Pat Parker has campaigned for Democratic presidential candidates in the battleground state of Michigan through five elections, and it hasn’t always been a happy experience.
The thrill of doorstepping for Barack Obama gave way to working in a Hillary Clinton campaign office in the bellwether Saginaw county, Michigan, with all the atmosphere of a morgue, even though it was assumed she would win. Campaigning for Joe Biden was constrained by the pandemic.
Next week’s election, though, is different. For the first time Parker is seeing real fear.
The clinical social worker is enthusiastic about Kamala Harris but she recognises that many of those who say they will vote to make her the US’s first Black female president are being goaded to the polls by her opponent, Donald Trump.
“It’s about him. There’s a huge component of, ‘We can’t have him back, we’ve got to stop him.’ Some conversations, it’s really difficult. People get completely freaked out and upset, and it doesn’t leave a lot of room for, ‘What do you think of Harris?’,” said Parker.
After Trump’s defeat in 2020, many Americans hoped and expected he would withdraw from the political stage. But the January 6 riot at the US Capitol, Trump’s continued subverting of confidence in the electoral system and the lasting consequences of his presidency, not least the loss of abortion rights, meant that the former president remained very much at the forefront of US politics.
Parker said this year’s campaign has only ratcheted up the fear as Trump spewed threats to tear down democracy, turn the military on the “enemy within” and use the justice system to punish those who crossed him. Then there is the mania of Trump’s campaign rallies filled with bile against immigrants, including those in the US legally, and threats to deport millions of people.
“We watch him. It’s like you can’t keep your eyes off a fire,” said Parker.
Michiganders have a front row seat to all this, blitzed with campaign ads and rallies, as Harris and Trump battle to the last for every vote in a key state where they remain neck and neck in the polls.
The Harris campaign sees its least difficult path to victory as running through Michigan alongside two other Rust belt swing states, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The key to that victory is turnout.
Trump won those “blue wall” states in 2016, taking Michigan by just 10,704 votes.
The then president increased his vote substantially in all three states in 2020 but still lost them to Biden, because Democrats who stayed home four years earlier turned out in large numbers to remove Trump from the White House. A larger proportion of registered voters – 72% – cast a ballot in Michigan in 2020 than in any election since John F Kennedy won the presidency 60 years earlier.
There are signs that this year could see an even larger turnout, with Michigan county clerks reporting increased voter registration and nearly 1m postal ballots returned already. The good news for Harris is that the bulk of those come from strongly Democratic areas such as Detroit.
But the Harris campaign is all too aware of taking anything for granted in the wake of the failures of 2016. Clinton barely bothered to campaign in Michigan or engage with key blocs such as car workers and Black communities who traditionally voted Democratic. Clinton’s strategists assured worried Michigan Democrats that the data showed she was five points ahead in the state and they were concentrating their resources elsewhere. That confidence was badly misplaced and she lost Michigan and other battleground states.
In contrast, Harris has spent more time campaigning in Michigan than any other state except Pennsylvania. The vice-president and her running mate, Tim Walz, are criss-crossing Michigan wooing factory workers and Black voters, white suburban women and college students.
The Harris campaign wheeled out Barack Obama to rap with Eminem at a Detroit rally and sent Bernie Sanders, the darling of the left of the Democratic party, to assuage the doubts of student voters who fear that Harris is just another corporate Democrat.
Harris is also working to draw in anti-Trump Republicans with the backing of former Republican officials in the state, including former members of congress. The vice-president shared a stage with former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney in a move to reassure Republican voters who are repulsed by Trump, and alarmed at the legal assault on women’s rights, that it is safe to vote for Harris.
Cheney’s father, Dick, has also endorsed Harris – an association that left some Michigan Democrats squirming given his role in driving the US to a disastrous war in Iraq.
Chris Wyant, a senior Harris campaign adviser in Michigan who also worked on the Clinton campaign in the state, acknowledged that the strategy is shaped by the lessons learned from the 2016 loss.
“I just don’t think there was the robust team and we didn’t get the time from the candidate that we do now,” he said.
For his part, Trump and his vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, have been hitting the state with lots of hard promises that even many of his supporters do not really believe will be fulfilled. The former president told a rally in Saginaw earlier this month that he would make Michigan the “car capital of the world again”. More than a dozen auto factories in the county, which once employed tens of thousands of people, have closed in recent decades.
