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The election of the president and the vice president of the United States is an indirect election in which citizens of the United States who are registered to vote in one of the fifty U.S. states or in Washington, D.C., cast ballots not directly for those offices, but instead for members of the Electoral College. 

These electors then cast direct votes, known as electoral votes, for president, and for vice president. The candidate who receives an absolute majority of electoral votes (at least 270 out of 538, since the Twenty-Third Amendment granted voting rights to citizens of D.C.) is then elected to that office. If no candidate receives an absolute majority of the votes for president, the House of Representatives elects the president.

The 2024 United States presidential election in Michigan is scheduled to take place on Tuesday, November 5, 2024, as part of the 2024 United States elections in which all 50 states plus the District of Columbia will participate. Michigan voters will choose electors to represent them in the Electoral College via a popular vote. The state of Michigan has 15 electoral votes in the Electoral College, following reapportionment due to the 2020 United States census in which the state lost a seat. Michigan is considered to be a crucial swing state in 2024. 

An Upper Midwestern state at the heart of the Rust Belt, no Republican presidential candidate has won Michigan with a majority since George H. W. Bush in 1988, and the last Republican to win by double digits was Ronald Reagan in his 49-state landslide four years earlier. The state was formerly part of the Blue Wall, having voted Democratic in every presidential election between 1992 and 2012, but only doing so by a double-digit margin in 1996 and 2008. 

Then, in 2016, Republican Donald Trump carried Michigan by a very narrow 0.23% in an unexpected sweep of the Midwest and Rust Belt which earned him a presidential victory, only to have the state flipped back into the Democratic column by Joe Biden four years later with a 2.78% margin of victory as the former lost the presidency to the latter. However, it was the worst margin for a victorious Democrat dating back to the 2.01% margin of victory for John F. Kennedy in the state in the extremely close 1960 election.

Michigan is purple to slightly blue, with Democrats holding all statewide offices since 2019. Due to the state’s nearly even partisan lean and the close margin by which it was decided in 2016 and 2020, this race is considered to be a tossup.On April 18, 2024, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was nominated by Michigan’s Natural Law Party. Despite suspending his campaign on August 23 and legal attempts to withdraw himself, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that his name will remain on the ballot. Jill Stein from the Green party has ballot access.

 

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