Michigan — birthplace of General Motors, Motown and Madonna — is one of several swing states that will help determine the winner of the presidential election.
With its 15 electoral votes, the Great Lake State could push former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris across the finish line.
So, with fewer than two weeks until Election Day, here is what recent polls and early voting data reveals about how the race is shaping up in the state.
What polls show
According to a polling average from FiveThirtyEight — an election analysis site — Trump and Harris are neck-and-neck with one another in Michigan. Similarly, Nate Silver — a preeminent pollster — has them about even , with Harris leading Trump by less than one point.
Multiple individual polls conducted in October also indicate the race is extraordinarily close, with Harris or Trump ahead by just a few points.
For example, an InsiderAdvantage poll conducted between Oct. 26 and 27 found Trump outpacing Harris by one point — 48% to 47%. The poll sampled 800 likely voters and has a margin of error of 3.7 percentage points.
The two candidates were tied at 47% in a Redfield and Wilton Strategies poll taken between Oct. 20 and 22. The poll, which sampled 1,295 respondents in the state, has a margin of error of 2.74 percentage points.
In contrast, a Quinnipiac poll found Harris leading the former president by four points — 49% to 46%. The poll, conducted between Oct. 17 to 21, sampled 1,136 likely voters and has a margin of error of 2.9 percentage points.
Referencing these recent polls, Nicholas Valentino, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan, told McClatchy News, “The best information we have at the moment is that Michigan is a dead heat.”
He noted, however, that polls from the past two presidential elections in the state were biased toward the Democrats.
“If the polls here are biased in the same way as 2016 and 2020, even not quite as much, Trump will win the state,” Valentino said. But, he added that pollsters have gone through great efforts to “avoid making the same mistake.”
Matthew Grossmann, a professor of political science at Michigan State University, told McClatchy News polls in the state — like elsewhere in the country — show a sizable share of Black and Arab voters shifting toward Trump.
There will likely “be significant movement” among these groups, Grossman said.
But, at this stage, with the race being so close, the polls can’t be used to predict the winner, he said.
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What early voting data shows
The Michigan secretary of state announced that over 145,000 ballots were cast Oct. 26, the first day early voting was available statewide.
These results “far” exceeded “the expectations of state and local election officials,” the secretary said.
Overall, more than 1.8 million people in Michigan have cast their votes — either through mail-in ballots or early in-person voting, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab.
The state doesn’t provide party registration information about these early votes, making it difficult to determine whether the Democrats or Republicans are leading, experts said.
However, other demographic data is available — including on the age and gender of early voters.
So far, about 1 million women have cast ballots, compared to about 800,000 men, according to the Election Lab.
“That probably favors the Dems, but it’s hard to know anything for sure,” Dante Chinni, director of the American Communities Project at Michigan State University, told McClatchy News.
Grossman stressed that using early voting data to predict the final outcome is dubious for several reasons.
One is the state has instituted a number of changes to its early voting process in recent years, making it difficult to compare early voting data to past presidential elections.
“The other issue is that the earliest early voting statistics are the worst because people who vote on the initial days of early voting are usually the highest propensity voters,” Grossman said, meaning these voters aren’t representative of the overall voting population.
Ultimately, there won’t be a clear picture of how the early vote breaks down until after the polls have closed on Election Day, Valentino said.
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