White college-educated women in Michigan — who split evenly for Obama and Romney in 2012 — are breaking for Clinton by six points this year, which may help her offset low support among working class whites.

In the final days of the campaign, Michigan emerged as a somewhat unexpected battleground state. Michigan has not gone to a Republican for president since 1988, but earlier this year Hillary Clinton narrowly lost the Democratic primary to Bernie Sanders, perhaps indicating some vulnerability for her there. Michigan is also the only state in the country that actually saw its population decline between 2000 and 2010, and many of those left behind are white working class voters, making this fertile territory for the Trump campaign.

And Trump is indeed outpacing Mitt Romney’s performance with working class whites.  In 2012, non-college whites in Michigan went for Romney by 11 points, but tonight NBC News Exit Poll data show they are breaking for Trump by 30 points, nearly three times Romney’s margin.

Despite this, Trump is in a tough fight in the Great Lakes state owing to voter perceptions of his behavior toward women. Some 58 percent of women voters in Michigan said that Trump’s treatment of women bothered them a lot. By comparison, fewer men in Michigan — 41 percent — said that it bothered them a lot. 

Women who were most bothered by Trump’s treatment of women are breaking overwhelmingly for Clinton, 82 percent to 10 percent.

Concerns about Trump’s treatment of women may be playing a part in voters’ perceptions of Trump’s temperament. When asked whether they think each candidate has the temperament to serve effectively as president, only a third of Michigan women said Donald Trump has the right temperament to serve effectively as president.

By contrast, a majority of women in Michigan said Hillary Clinton has the right temperament.

Clinton’s strong showing with women has a distinct class aspect to it. Among white college-educated women in Michigan, she is doing six points better than Trump.

Among white non-college women in Michigan, she is doing about seven points worse than President Obama did in 2012.

Throughout Election Night, a team of survey research analysts will be crunching the numbers on who voted, what issues were on their minds and why they voted the way they did.

The team includes Stephanie Psyllos, manager of exit polling, NBC News; Scott Keeter, senior survey advisor at Pew Research Center; Courtney Kennedy, director of survey research at Pew Research Center; Cary Funk, associate director of research at Pew Research Center; Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute; Maureen Michaels, president of Michaels Opinion Research Inc.; Mara Ostfeld, postdoctoral fellow, Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan; Patrick Egan, associate professor of politics and public policy at New York University; Hannah Hartig, assistant director, University of Pennsylvania's Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies; Jennifer Su, senior project director, Princeton Survey Research Associates International; and Andrew Arenge, assistant producer, NBC News. The NBC News Exit Poll Desk works closely with digital editors David Taintor and Elizabeth Johnstone to curate the stories we produce.