The largest bloc of registered voters in the city of Saginaw has yet to make a choice between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, and probably never will. A majority of Black residents of the biggest city in the most closely contested county of the battleground state of Michigan simply don’t vote.
To the frustration of civil rights activists and Democratic politicians struggling to secure every ballot in a state that the Harris campaign sees as crucial to victory, more than half of Saginaw city’s population has long been unpersuaded that elections make much of a difference to their lives.
Now, against the backdrop of the drama of the US’s knife-edge 2024 election, Black organizations and churches are once again making a determined push to turn out voters, helped by the first female Black candidate for president and changes to Michigan law making it easier to vote.
But Terry Pruitt, president of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) branch running voter education campaigns, said it was a struggle to generate enthusiasm in Saginaw.
“I’ve been here all my life. I grew up on the east side of Saginaw and I see the apathy. This is not something that they put at the top of the priority list when they’ve got to figure out, can I get to work today?” he said.
“My church is on the south side of Saginaw, probably the lowest socioeconomic district in Saginaw county other than a couple of rural areas, and when I walk through the neighborhood and talk to people about why they don’t vote, you’d be surprised how many of them say, ‘that’s not important to me.’ These folks are going to go ahead and do what they want to do. They don’t listen to me. They don’t want to hear what I have to say.”
Black residents account for nearly half of Saginaw city’s 45,000 population with white people about one-third. Historically, a sharp racial divide was marked by the Saginaw river running through the heart of the city so that there were two downtowns on opposite banks.
Neighborhoods on the east side are overwhelmingly Black. The west side was mostly white but the population has become more mixed in recent years as large numbers of white people moved to neighboring Saginaw Township.
Voter turnout in the east of Saginaw city is consistently well below the other side of the river and anywhere else in the county. Many people are automatically registered to vote in Michigan when applying for a driving licence but do not do so.
In the 2020 election, which saw the highest turnout of voters in Michigan history at 70.5% as sharp divisions over Trump drew more people to the polls, less than half of registered voters in Saginaw city cast a ballot. In most Black neighborhoods the figure was even lower, falling below 40% in some precincts.
Even during Barack Obama’s first run for the White House in 2008, turnout in the east of Saginaw, where the man who would become the US’s first Black president picked up more than 95% of the vote in many precincts, was still much lower than elsewhere.
But the number that some Harris supporters in Saginaw are focused on is Trump’s victory in Michigan in 2016 by fewer than 11,000 votes – only slightly more than the number of registered voters who did not cast a ballot in the city of Saginaw. Although Joe Biden narrowly won the state back four years later, Michigan is again on a knife edge. Michigan could help decide the whole US election, and Saginaw could help decide the whole of Michigan.
Jeff Bulls, the president of the Community Alliance for the People in Saginaw, which is running a get-out-the-vote campaign, said the low turnout was not easily overcome.
“The numbers are stupid. They’re really, really low. Some people, especially poorer people, they feel like their vote doesn’t count. Or people have become jaded with government. A lot of them feel like government doesn’t have any effect on their lives. That’s how people draw back from the process: ‘I’m going to go vote for what?’ A lot of people are disenchanted with the process. That’s not easy to change,” he said.
Bulls said the sense of being overlooked by political leaders was especially evident in March, when Biden was still running for re-election. The president visited Saginaw city but failed to meet Black leaders or visit a Black church.
“There was a lot of tension with people feeling like the president didn’t really care about the Black vote. His visit was specifically to come here and meet with Black leaders in the community and Black clergy to address that sentiment. When he got here, everything changed. He ended up meeting with white liberal Democrats and that pissed a lot of people off and set off a firestorm,” he said.
Pruitt demanded an explanation from Biden’s campaign which, he said, apologized.
“It left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths. It was clearly a mistake and, believe me, there were several of us who let him know that,” he said.
Critics turned on the county’s Democratic party and its chair, Aileen Pettinger. She shakes her head in despair on being asked about the debacle.
