Biden leads Trump by 7 points in Fox News Poll

Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden leads President Trump by 7 percentage points in a Fox News poll released Thursday. 

The Fox News poll determined that 49 percent of respondents backed the former vice president, while 42 percent said they’d vote for Trump in a head-to-head contest. Nine percent of participants said they were undecided or would back a third-party candidate. 

This month’s poll results were similar to July’s, where Biden held an 8 percentage point lead over the president. In June, Biden, with 50 percent of the vote, was ahead of Trump by 12 percentage points. 

Biden has held a lead outside of the margin of error 16 times since March 2019 in Fox News polls, while the president has earned between 38 and 42 percent of the vote. 

Fox News noted that more than half of the interviews were completed before Biden announced Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) to be his running mate. 

Voters were split over whether Biden would be a strong leader, but a majority at 54 percent said the current president is not.

A total of 54 percent of respondents said they disapproved of Trump’s job performance, and 66 percent said they were unhappy with the direction the country is going in, including about 40 percent of Republicans. 

A majority of voters at 85 percent remain concerned about COVID-19 spreading, with more than half at 54 percent saying the federal government did not respond to the pandemic seriously enough. Almost one in five said they think the virus is mostly or completely under control.

The Fox News poll was conducted under the joint direction of Beacon Research and Shaw & Company. The poll surveyed 1,000 registered voters between Aug. 9 and 12. The margin of error amounted to 3 percentage points. 

Biden has seen an advantage in recent national and state polls, including leading ahead of Trump in swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania. But Trump and his campaign have discounted the polls, specifically calling Fox News polls “fake.”