How Michigan explains American politics

The blue wall These 18 states, along with Washington, DC, for a long time, were known as “the blue wall.” And we called it that because, starting in 1992, each one of those places voted for a Democrat for president, again, and again, and again, and, well actually-- “The blue wall, right?!” In 2016, Donald Trump won by breaking the blue wall. “We didn't break it, we shattered that sucker.” And the way he shattered that sucker is that he won three blue wall states: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and, just barely, and in maybe the biggest surprise: Michigan. “Michigan, a state that was supposed to be a lock for Hillary Clinton.” “Michigan has been blue for a long time.” “Michigan, isn't that one of the pillars of the infamous blue wall?” But here's something that people missed about “blue wall” Michigan. Even though Michigan had consistently voted for Democrats for president over the years, it wasn't as blue as it looked. By 2016, Michigan already had a Republican governor and a Republican legislature, and it had been that way for some time. During the 2010s, that Republican state government had undermined unions... “so-called right-to-work legislation” ...restricted abortion... “The bill is passed.” ...loosened environmental protections... “Controversy surrounding this oil refinery.” So Trump winning Michigan didn't really come out of nowhere. But then, in 2018, Michigan elected a Democrat as governor. In 2020, it voted for Joe Biden over Trump. And in 2022, in a midterm election that was expected to be a red wave, Democrats won every elected branch of Michigan's state government -- for the first time in 40 years. So now Michigan was blue... again, I guess. And its new blue government got to work fast: repealing some of the Republicans’ signature legislation... “The first state to repeal a right-to-work law in decades.” ...expanding anti-discrimination laws... “The bill is passed.” ...and pouring money into the state's transition to clean energy. “Michigan, a national leader in the fight against climate change.” In this video, we're going to ask why Michigan went so red, and then so blue. What do political scientists say, what does the data say... Because, maybe Michigan is just a swing state, and this is what it looks like when a swing state swings. But the forces pushing these swings tell us a lot about the US right now - and about our next election. Maps So let's go back to this timeline of big Michigan elections, and we'll start here. In 2008. Michigan voted for Barack Obama for president, and for a Democratic state House of Representatives. But the next election would turn out differently. 2010 is really a response to 2008. We see a blowback to Obama's national policies. In 2010, Republicans won control of the whole state. And the reason that matters is because the next year, 2011, was a redistricting year. Which means Michigan Republicans were in charge of redrawing these: Maps of the state's political districts. Maps that can favor one party or another, depending on which voters they draw into which districts. The new maps they drew looked like this. And as you can see: well... it's kind of hard to tell, actually. If you just sort of look at the map, it doesn't look too gerrymandered. But once those maps took effect, in the 2012 election, the impact was clear. Let's just look at these. The state House of Representatives districts. If you added up the votes across all of these districts in 2012, Republicans only won about 46% of that vote, but they ended up with 59 out of 110 seats, which was a majority. Meaning, they had successfully skewed this map in their favor. And for the rest of the decade, Michigan Republicans actually never won a majority of the statewide vote for the House of Representatives, but they always won a majority of its seats. Which kind of tells us something about this whole period. Redistricting explains the whole thing. If not for Republican complete control of redistricting in 2012, Michigan would look a lot different, throughout the whole decade and even into today. So Michigan wasn't as red as it looked either. But redistricting doesn't actually explain everything. For example, 2016, which is when Michigan, the whole state, broke the blue wall. So what was going on there? The bellwether This chart looks at how close the vote was in every state in the 2016 presidential election. And Michigan is all the way at the end over here, the closest state in 2016, voting for Trump by a margin of 0.23%. When it's such a close margin, we could find a dozen different reasons. That's true, lot of factors here. Let's just start with one or two of them. This is a map of all the counties in Michigan. There are 83 of them, and on the map, a lot of them are geographically the same size. But if you were to resize each county according to how many voters there are in each one, that would look more like this. As you might be able to tell, these three counties alone make up a huge part of the state's population. So the way that they vote matters a ton. So let's start here: in Macomb County. “Macomb County, just north of Detroit.” Traditionally Democratic, overwhelmingly white.” “Historically home to autoworkers, union members...” “Between 2000 and 2010, half of the manufacturing jobs in Macomb vanished.” Demographically, Macomb is very... white working class. Before 2016, Macomb was a bellwether. A bellwether - meaning it voted kind of like the rest of the country. So, this chart shows how Macomb County voted for president in the years before 2016. These are years that voted for the Democrat for president, this is when it voted for the Republican, and the height is the margin of victory. And now let's do the thing where we add how the whole US voted each year. And notice how closely Macomb always matches the country as a whole. A bellwether. Until... 