Former President Donald Trump‘s polling lead over President Joe Biden appears to be shrinking in his home state of Florida.
Trump, who has officially resided at the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach since 2019, won the Sunshine State each of the last two presidential elections, helping to transform Florida from a perennial swing state into a state with a reliably Republican lean.
While polls during the 2024 election cycle continue to show Trump with a lead in Florida, a survey released on Wednesday by Florida Atlantic University (FAU) and Main Street Research shows the ex-president losing half of his lead over the past two months.
The new FAU poll finds Trump with a four-point lead over Biden, 46 percent to 42 percent, in a head-to-head matchup. The April edition of the same poll showed Trump with a 50 percent share of the vote to Biden’s 42 percent.
Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said the following in an email to Newsweek when asked to comment on the new poll: “President Trump continues to dominate Crooked Joe Biden both nationally and in battleground states.”
Dukhong Kim, an associate professor of political science at FAU, said in a statement that the new poll results “suggest Biden has made modest gains and kept the race competitive in the nation’s largest swing state.”
When respondents were presented with the option of selecting independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., support dropped for both Trump and Biden. The June edition of the poll shows Trump leading with 43 percent of the vote, while Biden has 37 percent and Kennedy registers at 10 percent.
Trump was in a stronger position in April, when the poll showed that the former president was preferred by 48 percent of Floridians. Biden was favored by 38 percent of respondents in April, with only 7 percent opting for Kennedy.
The poll showed that 18 percent of voters aged 49 and younger were open to supporting third-party candidates, while only 3 percent of voters over 50 were open to the possibility.
Support for Trump was strongest among white voters without college degrees, with 57 percent supporting the former president. Black voters were Biden’s strongest demographic—68 percent said that they supported the Democratic incumbent.
“The demographic patterns we’re seeing suggest that Biden’s campaign needs to catch up among the traditional Democratic Party coalition partners – women, younger voters, Black voters, and Hispanic voters,” said Kim. “But Trump is holding onto his base among white voters, especially those without college degrees.”
The FAU poll was conducted on June 8 and June 9 among 878 adults living in Florida. No margin of error was assigned to the poll.
Several polls released in the weeks since Trump’s May 30 felony conviction in New York have suggested that Biden is gaining ground on the former president, including in states that have been trending Republican in recent years.
Trump was handed his slimmest polling lead over Biden since November 2023 in Ohio this week, although he was still leading the president by 7 points.
A special election for a U.S. House seat in the Buckeye State on Tuesday night also presented a potential warning sign for the former president and his party, with a heavily Republican district experiencing a massive 20 percent swing toward Democrats.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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