How Donald Trump and Joe Biden Polls Look Five Months Before Election

Donald Trump and Joe Biden remain closely matched in the polls five months before the presidential election, though early signs have suggested Trump’s guilty verdict in his hush-money case may impact his chances at electoral success.

In March, the incumbent president and the former leader won enough primary races to secure, respectively, the Democratic and Republican nominations in the 2024 presidential election. Polls have so far shown that the results will be tight as the pair are statistically tied in most surveys or enjoying only marginal leads.

However, Trump was last week found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records related to a $130,000 hush money payment allegedly made to adult film star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said the payment was meant to prevent Daniels from speaking publicly about her claims of having an affair with the former president. Trump had denied any wrongdoing and claimed the case was politically motivated.

Since then, a number of polls have suggested Trump’s guilty verdict is hampering his chances at electoral success.

An Ipsos/Reuters poll of 2,135 registered voters conducted between May 30 and 31 found that in a two-way race, 41 percent would vote for Trump’s Democratic rival Joe Biden if the election were held today. Trump, on the other hand, would garner 39 percent of the vote.

The margin of error is +/- 2.1 percentage points, meaning the pair are statistically tied, however the poll showed Trump is losing support. In January, Ipsos/Reuters found that 43 percent would have voted for Trump while 38 percent would have opted for Biden.

According to poll tracker VoteHub, which aggregates polling averages of polls issued by highly rated pollsters in the last 28 days, Biden is now slightly ahead of Trump by 0.2 percent with 46.3 percent of the vote to Trump’s 46.1 percent.

This marks a change from last week, when according to election forecasters 270 to Win, Trump was leading the national polls on average by just under two points (45.8 percent to Biden’s 44 percent) based on the last eight surveys.

However, the latest poll available on polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight, a Morning Consult poll of 10,404 registered voters conducted between May 31 and June 2, found that Trump had a 1 percent lead, with the Republican enjoying 44 percent of the vote share to Biden’s 43 percent.

Newsweek contacted representatives for Biden and Trump by email to comment on this story.

Despite these indications, Thomas Gift, who heads the Centre on U.S. Politics at University College London, previously told Newsweek that reading too much into polls was “a fool’s errand.”

“Polls are so variable at this point that the only consistent insight we can glean from them is that Biden and Trump are neck and neck—not only nationally but in key swing states,” he said. “Trying to read too much into any one poll, or even set of polls, five months out from the election is a fool’s errand.”

The presidential election will take place on November 5.