The Investor’s Business Daily tracking poll results released Tuesday have Biden ahead nationally by just 2.3 percentage points, at 48.1 percent to Trump’s 45.8 percent among likely voters.

The daily poll, which includes Green and Libertarian candidates, launched on Oct. 12 and has found increasing support for Trump and decreasing support for Biden going into Nov. 3’s Election Day.

Just a week ago, on Oct. 13, the poll found Biden sailing with an 8.6 percentage-point lead.

IBD said Trump is closing a gap among independents and has benefited from stronger support among Republicans than Biden has among Democrats. Biden held 90 percent support among Democrats in the latest poll, compared to 94 percent of Republicans backing Trump, the New York Post reported.

But IBD said Trump is lagging among elderly voters and those in the suburbs, groups that helped him win in 2016.

Investor’s Business Daily is widely regarded as a credible pollster, given an “A/B” grade by polling-focused news site fivethirtyeight.com.

In 2016, IBD’s poll was one of the few to predict Trump’s win — a shocking upset that caught most media and politics professionals off-guard. Its final 2016 poll found Trump ahead by 1.6 points. Ultimately, Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2.1 points, but won the Electoral College 304-227 thanks to narrow wins in many states.

The RealClearPolitics average of recent national polls has Biden ahead by 7.6 percent, though in many swing states, the margin is tighter. Trump allies believe he has many “silent voters” who won’t publicly admit their support but will show up to vote.

The Biden campaign released a memo Saturday warning that Trump can “still win the race” and is “neck and neck” in several battleground states, where the incumbent is hosting daily mega-rallies and where Biden’s campaign got off to a late ground game amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Even the best polling can be wrong and that variables like turnout mean that in a number of critical swing states we are fundamentally tied,” Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon wrote in a three-page message.

“If we learned anything from 2016, it’s that we cannot underestimate Donald Trump or his ability to claw his way back into contention in the final days of a campaign, through whatever smears or underhanded tactics he has at his disposal.”

Biden leads Trump 46 percent to 38 percent, a 2-point gain for Biden compared to previous polls conducted earlier this month.

The survey released Friday found that 8 percent of respondents were undecided in the race, a slight uptick from the previous poll, while 4 percent said they prefer a different candidate and 3 percent don’t plan to vote in November.

Biden holds a 10-point lead over Trump among independent voters in the poll, 39 percent to 29 percent. That’s an increase from a 2-point lead he held in the survey earlier this month.

Slightly more Democrats in the poll said they’d back Biden in November than Republicans who said they would support Trump, though both candidates had comparable levels of support from within their parties.

Among Democrats, 85 percent said they would back Biden if the election were held today, while 81 percent of Republicans said they would vote for Trump.

The survey was conducted Aug. 15-18, with some responses gathered on the first two days of the Democratic National Convention this week, where Biden formally accepted his party’s nomination.

The survey of 2,840 registered voters was conducted online and has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.84 percentage points. The previous Hill-HarrisX poll was conducted Aug. 11-14.

Media polls indicate Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ruling coalition will handily win a general election Sunday, possibly even retaining its two-thirds majority in the more powerful lower house of parliament, AP reported.

Japanese voters may not love Abe, but they appear to want to stick with what they know, rather than hand the reins to an opposition with little or no track record. Uncertainly over North Korea and its growing missile and nuclear arsenal may be heightening that underlying conservatism.

“I buy into Prime Minister Abe’s ability to handle diplomacy,” said Naomi Mochida, a 51-year-old woman listening to Abe campaign earlier this week in Saitama prefecture, outside of Tokyo.

“I think the most serious threat we face now is the North Korea situation. I feel Prime Minister Abe has been showing the best tactics to handle the situation, compared to other politicians including past prime ministers.”

Abe dissolved the lower house a little more than three weeks ago on the day it convened for a special session, forcing the snap election. The timing seemed ripe for his ruling Liberal-Democratic Party, or at least better than waiting.

Support for Abe’s Cabinet, the standard measure of a government’s popularity in Japan, had bounced back from summertime lows. The main opposition force, the Democratic Party, was in more disarray than usual after its leader had resigned. Holding off would only give a potential rival, Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike, more time to organize a challenge.

The election is “mainly about the Abe administration trying to lock in its position … and with success, get Prime Minister Abe re-elected as president of the LDP in September and rule until after the Tokyo Olympics, until 2021,” Michael Green, a Japan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., said on a call with journalists.

Koike, her hand forced by Abe’s decision, hastily launched a new party to contest the election. Her Party of Hope briefly stole the limelight from Abe, attracting a slew of defectors from the Democrats. Its populist platform includes phasing out nuclear power by 2030, and putting on hold an increase in the consumption tax due in 2019.

But Abe’s gambit appears to be paying off. The initial excitement for the Party of Hope has waned. Koike, the party leader, decided not to run for the 465-seat lower house and won’t even be in Japan on Election Day. She is heading to Paris for a global conference of mayors that will discuss issues such as climate change.

The Democratic Party has imploded. Its more liberal members have launched yet another grouping, the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, which is now outpolling the Party of Hope.

“To be honest, I wish we had strong opposition,” said Ko Horiguchi, a 71-year-old retiree listening to Abe’s campaign speech. “But look at their sorry situation right now.”

For the rest of the world, an Abe victory would likely mean a continuation of the policies he has pursued in the nearly five years since he took office in December 2012.

That includes a hard line on North Korea. Abe says it’s not the time for dialogue and has pushed for tougher sanctions to try to pressure leader Kim Jong Un to abandon the country’s weapons development.

He has backed a loose monetary policy that has boosted the stock market and breathed temporary life into a long-stagnant Japanese economy, though many of the gains haven’t filtered down to working people, raising doubts about the sustainability of the recovery.

A strong election showing would boost Abe’s chances of being reappointed to another three-year term as leader of the Liberal-Democratic Party next September, extending his premiership. That could make Abe the longest-serving prime minister in the post-World War II era.

It would also give him more time to try to win over a reluctant public to his longtime goal of revising the postwar Japanese Constitution. He may get the two-thirds majority he needs in parliament for a constitutional amendment, but any change also needs approval in a public referendum.