The GOP is gaining post-Trump. Trump? Not so much.

The Wall Street Journal’s Michael C. Bender on Friday spotlighted a pretty fascinating finding from his employer’s latest poll, which drives this home.

Back in 2016, there was a lot of talk about the group of voters we like to call “double haters” — those who disliked both of their options in that election. And they were legion, given that each candidate was among the most unpopular presidential nominees in recent history. About 6 in 10 voters disliked Trump, and about 6 in 10 disliked Hillary Clinton as well. The 1 in 5 voters who liked neither wound up favoring Trump by plenty — and just enough to elect him.

With President Biden falling significantly in the polls, this group now looms nearly as large as it did back then. And they hold pretty different views depending upon which election you’re talking about.

On the one hand, Bender notes, they favor Republicans over Democrats by 13 points in the upcoming 2022 midterms. On the other, when given a choice in a rematch of the 2020 election, they pick the Democratic president over the Republican former president by almost the same margin: 12 points.

The upshot is that Republicans lead 46 percent to 41 percent in the 2022 “generic ballot,” but the 2024 race is a dead heat, at 45 percent apiece.

When I saw this, I wondered if other polls demonstrated a similar dynamic. And they do — to some extent.

A Susquehanna poll conducted a few weeks ago, like the Wall Street Journal poll, showed Biden and Trump with remarkably similar image ratings. But it, too, showed Republicans doing better in 2022 than in a 2024 rematch. Republicans led 47-41 on the generic ballot, but Biden led 46-43 in a 2024 rematch.

It’s possible to overstate the significance of this. We do tend to see bigger swings in the battle for Congress than in presidential elections. We also need to account for the normal dynamics of midterms, which is that Americans almost always deliver big gains to the party out of power in the name of dividing power in Washington. As FiveThirtyEight’s Geoffrey Skelley and Jean Yi wrote recently, we need to treat these questions as different because, in voters’ minds, they often are different. (There’s a reason the opposition party almost always does well in midterms but presidents win reelection more often than not.)

But it’s also true that the GOP’s 2022 momentum doesn’t register in a 2024 rematch in quite the way you might expect. It’s one thing for the situation to change after the opposition party reclaims some power in a midterm; it’s another for voters to prefer Republicans right now, to dislike Biden quite a bit and to still say right now that they’re reluctant to vote for the Republican who would be running against Biden.

As interesting are some other numbers from the Wall Street Journal poll. Not for the first time, it suggests that views of a presidency improve once that presidency is over. While just 41 percent of people like both Trump and Biden personally, approval of Trump’s presidency climbs to 48 percent — higher, it bears noting, than it almost ever was when he was in office.

So the poll actually includes more people who approve of Trump’s term (48 percent) than approve of Biden’s (42 percent), and significantly more people prefer Republicans to be in charge of Congress. And yet Trump can’t turn that into a lead.

It’s enough to suggest that maybe the best course for Republicans would be to turn the page on Trump — as if they actually have a choice.