President Joe Biden should be worried about Michigan.
The latest poll from Quinnipiac University finds the Democrat trailing his Republican rival Donald Trump in the swing state.
According to the poll, Trump leads 41% to Biden’s 36% when third-party candidates are factored in, including 10% for independents Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and 3% for Cornel West, and 4% for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, with 5% saying they either are undecided or refused to answer.
If the third-party candidates are removed from the equation, the poll still found Trump leading 48% to Biden’s 45%, with 3% saying they are undecided, 2% saying they wouldn’t vote, 1% saying they vote for someone else, and 2% refusing to answer, though Quinnipiac called the two-way race too close to call.
The question of whether Biden should run for re-election has dominated the media in recent months; at 81 he’s the oldest sitting president in American history. (Trump is 77.) Last month, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein argued that the Democrats should pick a new candidate in an open convention, and one of the top names floated by pundits as a possible replacement is Michigan’s Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who is popular here and has become a national figure thanks in part to her support of abortion rights.
The Quinnipiac poll found 54% approve of Whitmer’s job as governor, while 39% disapprove. (Among Democrats, 94% approve.) While 51% said they would not like her to run for president at some point in the future, 41% said they do, with 79% of Democrats supporting Whitmer for president in the future.
For her part, Whitmer — who handily won re-election in 2022 — has said she is not interested in running for president at this time, and in fact serves as one of eight national co-chairs for Biden’s re-election campaign.
Last month, Michigan’s primary election highlighted a potential vulnerability for Biden here, with a campaign to vote “uncommitted” in the Democratic primary to protest Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza leading to more than 100,000 “uncommitted” votes. The campaign was led by leaders in Michigan’s sizable Arab American community who supported Biden in 2020 but say they can no longer do so unless he puts more pressure on Israel to de-escalate the fighting, which has resulted in more than 30,000 dead Palestinians.
In 2020, Biden beat Trump in Michigan by some 150,000 votes, but there are more than 200,000 Arab Americans in the state — not to mention many young voters who oppose the war.
The “uncommitted” movement has since spread to other states, and has resulted in a number of uncommitted delegates that will be sent to the Democratic National Convention in August. Earlier this week, both Biden and Trump formally clinched enough delegates to become their parties’ nominees at the convention.
When asked of the most important issues facing the country, the poll found the top three are preserving democracy in the United States (22%), the economy (21%), and immigration (21%).
Lee DeVito
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