Michigan takes the keys to November drive – The Ukiah Daily Journal

SAGINAW, Michigan — Make way, Pennsylvania. This, too, is a Keystone State. Pennsylvania claims Keystone State status for purely geographic reasons. Located practically in the middle of the 13 colonies, Pennsylvania got its name because, like the keystone of an arch, it held the entire structure together when the United States came together in the mid-1770s.

But Michigan has also been a key state historically and has an equally legitimate claim to that title. It was the center of the iron, copper and lumber trade that led America into its industrial transformation. Its location on the Great Lakes transportation corridor made it a cog in the great movement of resources across the continent. For decades, its automobile industry was the engine of the country’s economy.

And then there is Michigan’s political profile. In more than two and a half centuries of its political existence, all of its politicians combined have not had the influence of a single Michigan politician, Senator Arthur Vandenberg. When the Republican from Grand Rapids gave his landmark speech in 1945 announcing his shift from isolationism to internationalism, the country swung decisively to his side. That debate was over – until Donald Trump reignited it.

And besides, when Michigan’s economy fell into crisis in the 1970s, the United States economy also collapsed.

So there is a certain poetry in the fact that Michigan, at least for the duration of this column, is considered a key state – or, as political experts call them, swing states – alongside Pennsylvania. It is no exaggeration to say that the 2024 election could be decided in the two states.

Michigan, which joined the Union 61 years after the Declaration of Independence, voted Republican in four elections from 1972 and Democrat in six elections from 1992. Trump won a narrow victory in 2016, but Joe Biden took it four years later. A true swing state.

“Michigan has been a toss-up state for many years, and Democrats are going to have to work hard to win here,” former Democratic Gov. James Blanchard said recently as he prepared to speak on behalf of the Biden campaign on a Detroit television station. “We’re going to see these candidates once a week.”

Just as Pennsylvania has a brilliant Democratic governor (Josh Shapiro, a sure-fire frontrunner for the 2028 presidential election), Michigan has one with four years more gubernatorial experience (Gretchen Whitmer). More than a few analysts, including this one, have wondered whether a Whitmer-Shapiro ticket would win 40 states for the Democrats in November—but that’s a question for another day, though perhaps sooner than anyone expected.

Biden has opened 15 field offices here. Trump was here last month and spoke at a black church. The two will cross the state several times before Election Day, and no one would be surprised to find them in Michigan on the same day – or days. That’s how crucial it is. Democrats are a little more confident about their prospects in Pennsylvania than in Michigan, so Biden may be the more frequent visitor.

Right now, Trump has a 2.4 percentage point lead over Biden here, according to the average of 538 polls. That’s basically nothing; the flutter of a butterfly in Fordlandia, Brazil – the prefabricated industrial community that Michigan’s Henry Ford built in the Amazon rainforest 96 years ago – would be enough for the two major party candidates to swap places at the top of the list, especially with independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. polling at 8.7 percent here. For that reason, both candidates fear, if not respect, the late New York senator’s son.

Michigan is more than Pennsylvania, it is a microcosm of contemporary American politics.

Blanchard, the first Democratic governor in 20 years and a four-term House member preceded and followed by Republican lawmakers, said commentators often oversimplify Michigan’s political profile. “It’s not just one group, it’s every group that matters in this state, and especially in this election,” he said. “Yes, Michigan is a working-class state, and it’s a black state and an Arab state, and it has a large Jewish community. You shouldn’t dismiss the suburbs here as being important. They’re going to be key, along with the west side of the state, which seems to lean Democratic. But we have to put in the work.”

Democrats are split between progressives and moderates, a divide deepened by Arab Americans’ dissatisfaction with Biden’s policies on the war between Israel and Hamas. In the Democratic primary this spring, he faced a rebellion in the cities of Dearborn, Dearborn Heights and Hamtramck, all of which have high populations of Arab Americans. Indeed, the 100,000 Democratic voters who voted “undecided” in the primary – an action called for by Representative Rashida Tlaib, who represents Dearborn and is the first Palestinian American in Congress – clouded Biden’s victory here.

Not that Republicans are united. While Gerald Ford’s Republican style – quiet and respectable rather than loud and rebellious, a formula that worked for him for a quarter century from 1949 to 1973, when he became vice president – is in the background, Michigan Republicans have not fully embraced Trump’s insurgency. The state’s GOP is a mess, reflecting conflicting views of Trump and his MAGA movement. A long fight to remove state Chair Kristina Karamo, a Trump ally, from office finally succeeded; Pete Hoekstra, who served in Congress and was Trump’s appointed ambassador to the Netherlands, became the new chair and has begun to steer the ship back on course.

“Republicans were losing, and that will help Trump in November,” said Bill Ballenger, a former Republican member of the state House and Senate before becoming a leading political analyst in Michigan. “But it remains a very close race here. It’s going to go back and forth every day from now until Election Day.”

The gap between Tlaib and Karamo – from far left to far right – speaks volumes about how politically divided America is today. It also speaks to the changes in political life in this swing state, which has recently had important governors from the mainstream Democratic Party, such as G. Mennen Williams (1949-1961) and Blanchard (1983-1991), and from the mainstream Republican Party, such as George Romney (1963-1969) and William Milliken (1969-1983). Could either of them be elected today?

David M. Shribman is the former editor in chief of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.