President Donald Trump’s path to re-election this November is looking increasingly precarious. In a new poll conducted by the firm EPIC-MRA in Michigan, a state which was key to Trump’s electoral college victory in 2016 and will likely be key to the victory of whoever wins in the upcoming general election, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden leads Trump by a full 12 percent. That’s a doubling of Biden’s lead in the state since the most recent poll by the same firm, which was conducted in January.
Biden’s lead stands at 12 percent when the perspective of those who are just “leaning” towards their preferred candidate is factored in. In the initial round of poll results, 50 percent of respondents said that they’d vote for Biden, and just 41 percent of respondents said that they’d vote for Trump. Those who were undecided were then asked who they’d lean towards if the election was happening and they had to choose, and Biden’s lead increased by an additional 3 percent overall. None of the undecided respondents went to Trump.
As of Saturday afternoon, the poll results giving Biden an overall 12 percent lead in the state are the most recent poll results to come out of the state. On average, according to RealClearPolitics, Biden currently leads in the state by 7.3 percent. It’s worth noting, all of these numbers have real-world support beyond “mere” poll numbers. In both 2008 and 2012, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama and then-vice presidential candidate Biden won Michigan by big margins. In 2008, the Obama-Biden ticket won by a staggering 16.4 percent. In 2012, the Obama-Biden lead slimmed, but they still won by an impressive 9.5 percent — almost double-digits. In 2016, Trump won the state by a meager 0.3 percent, suggesting that the state could easily swing back towards the Democrats.
Biden currently leads in an array of crucial swing states, according to RealClearPolitics. In Wisconsin, he leads by an average of 4 percent, and in Florida, he leads by an average of 3.4 percent. Senior voters make up an especially significant portion of the Florida electorate — and in recent Quinnipiac University polling, although Trump won among senior voters in 2016, Trump was losing to Biden among senior voters by 10 percent.