Trump has also latched on to divisions over electric vehicles at his recent rallies in Michigan, where most voters are opposed to government incentives to promote EVs because it could cost jobs in traditional auto factories.
However, the former president did not help himself at a rally in Detroit by disparaging a city still recovering from loss of factories and population, and dotted with abandoned and burned out homes.
“Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president,” he said.
But Trump is trusted much more than Harris on two key issues in Michigan – inflation and immigration. The Biden administration boasts of a booming economy, including record job growth, but statistics don’t help the large numbers of Americans still grappling with the consequences of years of surging prices.
At a Saginaw soup kitchen, Darshell Roberson is less concerned as a Black woman about Trump’s racist rhetoric than she is about struggling to maintain a job.
“I voted for Biden but I really feel like Biden has failed me. I trust Donald Trump. In the last election I didn’t vote for him. I was kind of scared of him a little bit, but once I really got to watch him and look at him I liked him,” she said.
“I think Donald Trump is gonna make everything better. I really do. I could be wrong but hope I’m not.”
Roberson’s shifting loyalties reflect a deep disillusionment with politicians among many in Michigan, much of it aimed at national Democrats who are viewed as too close to corporate interests or not caring for working people. Union organisers in Saginaw despair that many of their members vote for Trump and in part blame it on how far the Democratic establishment has become detached from the party’s traditional base.
Trump is also popular with young white males in Michigan, some of them first-time voters who could help push up the former president’s vote count. Lewis Jensen, for example, travelled to Trump’s rally in Saginaw from rural Michigan.
“I’m voting for Trump. All my friends are voting for Trump. He may get a little crazy in some of the things he says but he’ll put Americans first,” he said. “I don’t trust Harris. I think she’s under the control of Obama. She’ll just do what the banks want.”
The key question for Trump, though, is whether he can find enough votes to take the state if Democrats turn out for Harris in the same numbers as they did in 2020.
Parker, the Democratic campaigner, said the conversations she is having with other voters suggests many share her alarm at the prospect of Trump returning to power, and this will drive turnout.
“He can do anything now if he gets re-elected. There’s a lot of him that’s just bluster and untruth, and he doesn’t have the energy to follow through on half of it. But he’s now putting people around him that do. It could completely transform this country,” she said.
“I don’t think we’ll have the ability to protest. I don’t think we’ll have the ability to be heard. I’m not even sure if there will be elections again. The vengefulness, how deep will it go?”
Trump is also facing a changed election process in Michigan.
Parker was an activist for a grassroots group, Voters Not Politicians, that won a referendum to put an end to gerrymandering of elections to the state legislature. A second campaign saw the introduction of nine days of early voting for the first time in the state’s presidential election. Among other things, that will help a push by Black churches to turn out their congregations to vote on the Sunday before election day in a “souls to polls” initiative.
Turnout is also likely to be spurred by the issue of abortion rights. Voter numbers surged in the 2022 midterm elections as they backed a ballot initiative enshrining the right to abortion in the Michigan constitution, after the US supreme court struck down Roe v Wade. Democrats in Michigan believe that continued fear of a federal ban on abortion if Trump is elected again, and Republicans win control of both houses of congress, will again help drive turnout, and win over some white suburban women who previously voted for Trump.
The issue was a particular driver for students in the midterms. Keaton Henning, a student campaigning for Harris at Saginaw Valley State University, said he expects to see the same this year.
“I’ve been active since I heard what Donald Trump said about immigrants. Coming from a Hispanic family, that was a big deal in 2016 and so ever since it stuck with me,” he said.
“But for a lot of students it’s women’s rights. So restoring Roe v Wade, that is a big thing that a lot of people on campus talk about. And then there’s a subsection of other people who are talking about the war in Gaza. There’s still that.”
Israel’s war in Gaza continues to be a difficult issue for Harris in Michigan. More than 100,000 people, many of them from the state’s Arab American community around Detroit, voted uncommitted in the Democratic primaries in February in a protest against Biden’s support for Israel, as the toll of Palestinian deaths surged into the tens of thousands. Few of those voters are likely to back Trump, but they may abstain. This could decide the election in Michigan if the race is as tight as in 2016.
The uncommitted movement is now warning about the danger of letting Trump back in, saying he would be even worse for the Palestinians than the president they’ve dubbed “Genocide Joe”.
For some people, it’s all too much. “One of my dearest friends is leaving the country on November 1,” said Parker. “She’s going to Canada to get out of the country and not coming back until it’s all over.”
