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 surveyed voters said they backed Trump, while 38 percent said they would vote for Biden. Another 12 percent said they supported Kennedy, and 5 percent said they did not know or were unsure of whom they were going to support.
The former president also led Biden in a two-way race, with 48 percent of respondents saying they would back Trump and 43 percent saying the same about Biden. Another 9 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 more women backing Biden.
The polling comes as Republicans and Democrats express concern about 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 polls 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 the social platform 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.
Results are weighted based on a variety of a respondents’ characteristics to align 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 plus or minus 2 percent.