Former Vice President Joe Biden is crushing Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in polls out Monday as the campaigns hone in on Michigan, likely the last primary contest where Sanders can turn around his losing streak.
An “early results” poll commissioned by local news outlet, the Detroit Free Press, shows Biden with a commanding two-to-one lead over Sanders, shellacking the Vermont socialist 51% to 27%.
“EPIC-MRA talked to 400 people, according to the ABC12 poll, the results are very different from 2016. Sanders beat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Michigan during the 2016 elections,” Michigan outlets reported Monday. “Results show 51% of voters say they’re picking Biden, Sanders comes in with 27%, 9% say they’re voting for another candidate and 13% say they’re undecided. There’s a 4.9% margin of error.”
The chasm is so big that even if all undecided voters swing to Sanders, he won’t make up the difference. And among those who spoke to the Detroit Free Press, only around 11% remain open to switching their vote in the 24 hours ahead of the contest.
For Michigan voters, the poll says, health care remains a top concern, but Sanders doesn’t necessarily pick up support for his “Medicare for All” plan, likely because Michigan’s many union members are part of collective bargaining agencies that have fought hard for comprehensive health coverage as part of their benefits packages. A “Medicare for All” plan would end those benefits, and union members seem none to happy about that prospect.
Sanders had made Michigan into a keystone state for his campaign, and held half a dozen rallies there over the weekend, largely focused on turning out the state’s youth vote. Sanders, who struggles with support among African-Americans, largely abandoned plans to focus on minority voters in his Michigan appearances, according to reports from within the campaign, in the hopes that he can ride the support of college students and other ethnic minorities to a late victory.
“In a revised stump speech urging the mostly white audience to consider whether they were ‘satisfied with the status quo,’ the senator emphasized the importance of Michigan to his second presidential campaign,” the Washington Examiner reported. “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 Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Sunday morning.”
Although there’s a 20-point difference between Sanders and Biden, the Vermont socialist isn’t out of the contest. Sanders supporters’ pointed, Monday, to a similar poll taken just a day before the Michigan matchup in 2016, then between Sanders and the eventual 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton.
Clinton was leading Sanders by 25 points in a poll released the Monday before the 2016 Michigan primary, but Sanders pulled out a remarkabke upset victory over Clinton, besting her campaign by 14 points. This time around, though, Sanders is contending not just with “moderate” union members, many of whom have responded well to president Donald Trump’s message of economic populism, but with practicality. Michigan’s Democratic elite have mostly endorsed Joe Biden on the premise that Biden performs demonstrably better against Trump in the “Rust Belt” battleground state than Sanders.
Michigan is one of six states voting March 10th — Washington, Idaho, Mississippi, Missouri, and North Dakota make up the other five. In total, just over 350 delegates are at stake Tuesday.