Should the Democrats find a way to kick Joe Biden off the top of the party's 2024 presidential ticket? A recent Lord Ashcroft survey says that if the Democrats wish to retain the White House, they'd better. The online survey of 10,192 registered American voters occurred on January 17-28. 

Analysis by former Conservative deputy chairman Lord Ashcroft, shared with The Mail on Sunday, puts 81-year-old Biden, who is running for re-election as President in November, on 40 per cent among US voters, the same as Trump.

But when the voters are offered a choice between Trump, 77, the frontrunner to be his Republican challenger, and ‘a Democrat other than Joe Biden’, the notional candidate leads by six points. Biden would beat Nikki Haley, Trump’s last-remaining rival for the Republican nomination, by 11 points.

Even though the two men are tied in the 10,000-sample poll, the American electorate thinks the momentum is with Trump: just 28 per cent think that Biden will win re-election, compared with 38 per cent who expect Trump to return to the White House.

As the Lord Ashcroft survey's report and analysis points out, one factor may be a large enthusiasm gap among members of each party for their presumptive nominee.

Unlike Biden, Trump is more popular than his party, and Republicans themselves feel more positive about their man than Democrats do about the incumbent president. This gulf in enthusiasm between the two sides – the “intensity gap”, as political scientists have it – really matters. In a close election in a divided country, persuading your people to bother getting out to vote can be the difference between victory and defeat.

This is an interesting point; among Republican voters, there are a significant number of voters who feel that the 2020 election was influenced by election-night shenanigans to the point where the election may have tipped; those people will be the ones who will crawl on their hands and knees through a mile of broken glass to vote this year. Democrat enthusiasm for the increasingly befuddled Biden, meanwhile, may well be much more tepid.

See Related: 'He Speaks in Gibberish': Yet Another Liberal Thought Leader Demands Biden Drops Out 

Shock Poll Reveals Voters Have Doubts Both Biden and Trump Will Last Till Election Day

There are a few interesting data points tucked away in this survey:

Among 2020 Biden voters, 77% said they would vote again for Biden, 5% would switch to Trump, 9% said they would vote for another candidate and 8% said they didn’t know or would not vote.

Among 2020 Trump voters, 88% said they would vote again for Trump, 2% would switch to Biden, 5% to another candidate, and 5% said they didn’t know or would not vote.

This is a small but significant illustration of the enthusiasm gap mentioned earlier; if anything, this survey (Qualifier: I'm very skeptical of online surveys) understates that gap. But here's the headline indicator:

We also asked all respondents how motivated they would be to turn out and vote in the presidential election in each of these scenarios, on a 10-point scale. In a Biden v. Trump election, 50% of registered voters said they would be 10/10 motivated to turn out, including 52% of 2020 Biden voters and 57% of 2020 Trump voters. The 10/10 proportion falls only slightly to 48% in a contest between Trump and a Democrat other than Biden, but drops to 37% in the event of a match-up between Biden and Nikki Haley.

From this, it appears that Trump voters take the prize for "most motivated." If this is accurate, and if it holds, that could make the difference in November.

Democrats have a Biden problem, and it's getting harder to see a way out as time goes on. The 25th Amendment, clearly indicated though it may be, requires a 2/3 vote of both House and Senate to remove a President, and as time goes on it looks less and less likely that Joe Biden will step down voluntarily. Barring a mental or physical collapse (neither of which would be surprising), it looks a lot like Joe Biden will be on the ballot in November. That can't be encouraging for Democrats - but they made this bed and now are required to lie in it.

The full Lord Ashcroft survey can be viewed here.