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Recap / Law & Order: Criminal Intent S2E3 "Anti Thesis"

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This episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent begins with a retirement party for a Hudson University department chair, Professor Winthrop. Winthrop disparages a fellow professor, Sanders, for being a media hound and even turning his subject matter into a rap video. He is then pestered by a graduate student Mark Bayley, who asks for more time to finish his dissertation. Two female professors, Fellows and Hitchens disparage Bayley. Prof. Sanders is pissed and confronts Winthrop in his office. Sanders then talks to Bayley and promises to grant him more time for his thesis - if he is made the new department chair.

Soon after, the department head and his secretary are found dead in his office.

The detectives investigate the scene and determine that the murder weapon is a gavel - implying that the killer thought he was getting justice by murdering Winthrop. They talk to the secretary’s roommate, who reveals that she was starting and stopping a CD on her Diskman. The detectives don’t find the CD, but they do find the words transcribed. The lyrics of the song point to an older African American man, most likely a professor at Hudson U. Which leads them to Sanders.

Sanders states that he was grading papers all night, but the detectives bust that alibi by noticing one paper with an obvious error that the professor should have caught were he actually grading papers. His assistant though, gives him a stronger alibi. The detectives then look into Mark Bayley, the grader of the paper and notice that his shoes are way too nice compared to the rest of his clothes. They find out from the exclusive store that sells those shoes, that a woman named Hitchens bought them from him.

Goren and Hitchens seem to verbally dance around each other. Hitchens is shown comforting Bayley before going to bed with him. The next day, she gets into a car and kisses Prof. Fellows, who now seems to be a lock for the department chairmanship.

Goren and Eames interrogate Bayley. When confronted with the insults that Hitchens uttered about him to Goren, Bayley appears ready to confess and implicate her too. But he goes into shock and dies.

An autopsy and medical records reveal that Bayley was allergic to peanut products. Medical records also show that he was recently rushed to the ER from a Thai restaurant. When the detectives question the hostess at that restaurant, they find out that he was there with an Australian woman who ordered for him in Thai, so he wouldn’t know the dish had peanuts. Upon further inquiry, the hostess reveals that the Australian woman spoke fluent but low class Thai and claimed to have lived in a town that has a large women’s prison. Detectives find out “Hitchens”’ real name - Nicole Wallace, and find out she had been convicted of aiding a Frenchman who murdered eight tourists to rob them.

The detectives trick Prof. Fellows into firing Hitchens/Wallace, then detain and interrogate her. The professor realizes she’s been played by the cops, re-hires “Hitchens” and sends a lawyer to spring her from detention. The police then discover that the real Prof. Hitchens had embezzled money from a foundation in Sydney. This was why Nicole had fled to the US - because financial crimes aren’t covered in the extradition treaty between the US and Australia.

But the cops discover that Hitchens cleared out her apartment and has fled, leaving a weeping Prof. Fellows.

