Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Wikimedia Commons
If Kamala Harris loses Michigan in two weeks, she can probably say goodbye to Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and the rest of the Electoral College. Perhaps the most blue-leaning of the seven most important swing states, Michigan swung back left in 2020 after barely voting for Trump eight years ago. This time around, thanks to inflation, the economy, and state-specific issues like electric-vehicle policy have made the race something close to a tossup — but Donald Trump’s erratic tendencies, which have recently included trashing Michigan’s resurgent biggest city, isn’t helping his cause. I spoke with Emily Lawler, political editor at the Detroit Free Press, to get the lay of the land.
Of the seven key swing states, Democrats are probably most confident about Michigan, both because of this year’s polling, — Kamala Harris is up there, though narrowly — and because of the state’s history. Biden won it back by almost three points in 2020, and Democrats had very solid years there in 2018 and 2022. Does that perception jibe with what you’re seeing on the ground? Are Democrats confident about the state, or is it just pure nervousness?
I’d say we’re still at pure nervousness. Democrats are maybe cautiously optimistic, but it really seems like we’ve seen Kamala Harris come here and portray herself as an underdog in this race. And Michigan’s just so close. The average people that we’re talking to on the ground really see this as balanced on a knife’s edge.
Early-voting turnout so far has been pretty spectacular, but that doesn’t really mean anything, right?
I hate to give you a technical answer, but in Michigan it’s really hard to judge, because in 2018, ‘20, and ‘22, we had three major ballot initiatives that made big changes to how we vote in ‘18, ‘20, and ‘22. This is our first presidential cycle with early voting in addition to absentee, and only our second cycle where we’ve had no-reason absentee. It’s hard for me to compare year to year, but I do think we’re seeing a lot of people using both absentee and early voting.
Michigan is synonymous with the car industry, and thus with unions. Kamala Harris has had a little trouble there. Some polls have shown that Trump has made considerable headway among union voters, and the Teamsters and the Firefighters Union nationally didn’t endorse either candidate this year, whereas they both endorsed Biden in 2020. How big a problem this is for her, and what accounts for the drop-off in support? Is it just that Biden is an older white guy and she’s not?
I think unions have taken on more prominence in state and national discussions than they might’ve had in previous cycles, particularly after the UAW negotiations and strike leading up to this election. And Joe Biden, of course, appearing on that picket line in Michigan. To some extent, I think we’re just asking more union voters what they’re doing and how they’re feeling, and tuning into that a little bit more.
What we’re seeing in our reporting is that there’s a diversity of opinion within the union, but we know it’s a huge bloc. Especially, you look at UAW in Michigan and you’re not just looking at people who work on the line or have UAW jobs currently, they’ve got this huge retiree base, and what they can do in terms of getting the message out to folks who may have been active in the workforce anywhere, last year or 10 years ago, or 20 years ago in some cases — they’ve just got a really big reach. And I think that’s true of a lot of unions in Michigan. But I also think that union members have a little bit of an independent streak, so we see them certainly breaking both ways. And I’ve been looking at the polling that you just referenced too, and it does look like the memberships are pretty split.
If Harris is losing ground among that demographic, where might she be making up ground to keep her lead?
She’s really running a base campaign here. She’s looking to turn out people in our population centers, particularly Detroit. We see that in terms of where she is citing her rallies and what communities she’s doing outreach to. I would say that she probably does have room to pick up some votes. Joe Biden got roughly 6,000 more votes in the city of Detroit than Clinton did four years prior. I think there’s some potential for her there. Certainly, Joe Biden isn’t the city’s high-water mark — that would be the Obama years.
In Oakland County, which is just north of Detroit, Harris taped her appearance with Oprah Winfrey earlier this year. She appeared with Charlamagne tha God last week in Detroit. I think she’s being really intentional about that outreach to Black voters. People think about Detroit, but I think it’s an underdeveloped story that the diversification of our suburbs is really strong here, and has been the last couple cycles too.
Trump, meanwhile, has been scapegoating Detroit, comparing it to a developing country and warning that the rest of America will start looking like it. I’ll go out on a limb and say this is not a popular stance in the city itself. But I wonder what the rest of Michigan thinks of his words and whether it’s a similar dynamic to New York, where some Long Islanders think of New York City as a hellscape, despite the evidence.
