President
Joe Biden
and Republican frontrunner
Donald Trump
are in a dead heat in the White House race, and third-party candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr is pulling away significant support from both, according to a new poll.
A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday shows in a head-to-head matchup 47% of poll respondents support Biden, with 46% supporting Trump. In a three-way race with Kennedy, the anti-vaccine activist garners 22% support, pulling from both the major party’s support bases.
That leaves Biden with 38% and Trump with 36%, within the poll’s 2.4% margin of error.
The poll indicates that Kennedy has gained significant traction in a moment when voters are unhappy with their likely general election choices. Kennedy, who switched from running as a Democrat to an independent in October, doesn’t neatly align with either party’s ideology. He has called for closing the US-Mexico border and also describes himself as pro-union and pro-environment.
Trump has widened his lead in his party’s primary, polling at 67% among Republicans. Florida governor Ron DeSantis and former UN Ambassador
Nikki Haley
both trail him with 11% each.
The poll found that 53% of voters are concerned with Trump’s recent comment saying he would be a dictator on “day one” of his second term if he wins the 2024 presidential election, while 44% of respondents — and 84% of Republicans — said they aren’t worried about the remark.
Wednesday’s poll also found that support for sending financial aid to Israel to fund its war with Hamas is quickly deteriorating. In December, 45% of registered voters said they want more aid for Israel, down from 54% last month. Voters are split on how the US is handling the relationship with Israel: 17% said it is not doing enough, 29% said the US is too supportive of Israel and 45% said it’s about right.
Support for another major global conflict, the Ukraine-Russia war, is relatively stable, but split among partisan lines with Democrats largely supporting more aid to Ukraine, while only 42% of Republicans favor the idea, according to the Quinnipiac poll.
The downgraded support for Israel comes as Congress ended its year at an impasse over a deal to provide new funding for both Ukraine and Israel. The Pentagon said it would run out of money to replace US weapons sent to Ukraine by December 30. US lawmakers aren’t scheduled to return to the Capitol until the second week in January, meaning that funding could languish for weeks, if not months, while Congress continues to debate a foreign aid package.
The poll of 1,647 self-identified registered voters nationwide was conducted December 14-18 by cell phone and landline telephone. It has a margin of error of plus-or-minus 2.4 percentage points.
English (US) ·