The incumbent president has opened up a lead over challenger Donald Trump in the 2024 US election race
US President Joe Biden hugs a woman after speaking at an event last August in Salt Lake City, Utah. © Getty Images / George Frey
Female voters have propelled US President Joe Biden into the lead over Republican candidate Donald Trump in the 2024 race for the White House, a newly released survey has shown.
A Quinnipiac University poll, released on Wednesday, suggests that the incumbent Democrat has a 50-44 edge over Trump in a hypothetical one-on-one matchup. That compares with a 47-46 lead for Biden, essentially a tossup, when Quinnipiac conducted the same poll just a month ago.
The major shift is due to support from female voters, who favor Biden by a 58-36 margin, up from 53-41 in December. The results were little changed for male voters, who prefer Trump by a 53-42 margin, compared with 51-41 previously.
“The gender demographic tells a story to keep an eye on,” Quinnipiac polling analyst Tim Malloy said. “Propelled by female voters in just the past few weeks, the head-to-head tie with Trump morphs into a modest lead for Biden.”
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However, the race is tighter when it includes the other candidates who will be on the ballot in November. Biden receives 39% support in competition with the full field, compared with 37% for Trump, the poll showed. Independent and third-party candidates Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West, and Jill Stein are favored by 14%, 3%, and 2% of voters, respectively.
Trump is far and away the leading Republican candidate to face Biden in the November election, and other recent polls have shown him ahead of the incumbent. For instance, a Reuters/Ipsos survey released last week found that Trump has a 40-34 edge over Biden. Respondents to that poll largely agreed that they didn’t want a rematch of the Biden-Trump 2020 race, with 67% saying they “want someone new.”
Trump’s last remaining opponent for the Republican nomination, former US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, would lose handily to Biden, Quinnipiac found. In a hypothetical matchup with Haley and the rest of the field, Biden would beat the Republican by a 36-29 margin, with Kennedy winning 21% of the votes. Haley would defeat Biden in a one-on-one matchup, the survey showed, but she would lose when other candidates are included because of her relatively weak support from Republicans.
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Quinnipiac is one of the most prominent polling outfits in the US, although like other major researchers, it wrongly predicted that Hillary Clinton would trounce Trump in the 2016 presidential election. Quinnipiac got it wrong in 2020, too, overestimating Biden’s margin of victory over Trump and erroneously predicting that he would win the key states of Florida and Ohio.