This episode contains examples of the following tropes

• Armor-Piercing Question : Nicole tries to rattle Goren by asking when he realized his mother was abnormal. Goren fires back by asking her whether sexual abuse by her father led her to prey on men.
• Artistic License – Law : Getting terminated while on a work visa doesn’t immediately make your presence in the country illegal. You have a 60 day grace period to find a new job. Also, even a visa overstayer or undocumented migrant has the same legal protections that arrested US citizens have - the right to counsel, right to remain silent, right against detention without charges or a trial.
• Citizenship Marriage : Of sorts. Nicole has shacked up with Prof. Christine Fellows so that the latter will sponsor her work visa and eventually an Employment based Green Card.
• Depraved Bisexual : Nicole is involved in at least 9 murders, and sleeps with men and women.
• Failed a Spot Check : A paper that Prof. Sanders supposedly graded during the time of the murder, attributed a quote to T S Elliot when Sanders himself states later that it was Ezra Pound who stated that quote. This tips the detectives off to the fact that Sanders’ teaching assistant was grading those papers instead of him. Later, they use the same mistake to zero in on Mark Bayley.
• Kill and Replace : While it isn’t confirmed for sure, it is heavily implied that Nicole Wallace killed Dr. Elizabeth Hitchens and assumed her identity.
• Malcolm Xerox : Professor Sanders is a textbook example. He takes umbrage at his unorthodox teaching methods being characterized as a “rap video” and even calls the university a “plantation” and the department chair as a “massa”.
• Manipulative Bitch : Nicole Wallace manipulated Mark Bayley into murdering the head of the department. With him gone and the black professor as the prime suspect, her lover Dr. Fellows has a clear path to take over the department.
• Meaningful Appearance : Mark Bayley’s classy shoes don’t match his otherwise slovenly clothes and appearance. This tips the detectives off that someone else is buying him stuff, presumably female.
• Passed-Over Promotion : Sanders was a shoo-in to succeed Winthrop as department chair. Until Winthrop scuttled Sanders’ candidacy as well as his ability to get hired on at any other prestigious university, by raising a stink about the “rap video”.
• Perfect Poison : Nicole uses Mark Bayley’s peanut oil allergy to kill him - by spiking his nicotine gum. That said, an autopsy immediately identifies peanut oil as the method and Goren zeroes in on Nicole as the culprit.
• Ridiculous Procrastinator : Mark Bayley has been working on his doctoral thesis for ten years. And he is still nowhere close to being done. This is presumed to be the motive for murdering the Department Head - so a different one will give him yet another extension.
• The Sociopath : Nicole. Charming, manipulative and homicidal.
• Spanner in the Works : Nicole had a good thing going, having assumed the identity of Dr. Elizabeth Hitchens from Sydney Australia. Too bad, the real Elizabeth Hitchens had embezzled money and the Sydney police were closing in on her. This forced Nicole to run to the US.
• Secret Relationship : Between Nicole and Prof. Fellows. Also between Nicole and Bayley.
• Weaponized Allergy : "Hitchens" ordered Bayley a dish with peanuts, in order to trigger Bayley's allergy.
• Recap/Law & Order: Criminal Intent
• Law & Order: Criminal Intent S3E7 "A Murderer Among Us"

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Law & Order: Criminal Intent

Anti-Thesis

Cast & crew.

Reg E. Cathey

Daniel London

Olivia d'Abo

Linda Emond

Peter Gerety

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Law & Order: Criminal Intent – Season 2, Episode 3

Anti-thesis, where to watch, law & order: criminal intent — season 2, episode 3, popular tv on streaming, cast & crew.

Vincent D'Onofrio

Detective Robert Goren

Kathryn Erbe

Detective Alexandra Eames

Courtney B. Vance

Jamey Sheridan

Reg E. Cathey

Daniel London

Episode Info

Law & Order: Criminal Intent/Anti-Thesis

Anti-Thesis is the third episode of the second season of Law & Order: Criminal Intent , and the twenty-fifth episode overall.

Starring : Vincent D'Onofrio ( Detective Robert Goren ), Kathryn Erbe ( Detective Alexandra Eames ), Jamey Sheridan ( Captain James Deakins )

and Courtney B. Vance ( ADA Carver )

Guest Stars : Olivia d'Abo (Elizabeth Hitchens / Nicole Wallace), Linda Emond (Dr. Christine Fellowes), Peter Gerety (George Dawkins), Daniel London (Mark Bayley), Reg E. Cathey (Professor Roland Sanders)

and Philip Bosco (Prof. Winthrop)

with Geoffrey Cantor (Ronald Hardin), Craig Chester (Derek), Doug Barron (Hamilton Frisch), Pascale Armand (Valerie Goodman), Jason Furlani (Detective Ponds), Liana Pai (Janey Lin), Tess Lina (Vana), Shauna Hurley (Kate Robbins), Jane Sweet (Female Student), Khaz B. (Male Student)

Plot Overview

Arc advancement, behind the scenes, allusions and references, memorable moments.

• Episode Stubs
• Law & Order: Criminal Intent/Episodes

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Law & Order: Criminal Intent Anti-Thesis

Starring: Vincent D'Onofrio, Kathryn Erbe

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Nicole Wallace

• View history

A brilliant, calculating sociopath, Nicole was the only person who was ever able to get the better of Goren and took particular delight in confronting him about his unhappy childhood and career hurdles, which he always retorted by regularly regarding her own traumatic past and failures at a safe, normal life.

