Detroit
Alarm bells started sounding in Michigan six days before the presidential election.
Former president Bill Clinton arrived in Detroit on an unannounced visit. He hastily organized a meeting with the region’s political and clergy leaders at a city church whose pastor is the leader of the NAACP’s Detroit branch. The topic: How to get more African-Americans to vote for his wife, Hillary Clinton.
Most polls showed Clinton with a comfortable lead in Michigan—an average of about 6.5 percentage points in a Real Clear Politics average of recent surveys. But the signs on the ground in the state’s largest city and Democratic stronghold were lackluster. Detroit black political consultants were dismayed that city residents’ returned number of absentee ballots was much lower than Barack Obama’s numbers than they liked. As one told the Detroit News: “She’s gotta fire up the base … or this thing is done.”
The gravity of the situation was captured by Congresswoman Debbie Dingell, a first-term Democrat but a longtime Democratic National Committee member and wife of legendary former congressman John Dingell. As she rushed into the black church, she told a Detroit News reporter: “We’ve got to energize people. A lot of people got complacent.”
That complacency and fired-up working-class voters across the state gave Republican Donald Trump a dramatic 47.6 percent to 47.3 percent victory in Michigan, a win by 13,107 votes, according to the state’s uncertified results. It was the first time a Republican candidate had won the Great Lakes State since George H.W. Bush in 1988.
Trump flipped 12 counties that backed President Barack Obama in 2012. He won 75 of the state’s 83 counties.
Clinton won Wayne County and Detroit, but with fewer votes than Obama got four years ago. Clinton generated nearly 48,000 fewer votes in Detroit, where turnout declined to 48.5 percent this year from almost 51 percent in 2012. Clinton beat Trump 95 percent to 3 percent in Detroit, but it was better than Obama’s 98 percent to 2 percent drubbing of Mitt Romney in 2012.
Exit polling for the Detroit News and national television networks showed 61 percent of Michigan’s white voters without a college education voted for Trump, while 31 percent backed Clinton. While the state’s female voters supported Clinton 53 percent to 42 percent, white women backed Trump 48 percent to 44 percent.
The formula for Trump’s triumph nationwide is well known. It included his outsider status, the candidate’s unusual discipline during the campaign’s final two weeks, and the WikiLeaks deluge of embarrassing, hacked, emails from the Clinton campaign. It also involved the FBI investigation into new emails possibly associated with Clinton’s private email server. Trump’s emphasis on bad trade deals, lost manufacturing jobs and cleaning up political corruption resonated.
In Michigan, the appeal was more local. For more than a year, Trump slammed the Ford Motor Company for planning to move small-car production jobs to Mexico. He claimed the Dearborn automaker would cost jobs for Michigan even though the company insisted there would be no net loss of jobs because it was hiking employment at other U.S. factories. He said the North American Free Trade Agreement was doing the same thing, despite a growth in Michigan jobs during the past few years.
But in politics, facts don’t matter as much as sentiment. Working-class and rural voters in Michigan alienated by political and corporate leaders found someone with whom they could identify. Trump talked in plain terms about taking on the establishment, while 2012 GOP presidential nominee and Michigan native Mitt Romney talked philosophically about attacking political interference in the economy.
“With Mitt, they saw kind of a professor, and what they saw with Trump was a fighter,” former West Michigan Republican congressman and state Trump campaign co-chair Pete Hoekstra told Detroit News reporter Chad Livengood.
Congresswoman Candice Miller, a longtime Macomb County Republican who backed Trump, saw the same connection at play in the county of blue-collar, socially conservative “Reagan Democrats” that went for the New York businessman, 54 percent to 42 percent. Voter turnout in Macomb, home to many auto jobs, rose 4 percent from 2012.
“Trump was just always fighting,” said Miller, who was campaigning in the county for a public works position because she is retiring from Congress at year’s end.
Ford seemed an odd punching bag. The company refused to take a federal bailout loan during the Great Recession. It overhauled its cars and trucks and improved their quality by mortgaging all of its assets for almost $24 billion in private loans. The family-owned automaker has shown in many ways it cares for its workers.
But the symbolism of moving jobs out of the country was more powerful. This summer I talked informally to a Ford employee who outlined all of the great things the automaker is doing. But the employee had to agree with Trump: Those jobs should really stay in America and not go to Mexico.
“I’ve never seen so many yard signs,” said Miller, a former Michigan secretary of state. “It was very organic. There were Trump-Pence signs in people’s yards. Do you know how hard it is to get someone to put a political sign on their lawn? I’d never seen anything like it.”
Michigan has a history of flirting with anti-establishment candidates. Former Alabama governor George Wallace won the 1972 Michigan Democratic caucuses. Jesse Jackson won the state’s 1988 Democratic caucuses. And Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the self-declared “democratic socialist,” for one day fulfilled his promise of a “political revolution” and came from a more than 20-point polling deficit to eke out a narrow upset over Hillary Clinton in the March 15 Democratic primary.
On the general election front, Michigan has had its share of historic presidential campaign moments. There was Democrat Michael Dukakis dooming his 1988 run against Vice President George Bush by donning a funny-looking tank helmet on the grounds of a U.S. Army facility in a Detroit suburb. And Vice President Al Gore was forced in November 2000 to visit Michigan the day before the election, wasting time in a state he would win and less time in Florida, where he would lose by 537 votes and thus the presidency to Republican George W. Bush.
Trump has added his own imprint. He ended up winning Michigan in the final week and a half as the campaign bombarded the state with visits from Trump and myriad visits from all of his grown children: Donald Jr., Ivanka, Eric, and even Tiffany. Running mate Mike Pence made four campaign appearances in the last five days of the campaign in the socially conservative GOP stronghold of West Michigan—one of them with Texas senator and Trump critic Ted Cruz, who was popular in the region during Michigan’s primary.
The Clinton campaign countered with the former president visiting a Detroit coffee shop one day and campaigning in the urban areas of Flint, Lansing, and Metro Detroit the Sunday before the election. Hillary Clinton herself paid a Friday visit to Detroit to try to whip up enthusiasm and made a late play Monday for wavering voters in West Michigan, where Trump’s support was comparatively tepid. President Barack Obama visited the college campus of the University of Michigan on the same day.
Trump would not be outdone. He held a rally in a West Michigan suburb and a Sunday rally in the Macomb County city of Warren. And when he heard Clinton was making a last stand in Michigan the day before the election, Trump scheduled a late-night Monday rally in Grand Rapids so he would have the last word.
Of course, Trump ran a little behind. But at 12:30 a.m. Tuesday morning, Trump could see the finish line. The polls in Michigan and many states would open in about seven hours.
As he addressed a crowd of thousands in a downtown Grand Rapids convention center, the Republican businessman made his last bold promise and statement of the campaign, one that materialized.
“Michigan stands at the crossroads of history,” Trump said. “If we win Michigan, we will win this historic election and then we will truly be able to do all of the things we want to do.”
Richard Burr is an assistant city editor at the Detroit News, where he oversees politics and government coverage.
