DETROIT — 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.
However, Sanders drew a crowd in excess of 10,000 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on Sunday.
In a revised stump speech urging the mostly white audience to consider whether it was “satisfied with the status quo,” the senator emphasized the importance of Michigan to his second presidential campaign. Sanders played with his messaging to black Democrats over the weekend, scrapping plans to “directly address the African American community and make the case for why black voters should support him over Joe Biden” before announcing an endorsement from civil rights activist and former White House hopeful Jesse Jackson. Jackson joined him on the trail in the conservative stronghold of Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Sunday morning.
“Back in 1988, Jesse Jackson won the state, 2016, I won the state. And on Tuesday, if we stick together, if we bring our friends out to vote, we’re gonna win it again,” Sanders said Sunday evening in Ann Arbor.
A Michigan win, and earning a good chunk of its 125 delegates, is critical for Sanders’s path to the Democratic presidential nomination. Not only is Biden 91 pledged delegates ahead of Sanders, but it will test whether there is any appetite among Democratic voters for a 2016-like drawn-out primary fight between socialist Sanders and an establishment candidate.
There are 352 delegates up for grabs in Tuesday primary contests in Michigan, Washington, Idaho, Mississippi, Missouri, and North Dakota.