• 1 Background
• 3 Accomplices
• 4 Associates
• 5 Known Victims
• 7 Appearances

Very little is known about Nicole's past, although it was apparently so painful that she went to great lengths to keep anyone from learning about it. As best as can be determined, she was born somewhere in Queensland, Australia . Detective Goren once speculated that she was molested by her father from the age of three. Nicole has vehemently denied this is true, but once said in private to Gwen Chapel that "sometimes daddies love too much".

Nicole later surfaced in Thailand , where she met a charismatic sociopath named Bernard Fremont . Fremont saw great potential in her and trained her as his apprentice-in-crime. Together, they robbed and murdered eight tourists, for which she was imprisoned for ten years. While in prison, she learned to speak Thai, though only low-class, likely picking up the language from her fellow prisoners. After she served her time, she moved back to Australia to start a new life. In 1995, she was living in Bendigo and was vaccinated for anthrax there. One year later, she met a man named Daniel Croydon , who was studying anthrax in Bendigo.

As an adult, she married Rohan Bartlett, and the two had a daughter named Hannah together in 1997. Things were apparently normal up until her daughter Hannah turned three. After that point, Nicole began to fear that her daughter Hannah would become a rival for Rohan's affections; Goren later speculates that she had internalized her father's excuse that young girls are too attractive for men to resist. On September 12, 2000, while visiting Stradbroke Island at the beach with her daughter, she broke the girl's neck and arm, killing her, leaving her feeling remorse with what she had done. The child's father reported the crime to the Queensland Police at 2:30pm. Then, she later came up with the cover story that her daughter drowned in the waters off Stradbroke Island. She was never conclusively connected to the crime, but a year later, she left the country under the name of Elizabeth Hitchens after her daughter Hannah's body was discovered. Police in Brisbane would later find the body of an unidentified woman, suspected to be the real Hitchens.

Nicole first became known to Goren and Eames while using her Hitchens identity. Under this alias, she was employed as a visiting professor at Hudson University . While there, she became romantically involved with Professor Christine Fellowes , who was in line to become the head of the American Studies department. Wallace arranged for the dean's murder, knowing he was deciding on that position. Nicole hoped that Fellowes would get the position because of the suspicion cast on another candidate through the killer, Mark Bayley . To cover her tracks, she poisons Bayley after talking with Goren. However, her scheme is eventually discovered, and her fake identity's embezzlement is exposed, which gives her motive for the murders. As a murder suspect, Nicole could be deported back to Australia because she lacks American citizenship. When Eames and Goren arrived to arrest her, she had already fled. ( CI : " Anti-Thesis ")

She eventually meets a man named Gavin Haynes while on the run, seducing and marrying him. Nicole is thus safe from extradition since she becomes an American citizen upon her marriage. She decides to get revenge on Goren for exposing her scheme. To this end, she seduces and sleeps with Doctors Roger Stern and Scott Borman , also stealing two grams of anthrax from Davis' personal collection. She then met a woman named Connie Matson at a bar near a U.S. Air Force base and slept with her to gain her trust. Nicole then persuaded Connie to get some anthrax vaccine boosters so she could buy them from her. ( CI : " Zoonotic ")

When Connie managed to get the vaccines, Nicole killed her by hitting her over the head with a dumbbell, stole the vaccines, and framed Dan Croydon, a deadbeat dad whom Nicole knew would remind Goren of his own father. When Goren relentlessly pursued Croydon, she invited herself into Croydon's apartment, had sex with him, and enticed him to write a note expressing his anger at Goren. When he was finished, she killed him and made it look like a suicide. She then left the vaccines and vial of anthrax on a train to Montreal to prove Croydon's innocence and ruin Goren's reputation. Nicole later met Goren in a diner and taunted him. She also introduced him to Gavin. Goren had her arrested on suspicion of stealing the anthrax and tricked her into revealing her true identity. She is then arrested for murder. ( CI : " A Person of Interest ")

Nevertheless, Haynes stood by Nicole and even used his money to finance her successful defense to the murder charge. ( CI : " Pas de Deux ")

