Before dinner last night at the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference, I attended a panel discussion with pundits and pollsters, which included my former Human Events colleague John Gizzi along with some of Michigan’s leading commentators. Alex Gage, the man who invented microtargeting, was also there.

While the pundits debated the GOP’s brand and Hillary Clinton’s dominance of Democratic politics, I paid close attention to a couple of new polls about the Republican primary in Michigan.

The first, conducted by Dave Doyle of Marketing Resource Group, put Rudy Giuliani in the lead with 27% and showed a dramatic drop for John McCain of 17 percentage points since the last poll was taken in April.

Giuliani — 27%
Romney — 13%
Thompson — 13%
Hunter — 7%
McCain — 6%
Huckabee — 5%
Brownback — 4%
Paul — 2%
Tancredo — 0%

The other poll was released this morning, but Steve Mitchell of Mitchell Research and Communications gave us a sneak preview yesterday. It had no clear favorite, but the same three names appeared at the top of this poll as the other.

Romney — 21%
Giuliani — 19%
Thompson — 18%
McCain — 10%
Huckabee — 3%
Hunter — 3%
Paul — 1%

You can assume that Brownback and Tancredo didn’t register. Both polls showed about a quarter of those surveyed remain undecided.

While these polls are just a snapshot in time, they give us a pretty clear picture that one of the most important early primary states — voting will take place on Jan. 15 — remains wide open.