NEWSWEEK
Vice President Kamala Harris has surged ahead of former President Donald Trump in the new poll in Michigan, a critical swing state in November’s presidential election.
The poll, conducted by Morning Consult for Bloomberg, found Democrat Harris was 12 points ahead of Republican Trump in the battleground state, where he had been consistently but narrowly polling ahead of Joe Biden before the president announced he was ending his 2024 campaign.
The survey polled 706 registered voters in Michigan between July 24 and July 28 and has a margin of error of +/- four percent.
When asked who they would vote for if the election were held today, 51 percent of respondents selected Harris, 39 percent selected Trump, and 5 percent chose independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Three percent of respondents chose other candidates.
In a direct head-to-head between Harris and Trump, she maintained an 11-point lead.
Newsweek reached out to Trump’s campaign via email on Wednesday for comment.
Michigan will likely be one of the most important states to decide the outcome of the election because it is one of the larger states in terms of Electoral College votes (it has 15) and is much more competitive than some other populous states like California, Texas, Florida, and New York.
Other pollsters have Michigan as a tie or as a narrow Trump lead, but aggregator RealClearPolling puts Harris ahead by 2 points on average.
While other pollsters consistently put Trump ahead of Biden in Michigan in surveys earlier in the year, Morning Consult, which conducted the latest poll, was one of the only firms that put Biden ahead in the state. Their polls had Biden in the lead since April.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, said last week that abortion would be a key issue mobilizing voters in the state to support Harris. Harris wants women in every state to be allowed to get an abortion while Trump wants each state to make its own laws on the procedure.
