A feature of modern presidential politics is a grim one: Voters are generally asked to choose between two candidates they might not like very much.

Sure, partisans are generally enthusiastic about their party’s nominee, but in 2016, given how unpopular both candidates were, a sizable number of voters who cast ballots said they liked neither Donald Trump nor Hillary Clinton. According to exit polling conducted that year, about 1 in 5 voters said they liked neither Trump nor Clinton, about nine times as many as said they liked both major-party candidates.

That became important, given how close the 2016 election ended up being. As it turns out, while people who liked Trump and didn’t like Clinton voted heavily for Trump (as you’d expect), the current president also had an edge among people who disliked both him and Clinton. He won those voters by 17 points nationally — and by margins in the closest states that were likely enough to hand him the electoral college victory he needed.

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The split between those who like or don’t like the candidates is remarkably similar to 2016. Trump is the only candidate liked by 36 percent of respondents, same as the percentage of voters three years ago. Biden is the only one liked by 41 percent — the same percentage of exit poll respondents who said the same of Clinton. The group of like-neithers is slightly smaller, at 12 percent.

How do they vote? According to Quinnipiac, they prefer Biden by a wide margin. This is a relatively small group of people, so the margin of error is fairly large, but Biden’s margin is large enough that it doesn’t matter.

Note that only 10 percent say they’d vote third party, half the percentage of the same group that said that in 2016. Another 9 percent say they wouldn’t vote at all.

What we see when we compare those numbers to 2016 is a flip in sentiment among the cynical voters. That year, Trump’s support among the like-neithers was about the same as his overall percentage; it was Clinton whose numbers plunged. In Quinnipiac’s poll, Biden holds strong with that group, while Trump’s numbers drop off a cliff.

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Republicans did not spend decades hating Biden the way they did Clinton. many sort of like the guy.