Last month, I laid out four swing states that — at that time — seemed most likely to help you understand the election: Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. They are all still very important. But, in a twist that was probably inevitable in a close and volatile election, another state may be emerging as do-or-die territory for Vice President Kamala Harris.
This is why I headed to Michigan this week.
Michigan is, after Pennsylvania, the state where the campaigns for both Harris and former President Donald Trump, and their allies, have spent the most money on television advertising. It is the only state where both candidates, both of their running mates and both Obamas were all scheduled to appear this week, with both Harris and Trump themselves holding two public events each.
And, if Trump’s slight polling leads in Georgia and North Carolina bear out on Election Day, the loss of Michigan’s 15 electoral votes could cost Harris the presidency even if she holds onto Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
On paper, you might think Michigan would be easy for Democrats. The state helped Democrats win back the House in 2018, gave President Biden his biggest margin of victory among the swing states in 2020, and handed Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, an 11 percentage-point victory after the Dobbs decision in 2022.
Both Democratic and Republican operatives I spoke with here believe the race to be deadlocked, and both sides insisted they have a clearer path to victory. Allies of Trump believe that Harris’s troubles with Arab American voters, who are frustrated with the Biden administration’s policy toward Israel, and her apparent erosion among some Black men, will carry him over the finish line. Democrats are trying to hold the line in Detroit and run up the score in the suburbs, leaning hard on women as they pull out their post-2016 playbook for its biggest test yet.
“We are not in panic mode,” Representative Hillary Scholten, a Democrat whose district in Western Michigan includes the kind of well-educated suburbs, such as East Grand Rapids, that Harris is banking on. “Michigan could come down to something like two votes per precinct. We want to make sure we’re reaching all of those voters.”
Women vs. sexism
Yesterday, I squeezed into the second floor of an office building in Madison Heights, Mich., where Representative Elissa Slotkin, the state’s Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, was speaking to a packed room of volunteer and union canvassers who were about to head out to start knocking on doors.
“We’re going to get through it, we’re going to do it,” she told the crowd. “This is your therapy, knocking doors, doing something proactive.”
Democrats are banking on big suburbs like this one, Oakland County, where Biden beat Trump by 14 points in 2020 after Hillary Clinton beat him by 8 in 2016. It is also a place where Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor, showed considerable strength during this year’s Republican primary.
College-educated voters and women in places like these have been central to the Democrats’ run of recent victories in Michigan, which included overwhelmingly passing a referendum protecting abortion rights in the state. Scholten said she worried initially that the referendum victory could dial down the urgency for some women in the state; she and other Democrats say reproductive rights are still on the ballot at the federal level this year.
“I think that women in particular, suburban women, are going to be very, very decisive,” Scholten told me over the phone while she was sitting in her minivan between sporting events for her kids.
They’re betting on voters like Ann Hutchins, 65, a Harris supporter who once backed the Bushes but has found herself leaning increasingly Democratic over the years. As she left a grocery store in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., she made clear how strongly she wanted to defeat Trump. Hutchins said she hoped there were “millions of people in my same boat who show up and kick his ass.”
Democrats are also trying to keep their numbers up in big cities like Detroit — which Trump recently insulted and where officials say early voting is already breaking records — while also stemming their losses in rural areas. They are worried about the third-party candidacy of Jill Stein, and some Democrats told me they’re running into another problem that has them deeply nervous: sexism.
Kim Kohn, 54, a manufacturing technician who is a member of the United Auto Workers union, has been knocking doors for Harris for weeks as part of the union’s get-out-the-vote effort. She says she has heard deep skepticism from some of the men who come to the door — and she is also working to persuade her boyfriend and his son to back Harris, too.
“They don’t like the fact that we have this woman of color that might be the most powerful woman in the world,” Kohn, who is Black, said of some of the men she has spoken with at the doors. “It gets very frustrating. And I’m very, very nervous right now.”
Kohn said she would be “devastated” if Harris loses, but she was determined to do everything she could to keep that from happening. “We’ve got to do this,” she said.
Why Republicans are bullish
After his party endured a 2022 midterm election that he called an “embarrassment,” Pete Hoekstra, the chairman of the Michigan Republican Party, sees three main reasons to be optimistic now. There are Trump’s attacks on Harris over electric vehicles, which he believes will resonate with labor; his apparent gains with Black voters, which could help him hold down his losses in Wayne County; and Harris’s eroding standing with the state’s sizable Arab American population because of the war in the Middle East.
“These are nontraditional Republican voters, and Donald Trump is connecting with them in a very, very powerful way,” Hoekstra said.
One of those nontraditional voters is Zak Alkusaimi, 35, who lives in Hamtramck, a city just outside Detroit with a large population of Arab Americans and Muslims whose mayor, a Democrat, recently endorsed Trump.
While he waited for his order at Yemen Cafe, Alkusaimi told me he did not consider himself either a Democrat or a Republican, and he has never cast a vote in a presidential election before. But this year, he said, he’s going to vote for Trump.
Alkusaimi said he had just lost his job at Stellantis, the auto manufacturer, and he was unhappy about the war in the Middle East.
“Nobody wants war, nobody wants to lose their job,” he said. Trump, he said, “is the only way.”
Trump will return to the state tomorrow; and he and Harris, who will be joined by Michelle Obama, will both be rallying in the state on Saturday.
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