Lyta Gold , August 22, 2024

The Thin Blue Wall

Democrats teeter on the edge in Michigan Former Packard Plant in Detroit, 2003. Camilo J. Vergara. | Library of Congress

Michigan, according to the national progressive media apparatus, is a state that pops into existence every four years in order to help win or lose the presidential election. For Democrats, it’s an essential piece of “the blue wall” along with Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, without which an electoral college victory is generally impossible. And earlier this summer, it indeed looked impossible. A mid-July poll published in the Detroit Free Pressshowed Joe Biden trailing Donald Trump there by seven percentage points; other polling was similarly ugly.

Back in 2020, Biden defeated Trump in Michigan by a slim margin, but in 2016 Hillary Clinton lost to Trump by 10,704 votes. Now that Biden is out of the race, the question is whether the Kamala Harris campaign can generate more enthusiasm in Michigan than Clinton did, perhaps even duplicating Obama’s easy sweep in 2008, when change seemed possible, or his much narrower conquest in 2012, when hope had dimmed.

Two months ago, I had little hope for Michigan. This attitude has long been familiar to people like me who grew up in in the state. Every state is unhappy in its own way, but Michigan has an especially long list of woes, most of them stemming from the decline of the U.S. auto industry and the various political and economic punches to the city of Detroit over the last seventy-odd years. And yet Michigan is also, of late, something of a progressive success story, currently run by a Democratic trifecta which controls the state senate, house, and the governor’s office. Governor Gretchen Whitmer, whose campaign buses read “fix the damn roads,” is a relatively popular and active politician, signing legislation providing free school breakfast and lunch, protecting LGBTQ+ people from discrimination, and fixing at least some of the damn roads. But a lot of Michigan’s infrastructure remains broken, as the broader economy remains broken and ineffective for a lot of working-class people. As Pontiac city council member and Michigan DSA co-chair Mikal Goodman put it bluntly: “Everything’s expensive and people can’t afford it.”

Inflation has cooled down somewhat in Michigan, as it has elsewhere, but it remains a significant factor in daily economic life. Unemployment is relatively low, but having a job doesn’t necessarily mean much when groceries, utilities, and rent are so expensive, especially in comparison to wages. Polling on the subject varies, but in some surveys Trump is still more trusted than Harris when it comes to the Michigan economy, and key demographics—such as black male voters—have often pointed to economic factors and immigration as the reason for their increasing support of Trump. Other factors are likely significant here as well, such as a general conviction that Biden didn’t accomplish enough with his presidency, pessimism about the possibilities of racial justice, and the broader rise in reactionary sentiment among young men of all races. Trump has also recruited a number of dynamic representatives in Michigan, including the charming and famously corrupt former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who was serving a twenty-eight-year sentence for racketeering until Trump commuted it on one of his last days in office. Before the July 13 assassination attempt, he and Kilpatrick campaigned together in Detroit; not, as an article in local news source Bridge Michiganmakes clear, because the Republicans have been hoping or expecting to win a majority of Detroit-area voters but because Trump only needs to peel off a small sliver from Biden’s former bulwark counties in order to win Michigan. Trump also needs to shore up his support in the deep red parts of the state, which is why he recently stopped over in Howell, a city of ten thousand people known mainly for its association with the KKK. In July, a group of white supremacists marched through Howell chanting, “We love Hitler. We love Trump.”

Michigan’s political composition varies wildly from county to county. The two most populous counties—Wayne, home of Detroit, and Oakland, which includes Detroit’s wealthy suburbs—are reliably blue. But Hillary Clinton lost Macomb County, third largest in the state, and voter turnout in Wayne County was unusually low. Biden lost Macomb as well, but did much better in Wayne: he simply had better turnout statewide than Clinton did, and managed to flip three formerly Republican counties, including Kent, the fourth largest county and home of Grand Rapids. Washtenaw County, which includes Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan, is the sixth largest county and reliably goes blue every time. Outside the major cities and college campuses however, most of Michigan is a sea of rural red. Democratic presidential candidates who want to win Michigan need major urban and student turnout, as they do in virtually every competitive state; but Democratic voters in Michigan have a particular history of not showing up for candidates who don’t work hard for their votes. When Biden was the 2024 candidate, apathy was the tone of the hour: a source on the ground in Michigan told me back in June that even confirmed Biden voters usually framed their choice as “I am voting for Biden, but—” or “I am supporting Biden, but—”

On the other hand, when Kamala Harris landed in Detroit on her recent press tour, she was greeted by enormous crowds—none of which, despite Trump’s envious proclamations to the contrary, were AI-generated. Whether the enthusiasm for Harris is permanent or passing remains to be seen. Michigan has grown accustomed, I think, to a national Democratic Party that has so often been unresponsive to their problems and their concerns; only attending to them every four years, and only then by lip service. Former U.S. representative Andy Levin (who represented the ninth congressional district, due north of Detroit) expressed his frustration to me that the national Democratic Party has missed critical chances to make connections and build support with important constituencies in the state, especially the diverse and vibrant Muslim communities in southeastern Michigan. Dearborn (Wayne County) has the largest Arab-American population in the country per capita; the Democrats have largely been taking their votes for granted, assuming that fear of Republican bigotry will be enough.

One of the most significant concerns for this key constituency is the war in Gaza. Harris’s Detroit rally was interrupted by pro-Palestine protesters, though leaders of the “Uncommitted” movement had been invited by the campaign to attend the same rally. The importance of the “Uncommitted” movement in Michigan cannot be overstated. Levin, a progressive Jewish politician who was ousted by an AIPAC-funded hardliner in 2022, told me it was “hard to imagine” a Democratic victory without a significant policy change toward Gaza. The numbers bear this out: back in February, thanks to the efforts of activists in the “Listen to Michigan” coalition, one hundred thousand registered Democratic voters cast their votes for “Uncommitted,” protesting Biden’s continued military aid to Israel.

