Former President Donald Trump narrowly leads President Joe Biden by 2 points in Michigan, a swing state that Biden flipped by fewer than 3 percentage points in 2020, recent polling aggregates showed.
The aggregator from 538, formerly FiveThirtyEight, included polls the website deemed reputable conducted between June 3 and June 26 which showed that 78-year-old Trump led with an average of 43 percent of the vote against 41.2 percent for 81-year-old Biden as of July 1.
Aggregate polling by The Economist puts Trump ahead by 2 points and forecasts that he currently has a two-in-three chance of carrying the state in November.
FiveThirtyEight's aggregate included a poll of 600 likely voters in Michigan conducted between June 21 and 26 by EPIC-MRA put Trump at 42 percent to Biden's 38. Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came in third with 10 percent, followed by 2 percent each for Green Party candidate Jill Stein and People's Party candidate Cornel West.
Trump maintained his lead in a direct head-to-head contest with Biden, at 49 percent against the incumbent's 45 percent.
The aggregate also included a survey of 1,000 likely voters in Michigan conducted by Emerson College for The Hill, which put Trump ahead by two points—with 44 percent to Biden's 42 percent. Kennedy followed with 5 percent.
Again, the poll, conducted from June 13 to 18, found Trump kept his lead in a potential head-to-head, receiving 51 percent of the vote against Biden's 49 percent.
Newsweek contacted the 2024 Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns for comment by email.
With 15 electoral votes, Michigan is pivotal in the path to the White House. Trump narrowly won the state in 2016, the first Republican to do so since George H. W. Bush in 1988, before Biden won it back in 2020. According to a survey conducted for The Associated Press before the 2020 election, the state's electorate contains a mix of Democratic-leaning urban voters in Detroit, a large block of slightly Democratic-leaning suburban voters, and small town or rural communities that lean Republican.
The president's chances of winning the Great Lake State may have slipped even further than suggested in the latest polls, which occurred before Thursday's CNN-hosted presidential debate in Atlanta, where his performance against Trump was widely criticized. Early polls and bookmaker odds have suggested that his performance damaged his chances of winning the election in November.
The president has also faced criticism from some Michigan Democrats. Earlier in the year, Biden won Michigan's Democratic primary in February with 81 percent of the vote, but a strong "uncommitted" campaign highlighted his vulnerability in the state. Progressives in Michigan had urged voters to withhold their support from Biden in the primary in protest of the president's policies toward Israel's war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
More than 100,000 people, or 13 percent, had cast "uncommitted" ballots in Michigan.
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Flynn Nicholls is a Newsweek reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on U.S. politics and society. Originally ... Read more
