Former President Donald Trump is leading President Joe Biden in the key battleground state of Michigan by 7 points, according to a poll reported by The Detroit News on Wednesday.

In the state that Trump won in 2016 but lost to Biden in 2020, he beat the president 42% to 35%, with 20% saying they’d vote for someone else and 3% opting not to pick a candidate, according to a Marketing Resource Group (MRG) survey. When the Democratic candidate was changed to Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, she beat Trump 46% to 40% — a 13-point swing from the matchup with Biden.

“It tells me that Biden has a problem, not necessarily the Democrats,” Jenell Leonard, GOP consultant and owner of MRG, told The Detroit News of the numbers. “If the base doesn’t show up, they could likely see themselves in the same situation as they saw in 2016.”

Several recent polls have suggested that Biden would win by several points in Michigan, according to FiveThirtyEight’s survey compilation. An early August Emerson College survey indicated that in a head-to-head matchup, Trump and Biden were tied at 44%, but in a three-way race with independent candidate Cornel West, the former president won by 2 points.

Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate in decades to win Michigan in 2016, where he narrowly beat Hillary Clinton 47.6% to 47.3%, according to Politico. In 2020, the state swung back to the Democrats, with Biden winning by nearly 3 points.

The MRG survey polled 600 likely Michigan voters from Oct. 2 to Oct. 8 with a margin of error of plus or minus 4%.

Neither Trump nor Biden immediately responded to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.

Mary Lou Masters on October 11, 2023