Donald Trump Trails in Battleground State Poll for First Time in Six Months

Former President Donald Trump is polling behind President Joe Biden in Arizona for the first time in six months.

According to a poll by Data Orbital released on Tuesday, Biden would garner 38.8 percent of the vote share, while Trump would get 38.1 percent if an election were held at the time of sampling. While this lead is incredibly small, and within the poll's margin error, it represents the first time Biden has taken the lead in an Arizona state poll since November, according to analysis by polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight.

For instance, an April Echelon Insights survey of 2,401 registered voters, conducted for the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation, showed that Trump was ahead of Biden in Arizona by 51 percent to 45 percent.

In March, the former president and the incumbent won enough primary races to secure, respectively, the Republican and Democratic nominations in the 2024 presidential election. Polls have so far shown that the 2020 rematch will be tight as the pair are statistically tied in most surveys or holding only marginal leads.

Arizona has historically leaned towards Republicans in presidential election, backing the GOP candidate in six of the last eight trips to the ballot box, but it backed Biden in 2020 and the Democratic party in several statewide races in 2022. It's expected to be a close race in November.

Battleground states like Arizona will play a key role in determining the result of the election, so surveys from those states could be more telling than those of national polls.

However, many experts and academics have cautioned against relying on polls to try to predict the outcome of the election rematch. Thomas Gift, who heads the Centre on U.S. Politics at University College London, previously told Newsweek that reading too much into polls was "a fool's errand."

"Polls are so variable at this point that the only consistent insight we can glean from them is that Biden and Trump are neck and neck—not only nationally but in key swing states," he said.

Newsweek contacted representatives for Trump and Biden by email to comment on this story.

In response, Steven Cheung, Trump's campaign spokesperson, sent Newsweek links to a series of Arizona polls from February to April in which Trump led Biden in the state.

Data Orbital's poll was conducted from April 27-29. The sample size was 550 people, and the survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.26 percentage points.

The presidential election will take place on November 5.