The marriage ended after Nicole said that she was unable to bear children and "didn't see the point" of seeing a doctor about it. Sometime after, Nicole took a new lover, Ella Miyazaki , and began training her to be her accomplice, just as Fremont had trained her. Upon learning that Haynes had revealed her infertility to Goren and Eames, she sent Ella to kill her ex-husband by trapping him in an elevator and stealing his asthma inhaler so he would have an attack and suffocate. However, this attempt was averted by Goren. Eventually, the murder of her own daughter Hannah was revealed, which persuaded Ella to turn on Nicole. When Nicole figured it out, Nicole killed her and she faked her own death. ( CI : " Great Barrier ")

Nicole re-emerged a year later, now working as a librarian and engaged to Dr. Evan Chapel ; however, it is strongly implied that she murdered Evan's brother Larry and made it look like an accidental drug overdose. Goren believed that Nicole was planning to kill Evan's daughter Gwen in order to collect on the girl's trust fund. During the investigation, Goren learned that Evan was, in fact, trying to kill Gwen, and Nicole was trying to protect the girl, whom she had grown to love Goren confronted Wallace and told her that she would always pose a threat to anyone who got close to her, and implored her to help him protect Gwen. Nicole gave Goren evidence implicating Chapel in the murder of his wife and the assault of his daughter but insisted that she could be a good mother to Gwen. She then kidnapped the girl, but, in a rare moment of conscience, left her with her aunt in Arizona. She then left a voicemail for Goren admitting that he was right and cursing him for taking away her last chance at happiness. ( CI : " Grow ")

In 2005, Bernard Fremont was arrested for the murder of Russ Corbett. As he was leaving the courthouse after his arraignment, an unidentified woman stabbed him with a syringe, killing him instantly. Though he would never be able to prove it, Goren believed Nicole to be the assailant. ( CI : " Slither ")

In 2008, she was murdered herself by Dr. Declan Gage , who cut her heart out after manipulating her to murder Frank Goren , Robert's brother. According to Gage, her last words were "Tell Bobby he was the only man I ever loved." While it's never revealed who Bobby was, it's possible she means Goren since his first name is Robert ( CI : " Frame ").

Goren thought about his initial encounter with Nicole during a therapy session with psychologist Paula Gyson . ( CI : " Boots on the Ground ")

Accomplices

• Bernard Fremont
• Mark Bayley
• Ella Miyazaki
• Declan Gage
• Victim: Officer William Davis
• Victim: Monica Chapel
• Attempted Victim: Gwen Chapel

Known Victims

• Unknown dates from 1985 to 1987, Thailand: Eight unnamed men (all seduced by Nicole and killed by Fremont)
• September 12, 2000: Hannah June Bartlett (twisted her arm until it fractured and broke her neck)
• Unknown date in 2001: Elizabeth Hitchens (murdered)
• Franklin Winthrop (bludgeoned with a gavel by Bayley at Nicole's direction)
• Kate Robbins (bludgeoned with a gavel by Bayley at Nicole's direction)
• October 2: Mark Bayley (poisoned with peanut oil in his nicotine gum)
• April 17: Connie Matson (bludgeoned over the head with a dumbbell)
• April 23: Daniel Croydon (strangled and staged his death to look like a suicide)
• May 18: Zach Thaler (injected with a fatal dose of succinylcholine)
• Gavin Haynes (assaulted; Ella attempted to suffocate him in an elevator)
• Ella Miyazaki (crushed her trachea)
• August 2005: Larry Chapel (injected with a fatal dose of potassium chloride under his tongue)
• December 2006: Bernard Fremont (poisoned)
• Frank Goren (injected with a fatal dose of succinylcholine at Gage's direction)
• Robert Goren (stalked and harassed with Gage's conspiracy)
• Her fingerprints are later matched to a murderer named Madeleine Haynes on the French crime series Jo and according to actress Olivia d'Abo and the series creator René Balcer , Madeline is Nicole Wallace with a new alias. Peculiarly, her DNA wasn't a match, meaning she likely used forensic trickery to escape and assume a new identity.
• Viewers were polled to see whether Nicole would die on Great Barrier . East Coast viewers saw Nicole live; the West Coast viewers saw her die.

