Biden takes slight polling lead over Trump as independents consider Kennedy

While former President Donald Trump spends his days in a New York courtroom defending himself from 34 felony level charges, polls show his support among independents waning and his once-clear lead in the 2024 election all but dried up.

According to a Morning Consult poll of nearly 10,000 registered voters released Tuesday and taken in the days after the first trial of a former U.S. president began, President Joe Biden has slipped ahead of his Republican rival by a single point and is leading 44% to 43%, a 3-point swing from just one week ago.

“While Biden led Trump for most of 2023, Trump began making up ground last summer as the Republican presidential primary heated up. The presumptive GOP nominee consistently led Biden during the first two months of 2024, but the race has narrowed since then to a practical dead heat,” pollsters wrote.

Those results are in keeping with a Marist poll released Monday, which showed the elder politician up by three points among registered voters and a full six points among those who said they will definitely vote this November.

“Despite some weak spots for Joe Biden among non-whites and younger voters, he continues to outperform his 2020 numbers among white voters,” Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, said with the poll’s release.

Both polls show that adding independent candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West and Green Party candidate Jill Stein to the mix only further complicates matters for Trump’s second try at a second term.

According to the Morning Consult Survey, “nearly 1 in 10 voters have consistently said they would back a third-party candidate if the election were today, a high number that reflects Americans’ dissatisfaction with their probable choices in November.”

Of those independent minded voters, many who might have voted for Trump are leaning toward Kennedy, who originally started his long-shot White House bid as a Democratic candidate. Marist pollsters say that “Trump’s support among independents is also down (30% from 38%) in a multi-candidate field. While Biden’s support is little changed (34% from 33%), Kennedy’s support among independents has inched up to 27% from 21%, previously.”

“Although it bears watching in the future, right now, a multicandidate field does not benefit Trump,” Miringoff said.

At this point in 2020 election, Biden was up over then-President Trump by an average of 5.5 points, according to RealClearPolitics polling averages. At the same point in 2016, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was ahead of Trump by an average of 9.9 points.

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