The voters who could decide the 2024 election in Michigan

If you’re just emerging from six months under a rock, we have some news for you: The election is Tuesday, and it’s a toss-up. Seven swing states will decide whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump is sworn in as the next president in January, and their polling averages are all within the margin of error. In an election this close, small constituencies really matter. In Michigan, that has meant a focus on its Arab American community, which numbers more than 200,000. Long a reliable Democratic constituency, many of these voters are furious with the Biden administration for its handling of Israel’s war in Gaza and now Lebanon. Trump has been trying to take advantage of this: He has welcomed the endorsement of the mayor of a majority Arab American suburb of Detroit, as well as the endorsement of some local imams. But the biggest beneficiary of Arab American anger at Democrats may be Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Among American Muslims, Stein is tied with Harris, with Trump a distant third, according to a new nationwide poll by the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Still, many Democrats see a vote for Stein as a vote for Trump. And if Stein is able to peel off enough Arab American voters, it could cost Harris Michigan — and the election. “If you told me it’s the morning after the election and Michigan has made the difference, I would say the most likely scenario is that Democratic weakness among Arab American voters and Black voters showed up,” Matt Grossmann, director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research at Michigan State University, told Today, Explained co-host Noel King late last week. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. What is Kamala Harris’s closing argument? Matt Grossmann Well, there is a bit of dissent within the Harris campaign and the broader Democratic apparatus. The Democratic super PAC, which has tested hundreds of messages, has repeatedly come back and said that the most effective messages are about Harris herself and about Harris’s economic policy proposals. But the campaign has remained somewhat focused, while including that message, on threats to democracy and the threat of Donald Trump. So it will be interesting to see which one they emphasize more at the end. This is the most money that has been spent in a presidential race, so they really do have the money. But the message is a little bit different in the ads than it is from the candidate herself. What is the economic message in Michigan specifically? Matt Grossmann The Democrats believe that they made a mistake in 2016 by running the same ads that they ran nationally. … Since then, they have made an effort to really target the Michigan auto industry. That was not new. In 2012, Barack Obama’s campaign was all about the auto bailout and “Mitt Romney was going to close your factories.” So they believe the 2016 move was a problem. In 2020 and 2024, and really throughout the Biden administration, they have been repeatedly focused on the auto industry, on union support, coming back to talk about factory retooling, about support for infrastructure. They’ve been here a lot, talking about Michigan-specific concerns. How are residents of Michigan responding to that? Matt Grossmann In general, positively. Certainly, there’s no concern that Michigan has been left out or that the Harris or the Biden administration have ignored Michigan. But Republicans have come up with a useful counterattack on the auto industry, which is that, overall, the electric vehicle transition is not going to be great for Michigan. And so while Democrats want to get your traditional bonus from showing up to a ribbon-cutting, saying we’re opening a new factory or doing a big factory retooling investment, Republicans have come back and said, really, this is DC trying to impose an electric vehicle transition that the industry wouldn’t otherwise be moving forward with. In the first half of the show, we talked to Khalil AlHajal. He’s an opinion editor at the Free Press, and he told us that the Arab American community in and around Detroit is very angry at the Democratic Party. How much do you think this will hurt Kamala Harris? Matt Grossmann It is a small part of the voting population as a whole, but it is one that could swing in a strong direction this year. We have this perception that Arab American voters are liberals overall, that they are concerned about this one issue and willing to sit it out or vote for a third-party candidate. But that’s really not representative of the Arab American population as a whole. They have actually been more of a swing vote than people might think. For example, in the 2022 midterm election, the Dearborn area actually moved toward the Republicans while the rest of the state was moving toward the Democrats. It had to do with a controversy over LGBT books in schools and over general post-pandemic school policy. It’s a constituency that has a lot of people who are socially conservative. It also has a lot of small-business owners and people who are economically conservative. And yet, since 9/11, [Arab Americans] have viewed the Democratic Party as their home, as the party that supports them and the Republican Party as the party that opposes