2016. 2016 changes all that, and it can come down to one word, and that's Trump. “God bless you, Michigan. God bless you.” He just shifts things dramatically in Macomb County. Focused on trade, manufacturing... “Michigan has lost one in four manufacturing jobs.” “This area is a manufacturing area. A lot of people are affected by losing their jobs.” “We will stop the jobs from leaving Michigan.” “Job creation. Not doing all our jobs offshore.” “We're going to bring a lot of industry back to our country” “The opportunity to earn a living and take care of our families. Put us all to work.” Talking about car jobs is one way that Trump takes Macomb from this to this. But... it's not the only way. We're seeing Trump stoke racial resentment, which has, in Macomb, always been, sort of, unfortunate to say, popular. “Look at the city of Detroit. Nearly half of Detroit residents do not work.” OK, that's not true, incidentally, unless your data includes children and the elderly. But while we're here, let's talk about Detroit, which is right next door to Macomb County, in Wayne County. The city of Detroit is about 78% black, and it typically votes between 93% and 98% Democratic. And in a place with such consistent voting patterns, it really helps to look at turnout. Politically speaking, when Detroit shows up, it's hard for Republicans to be able to win the state. This chart shows how many people voted in Detroit in different elections over the years. You can see that turnout in presidential elections is typically higher than turnout in midterm elections, and that's true pretty much everywhere. But look at the turnout in 2016. It's almost as low as, for example, the midterm election of 2006. Now, two things are happening here. Detroit is getting smaller during this time. Its population is shrinking, so fewer voters. But Trump had a role here, too. “Look how much African American communities have suffered under Democratic control.” The thing that I think Trump did effectively as far as interacting with African American voters is not getting them to become Republicans or switch their vote to the Republican Party. It’s to get them to not be comfortable voting for anyone. “America must reject the bigotry of Hillary Clinton, who sees communities of color only as votes, not as human beings.” Republicans don't have to move the needle that much in those communities to have an incredible impact on election outcomes. “I’m not convinced African Americans like Hillary Rodham Clinton as much as they liked Barack Obama.” “No one in this race, on either side, has that same pull.” If you don't like either side, maybe you don't vote. Now, there are, of course, other factors, too. That outcome is just one more of many that take us from blue Michigan to red Michigan. But remember: after 2016 is when Michigan starts to swing back. In 2018, the state elected a Democratic governor by a big margin. In 2020, it voted for Biden. And to see how we got there, we have to talk about... white women. Exit polls This chart comes from exit polls of white women in Michigan over ten years of presidential and gubernatorial elections. And it shows us, in the early 2010s, including 2016, white women in Michigan were voting more for Republicans. In 2016, white women across urban, rural, suburban, educational level, gave Trump a chance. But after 2016, something changes. A big swing among that demographic towards Democrats. Now, this chart doesn't tell us the reason for that. But there was something big happening around that time. A kind of adjustment in the way that many women in the US were participating in politics. “Not my president!” “We will not be ignored!” “Millions of people around the world marching for women's rights today.” One part of Michigan was particularly energized during this period. “The largest of all was in Washington, DC.” “Everywhere we turned, we ran into somebody from Michigan.” “I’m from Huntington Woods, Michigan.” “Waterford, Michigan.” “Franklin.” “We’re from Ferndale!” Huntington Woods. Waterford. Franklin. Ferndale. All in Oakland County. Women, especially white women in places like Oakland, were a big part of what drove the Democrats to their victory in 2018, and led to Trump losing the state in 2020. “I didn't think I'd ever have to worry about whether or not the president of the United States was a good role model. and I do now.” “I spent every day, from 2016 through now, making sure I did everything I could to make sure he's not reelected.” In some ways, Oakland is the mirror image, or maybe a 180 from Macomb County. Oakland is the wealthiest county in Michigan, and the second most well-educated. And at one time, those things made Oakland a very Republican county. But those types of voters - wealthy, well-educated - they vote differently than they once did. And you see