I think today’s Detroit suburbs, like our Metro Detroiters, are huge cheerleaders for the city. They’ve seen how the city has changed in the last decade or so. They have seen how it’s come out of bankruptcy. We see our sports teams overperforming — I’m not a sports person, so that’s my best characterization — but people are coming downtown and making a weekend out of it, or a night out of it. And they want to be at the restaurants in Detroit, and they want to be at the museums and patronizing some of the businesses. I’m not sure Trump’s comments play as well as they would have even five or 10 years ago.
What about his demagoguery around EV mandates? Do you feel like that has purchase with voters at all?
Michigan has a complicated relationship with the EV revolution. On one hand, our officials have put a lot of effort into courting and supporting the EV industry and the kind of jobs it could bring to the state. There’s a real feeling that people don’t want to get left behind. On the other hand, EV adoption hasn’t been what some initial estimates pegged it as. There are places in Michigan that EV adoption’s just a hard sell, especially for more rural areas. I think Trump really has tapped into something there. And he brings it up so often in Michigan that it seems like he has really keyed in it.
There’s a specific proposed plant that’s gotten attention in this presidential race, and a lot of foreign-policy implications with China on the EV issue. It’s a shifting landscape, and I’m not sure either side knows exactly where it’s going.
I’ve been asking the other participants in this swing-state series the same question about the campaigns’ ground games. Kamala Harris has quite a bit more money than Trump, and she seems better organized than him in most places. Trump’s strategy has centered around turning out low-propensity voters who don’t pay a lot of attention to politics. Does that match what you see going on there?
The Republican Party probably got off to a slower start. They had a leadership change at the beginning of this year and some inner-party turmoil that I think put them behind the ball on organizing. But a colleague of mine, John Wisely, spent some time with the Oakland County GOP, and they have a data operation, and are trying to court new voters too. But the Biden campaign — now the Harris campaign — opened field offices probably months before you would typically expect. And all across the state they were very forward about talking about their ground game. They’ve got staff on the ground here. A lot of staff on the ground here. I do think there are some differences. But as you said, those could speak to a difference in strategy more than a difference of show of force.
I had forgotten about the Republican Party civil war there until you mentioned it. Can you just fill me in on that a little?
Both sides were pro-Trump. It was a rules disagreement, and maybe a personality disagreement too. Kristina Karamo was a Secretary of State candidate in our midterms. She didn’t win the Secretary of State position, although she never conceded it. She wanted the party chairmanship, and members had real concerns about her ability to fundraise, some financial concerns about how the party was doing. There were two factions, but now the party’s run by former ambassador to the Netherlands, Pete Hoekstra. He’s got a lot of experience, obviously having served in Congress and been an ambassador. I think that he took over the institutional moorings, and people are a little bit more comfortable with their financial situation at this point. But there’s still a lot of turmoil within the party.
It’s just remarkable to me how many times that’s happened across the country with these state Republican parties that seem torn between the extremist Trump people and the non-extremists. Arizona is another one.
And remember, we had a historically strong Republican Party. Ronna McDaniel won Michigan in 2016 for Trump with her organization, and obviously was bumped up to the RNC. We’ve definitely gone through an evolution here.
Arab Americans have been furious at the Biden administration for its mostly blanket support of Israel. And based on what I’ve read and the numbers I’ve seen, Kamala Harris hasn’t made much headway with this group of voters, even if her rhetoric on the issue is a bit different from Biden’s. Arab Americans are about 1 percent of the state’s population, but there has been a huge amount of press about this, mostly focusing on Dearborn. How big a problem do you think this is for Kamala Harris?
Certainly, I’d expect the attention, given the large Arab-American population — there’s about 300,000 Arab-American people in Michigan. I think it’s incorrect to view them as a monolith. Some are Republicans, some are Democrats. That’s not 300,000 people who are definitely going to vote for Democrats, and now definitely aren’t. I think there’s a really broad variety of viewpoints in that community.
And it’s also not that Trump is necessarily winning a lot of these votes, it’s more apathy — not voting or voting for Jill Stein or whatever, which could be a significant factor. In 2016, Trump won Michigan by just under 11,000 votes. Jill Stein got 51,000 votes.
He did, although I’ve seen many people push back on that narrative, saying most of those voters wouldn’t have voted for Hillary Clinton under any circumstances.
Well, only a fifth would have had to.
Fair enough, that’s math.
I do think that the third party factor is a factor — RFK is still going to appear on our ballot. Anyway, I think that when we’re looking at Arab Americans, you can’t afford to discount any one demographic in this tight an election. And there are still a number of votes where it’s not clear how they’re going to land.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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