Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's epic off-script speech Saturday night in Grand Rapids, Michigan, is not yet reflected in polling, but Trump had already surged to a 7-point lead over President Joe Biden in the key battleground state.
The Detroit Free Press story openly expressed concern and "worry" for Democrats in the must-have, Rust Belt, heavily Democratic state as its exclusive EPIC-MRA poll released Sunday morning showed Trump leading Biden 49%-42% head to head and leading Biden (43%-36%) in the five-way race:
- GOP nominee Trump 43%
- Presumptive Democrat nominee Biden 36%
- Independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 8%
- Green Party Jill Stein 2%
- Independent Cornel West 2%
"It's only going to add to the pressure on Biden to step aside and have someone replace him," EPIC-MRA pollster Bernie Porn told the Free Press. "The Democrats are in a difficult position."
The poll analysis in the Detroit paper expressed "worry" for Trump's "remarkable" lead in the Democrat strongholds of metro Detroit: 46%-44% head to head and 43%-38% in the five-way race.
"Trump's lead in metro Detroit is a significant indicator of how the political winds have changed for Biden, who four years ago beat Trump 56%-40% in the region," the Free Press wrote.
The statewide lead by Trump is double that of the previous EPIC-MRA poll that came before the "bad night" debate June 27 for Biden. Trump took a 3-point lead into that debate, which was such a blowout Biden did a damage control tour that forced him to admit he lost — something most candidates never cop to — and suggest he made a "mistake" without saying which mistake he was referring to.
Then, as Democrats have seen a cognitive-compromised Biden losing and failing to stand toe to toe on stage with Trump — as conservative media has shown for years — they are even calling on Biden to withdraw from the race.
That call began before the assassination attempt on Trump and now has only grown more desperate to disenfranchise the Democrat primary voters to hand-pick a candidate who might compete with Trump to keep Democrats in power.
"There's never been anything like it, and now we have something coming up where they're going to go to the convention and they have a couple of problems: No. 1, they have no idea who their candidate is and neither do we," Trump told his Saturday night Grand Rapids campaign rally that aired live and in its entirety on Newsmax and the free Newsmax2 streaming platform. "That's a problem. But we'll see. Hopefully they get it worked out.
"Sort of interesting: This guy goes and he gets the votes and now they want to take it away. That's democracy. They talk about democracy. Let's take it away from them."
EPIC-MRA polled 600 voters starting the day of the attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, Pa., and ending before Trump spoke at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, — another key battleground in the blue wall Rust Belt. The results have a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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