In a state that often has narrow margins of victory, one hundred thousand is an enormous number: fully ten times the number of voters by which Hillary lost the state in 2016. The highest concentration of these votes came out of Dearborn, but also out of liberal (and significantly Jewish) Ann Arbor. The two districts actually cast enough “Uncommitted” votes to send one delegate each to the Democratic National Convention. Pro-Palestine activists have also staged large-scale protests at the DNC to keep the war in Gaza top of mind.

Harris seems so far to be more aware of the significance of the “Uncommitted” vote than her predecessor, and more willing to express public sympathy for Palestinians, but she has also refused to support an arms embargo of Israel, which is key among the protesters’ demands. Even if she did agree to an embargo, it’s unlikely that she would be able to force the Biden presidency to enforce it before the election; and even if she won the election, she wouldn’t be the first candidate to renege on a campaign promise. It’s notable that U.S. representative Rashida Tlaib (who represents Dearborn) continues to withhold her endorsement of Harris as president, the lone member of “the Squad” to do so.

Some previously surveyed African-American Biden-to-Trump voters cited the war in Gaza as the reason for their party affiliation switch, but that doesn’t necessarily indicate that voters, or the members of the “Uncommitted” movement, believe Trump would treat Palestinians and their supporters more gently than Biden. Trump has given every indication that he intends to violently squash pro-Palestinian protests, and nothing about his previous presidential history indicates that he would hamper the flow of weapons to Israel. The danger for a Democrat of being slightly less terrible than the other guy—actively contributing to the misery and death of slightly fewer people—is that it’s hard to maintain support from the kinds of voters who believe massacring civilians is a bad idea. It’s a difference in scale, not a difference in values. Harris, as Biden’s vice president, can try to distance herself from his administration’s policies, but it’s unclear if this will sway a sufficient number of people sickened by what seem to be daily massacres of Palestinian civilians.

Still, Harris does represent some degree of change, as well as better vibes, and that may be enough to win Michigan in the end. She’s picked up other significant endorsements and support in the state, including from the all-important UAW and its president, Shawn Fain, who had a prime time speaking slot at the DNC on Monday. Governor Whitmer has also enthusiastically endorsed Harris, and is co-chairing her campaign.

Whitmer herself was floated as a possible replacement for Biden in the days following his disastrous debate performance: TheNational Review even ran a panicky piece at the time titled “Beware Gretchen Whitmer.” When Harris assumed the candidate’s mantle, much coverage of her potential vice president overlooked the fact that Whitmer was—on paper—the obvious choice: the tough, photogenic and mostly well-liked governor of a key swing state. But Whitmer was simply never going to be selected: a two-woman ticket was not an option, especially with so much anti-woman sentiment animating young male defectors to the Republican Party. Harris’s pick was always going to be a white man (a DEI hire, if you want to get real about it).

Yet Tim Walz may be a smart choice to help wrap up Michigan: he’s midwestern to the bone and a former high school football coach to boot. Michigan and Minnesota have a benevolent relationship, with gentlemanly college football rivalries; as opposed to Michigan and Ohio, which remain bitter enemies (there was a small war in the 1830s; it’s complicated, the aggression is mostly worked out now through football). J.D. Vance’s status as an Ohio senator and a graduate of the much-despised Ohio State University probably wouldn’t matter much if he were more likable, and if he hadn’t made his identity and personal history so central to his campaign. But in debates against the genial Walz, Vance is likely to come off as stiff, fake, and unacceptably not-from-here. Walz can talk your ear off about the 4-4 defense he ran as a coach; if I gave Vance a napkin and told him to draw me a cover-2, I’m not convinced he could.

These are relatively unimportant “vibes” questions, but then this is supposedly a vibes election: relying on the hope that good feelings about Harris’s potential will outweigh the baggage she brings along as Biden’s vice president. If she wins, the Democrats may end up with a bright future ahead, in which progressive midwestern states keep fielding impressive vice presidential or even presidential candidates, and Michigan is no longer just a neglected part of the siege wall. Any plan to run people like Walz or Whitmer in future elections, however, presumes that there will be future elections. And there’s the rub, the unavoidable fact of this particular election. Yes, the national Democratic Party needs to do a better job of listening to Michigan; yes it would be good if presidential candidates cared about humanitarian issues and the legitimate life-and-death concerns of key voting blocs, and it would be even better if they did so more than once every four years. But these truths are only relevant if, in the future, we still have elections as usual; and the existence of future elections may depend not only on whether Harris wins, but whether she wins by enough in key states like Michigan to help stave off challenges by far-right activists who view all Democratic victories as the result of fraud.

The Michigan GOP was, until recently, run by an election denier named Kristina Karamo; she ran the party into the ground financially and was ousted early this year, though she continues a legal battle to get herself reinstated. The Democratic trifecta in Michigan and its ability to pass solid progressive legislation has largely been due to the GOP’s utter implosion in the state. Trump’s campaign has also been teetering in Michigan of late: besides the deft use of surrogates such as Kwame Kilpatrick, and Elon Musk’s possibly illegal voter data-stealing PAC (currently being investigated by the Michigan secretary of state), the ground game has been lackluster, especially in normally Trump-safe rural Michigan. If Republican voters end up being the ones with the enthusiasm gap in this presidential election, then Harris will win easily. But even taking the right counties won’t be quite enough if she can’t drive sufficient turnout and can’t win enough support in places like Dearborn and Detroit. Given the Republican enthusiasm for election denial, Harris also needs to run up the score.

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