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Joseph R. Biden Jr. leads President Trump by eight percentage points in Michigan, according to a new poll by The New York Times and Siena College on Wednesday, the latest poll showing Trump’s problematic position in Midwestern states as voters. white. without university degrees, his political stronghold, stay away from him.
Four years ago, Michigan delivered one of Trump’s most surprising victories, helping him break through the so-called blue wall of northern industrial states that had favored Democrats in presidential elections since the 1990s. This year, Michigan is back. to tend to those states, but in the wrong direction for Trump’s re-election hopes.
Biden, the Democratic nominee, had the support of 49 percent of likely voters in the poll, and Trump was at 41 percent, virtually unchanged from a Times / Siena poll in Michigan two weeks ago.
Recent polls have shown that Trump is behind Biden in Wisconsin by similar or even higher margins. Trump is also behind in Pennsylvania, although polls have shown the race tightened a bit recently and he held three rallies in the state on Monday, a sign his campaign believes is within his grasp.
Biden will win the election if he captures Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and clings to the states Hillary Clinton won in 2016.
The results in Michigan also indicated a tough race for Republican Senate candidate John James, a 39-year Black Army combat veteran who has benefited from a large amount of donations and support from the national party and its allies. Despite Republicans’ optimism about winning over Senator Gary Peters, a first-term incumbent, the poll showed the Senate race aligned with the presidential race: Peters led, 49 percent to 41 percent. .
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That was a better result for Peters than in the Times / Siena poll two weeks ago, when he led by just one point.
Above all, Trump’s popularity has been seriously affected by the coalition of white voters – independent, those who had an unfavorable opinion of him but who supported him anyway, people with and without a college education – who helped him to advance to victory in Michigan in 2016. He won by fewer than 11,000 votes, or 0.2 percentage points, his thinnest margin of any state.
Four years ago, exit polls showed it had a narrow majority of independent, white college graduates, while a large majority of white voters without college degrees won. Half of his voters said they did not have a favorable impression of him.
The Times / Siena poll found that only 33 percent of college-educated white voters said they supported Trump for re-election. Biden is winning that demographic comfortably, with 60 percent support. Biden also has an advantage among independents, with 44 percent supporting Trump’s 37 percent, and he leads the president in every region of the state except rural areas.
Robert Sutton, who lives in Waterford Township in Detroit’s northern suburbs, is typical of the state’s voters who have approached Biden’s column. Sutton, 74, is retired from General Motors and voted for Trump in 2016 as a “lesser of two evils” option, as he described it in an interview. But you recently voted by mail for Mr. Biden.
“Joe Biden is not my original pick, but I definitely don’t like Trump,” Sutton said. “The way he acts, the lies he tells, the harassment. I can go on and on. “He initially liked the idea of a non-political president.” But he was wrong, “he said.
Still, Sutton is concerned about the outcome. “I hope Biden wins, and I’m afraid Trump could,” he said.
He is hardly alone. Nelson Sepúlveda, a professor of electrical engineering at Michigan State University, said the prospect of a Trump victory has left him “very stressed.”
He said he checks political websites for the latest polls four times a day. And despite the fact that Biden leads in most of them, he still doesn’t quite believe it. “I have the feeling that whatever happens in 2016, it will happen again,” Sepúlveda said. “And I am terribly scared of what could happen to a person who is so divisive and only cares about himself and the stock market.”
Even among the least educated white voters in Michigan, with whom Trump enjoys a wide advantage, he performs poorly. The president is supported by 54 percent of those without college degrees, according to the poll, compared with 62 percent in exit polls in 2016.
Among white voters, overall, Trump is just one point ahead of Biden, 47 percent versus 46 percent. And despite the president’s insistence that his popularity with black voters is increasing, he only has 4 percent support among them in Michigan.
The poll, which was conducted in telephone interviews with 856 likely voters from Oct. 23-26, has a margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points.
Biden also leads significantly with people 65 and older, another voting bloc that elected Trump in 2016. Older voters in much of the country have resented the president as the coronavirus pandemic emerged and he was unable to execute a plan. consistent to fight. that. Now cases are on the rise again in Michigan, one of the states hardest hit by the first wave of infections.
As in other places, the pandemic has changed how and when people vote. Forty-one percent of likely voters in Michigan said they had already voted.
Diane Hall, 61, who lives in Alpena, in the rural northeast corner of the state’s lower peninsula, has not yet voted, but said she would support Trump. Ms Hall, a registered nurse, did not blame the president’s response to the coronavirus.
“Trump brought in military hospitals. I was ready. We had fans. We had the nurses and the doctors, ”he said, reserving his criticism for the former vice president.
“I hate Joe Biden,” he said. “I hated him since he worked for Obama.” As for Trump, Hall said: “He has done everything he said he was going to do, and I couldn’t be happier with his performance.”
Here are the crosstabs for the survey.