Appearances

• Season 2 : " Anti-Thesis " • " A Person of Interest "
• Season 4 : " Great Barrier "
• Season 5 : " Grow "
• Season 7 : " Frame "
• Season 10 : " Boots on the Ground " (archive footage)
• 1 Elliot Stabler
• 2 Olivia Benson
• 3 Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

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Standout moments from the hearing on the Biden classified documents probe by special counsel Hur

Special counsel Robert Hur says politics played no part in his investigation or report into President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents. Lawmakers have turned a hearing on the matter into a proxy battle between Biden and Donald Trump.

Special Counsel Robert Hur speaks during a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee in the Rayburn Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, March 12, 2024. (AP Photo/Nathan Howard)

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Special Counsel Robert Hur listens to recorded remarks of President Joe Biden during a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee in the Rayburn Office Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, March 12, 2024. (AP Photo/Nathan Howard)

Department of Justice Special Counsel Robert Hur is sworn in before a House Judiciary Committee hearing, Tuesday March 12, 2024, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

A transcript of a recorded interview between Special Counsel Robert Hur and others, and President Joe Biden, is photographed after being released, Tuesday, March 12, 2024 in Washington. Hur is scheduled to testify before a congressional committee on Tuesday as House Republicans try to keep the spotlight on unflattering assessments of Biden. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s a now-familiar ritual in Washington: a federal prosecutor being summoned to Capitol Hill to discuss the findings of a politically explosive investigation.

Tuesday’s hearing with special counsel Robert Hur , who investigated President Joe Biden’s handling of classified information , broke little new legal or political ground. But it delivered plenty of talk about the president’s memory — faulty, in Hur’s assessment — about the laws surrounding classified material and, of course, lots of discussion about Donald Trump.

Here are a half dozen notable moments from Hur’s testimony, the questioning surrounding it and the newly released transcript of Biden’s fall interview with the investigator:

DEMOCRATS ON THE ATTACK

Special Counsel Robert Hur. (AP Photo/Nathan Howard)

Democrats sought to use Hur’s Republican bona fides to paint him as a political partisan who set out to smear Biden to hurt the president’s reelection campaign.

Though Hur concluded Biden should not face criminal charges, the special counsel also impugned Biden’s age and competence, saying in his report that the president would probably come across to jurors as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

In one of the most contentious exchanges of the hearing, Rep. Hank Johnson, a Democrat from Georgia, walked through Hur’s career, including his time as a law clerk for conservative Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist and his service as a top official in the Trump Justice Department.

Johnson accused Hur of slamming Biden to try to boost Trump’s campaign, saying Hur knew his characterization of the president’s age and memory “would play into the Republicans’ narrative that the president is unfit for office because he’s senile.”

Hur acknowledged that he is a registered Republican, leading to a smattering of clapping in the crowd. But Hur insisted that politics had nothing to do with his investigation. And he rejected Johnson’s suggestion that he was trying to get Trump elected because he wants to become a federal judge or return to the Justice Department.

“I can tell you that partisan politics had no place whatsoever in my work,” Hur said. “It had no place in the investigative steps that I took, it had no place in the decision that I made. And it had no place in a single word of my report.”

TRUMP ON TRIAL

Trump, the former president and Biden’s expected opponent in this year’s election, was nowhere in the committee room and the prosecutor who investigated him, Jack Smith, wasn’t on the committee witness list.

But that didn’t stop Trump from being a central character in Tuesday’s hearing. Democrats time and again invoked the criminal case charging the ex-president with illegally hoarding classified documents and refusing to give them back as a way to a distinguish his behavior from that of Biden.

Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York asked rhetorically why Trump was charged but Biden was not.

“Not because of some vast conspiracy, not because the so-called ‘deep state’ was out to get him, but because former President Trump was fundamentally incapable of taking advantage of even one of the many, many chances he was given to avoid those charges,” Nadler said.

Indeed, both Hur and Smith have taken great pains to illuminate the factual and legal differences between the two investigations.

Biden’s team returned the documents after they were discovered, and the president cooperated with the investigation by voluntarily sitting for an interview and consenting to searches of his homes.

Trump, by contrast, is accused of knowingly storing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, obstructing FBI efforts to get them back, soliciting the help of aides to conceal the documents from the government and seeking to have incriminating evidence destroyed.

