More voters in Michigan plan to vote by mail than in person on election day, according to a Spry Strategies poll.
The poll, which shows former President Donald Trump leading President Joe Biden by 4.3 percentage points, found that 43.3 percent of the 709 likely voter respondents intend to vote via an absentee mail-in ballot, while 41.2 percent plan to show up at that ballot box on election day.
Another nine percent say they will vote early, but in person, while nearly seven percent are unsure how they will cast their ballots.
During the 2020 election, amid the coronavirus pandemic, 3.2 million of the state’s 5.5 million ballots were absentee ballots, Mlive reported days after the election. This accounted for 57 percent of the total vote.
This marked a major jump compared to 2016, when “26 percent of all votes were cast early,” as the New York Times reported. While the poll indicates the absentee voter turnout will be less than in 2020, it reveals the voting method has gained popularity since 2016, so much so it is preferable to a plurality of voters.
And while a tepidness exists among Republicans about voting in-person, RNC co-chair Lara Trump, the daughter-in-law of the 45th president, is calling on the GOP base nationally to embrace mail-in and early voting.
During an interview with NBC News published on March 27, she pointed to mail-in voting when asked “what has to get addressed right now” for the GOP to be successful in 2024:
I think we addressed some staffing that probably we didn’t need there. We’ve kind of shaken things up in that respect, but I think when we’re looking at actual election, we have to start encouraging Republican voters to do things like voting early, trust mail-in voting. These are ways that we actually can have a big lead heading into election day. And these are things Republicans have historically shied away from.
She told NBC News correspondent Garret Hake, “I think if you talk to [Donald Trump] right now, you will see that he is very much embracing early voting.”
The poll sampled 709 likely voters in Michigan from March 25-28, and the margin of error is ± 3.7 percent.
