Approval of Trump’s handling of the economy was also up 10% over the past four years.
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 Democratic party,” Jones wrote.
According to the Kennedy campaign, the candidate and vice-presidential pick Nicole Shanahan currently have enough signatures to get on the ballots of just six states: Hawaii, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, North Carolina and New Hampshire.
Earlier this month, third-party group No Labels announced it would not field a “unity ticket” candidate after reaching out to 30 potential people and raising $60m despite assessing that “Americans remain more open to an independent presidential run and hungrier for unifying national leadership than ever before”.
The group said it would only offer a candidate if it could identify a candidate with a “credible path” to the White House.
“No such candidates emerged, so the responsible course of action is for us to stand down,” it said.
Kennedy, who has consistently denied his candidacy is in effect a “spoiler” to Democratic hopes of retaining the White House, is not the only worry for the party currently holding executive power.
Polls are wildly conflicting. A recent Rasmussen survey found that Biden trails Trump regardless of third-party candidates.
In a two-way contest between Biden and Trump, 49% of likely US voters said they would choose Trump, and 41% would vote for Biden. That was a marginal increase for Trump since February, when he led by six points.
That same poll found 8% would vote for some other candidate, virtually matching the I&I/Tipp findings.
