Trump tops Biden by 2 points in new poll

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to reflect the poll was a national survey.

Former President Trump in a new poll is leading President Biden by 2 points nationally, the latest indication of a tightening race between the two candidates.

The poll from the University of North Florida (UNF), published Thursday, found 47 percent of likely voters said they would vote for Trump, while 45 percent said they will vote for Biden. About 4 percent said another candidate, 2 percent said they do not plan to vote, and 3 percent said they do not know or refused to answer.

The findings suggest it could be a “very close race” in November, Michael Binder, the faculty director of the Public Opinion Research lab at UNF, noted in a statement.

While Biden appears to be gaining ground on the former president in the poll, he has also lost the support of some voters who picked him in 2020.

Six percent of respondents who voted for Biden in 2020 said they will instead vote for Trump in 2024, while 4 percent said they will choose a different candidate, pollsters found. Only 2 percent of 2020 Trump voters said they will switch to Biden this November, and another 2 percent said they will vote for someone else.

Trump has spent most of his days the past two weeks in a courtroom in New York City as he is required to attend a trial on charges he falsified business records as part of an alleged hush money scheme. The former president will travel next week to Wisconsin and Michigan to campaign.

The poll found 67 percent of voters said it would not affect their vote if Trump is convicted of a crime.

Meanwhile, Biden stopped in Florida on Tuesday to give remarks on reproductive rights, his first visit to the state since its state Supreme Court cleared the way for a policy effectively banning most abortions beginning May 1.

“You wouldn’t know it from what you read and hear, but, you know, we’re in pretty good shape in the polls,” Biden remarked Tuesday.

Thursday’s poll follows a series of other recent polls showing Biden starting to pull ahead in a handful of other states or national polls released this month.

A New York Times/Siena College poll published April 13 found Biden trailing Trump by 1 percentage point nationally, an improvement from a February poll that showed Trump leading by 5 percentage points.

An NBC News national poll published this week showed Biden trimmed Trump’s lead from 5 percentage points in January to 2 percentage points this month.

The UNF poll was conducted among 745 likely votes from April 8-20. The margin of sampling error is 4.2 percentage points.

Updated at 5 p.m.