Former President Trump is the favorite 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 dispute between the three candidates, 44% of voters interviewed said they supported Trump, while 38% said they would vote for Biden. Another 12% said they supported Kennedy and 5% said they didn’t know or weren’t sure who they would support.
The former president also led Biden in a two-way race, with 48% of respondents saying they would support Trump and 43% saying the same about Biden. Another 9% said they didn’t know or weren’t sure.
“Trump now has a clear lead in the presidential race and this is based on the simplest of reasons: America thinks Donald Trump did a better job as president and is therefore willing to vote him back into office. Biden has a hill to climb right now, even though he has done so in the past,” said Mark Penn, co-director of the Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll.
Penn added that the poll shows a gender divide between Trump and Biden, with more men supporting Trump and more women supporting Biden.
The vote comes as Republicans and Democrats alike express concern about how Kennedy could impact the race as a third-party candidate. The Democratic National Committee established its own team to combat the influence of third-party candidates like Kennedy. And despite polls showing he fared well against Kennedy in the race, Trump attacked him.
In a Truth Social post last week, Trump accused Kennedy of being thrown into the race in an effort to help Biden and said his running mate, Nicole Shanahan, is not a serious choice. Kennedy responded to social platform X, calling Trump “deranged.”
“President Trump’s tirade against me is an incoherent barrage of wild and inaccurate statements that should be better resolved in the American tradition of presidential debate,” Kennedy said.
The poll was conducted April 24-25 among 1,961 voters registered by Harris Poll and Harris X.
Results are weighted based on various characteristics of respondents 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.
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