Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has a slight lead over rival candidate Rick Santorum among voters in Michigan, according to an NBC poll released Wednesday.
Mr. Romney considers Michigan to be a crucial state for his candidacy hopes, but is finding it difficult to connect with voters in the state where he was born and raised.
Mr. Romney finished the NBC poll with 37 percent of the votes, trailed by Mr. Santorum almost within the poll’s margin of error at 35 percent.
The Michigan race is looking like a two man race unless something drastic happens prior to next Tuesday, as Texas congressman Ron Paul finished the poll in a distant third place at 13 percent, trailed by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich at 8 percent.
Additionally only 4 percent of the voters in the Michigan poll said that they were undecided as to who they will vote for in next week’s Michigan Republican primary election.
“Michigan is neck and neck,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, which conducted the Michigan survey for NBC.
According to Chuck Todd, political director for NBC News, Mr. Romney and Mr. Santorum are drawing the bulk of their support from different regions of Michigan. Mr. Romney’s supporters are mainly in the suburbs and city of Detroit.
Mr. Santorum is drawing most of his supporters from the rural areas of Michigan, where evangelical Christians and socially conservative religiously focused voters have a greater presence.
Mr. Santorum and Mr. Gingrich are statistically tied when it comes to the second choice of Republican voters in Michigan. That’s interesting, seeing as Mr. Gingrich finished the poll overall in last place, and the former speaker has not spent much time courting voters in Michigan.
The poll also found that Michigan is overwhelmingly a Democratic voting state when it comes to the general election.
In hypothetical general election match ups against President Barack Obama, the president leads all of the remaining candidates by at least 15 percentage points.
The NBC/Marist poll of voters in Michigan was conducted between February 19th and February 20th among 3,149 registered voters, with a margin of error of 1.8 percentage points.
