President Joe Biden has overtaken his Republican challenger Donald Trump in three battleground states, according to polls five months before the presidential election.
In March, the incumbent and the former president won enough primary races to secure, respectively, the Democratic and Republican nominations in the 2024 presidential election. Polls have so far shown that the results will be tight as the pair are statistically tied in most surveys, or enjoying only marginal leads.
According to swing state polling by Florida Atlantic University (FAU) and Mainstreet Research, however, there are signs Biden is gaining ground in three key states.
Due to the U.S’s Electoral College system, which awards each state a certain number of electoral votes based on population, battleground states will play a key role in determining the result of the election. A presidential candidate needs to secure 270 electoral votes for victory, and winning the national popular vote does not guarantee success. Surveys from those battleground states could be more telling than those of national polls.
In Wisconsin, when third-party candidates are included, 38 percent of respondents said they would vote for Biden while 31 percent would vote for Trump, according to the poll.
Under the same circumstances in Michigan, 41 percent said they would vote for Biden and 39 percent said they would vote for Trump.
In Pennsylvania, Biden would also win with 41 percent of the vote to Trump’s 39 percent.
Biden won in these states by slim margins in the 2020 presidential election, taking all three from Trump after he won the three key states in 2016. In 2020, Biden won Michigan by 2.8 percent of the vote, Pennsylvania with 1.2 percent and Wisconsin with less than 1 percent.
Previous polls had indicated that Trump was ahead in key battleground states, including in polls that took into account third-party candidates.
The FAU/Mainstreet Research polling was conducted between May 30-May 31. It was partially completed online so a margin of error cannot be assigned to it, FAU said, but the pollsters added that a poll of this size would normally carry a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percent.
However, speaking to Newsweek Todd Landman, a professor of political science at Nottingham University in the U.K., said it was “still too far out from the election” to read much into swing state polls.
He said: “The race remains highly volatile, and it is still too far out from the election to make any firm conclusion from changing polls across these swing states.”
He added that legal proceedings against Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, as well as sentencing in Trump’s hush money case, which he was last week found guilty in could also affect voter’s opinions.
“The Hunter Biden proceedings in Delaware are just underway and there is a very long time to go politically, with many unknown events that will have effects on voter preferences and choices at the national and state level,” he said. “The sentencing for the Manhattan case is five weeks away and much could still happen that could change the electoral landscape.”
Newsweek contacted representatives for Biden and Trump by email outside of business hours to comment on this story.
The presidential election will take place on November 5.