that in exit polls, too. This one shows how college-educated voters across Michigan have voted over the past few elections. They've been trending heavily towards Democrats. You can really see the backlash to Trump in the raw voter turnout numbers in Oakland County. Turnout in 2016 was kind of unremarkable, basically in line with earlier years. But look at how many people voted in the first election after Trump won, the midterm election of 2018: Almost as many as in a presidential election. And the 2020 count was unprecedented. Okay. We’ve finally made it to 2022. Democrats win it all. Except sorry one more thing. “Proposal 2, the anti-gerrymandering proposal.” “The state overwhelmingly passed Proposal 2.” In 2018, by a big margin, Michigan voters approved an anti-gerrymandering measure, that took redistricting out of the hands of the legislature, and gave it to an independent commission. Over the next three years, that commission would replace these maps, with new maps. And the first year that these maps would be in effect was 2022. 2022 In 2022, if you added up all the elections for Michigan state representatives, Democrats won 51% of that vote. And under the new district lines, they won 56 out of 110 seats, which is... 51%. Michigan's independent redistricting commission gave Michigan Democrats the opportunity to finally have maps that weren't overly biased to Republicans. Redistricting unlocks a big part of how this happened, but there was more going on here. To really understand 2022, we have to look at these two stories. One started with the overturning of Roe v Wade in June of 2022. In Michigan, activists responded to that by putting Proposal 3 on the ballot that year: a measure that would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. The measure was really popular, and passed easily, by more than ten percentage points. The other big thing was something happening in the Michigan Republican Party. By the time 2022 gets around, the Trump wing of the Republican Party had taken over entirely. These are photos from a “stop the steal” protest at the Michigan state capitol, just after the 2020 election. By May of 2022, a poll found that a majority of Michigan Republicans supported overturning the 2020 presidential election. Among Michigan voters as a whole, though, only around a quarter agreed with that. But Republicans running for statewide office in 2022 largely endorsed that idea. “How many of you believe that the widespread election fraud was enough to swing the election toward Biden? Raise your hand with me.” That is Tudor Dixon, who Michigan Republicans nominated for governor in 2022. “The city of Detroit has been plagued with election corruption for years.” And that is Kristina Karamo, the Republican who ran to be in charge of Michigan's elections. Both Dixon and Karamo would lose to Democrats by more than ten percentage points. One place you could really see the reaction to abortion rights on the ballot, and to the Republican focus on election fraud, was the Michigan suburbs, which exit polls tell us had historically voted Republican until 2022. And the next year, Michigan Republicans met at their convention, and they chose Kristina Karamo as their new party leader. “We need to fight to secure our elections. It's the reason I did not concede after the 2022 election.” It's almost like that's all you hear from them. Michigan and the US It's tempting to think that Michigan is just a blue state now. But it won't take much to make it swing back. For example, Michigan is about 3% Middle Eastern and North African. Doesn't sound like much, but that actually makes it the most Arab American state in the country by far. And that would be worth paying attention to if, for example, something were to happen that made Arab American support for Joe Biden go way down. “President Biden shows unwavering support for Israel, with the civilian death toll in Gaza rising.” “I did vote for Joe Biden in 2020. Do you plan to vote for him in 2024? I do not.” Still, if we look back at some of the big moments in this story, you might notice two things. First, it's Donald Trump who's actually been the main character in Michigan politics, going back almost a decade now. And second, you probably saw some of these things happen outside of Michigan, too. This chart shows how every state voted in the most recent presidential election, 2020. If you put how the whole US voted onto this chart, it would go here. And here is Michigan. In other words, by at least one measure, Michigan is the state closest to the country as a whole. Redistricting battles like Michigan's are happening all over the country. National exit polls show that college- educated Americans everywhere have been voting more Democratic, just like in Michigan. And that non-college educated Americans are doing the opposite. That's pretty indicative of where the parties are headed. I do think that you're seeing party coalitions shift. There's also evidence that the overturning of Roe v. Wade has been a powerful motivator everywhere, not just in Michigan, with voters rejecting abortion bans in surprising places like Kentucky, Montana, Kansas, Ohio... So, you know, Michigan can make or break a whole national election. But there's a better reason for Americans to be watching Michigan really closely. And it's that when we do, we're looking at ourselves.