them. So it’ll be interesting to see, not only if you get lower support for the Democrats this time, but [if there’s] actually increase in Trump’s support, even though it might seem odd given that Trump’s position on Israel is at least as, if not more, pro-Netanyahu than the Biden administration. The other demographic that you mentioned that Kamala Harris has had some trouble with is Black voters. We’ve covered this all year long. Black men in particular are interested in Donald Trump in greater numbers than before. What specifically is Kamala Harris failing to do with this demographic? Or maybe a better way of putting it is: Say that in the days after the election, we learn that Black men did turn toward Donald Trump. Is that something that the Trump campaign did right or that the Harris campaign did wrong? Matt Grossmann Maybe neither. These are long-term trends in progress. The age gradient on the white vote is that the older you are, the more likely you are to be conservative and a Republican voter. But it’s actually reversed among Black voters. The younger you are, the more likely you are to be a Republican because [you’re] losing the tie that the Democrats had to Black voters from the civil rights movement. So in some ways, it is part of an ideological realignment or an educational realignment that may be happening regardless of the candidates. Biden was losing Black voters and had a bigger reduction in support among Black voters than Harris does now. Harris has actually improved her standing among Black voters, including Black men, compared to Biden this summer. So I don’t think we can say this was about any particular attribute of Harris. It’s more about the reaction of the Black community to four years of the Biden administration and the continuing distance from civil rights history. There are a lot of Black voters that self-identify as conservatives, have conservative positions on social issues and economic issues, and still vote Democratic. And the explanation that’s usually given is that there is still a social tie to the Democratic Party, social pressure within the Black community to support Democrats. It brings along people who are really pretty conservative. So if they lose pretty conservative voters who disagree with the Democrats on most issues, it’s hard to say whether that was the fault of the Democrats or the credit of the Republicans. All right. Let’s talk about Donald Trump. What is his closing argument to the great state of Michigan? Matt Grossmann Well, there’s what the campaign is running on the airwaves, which I take to be the poll-tested research-supported message, which is clearly just comparing the Biden administration to the Trump administration. It’s just, were you better off under the Trump administration or under the Biden administration? And in Michigan, there’s a particular gain to talking about nostalgic politics, talking about the way things used to be, because we’re a state that used to be in the top 15 or 20 in income in the US and are now in the bottom 10 or 15. So it’s a place that really did think that things were better before, at least in economic terms. And so Trump’s message is the same nationally, but has a chance to land with Michigan. [But] it’s hard to get the candidate on the same message, especially with Trump. And what’s Donald Trump’s message to the auto industry? Matt Grossmann The Republicans have at least been effective at countering the Democratic message that they’re investing in the auto industry by saying, “This is about the imposition of environmental values and constraints on the auto industry that really isn’t going to be good for Michigan. It’s going to be better for China.” It’s certainly a continued emphasis on trade and immigration, although Michigan is a place where immigration is actually not as big of an issue in terms of the most important problem as in other states. So he really has to lean a little bit more on the economic message here. All right. So Michigan is a toss-up. Much of the country, the polls tell us, is a toss-up. What is the uncertainty in Michigan? Matt Grossmann It’s hard to say whether it’s uncertain because there’s a whole bunch of people who haven’t made up their mind or if it’s just uncertain because we’re not great at polling. I do want to hold out that second possibility. We could have the election and it could be six points more to the Harris side or six points more to the Trump side, which would look in our times like a landslide. And that would just be an average polling error. It probably is not the case that if that happens it’s because a whole bunch of people just made up their mind at the end. It is instead that we were just wrong all along. And I’m not picking on the pollsters. We have our own survey of Michigan. It shows Harris up five. So, you know, if that turns out to be right, I won’t even necessarily believe that the poll was right internally. We may have just gotten lucky. But I do think it’s important to say that we are divided as a country, as a state. It’s been 40 years since a presidential candidate won by 10 points or more. We just have not had landslide elections. We have been fighting in the middle for a shrinking number of voters who haven’t made up their mind between the two sides. And there’s not any easy way out of this two-sided system.