ELEMENTS OF A CRIME

The hearing, just like the report, featured substantial discussion of the ins and outs of the criminal statutes governing the mishandling of classified information.

Republican lawmakers appeared repeatedly aghast that Hur could have recommended against prosecution, particularly given the storage of classified documents in a garage as well as a recorded conversation in which Biden can be heard telling his ghostwriter that he had “just found all the classified stuff downstairs.”

But Hur repeatedly reminded committee members that the most relevant statute at issue in the investigation requires that the unlawful retention of national defense information be willful — in other words, that it’s done with criminal intent. It’s a high standard that investigators in some other prominent probes have not met, such as in the Hillary Clinton email inquiry.

Hur did say in his report that he had uncovered evidence to support the idea of willful retention, but repeatedly noted he had not found enough to establish proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican, asserted that Hur had found the elements of a criminal violation but had given the president a pass because Biden was “senile.” Hur objected to that characterization.

“I need to disagree with at least one thing that you said, which is that I found that all of the elements were met,” Hur replied. “One of the elements of the relevant mishandling statute is the intent element. And what my report reflects is my judgment that based on the evidence, I would not be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury that that intent element had been met.”

ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEMORY

The release of the transcript of Biden’s interview with Hur and the special counsel’s testimony were unlikely to change anyone’s preconceived notions on the 81-year-old president’s mental stamina and fitness for office.

Biden repeatedly demonstrated a fuzzy recollection of some dates in his interviews with Hur, including the year of his son’s death and the years of his service as vice president. Yet he also demonstrated his ability to provide detailed accounts of both significant and mundane parts of his life.

Biden gave Hur a “photographic” overview of his home, long discourses on his political life and humorous asides about his sports car.

The interview transcript showed that Hur never asked Biden about the timing of his son Beau’s death, as the president had angrily accused him of doing. But it also suggests Hur’s exchange with Biden about his son was less revealing about the president’s memory than the special counsel had indicated when he cited the episode as an example of the president’s confusion.

Already the country’s oldest president, Biden is seeking another term that if served out would have him at age 86 when he left office.

SAME OLD STORY

Biden has a stable of well-worn stories from his life and career that he uses when he speaks publicly. Turns out, he uses them when he’s talking privately, too.

The transcript of his interviews with the special counsel shows how Biden revisited some of his most oft-told tales with the investigators who questioned him.

There’s the one about how he decided to run for president following the violence at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. “And then a young woman got killed, and I spoke to her mom,” Biden said. “And that’s when I decided that I’ve got to run. I’ve got to be involved, because I thought, presumptuous of me, that I was the antithesis of everything that this guy stood for, and I could beat him.”

Later, he told investigators the story of his trip to Mongolia when he was vice president, where he got handed a bow and arrow during a demonstration of an invasion of yore. “Pure luck, I hit the goddam target.”

And there was the story of his son Beau’s death, which helped propel Biden back into public life and inspired the title of his memoir, “Promise Me, Dad.” As Beau Biden was dying of brain cancer, he asked for a minute of his father’s time, Biden recalled.

And that’s when Beau said, according to the president: “’Promise me, dad. You have to stay engaged, promise me.”

PRESIDENTIAL POLITICS

Anyone expecting a sober discussion of the finer points of classified document handling would have been disappointed. Instead, Democrats and Republicans used the hearing as a vehicle to attack the other party’s presidential candidate.

The strategy was clear from the opening moments. Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, played a lengthy clip of a Biden press conference where he responded to Hur’s report but accidentally referred to Egypt’s leader as “the president of Mexico.”

Nadler responded with a sizzle reel of Trump struggling to remember things or messing up names.

Other Democrats also saw an opportunity to bring up Trump’s legal troubles beyond those involving classified documents. Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat, asked Hur whether he uncovered evidence that Biden paid hush money to a porn actress or former Playboy model. (“No,” Hur replied.)

It’s unlikely that either side landed a knockout blow, even after hours of testimony. Voters’ views of Trump and Biden are deeply entrenched after years in the public eye.

AP writers Colleen Long and Zeke Miller contributed to this report.

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