Donald Trump’s supporters do not pitch up at his rallies expecting to hear policy speeches or even the truth. Mostly they go for the comfort of distractions from hard realities and the allure of false promises to revive the past.
But some of the loudest cheers at Trump’s recent rally in Saginaw, Michigan, came in response to a claim the former US president’s supporters could believe, when he said election polls were swinging his way in the battleground state and that Kamala Harris’s “honeymoon period” was over.
“We’re up in all of the polls. We’re up in every swing state. They had a honeymoon period,” he said before he was drowned out by the cheering crowd.
With just three weeks left until the election, Democrats fear that Trump is right. Some complain that Harris has squandered an initial burst of enthusiasm after Joe Biden dropped out of the race in July, which sparked a surge in fundraising and volunteering for her campaign.
Michigan is one of the handful of key swing states that will decide the result of this most momentous of elections. While Harris has a slight lead in national polls, she is struggling in Michigan, a state she must win or face a more challenging path through the US’s electoral college to take the White House. Trump won the state by just 10,704 in 2016 and lost it by a narrow margin to Biden four years later.
The stakes are enormous. Trump has campaigned in 2024 on an ever more extreme platform, threatening mass deportations of immigrants and promising to seek revenge on his political enemies if he returns to the White House. Last week, Trump even demanded one of America’s big television networks lose its licence because he sees its political coverage as unfair to him. In a country that prides itself on free speech, freedom of the press could ail quickly under a second Trump term. For many, US democracy itself feels on the line.
The Harris campaign has long considered its easiest path to victory is by winning the Rust belt battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. If the vice-president were to lose in Michigan, she would almost certainly need to win one of the other closely contested states of Georgia, Arizona or North Carolina.
A Quinnipiac University poll released last Wednesday put the vice-president three points behind Trump in Michigan, while poll trackers offer a mixed picture.
For those desperate to know which way Michigan might go, it is Saginaw that is the bellwether county of the state. Barack Obama won it twice before Trump beat Hillary Clinton in the county by a little more than 1,000 votes, just over 1% of the ballot, in 2016. Four years later, Biden took Saginaw county from Trump by an even narrower margin of just 303 votes.
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Why Saginaw, Michigan?
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In what is expected to be a knife-edge US election decided by a few voters in a handful of key battleground states, the Guardian is exploring Saginaw, Michigan. It is a swing area in a swing state whose voters will bear an outsize influence on the outcome of the fight between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Chris McGreal is on the ground in Saginaw in the run up to November’s election examining the issues that voters of all political backgrounds care about.
Saginaw voters: tell us which issues will decide the US election
Both campaigns are piling resources into Michigan including a deluge of frantic television advertising, and a merry-go-round of candidates and prominent supporters wheeling through the state.
Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, was in Detroit on Friday looking to win over blue-collar union voters. The vice-president is expected in Detroit on Tuesday in a bid to turn out Black voters who are key to a Democratic victory in Michigan.
The Harris campaign has wheeled out Barack Obama in recent days and sent Bernie Sanders, the darling of the left of the Democratic party, to rally student support in Saginaw a week ago.
Meanwhile Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, traversed Michigan promising to bring back the old and attacking the new. Vance joked to an audience in Detroit on Tuesday about the importance of the state: “I’m going to be in Michigan like 30 times” before the election.
The pair have repeatedly pledged to make the American car industry great again, after so many jobs were lost to globalisation and automation, while attacking its future by scorning electric vehicles. Trump’s rally in Saginaw leaned heavily on promises to bring back the dozen or so auto factories in the county that have closed in recent years.
Alongside the fantasy promises is a darker campaign aimed at those who do not fit the view of what many Trump supporters think an American should look like. Some of it is dressed up as opposition to illegal immigration but groups supporting Trump are running television ads with sinister overtones in Michigan, including one paid for by Duty to America that shows a series of photographs of white people who are said to have been “left behind”.
“Even if we do everything right, Harris and the Democrats find new ways to make us pay. For what? No matter what we do, Democrats are against us. So this November, we’re against them,” it said.
Across the key Rust belt states, Trump has a clear lead on two of the most important issues for many voters, the economy and immigration. He is even ahead by one point on which candidate would better preserve democracy, despite his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to the Quinnipiac poll.
Behind the scenes, Democratic strategists are increasingly alarmed by the numbers. The party’s US Senate candidate in Michigan, Elissa Slotkin, warned last month that Harris was not polling as well as expected.
“I’m not feeling my best right now about where we are on Kamala Harris in a place like Michigan,” she told a fundraiser. “We have her underwater in our polling.”
Some Democratic campaigners blame the campaign.
Carly Hammond is an official for the US’s largest trade union confederation, the AFL-CIO, for the Saginaw region who is running for city council while also knocking on doors for Harris.
“This is the most expensive election in American politics so far. There’s more money around, more ads, more signs, the volunteers are there. I really haven’t seen anything like this in terms of the mobilisation efforts,” she said.
“What is missing is Harris’s policies. People ask: ‘What is she going to do?’ I’ve heard about 200 Harris ads in the past few weeks just because they’re inescapable. But I couldn’t tell you what her concrete plan is to tackle anything.”
