LANSING – Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton leads Republican Donald Trump in Michigan according to a new poll in which 44 percent of those surveyed said they support Clinton compared to 37 percent backing Trump.
The poll, conducted by Suffolk University, included all other minor party candidates who have qualified for the ballot, with 5 percent supporting Libertarian Gary Johnson, 3 percent backing Green Party nominee Jill Stein, 10 percent undecided and the rest scattered.
“Michigan is a state that Barack Obama won by nine points,” David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center in Boston, said in a statement. “Hillary Clinton, with a seven-point lead, appears strongest in the manufacturing base of a state that turned from Republican to Democratic after its auto industry began to decline in the 1980s.”
The poll of 500 likely voters, conducted Monday through Wednesday using live telephone interviews, has an error margin of plus or minus 4.4 percentage points.
Regionally, Clinton’s strength is in southeast Michigan, where most voters live. She led Trump there 54 percent to 28 percent. Trump was strong in northern Michigan with a 56 percent to 28 percent lead. Other regions of the state represented a statistical dead heat because the error margin in these geographic subgroups is large.
A major factor in Clinton’s lead is that while she leads Democratic respondents to the poll 84 percent to 6 percent, Trump’s problems with some Republicans had his support there at a relatively anemic 70 percent to 10 percent.
Trump led in the poll among white voters 47 percent to 33 percent while Clinton led among people of color, 74 percent to 10 percent.
Trump led among men, 43 percent to 33 percent, but Clinton had a commanding 54 percent to 32 percent advantage among women.
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