How Donald Trump and Joe Biden Polls Look Nine Months Before Election

Donald Trump continues to lead President Joe Biden in three of the last five national polls as the clock ticks down to just nine months until the November presidential election.

In a classic head-to-head, the former president is ahead in a McLaughlin and Associates poll of likely voters by four points at 47 percent support, with about 10 percent undecided. A CNN poll conducted by SSRS and released on February 1 also has Trump with a four-point lead, while YouGov recorded Trump ahead by one point in a poll of registered voters taken between January 24 and 30.

Biden leads by one point in a poll conducted by YouGov for the U.K. weekly newspaper The Economist, scoring 43 percent in a survey of 1,486 registered voters.

Newsweek has approached the Biden and Trump campaigns for comment.

Trump and Biden are likely to face other in a rerun of the tumultuous 2020 presidential election in which Biden took the White House for the Democrats, ousting Trump and leading him to claim that the election was stolen.

Newsweek discounted a poll sponsored by Trump loyalist Kari Lake and another by a Democratic party sponsor, while other polls considered a matchup between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris and a hypothetical 2024 presidential election with a number of other candidates.

Trump and Biden are the most likely to be their party's respective candidates, with the current president recording a massive lead ahead of the other party hopefuls.

A total of 71.4 percent of Democrats favor Biden as their nominee, according to the most recent polling average recorded by analysis website FiveThirtyEight.

Trump, meanwhile, has faced resistance from former U.N. Ambassador and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley but still has a commanding lead among Republicans nationally at 74.2 percent compared to Haley's 17.5 percent.

Haley experienced an uptick of about six percent after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis dropped out of the race, but Trump has also bounced by just under 13 percent.

Trump and Biden strategists will be looking closely at polls between now and the election, factoring them into key campaign decisions. The Biden campaign has one question that looms arguably larger than any other: his approval rating.

At 38.9 percent, according to an average from FiveThirtyEight, Biden might have an uphill struggle in the months ahead. The rating is just 0.5 percent higher than it was last month and has largely stayed the same since the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in August 2021.

Trump, meanwhile, has a favorability rating of 43 percent that is part of a steady and slight uptick from last June, when he recorded 40 percent favorability.

In the last month, Biden's best result in a matchup with Trump was recorded by a Quinnipiac University survey from January 25 to 29 that had Biden six points ahead.

Among independent voters, Biden was ahead 52 percent to 40 percent, according to the poll.

Gendered polling showed that 58 percent of women preferred Biden, compared with 36 percent for Trump, while the hypothetical scenario of a five-person general election also put the incumbent in the lead.

There is further positivity for the Biden campaign based on a report by Moody's Analytics that says Biden could win two extra Electoral College votes over Trump in 2024 compared with his overall score in the 2020 presidential election.

The report was based on economic performance and "hinges on our forecast for the strength of the economy between now and Election Day."

The Moody's report said Biden would win by a "thin margin" in November, but the margin in key states like North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Georgia would be extremely tight.

It concluded: "If the economy continues to perform well as we anticipate and voter turnout and third-party vote share remain close to their recent historical norms, President Biden should win reelection."

Some leeway was also given to the prediction of a Biden win, with Moody's saying Biden could lose North Carolina and Nevada and still win, but losing Pennsylvania could sound a death knell for the president's campaign.

In similar national polls, Trump's biggest lead over Biden—also excluding third-party candidates and sponsored polling—was a Rasmussen Reports survey released on January 11 in which Trump pulled ahead by eight points. The former president was the preferred choice among 49 percent of 968 likely voters.

There since have been other strong polling results from Trump, including one released by IPSOS and Reuters on January 25, showing Trump six points ahead of Biden.

Voters are also concerned about Biden's age, even though Trump is 77. If the incumbent were to secure a second term, he would be 86 by the end of his presidency.

A new poll of 1,000 registered voters by NBC News found that Trump is ahead of Biden by 23 points on whether either candidate has "the necessary physical and mental health to be president."

Additionally, a Gallup poll released on February 2 said that just 38 percent of voters believe Biden deserves a second term. The figure is 12 percent lower than for Trump, who scored 50 percent in January 2020 in his reelection bid.

The Gallup "early estimate" is not necessarily indicative of an overall election performance. Trump went on to lose in 2020, while President George H.W. Bush's recorded a score of 49 percent before he lost the 1992 election to Bill Clinton.

Gallup said Biden can "take some solace" in that "voter sentiment about whether a president deserves reelection has often changed over the course of prior election years."

Several factors could also impact polls, including the ongoing issues at the U.S.-Mexico border, inflation, the economy and Trump's legal woes. Trump faces 91 criminal charges across four indictments and it remains to be seen if—and when—the trials in Washington, D.C., Florida, Georgia and New York will go ahead. Trump denies all of the charges against him and says they are politically motivated.

Trump also says he is immune from prosecution for anything that allegedly occurred while he was president. That question is likely to go through a lower court, before the U.S. Supreme Court makes its on decision.

The Supreme Court will also rule on whether Colorado can ban Trump from the primary ballot after the state Supreme Court ruled that he was ineligible from running because he engaged in insurrection as part of the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.