Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump converged on Michigan on Friday as they fought for the small pool of undecided voters and Arab Americans who could decide a battleground state that has shot toward the top of the priority list for both campaigns.
In Grand Rapids, Lansing and Oakland County, a pivotal Detroit suburb, Ms. Harris made explicit and extended overtures to blue-collar Americans as she campaigned in a state that has historically been the heart of the nation’s labor movement, and as polls show her struggling with working-class voters.
“Donald Trump is no friend of labor — let’s be really clear about that, no matter what the noise is out there,” Ms. Harris said in Grand Rapids. She promised to “work with unions to create good-paying jobs, including jobs that do not require a college degree.”
Mr. Trump hit back by promising to revitalize the auto industry through a combination of tax incentives and tariffs. As he was proclaiming at length his fondness for tariffs, his microphone cut out, leaving him visibly frustrated as he paced onstage for nearly 20 minutes.
After the technical difficulties were resolved, Mr. Trump argued that his proposals would bring an economic boom to Detroit, a city he attacked last week and whose ongoing rebound he has been skeptical of. He then suggested that Ms. Harris’s tax proposals were tantamount to “economic Armageddon for Detroit.”
Throughout her speech in Grand Rapids, in Kent County, Mich. — a place Mr. Trump won in 2016 and President Biden flipped in 2020 — Ms. Harris was by turns forceful in laying out the grave stakes of the election and almost gleeful in her efforts to cast Mr. Trump as unfit for office.
Appearing to refer to Politico’s reporting that Mr. Trump was dodging media appearances because of exhaustion, she jabbed: “If you are exhausted on the campaign trail, it raises real questions about whether you are fit for the toughest job in the world. Come on. Come on.”
After stepping off his plane in Detroit, Mr. Trump called Ms. Harris a “loser” and insisted to reporters: “I’m not even tired. I’m really exhilarated.”
He then stopped by his campaign’s office in Hamtramck, Mich., a city with a significant Muslim and Arab American population whose Democratic mayor endorsed him last month.
The former president and his allies have been trying to capitalize on anger in Michigan from Arab American and Muslim voters toward the Biden administration’s support for Israel in the war in Gaza. Large numbers of these voters, as well as some progressives, say they may not vote for Ms. Harris.
On Friday, Mr. Trump was greeted by Hamtramck’s mayor, Amer Ghalib, and dozens of supporters, many of them Muslim or Arab American men. “We had a history of disconnect and miscommunication with the Republican Party,” Mr. Ghalib said. “Now we are here to end that disconnect.”
Mr. Trump told his supporters that he wanted to urgently achieve peace in the Middle East. But earlier, he still offered praise for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the Gaza war, saying that he was “doing a good job.”
Ms. Harris began her remarks at an evening rally in Oakland County by saying the death of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar “must be a turning point.”
“Everyone must seize this opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza, bring the hostages home and end the suffering once and for all,” she said.
But in a sign of her weakness with the state’s Arab American voters, Ms. Harris named just one Arab American official — one who was appointed, not elected — who is supporting her.
Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump both held events in Oakland County, a suburban area that was once solidly Republican but, like many suburbs, has become gradually more blue as many educated and upscale voters who live there recoiled from Mr. Trump. Democrats are hoping to run up large margins in Oakland County and places like it.
Mr. Trump, after his visit to Hamtramck, took part in what was billed as an economic round-table in an Oakland County community, Auburn Hills. The participants spoke more about policing, education and concerns over fluoride in the water than about inflation.
But he opened his evening rally, in downtown Detroit at Huntington Place, with an appeal to Detroit’s economic potential. “They’ve been talking about comebacks for so long, but we’re going to bring it back, better than it ever was,” Mr. Trump said.
The remark felt like an effort to clean up the attack he lobbed at the city last week, when he said in another speech here that “our whole country will end up being like Detroit” if Ms. Harris won.
Mr. Trump also repeated his hard-line stance on immigration, including false and exaggerated claims about undocumented immigrants and crime. He stumbled reading the teleprompter, inaccurately referred to the number of days left until Election Day, and closed with an unusual aside exhorting his supporters to tell their friends to “get your fat husband off the couch, get that fat pig off the couch” and “vote for Trump.”
The Trump campaign has been hammering Ms. Harris over the economy in Michigan, with Mr. Trump repeatedly making promises to bring the auto industry and manufacturing back — claims he also made in 2016 but struggled to fulfill in office. His campaign has been focused on appeals to blue-collar workers and the middle class.
Ms. Harris tried to counter that outreach during an early-evening visit to a United Auto Workers union hall in Lansing.
Under Mr. Trump, she said, “thousands of Michigan auto workers lost their jobs,” adding, “And if he wins again, we can expect there will be more of the same.”
Michigan is among the states Ms. Harris must almost certainly win, alongside Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, to defeat Mr. Trump. The candidates are essentially tied, according to a New York Times polling average.
In interviews, Democrats say Michigan is as close as they have seen. Their efforts to capture the state, which Mr. Trump won in 2016 and lost in 2020, have been complicated by the war in Gaza and by the decisions of some national unions, like the Teamsters and the International Association of Firefighters, not to make an endorsement for president, after both groups backed Mr. Biden in 2020.
“I’m not used to it being this tight,” said Representative Haley Stevens of Michigan. “It’s close. It’s close.”
Ms. Harris’s campaign is open about its intent to peel away suburban voters from Mr. Trump. In a memo first reported by CBS News, the campaign said it planned to capitalize on the former president’s “unprecedented weakness in the suburbs” to win Michigan. Ms. Harris leads Mr. Trump by five percentage points among suburban likely voters, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll of Michigan. Exit polls from 2020 showed Mr. Trump winning that group.
Representative Debbie Dingell of Michigan, a Democrat, said the party had built a powerful campaign infrastructure, unlike Hillary Clinton’s operation, which many Democrats believe took the state for granted.
“It’s not like 2016,” Ms. Dingell said of the Clinton campaign. “They thought it was done. Now they know it’s not done.”
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