Trump Pulls Ahead in Michigan as Union, Women Voters Sour on Biden

Jeff Green and Mark Niquette
·5 min read
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(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump has pulled ahead of President Joe Biden in must-win Michigan as voters remain pessimistic about the US economy, a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll shows.

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Trump led Biden 46% to 42% in the poll conducted Nov. 27-Dec. 5, after they were tied in the same survey done in October and early November. Trump’s lead is just within the poll’s margin of error of 4 percentage points. The former president now leads in the monthly tracking poll of all seven swing states that will decide the 2024 presidential election.

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Biden has lost support among suburban women in Michigan and voters aged 18 to 34. And his inability to improve his standing with union households — despite being the first sitting president to join a picket line, backing the United Auto Workers — is helping Trump, the poll found.

Losing Michigan would be devastating for Biden’s reelection hopes. In 2020 he won in part by beating Trump by 154,188 votes in the state. And Michigan had been equally critical to Trump in 2016, when he won the long-time Democratic stronghold by just 10,704 votes and narrowly carried Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

Inflation appears to be costing Biden support among women. They typically do more grocery shopping than men and have seen first-hand the price of necessities rise, said Sarah Miller, associate professor of business economics and public policy at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business.

“We’ve seen generally that women are less satisfied with the economy today and the price of everyday goods and services,” said Caroline Bye, a pollster and vice president at Morning Consult. “Women seem to be feeling that the economy is hitting them harder right now.”

The poll also shows Biden failing to gain traction among voters in Michigan’s union households, a critical bloc in a state that’s home to the US auto industry.

“Auto workers are more in tune with Donald Trump’s policies in terms of energy and the economy,” said Brian Pannebecker, founder of the Facebook page “Auto Workers for Trump,” sitting in a diner across from the Ford Motor Co. axle plant in Sterling Heights, where he worked for a quarter century before recently retiring. “And that’s what they’re going to vote on: Donald Trump’s policies. They’ve had a chance now to see Joe Biden in action, and I don’t think they like what they see.”

Democrats were expecting Biden, who has called himself the most pro-union president in US history, to get a boost from union voters in Michigan after the UAW secured unprecedented gains in its strike. While Biden showed his solidarity with the UAW, Trump held a rally at a nonunion shop near Detroit and said UAW members were being “sold down the river” by their leadership. The UAW leadership has not yet endorsed a candidate, but in the past they have picked the Democrat in the race.

The hope is that rank and file UAW workers will follow the recommendation of union leadership when the time comes to vote, said Nick Kottalis, UAW president for the Ford Dearborn Truck Plant west of Detroit. Kottalis said even he is aware of the shift toward Trump among some members. “I have heard that on the shop floor, and I’ve heard that in our own church,” he said, speaking from a walkway within the sprawling plant, as pickup trucks rolled off the line.

But Trump, who campaigned against trade deals that union members blame for the loss of US manufacturing jobs, has helped lure the working class to Republicans, said Jason Cabel Roe, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party. “It has less to do with the recent strikes and more to do with a range of issues and political realignments in the last decade,” Roe said.

Early polls aren’t a good indicator of the results a year from now, and the Democratic party has just started targeted messaging to help Biden in the state, Michigan Democratic Party Chair Lavora Barnes said in an interview. She expects the erosion of labor support to stop once the UAW rallies its members.“When the UAW turns its focus on this election, when labor unions all turn their focus on this election, they’ll remember that this is the president who has stood with them, and stood by them year after year, and will continue to,” Barnes said in an interview. “And they will come to the Democrats. I'm sure of that.”

Methodology

The Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll surveyed 4,935 registered voters in seven swing states: 796 registered voters in Arizona, 801 in Georgia, 703 in Michigan, 451 in Nevada, 704 in North Carolina, 799 in Pennsylvania and 681 in Wisconsin. The surveys were conducted online from Nov. 27 to Dec. 6, and the aggregated data across the seven swing states were weighted to approximate a target sample of swing state registered voters based on gender, age, race/ethnicity, marital status, home ownership, 2020 presidential vote and state. State-level data were weighted to approximate a target sample of registered voters in the respective state based on gender, age, race/ethnicity, marital status, home ownership, and 2020 presidential vote. The margin of error is plus or minus 1 percentage point across the seven states; 3 percentage points in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania; 4 percentage points in Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, and 5 percentage points in Nevada.

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