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Former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden will take the debate stage Thursday night while remaining neck and neck in the polls.
The two candidates will participate in the first debate of the 2024 election on Thursday at 9 p.m. in Atlanta. The debate, hosted by CNN and moderated by Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, will be the first time they have debated since 2020. They have agreed to participate in one other debate, in September.
As they prepare for Thursday's highly anticipated event, polls show a close race nationally, but one candidate has eked out an advantage in nearly every swing state.
FiveThirtyEight's latest polling average shows Trump and Biden are a mere 0.1 percentage points apart as of Wednesday, with the Republican garnering 41 percent support and the Democrat getting 40.9 percent. Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who failed to qualify for the debate, received 9.3 percent support, according to FiveThirtyEight.
In a head-to-head matchup without Kennedy's name on the ballot, averages from Real Clear Polling (RCP) show Trump ahead by just 1.5 percent, with 46.6 percent to Biden's 45.1 percent.
Although a new poll released Wednesday by The New York Times/Siena College found Trump with a 3-point advantage among likely voters and a 6-point advantage among registered voters nationally, the pollsters' polling average shows the former president with a narrower lead of only 1 percent.
In the battleground states, the former president is still ahead of Biden by 1 percent in Wisconsin, but that advantage increases in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Nevada. Trump leads in Michigan and Pennsylvania by 2 percent and Nevada by 4 percent, according to the New York Times/Siena polling averages. RCP averages paint a similar picture, showing Trump and Biden tied in Wisconsin and Trump up 4 points in Nevada.
In 2020, Biden beat Trump in all four of these states, although the margins were extremely slim. His largest win was in Michigan, which he carried by just 154,000 votes, and his smallest win was in Wisconsin, by a margin of 20,000 votes.
Trump's lead gets significantly larger in other critical swing states: Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina. Biden trails the former president by 5 percent in all three states, the New York Times/Siena polling averages show.
North Carolina was the only of the group that Trump won in 2020, and Georgia and Arizona were the closest two states in the last presidential election. Biden won Georgia by only 11,779 votes and Arizona by just 10,458 votes.
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About the writer
Katherine Fung is a Newsweek senior reporter based in New York City. She has covered U.S. politics and culture extensively. ... Read more