Donald Trump Scores Poll Boost in Critical Battleground State

A new poll has placed Donald Trump with a four-point lead over President Joe Biden in the critical battleground state of Michigan.

The EPIC-MRA poll, published on Saturday, found 49 percent of people would back Trump, while 45 percent would support Biden, the Detroit Free Press reported.

The poll found that both Trump and Biden lost ground when third-party candidates were included. Trump would then get 41 percent of the vote, Biden would get 38 percent, while independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would get 10 percent. Green Party candidate Jill Stein and another independent candidate, Cornel West, would each get 2 percent.

The poll surveyed 600 Michigan voters between June 21 and 26, and so does not reflect any impact from Thursday’s presidential debate between Biden and Trump, and has a margin of error of 4 percentage points.

Biden won Michigan’s Democratic primary in February with 81 percent of the vote, but a strong “uncommitted” campaign highlighted his vulnerability in a state with the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the nation.

More than 100,000 people, or 13 percent, cast “uncommitted” ballots in Michigan to show their anger over Biden’s ongoing support for Israel’s war in Gaza.

Israel’s offensive against Hamas, which controlled the Gaza Strip, has killed over 37,700 Palestinians, The Associated Press reported, citing Gaza’s Health Ministry. It erupted after Hamas’ surprise attack on Israel on October 7, in which militants killed some 1,200 people and took another 250 hostage. About half were freed during a November truce.

Another poll to establish how Thursday’s debate impacted the views of Michigan voters is expected in July.

“In a nutshell, you had Biden having a difficult time speaking the truth about a number of issues in a way that would be interesting and compelling,” Bernie Porn, a pollster for EPIC-MRA, told the Free Press. “Trump was able to much more articulately tell a lot of things that were not necessarily truthful.”

Kennedy could make further gains from Biden’s usual base in a July poll, Porn said.

“Given what happened [during the debate], I would not be surprised if that becomes a greater problem, where the Biden campaign needs to focus some of their efforts on dissuading people from moving for Kennedy,” he said.

It comes as polls are showing that many Democrats think Biden should drop out of the presidential race after his shaky debate performance against Trump on Thursday.

Seth Schuster, a Biden campaign spokesman, told Newsweek after Biden debated Trump that the president “is not dropping out.”

Even if Biden were to drop out, a poll found that none of the top names being floated to replace Biden would do better in a head-to-head matchup against Trump than Biden.

“The fact that other Democrats fare similarly to Biden against Trump suggests that this election is ultimately a referendum on Trump,” Thomas Gift, an associate professor of political science and director of the Centre on U.S. Politics at University College London, previously told Newsweek.

“Typically voters ask, ‘Are you better off today than you were four years ago?’ in deciding whether to back the incumbent. But Trump is such a polarizing figure that who the Democratic nominee is may be less important than in a typical election cycle.”