Biden closes gap on Trump but third-party candidates pose danger, polls show

Multiple new polls show Joe Biden strengthening slightly in the US presidential election, but suggest third-party candidates could present a risk to his chance of carrying the White House in November.

According to a New York Times/Siena College poll released on Saturday, Biden has whittled down the four-point lead Donald Trump held in February, with Trump leading Biden 46% to 45% among registered voters.

The narrowing of support for the candidates seven months before election day comes as Trump is likely to be largely off the campaign and fundraising trail for the next six weeks while he attends a criminal trial in New York over pre-2016 election hush money payments.

A separate study of 1,265 registered voters released on Sunday by I&I/Tipp showed Biden at 43% and Trump at 40% if no other choices are in the mix.

Poll respondents were asked who they preferred in a two-candidate contest, with the option to chose “other” and “not sure” – options that both returned 9% of those polled. That 18% figure of the total vote, editor Terry Jones of Issues & Insights wrote, showed that Biden and Trump “are not opposing against one another in a vacuum”.

Asked a follow-up question that added the independent candidates Robert F Kennedy Jr, an environmental lawyer and vaccine sceptic, the Harvard professor Cornel West, and the Green party figure Jill Stein, Biden took the greater hit to his support, leveling with Trump at 38%.

With Kennedy at 11%, West at 2%, and Stein at 1%, Jones calculated that Kennedy’s presence siphoned off five points of Biden’s support to Trump’s two.

“This is not surprising, given that RFK Jr is on most issues a traditional progressive leftist, which makes him indistinguishable from the current leadership of the