WASHINGTON >> As he announces his reelection campaign, President Joe Biden is extremely vulnerable. According to NBC News polling out this week, his disapproval rating is at 54% (just two points shy of his all-time high) while a whopping 70% of Americans say they don’t want him to run again. With those numbers, his campaign should be politically dead-on-arrival.

But here’s the problem for Republicans: Sixty percent of voters also don’t want Donald Trump to run again. Americans are sending a clear message to both parties: They want new candidates to choose from in 2024. As Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who helped conduct the NBC poll, explains, “people do not want a Biden-Trump rematch.” But it looks increasingly likely the country will get exactly that.

So, what happens if voters are forced to choose between two candidates they don’t want? A Wall Street Journal poll (conducted by pro-Trump super PAC pollster Tony Fabrizio) suggests the answer: It found that among voters who disapprove of both Trump and Biden, Biden leads Trump by a massive 39 points: 54% to 15%. Clearly, swing voters who dislike Biden dislike Trump even more.

To beat Biden, Republicans need the votes of the 54% majority who disapprove of his performance in office. And Trump appears to be the one candidate who can’t deliver those votes. If Republicans force these voters to choose between Trump and Biden, they will push these voters into a position they don’t want: picking Biden.

Trump is effectively Biden’s “get out of jail free” card — the former president is the one Republican candidate who can save Biden from the political consequences of all the serial disasters he’s unleashed on the country during this term: from the worst inflation in 40 years, to the worst decline in real wages in four decades, the highest gas prices ever recorded in the United States, the biggest annual rise in food prices since 1979, the worst labor shortages in American history and the worst crime wave since the 1990s.

That record should doom any president’s chances of winning reelection. But if Trump is the Republican nominee, Biden likely gets away with it. By contrast, if Republicans nominate someone else — almost anyone else — then the GOP can turn Biden’s 54% disapproval rating into an albatross around his neck.

It should not take another election loss for Republicans to understand this. Swing voters have already sent this message to the GOP — twice. In 2020, despite the fact that a record 56% of registered voters told Gallup that they were better off under Trump than they had been four years earlier, Trump lost — because he alienated too many people. Voters liked Trump’s policies, but they did not like him.

Then, in 2022, Biden turned in nearly the best first midterm performance of any president since John F. Kennedy — despite being the most unpopular U.S. president since Harry S. Truman. Democrats didn’t do so well because voters approved of Biden; it was because they disapproved of Trump’s handpicked House and Senate candidates, who lost winnable race after winnable race.

So, Trump has already cost the GOP two elections. Will it take a third for some to wake up to the fact that he is political kryptonite?

That’s the bad news for the GOP. Here are three pieces of good news:

First, while 41% of respondents in the NBC News poll say they will “definitely” or “probably” vote for Biden, 47% say they will “definitely” or “probably” vote for the Republican nominee — which means the election is eminently winnable.

Second, while nearly 70% of Republican primary voters say they stand behind Trump in the face of his indictment by a politicized New York prosecutor, only 46% in that same poll say that if the primary were held today, they would vote for Trump. A majority of Republicans say they want someone else.

Third, while clear majorities don’t want either Trump or Biden, Democrats are poised to nominate Biden. That means, if Republicans nominate someone other than Trump, they have the advantage.

Follow Marc A. Thiessen on Twitter, @marcthiessen.