Is Biden’s 24-Point Michigan Lead Deceptive? It Was for Hillary Clinton in 2016
Joe Biden has a 24-point lead over Bernie Sanders in a Michigan Democratic presidential primary poll released Monday, eerily similar to Hillary Clinton’s lead over the socialist Vermont senator in the state’s 2016 primary before he won in an upset.
A Detroit Free Press/EPIC-MRA Michigan poll released Monday, one day before Tuesday’s primary, found the former vice president with 51% support and Sanders at 27%.
The poll surveyed 400 likely Democratic primary voters in Michigan by phone from March 4-6 (after last week’s Super Tuesday primary contests) and has a margin of error of 4.9 percentage points.
Monday’s poll is analogous to the 2016 cycle. The day before former Secretary of State Clinton and Sanders faced off in the 2016 Michigan Democratic presidential primary, another Detroit Free Press/EPIC-MRA poll found Clinton with a 25-point lead over Sanders, 56% to 31%. Sanders then won Michigan’s primary by 1.4 percentage points in a major upset. Younger voters and voters outside the Detroit area turned out in much greater numbers than expected in the 2016 primary, contributing to the polling error.
Monday’s poll found that Sanders’s support among young Democrats is softer than in 2016 — 58% among ages 18-29 versus 65% in 2016 — and also softer with those outside metro Detroit. (Read more from “Is Biden’s 24-Point Michigan Lead Deceptive? It Was for Hillary Clinton in 2016” HERE)
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