LANSING – Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has a wide lead over her Republican opponent, businessman Donald Trump, a survey by Michigan State University’s Institute for Public Policy and Social Research showed Wednesday.

Though Trump has room to grow in the final days before next week’s election, the margin of support for Clinton, at 47 percent to Trump’s 28 percent, is still large enough that Ms. Clinton should take Michigan even if Trump was able to garner the collective 15 percent of respondents who said they would vote for third-party candidates, Libertarian Gary Johnson (11 percent) and Green Party candidate Jill Stein (4 percent).

“For Republicans to win, they have to win the independents by a large share, and they’re not doing that,” IPPSR Director Matt Grossman said. “Democrats have to win a majority of moderates tow in the campaign, and Hillary Clinton is doing that by a large margin.”

The survey is at odds with the limited polling of the state in recent weeks, most of which show the spread between the two major party candidates in the single digits.

Clinton’s dominance appeared across various demographics in the survey of 886 adults, 746 of them likely voters, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.3 percentage points among all respondents and 3.6 percentage points among likely voters.

The survey was conducted periodically between September 1 and October 30 over cell phones and landlines.

RACIAL ATTITUDES: Especially important in this particular election, Grossman noted, are racial attitudes. When posed the question whether “our country is changing too fast, undermining American values,” a combined 82 respondents supporting Trump either agreed or strongly agreed, while a combined 156 respondents supporting Clinton either disagreed or strongly disagreed.

Accounting for an inherent “agreement bias” in which respondents respond affirmatively to questions to get through surveys, IPPSR asked the question another way. “By accepting diverse cultures and lifestyles, our country is improving,” it suggested.

A total 125 respondents supporting Trump either disagreed or strongly disagreed with that sentiment, while a total 125 respondents supporting Clinton either strongly agreed or agreed.

Further pushing the racial standing needle, the quarterly survey posed to participants the notion that “many minorities overcame prejudice, and blacks should do the same without favors.” To that sentiment, some 62 respondents supporting Trump strongly agreed compared to 25 of Clinton’s supporters. Only 6 Trump supporters strongly disagreed with that statement compared to 86 Clinton supporters.

Asked another way – “generations of slavery/discrimination make it harder for blacks to rise” – 59 Trump supporters strongly disagreed compared to 25 Clinton supporters, and 74 Clinton supporters strongly agreed while only 10 Trump supporters felt the same.

The State of the State Survey also gauged white ethnocentrism by asking respondents about their ethnic preferences on a scale of one to 10, Grossman said. When polling strictly white, non-Hispanic respondents, 72 percent of Trump supporters preferred whites to blacks and 74 percent preferred whites to Latinos, the survey showed. Most of Clinton’s supporters (53 percent) said they were not ethnocentric, with the next largest percentage – 31 percent – saying they preferred whites to Muslims (56 percent of Trump supporters affirmed this category).

Overall, the survey found Clinton getting non-white voters 80 percent to Trump’s 9 percent, as well as white, non-Hispanic voters 45 percent to 39 percent for Trump.

In another demographic of note, Clinton led across all education types, ranging from “high school or less” to “grad school.”

But Trump did appear to have a substantial lead in one category regarding education: those only white, non-Hispanic voters with a high school or less education. In that category, he garnered 54 percent to Clinton’s 32 percent, the IPPSR survey found.

ACTUAL CANDIDATE SUPPORT: When it comes to whether respondents were actually voting for their candidate or against the other one, Clinton’s supporters were fairly evenly split at 49 percent actually voting for her and 47 percent voting against Trump. Trump’s support tended more to be Clinton’s opposition, as 57 percent of Trump supporters surveyed said they were more voting against Clinton than they were voting in support of Trump (41 percent were committed to Trump).

And 60 percent of female respondents pledged their support to  Clinton compared to Trump’s 23 percent. The two were pretty evenly split among male voters, 44 percent for Clinton and 42 percent for Trump.

GEOGRAPHY AND INCOME: Despite all of Trump’s rhetoric on how he would make Detroit better if he were president, voters who partook in the IPPSR survey did not appear to be buying it, as Clinton held that region (Wayne County exclusively) 77 percent to Trump’s 5 percent.

In fact, IPPSR’s survey found the only region Trump appeared to be leading Clinton was the East Central region, which included Clare, Gladwin, Arenac, Isabella, Midland, Bay, Saginaw, Gratiot, Clinton, Shiawassee, Tuscola, Huron and Sanilac. The survey found Trump’s support there to be 43 percent to Clinton’s 25 percent.

“This is a wide geographic spread for a Democratic candidate in Michigan,” Grossman said.

While much has been made of voters in the Upper Peninsula, IPPSR’s respondents tended toward Clinton by a margin of 42 percent to Trump’s 33 percent.

Clinton also appeared to lead support across all income levels, with the closest margin being the category of $150,000 or more, in which some 44 percent of respondents pledged to Clinton compared to 40 percent for Trump.

This story was published by Gongwer News Service. To subscribe, click on www.gongwer.com