Former President Trump is the front-runner in a three-way race with President Biden and Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., according to a Harvard CAPS-Harris poll shared with The Hill on Monday.
In a race between the three candidates, 44 percent of registered voters said they backed Trump while 38 percent said they would vote for Biden. Another 12 percent said they supported Kennedy and five percent said they did not know or were unsure of who they were going to support.
The former president also led Biden in a two-way race, with 48 percent saying they would back Trump and 43 percent saying the same about Biden. Another nine percent said they did not know or were unsure.
“Trump has a clear lead now in the presidential race and it’s based on the simplest of reasons — America thinks Donald Trump did a better job as president and so are willing to vote him back into office. Biden has a hill to climb at this point, though he has done it in the past,” said Mark Penn, the co-director of the Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll.
Penn added that the polling shows a gender divide between Trump and Biden, with more men throwing their support behind Trump and women backing Biden.
The polling comes as Republicans and Democrats express concern over how Kennedy could impact the race as a third party candidate. The Democratic National Committee has established its own team to counter the influence of third party candidates like Kennedy. And despite polling showing him fairing well with Kennedy in the race, Trump has lashed out against him.
In a Truth Social post last week, Trump accused Kennedy of being put in the race in an effort to help Biden and said his running mate Nicole Shanahan is not a serious pick. Kennedy fired back on X, calling Trump “unhinged.”
“President Trump’s rant against me is a barely coherent barrage of wild and inaccurate claims that should best be resolved in the American tradition of presidential debate,” Kennedy said.
The survey was conducted April 24-25 among 1,961 registered voters by The Harris Poll and Harris X.
Respondents for this poll are recruited through opt-in, web-panel recruitment sampling. Recruitment occurs though a broad variety of professional, validated respondent panels to expand the sampling frame as wide as possible and minimize the impact of any given panel on recruiting methods.
Results are weighted for age within gender, region, race/ethnicity, marital status, household size, income, employment, education, political party, and political ideology where necessary to align them with their actual proportions in the population. Propensity score weighting was also used to adjust for respondents’ propensity to be online. The margin of error for the total sample is +/- 2%.
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