Ahead of the first GOP primary debate for the 2024 election, Sentient used its true implicit testing platform, Sentient Prime®, to retest the Emotional Appeal and assess attribute associations of the presidential candidates currently leading polls. Results from the inaugural round of our political candidate tracker revealed early-stage voter attitudes, providing valuable insight into Republicans, Democrats, and most importantly, Independents–the majority of American voters. Our findings indicated that none of the candidates tested elicit positive emotional responses in the minds of Independents. After learning how voters felt implicitly, Sentient sought to better understand the cause. This next round of our political tracker provides explanatory data on how Americans perceive the top three presidential candidates prior to any qualifying Republican’s appearance on stage during the 2-hour debate set to start at 9PM EST, Wednesday, August 23.
Sentient’s second readout specifies differences in attitudes toward candidates among political parties and gender. Overall, Independents have an implicitly neutral emotional response to Biden and an implicitly negative emotional response to Trump as shown in Figure 1 above. However, splitting the data by respondents’ gender to look specifically at female Independents tells a powerful story. Independent women feel implicitly positive about Biden (106.5) and DeSantis (108.5), whereas their reaction to Trump is extremely negative (86.7) as seen in Figure 2. Analysis of the attributes most closely associated with these three candidates indicates why.