Newsweek
Donald Trump has lost his polling lead in one national poll, some five months before the presidential election.
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee is set to face incumbent President Joe Biden in November and polls have so far shown that the results of the 2020 White House rematch will be tight, with the pair statistically tied or holding only marginal leads in a number of surveys.
However, according to an Echelon Insights poll, Biden is gaining ground. The poll of 1,013 voters, conducted between June 10 and June 12 found that if a presidential election were held today, 48 percent would vote for Biden while 47 percent would vote for Trump.
The poll’s margin of error is +/- 3.7 percentage points meaning the pair are statistically tied. When third-party candidates were included, Trump regained a marginal lead. 43 percent said they would vote for him while 42 percent said they would vote for Biden.
Nevertheless, the poll does evidence a shift from Trump to Biden.
A previous poll by the firm in May suggested Trump was three points ahead of Biden with 49 percent of the vote share to Biden’s 46 percent.
The survey comes amid a series of positive polls for the incumbent president. According to poll tracker VoteHub, which aggregates polling averages of polls by highly rated pollsters given a rating of ‘A’ or ‘B’ in the last 28 days, Biden holds a very slim lead of 0.1 percent over Trump with 45.9 percent of the vote to 45.8 percent.
Meanwhile, polling and forecasting website FiveThirtyEight has predicted that Biden will win the election, using a simulation forecast.
However, while national polls are interesting, the 2024 presidential election will likely be determined by just a handful of key swing states due to the U.S.’s Electoral College system which awards each state a certain number of votes, based on population.
A presidential candidate needs to secure 270 electoral votes for victory, and winning the national popular vote does not guarantee success.
Meanwhile, other polls have suggested Trump is in the lead, and with five months to go until voters cast their ballots, it is still too early to predict the outcome of the election.
Biden and Trump will square off for the first of two scheduled debates on June 27 in Atlanta. The presidential election takes place on November 5.