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Former South Carolina governor and presidential hopeful Nikki Haley would beat Donald Trump in Michigan in a potential November 5 head-to-head matchup against incumbent President Joe Biden, according to recent polling from The Detroit News.
According to the latest polling by the Michigan newspaper, in a direct contest against Biden during the general election, Haley would beat the Democrat by a margin of 10 percentage points, with 44 percent of the vote against Biden's 34 percent.
Haley's presidential bid, which had been stalling for much of 2023, got a huge boost last November after Americans for Prosperity Action, a GOP donor group founded by Charles Koch, threw its "full support" behind the former South Carolina governor. Koch, a billionaire, is one of the GOP's biggest donors.
The endorsement did little to hurt Trump's popularity, but delivered a huge blow to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who until recently was the only candidate to rise above single digits in terms of support among Republican voters.
In a hypothetical—and likely—rematch between Trump and Biden in Michigan, the poll had the Republican frontrunner beating Biden by 8 percentage points, a smaller margin than that of Haley. Trump was estimated to get 47 percent of the vote against Biden's 39 percent.
The statewide poll, commissioned by The Detroit News and WDIV-TV, surveyed 600 likely general election voters some 10 months ahead of the vote on November 5. Only 17 percent of those surveyed said Biden should be reelected.
The polling shows that Haley could potentially be a better candidate to put the GOP back in the White House than Trump, but the former ambassador to the U.N. is still trailing the former president by a huge margin in recent Republican primary surveys.
Newsweek contacted Trump's and Haley's 2024 campaigns for comment by email on Wednesday.
According to FiveThirtyEight, the embattled former president had 61.3 percent of the Republican primary poll as of January 9. DeSantis and Haley trailed him with respectively 12.4 percent and 11.4 percent of the vote.
DeSantis and Haley will debate on CNN from Des Moines, Iowa, on Wednesday evening as they try to secure second place in the Republican primary race.
In Iowa, where the primary season will kick off with the caucuses on January 15, the margin between the three Republican rivals is smaller, with Trump still leading with 51.3 percent of the vote as of Tuesday and DeSantis and Haley trailing him with respectively 17.2 percent and 15.8 percent.
Democrats have scored significant electoral victories in Michigan in recent years, with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer winning her reelection bid in November 2022 by a margin of more than 10 percentage points. In November 2020, Biden won the state by 154,000 votes, or 3 percentage points over Trump.
In the previous presidential election, in 2016, Trump had won the state against Hillary Clinton. It was the first time in 28 years that Michigan's ballot resulted in a Republican victory in a presidential election.
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About the writer
Giulia Carbonaro is a Newsweek reporter based in London, U.K. Her focus is on the U.S. economy, housing market, property ... Read more