Former President Donald Trump has the lead over President Joe Biden in the latest national poll of the 2024 candidates from Suffolk University and USA Today, conducted just after the first debate between the two of this election cycle.
The poll, released on Tuesday, shows Trump three percentage points ahead of Biden, which is within the margin of error for the survey, in a matchup that includes independent candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West as well as the Green Party's Jill Stein and the Libertarian Party's Chase Oliver.
- Trump: 41%
- Biden: 38%
- Kennedy: 8%
- West: 1%
- Stein: 1%
- Oliver: 1%
The survey also found that more voters who chose a candidate other than Trump or Biden selected Trump as their second choice, 25%, while just 17% picked Biden. About 35% of voters who support a candidate other than Trump or Biden selected another third-party candidate as their second choice.
"It is still a margin-of-error-race right now, but the Biden campaign must be concerned about the defection of second-choice votes of third-party voters," director of the Suffolk Political Research Center David Paleologos told USA Today.
Independent voters "now favor Trump instead of Biden," he added. "The Stein/West/RFK voters he may have been counting on in November have left him after Thursday's debate."
In addition, the survey shows that most voters say both Biden and Trump should step aside and allow other candidates to take over as the Democrat and Republican nominees.
- 54% of voters said Biden should step aside.
- 51% of voters said Trump should step aside.
However, the survey shows that Democrats are far more likely to call for their presumptive nominee to stand aside than Republicans. About one in four Democrats said Biden should be replaced as the party's presidential nominee, while just over one in 10 Republicans said the same about Trump.
Voters were also much more likely to rate Trump the winner of the recent debate with Biden, with 50% of voters saying Trump won and 11% saying Biden won. Even among Biden supporters, less than one-third said the president won the debate.
"The findings, taken in the three days after the debate underscore the significant challenge for the Biden campaign as it tries to recover and put this debate behind them amid calls for the president to withdraw," Paleologos said.
The Suffolk University/USA Today poll surveyed 1,000 registered voters in all 50 states and the District of Columbia from June 28-30, with a margin of error of +/- 3.1 percentage points.