Some of the Democratic messaging in Michigan plays to Trump’s agenda, with repeated promises to “secure the border” even though Saginaw is 1,500 miles from the Mexican frontier and undocumented immigrants make up only about 1% of the state’s population. But it does not appear to be doing Harris much good while alienating some Democrats.
Hammond said she feared that Harris had retreated into defensive messaging and a reliance on scaring voters over Trump’s ties to Project 2025, the authoritarian plan to impose rightwing control across the entire US government, that is costing her momentum.
“When it switched over from Biden to Harris, there was an expectation that Harris would put out her own aggressive policy proposals and that hasn’t happened. There’s been a kind of walking back. Harris’s campaign said she’s going to take on the billionaires and corporate interest rates. A lot of that language fell off and now it’s just kind of ‘Project 2025, it really sucks’,” she said.
Trump, on the other hand, has been hitting the state with hard promises even if they’re unlikely to be fulfilled. He told his audience in Saginaw he would make Michigan the “car capital of the world again” after General Motors closed a dozen factories in the county and moved some production to Mexico.
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“Under my plan American workers will no longer be worried about losing their jobs to foreign nations. Instead, foreign nations will be worried about losing their jobs to America. We’re bringing them all back,” he said.
Large numbers of Trump voters don’t believe it will happen, not least because he made the same promise in 2016 and the factories didn’t return. But they apparently don’t care.
Gary Ell, chair of Saginaw’s Republican party and a fervent Trump backer, said his supporters take the promise alone as evidence that the former president cares about them while the Democrats care about other people.
“They don’t look at him as being a politician. They still look at him as being an experienced former president who still stands on the same policies that he stood for before with the exception that the economy has gotten so much worse and the migration of mass illegal aliens has gotten so much worse. Those are two things that he had in check when he was president before,” he said.
Biden boasts of a booming economy, including record job growth, but statistics mean little to large numbers of Americans who feel much worse off after years of surging inflation. Saginaw’s largest food bank has just received a $1m grant to expand because so many families are buckling under high grocery prices.
Still, the Harris campaign has been encouraged by data showing the vice-president gaining ground with white voters without college degrees in Michigan, a key part of Trump’s base.
In a move to shore that up, Democratic heavyweights from out of state, including the former US senator from Indiana Joe Donnelly, descended on Saginaw last Wednesday to tell trade union members that Biden had been good for blue collar workers and Harris would be too.
The area’s member of Congress, Dan Kildee, warned the workers that Trump’s false promises could cost them their jobs.
“This is a union hall where everybody’s working because the Biden-Harris administration has invested in American manufacturing. When Donald Trump was president, we were losing these jobs. Sixty per cent of these people were unemployed. Under Biden-Harris, they’re back to work. So, the question is, are we going to continue on this path or are we going to go back to those days?” he said.
The Harris camp also brought Sanders to Saginaw to get out the student vote with a rally at the local university. He said that Trump’s denial of the climate crisis threatened the future of the planet and warned that another Trump presidency could be a decisive blow to a democracy already undermined by a growing oligarchy.
Sanders also mocked Trump for losing the support of his own vice-president, Mike Pence.
“Mike Pence is a very conservative guy. His views are nothing like mine. I disagree with him on every issue. But he worked with Trump every single day and he said Trump is not fit to be president of the United States,” Sanders told a standing-room-only crowd.
Some Michigan Republicans are pushing a similar message. A former member of Congress from Detroit, Dave Trott, and other anti-Trump conservatives launched Michigan Republicans for Harris-Walz earlier this month, aimed at the more than 350,000 Republicans in Michigan who voted against the former president in their party’s primary in February. Trott accused Trump of “gutting Michigan’s economy” and called him “more dangerous than ever”.
It’s not clear if any of this is changing anyone’s vote. Both camps are focused on turnout, knowing that it is likely to decide the election. Trump’s support in Michigan went up in 2020 but he was beaten because many of those Democrats who stayed home when Clinton was the candidate four years earlier came out to remove him from the White House.
Trump has been restating his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen in urging supporters to vote in order to make the election “too big to rig”. Harris is counting on the enthusiasm initially generated by her campaign, particularly among young female voters.
Ultimately, the election in Michigan may be decided by events half a world away.
More than 100,000 people voted uncommitted in the state’s Democratic primaries in February in a protest against Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza, as the Palestinian civilian death toll climbed into the tens of thousands. But the Uncommitted movement is now alarmed at the prospect of those supporters boycotting Harris if it delivers Michigan to Trump.
On Tuesday, the group’s co-founder Lexi Zeidan pleaded in a video on social media to not let that happen.
“As a Palestinian American, the current administration’s handling of this genocide has been beyond enraging and demoralising, but the reality is that it can get worse. Nobody wants a Trump presidency more than [the Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu because that is his ticket to wiping Palestine off the map,” she said.
Zeidan’s warning fell well short of an endorsement of Harris but across Michigan, the vice-president’s campaign is counting on fear of Trump as much as enthusiasm for the vice-president to get her over the line.
