Former vice president Joe Biden holds a 24-point lead over Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) in Michigan, according to a Detroit Free Press/EPIC-MRA poll released Monday.
The poll of 400 likely Democratic primary voters shows Biden with 51 percent support, far ahead of Sanders’s 27 percent. The survey was conducted from March 4 through March 6, after Biden’s strong showing on Super Tuesday, and Michigan will conduct its primary on Tuesday, March 10.
However, when conducted during the 2016 primary, the very same poll showed Hillary Clinton with a 25-point lead over Sanders, and was one of several polls giving Clinton a 21-point lead on average. The Vermont senator then proceeded to win the Michigan primary by a margin of around 1.4 percent, boosted by turnout among young voters and voters outside the Detroit metro area that surprised even the Sanders campaign.
It is not clear whether Sanders will be able to repeat his 2016 upset. Following that election and the general election loss to President Trump, Michigan Democrats backed more moderate lawmakers in 2018, including Representative Elissa Slotkin and current Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
“Joe Biden is the one who is running on the blueprint that we ran on in 2018,” Whitmer said on Friday. “As I look to the fall, Joe Biden’s message is one that I know will resonate across the state.”
Sanders, however, has been campaigning hard in Michigan since Super Tuesday, canceling a planned rally in Mississippi last week in order to get to Michigan earlier.