“Unfortunately, because I’m the party chair, I got the brunt of it. Honestly, we were only told the night before. In the past, they would ask our input. This time they did not listen to us at all,” she said.
For some activists, the incident had echoes of Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 campaign when her staff arrived in midwestern towns waving data sets and riding roughshod over local advice, helping to cost her the election.
Pettinger said the Harris campaign was a long way from that. Pruitt agreed.
“I’m pretty sure that that would not happen with Harris,” he said.
But Pruitt said the incident threw a spotlight on the alienation many in the city feel from established political parties.
“There’s obviously the tendency for us who do vote to vote Democratic. But there’s a school of thought that the Democratic party takes that vote for granted and really doesn’t listen to what we really feel is important,” he said.
Pettinger said she recognised the problem.
“We have heard that on the doors but I’m seeing a huge shift out on the doors since Kamala has announced that she was running. It’s a huge difference. I haven’t seen hope like this since Obama, I haven’t seen this excitement,” she said.
“I’m not losing hope. I feel very energised about it. We just have to make sure it carries over and make sure we get people to the ballot box.”
Pruitt agreed that Harris had injected some enthusiasm into the election.
“I don’t think it will drive it as much as Obama. I never had the slightest thought that I’d see an African American be elected president of the United States, so that phenomenon has already occurred,” he said.
“But I see some people excited about the opportunity of a Black female being president and it will help drive our community to the polls. But in the end it’s the policies that matter to get people to vote. We have to help connect the dots for people. There has to be self-interest in voting which means you have to explain those two or three issues that you think are at the top of their list, and what we have to lose if we’re on the wrong side of voting on those things.”
Pruitt said his get-out-the-vote campaign was focusing on the dangers Trump poses to “the social safety network”, including housing support, childcare assistance, and disability and social security payments.
“As a national theme, abortion is out there and that’s what the parties are running with. That may be on the list for the average Black woman on the east side of Saginaw but it’s much further down the list. But if we start talking about losing the department of education and how that’s going to impact their children, that will hit home very quickly,” he said.
Bulls said affordable housing was also a major issue in Saginaw even though the city’s population has dropped sharply over recent decades. Saginaw is dotted with grass-covered spaces where abandoned houses have been torn down, but rents for what remains are high and the quality often substandard.
“In Saginaw city, almost 70% of our housing is over 60 years old. There’s a lot of blight, a lot of houses that have already been torn down or need to be torn down. There haven’t been any new builds in the city, en masse, probably this century. So we just have a huge need for new housing, whether it’s single family housing or apartments,” he said.
Then there is policing in a city with one of the highest crime rates in the country. Bulls said some of the alienation comes from frustration at the political decision to bring the state police into Saginaw.
“We’ve had a couple different community forums on it because people are really concerned. There’s a state programme called the secure cities partnership. It has largely brought a bunch of Michigan state police into the community. It’s been basically a stop-and-frisk program. They don’t answer 911 calls. They literally just patrol and pull people over. There’s a huge racial disparity on where they patrol and who they pull over. It’s been a very, very tense issue here, and it’ll continue to be until it’s dealt with,” he said.
Still, campaigners see an opportunity in the introduction of nine days of early voting for this year’s presidential election which, they say, which will assist Black churches running “souls to the polls” initiatives to lead their congregations to vote after Sunday services.
Pruitt has also looked to other places for advice, including to Stacey Abrams, the Georgia politician who created voting rights organisations that proved crucial in the Democrats winning two key seats in the US Senate four years ago.
“We’ve had conversations with Stacey Abrams and people from Georgia because it was remarkable what she did. But when I started looking at how she did it, it takes an army of people and an awful lot of money to make it happen. That’s another side of this, the resources, because the frustration for people like me is marshalling the resources to get it done,“ he said.
Bulls feels the same constraints, and laments what he sees as the tendency of white politicians to leave it to Black organisations to get out the vote in their community.
“It shouldn’t be left to us but here we are. It’s important to us so we’ll do it anyway, but it shouldn’t be just us,” he said.
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