attacks, as Clinton was. And Trump’s attacks against him over his son Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine haven’t resonated with Democratic and independent voters, who don’t find Trump to be a credible messenger. As one Democrat put it, double haters dislike Biden because he’s a Democrat—but unlike with Clinton, they don’t also think he’s the devil.