The Political Blizzard of Macomb County

Trudging through the snow, it was clear after a few hours why understanding this place is central to understanding what has happened to working class support for Democrats.

To be honest, had Vice President Harris won, the chance this Florida Man would have been found trudging across an icy parking lot in his warmest layered hoodies towards a conference room in a corner of an eighth-floor office building suburban Detroit, on snowy and quite cold Thursday evening in late February, would be quite low.

But she didn’t win.  And in losing, the slow melt of Democratic support levels over the last decade left fully exposed a problem:  our coalition to get to 50% + 1 nationally was gone.

Over the last four Presidential elections, nine states have flipped at least once between the two major parties.  

In those 9 states, there are 667 counties.   

Out of those 667 counties, 617 of them have moved Republican over those four cycles.  

Of those nine states, we won none of them in 2024.

Unite the County was founded in 2019 for one primary reason:  Elect Joe Biden.  We believed then that he was uniquely positioned to build a coalition that included working-class voters who had slipped away from Democrats in 2016, and we focused over 80 million in 2020 to talk to these voters.  

But when we woke up the morning after the 2024 election, for me — and for us, there was a new mission – one none of us had expected – a mission to understand, in the most transparent and clear-eyed way possible, what has happened to our support among working-class voters over the last decade.  And by working-class, we don’t just mean white working-class voters.   If 2024 made one thing clear:  we have a working-class problem that bridges racial, ethnic, and geographic boundaries.

While the problem is substantial, our initial goal is simple:  Go listen to voters in places where we used to win and talk to voters who used to vote for us about why they didn’t in 2024.  

In our initial list of nine swing states of the ten counties that had the biggest raw vote shift towards the GOP from Obama 2012 to Trump 2024, there are two that flipped from supporting Obama in 2012 to supporting Trump in 2024:  Miami-Dade County in Florida, and Macomb County in Michigan.      

Of those two, only one of them was in a state that was fully contested in 2024.  So that is where our journey begins. 

Macomb County

Macomb County is located just north of Detroit and is home to just under 900,000 people.  The largest employment sector is manufacturing, and for most of the last 20 years of the 20^th century, Macomb County’s per-capita income ran marginally above the statewide number.   But since the Great Recession in 2008-9, per-capita income in Macomb County now trails the statewide number.    The county population is just under 80% white.

In 2012, the county went for President Obama by 4 points, or some 16,000 votes.

Twelve years later, Macomb County went for President Trump by 14-points, or a margin of just under 70,000 votes.    

That nearly 86,000-vote shift in the margin is the largest of any 2024 swing state county that flipped from Obama 12 to Trump 24.

Michigan itself is quite a case study.   From the 2012 election to 2024, all but 9 counties in Michigan got more Republican.  Over half of the state’s counties – 44 to exact, saw Republicans improve their margins by more than 20-points.  In 8 of the 44, the margin got more Republican by 30-points, or more.   

But the sheer impact of the Macomb County shifts made it the logical first place to start our research journey.  Had Macomb performed in 2024 as it did in 2012, Kamala Harris would have won the state. 

We did two groups of Macomb County voters that night.   

The first was a group of mixed-gender non-college white voters who had previously voted for Democratic candidates.   Of the group of nine, five had voted for Biden in 2020.  All nine voted for Trump.

The second was a group of white men under 50, all of whom had voted for Trump, but all of whom had other ideological views that would lead one to believe they could be voting for a Democrat.

The goal was simple: to have a straightforward conversation with the type of voter who was very much a part of that shift from Obama 2012 to Trump 2024.  

Our Non-Existent Brand  (And what they think of us is bad)

It wasn’t just that these voters rejected our brand, in many cases, they couldn’t identify a single positive thing when asked to think about the Democratic Party.

But when pushed, voters responded with statements like this: “I supported Democrats back when they supported unions.  I think now they are more elitist and interested in gender identification and all these things working-class people don’t care about.”  

Words most frequently used were things like “weak,” “dishonest,” “too woke,” “too focused on DEI,” “stale,” and “out of touch.”

As one voter put it succinctly: “They spend all their time focused on smaller and smaller groups of people.  What about the rest of us?”

While the economic issues, namely inflation, are real – and had a significant impact on voting behavior, the imperative for us going forward is changing some basic perceptions of our party, perceptions that are creating real challenges in moving voters from these groups – many of them who had voted for Democratic candidates in the past, to a place where they would be open to a Democrat in the future.

For example, in the mixed-gender group of former Democratic supporting non-college Trump voters, half of the group voted for Joe Biden, yet nearly all of them found themselves agreeing with this statement:

Democrats have lost their way. They used to fight for middle class families and working people, but now they just seem to focus on letting biological men compete in women’s sports, opening our borders, coddling criminals and providing benefits to illegal immigrants. Democrats seem more worried about offending people than standing up for common sense and average Americans.

And in the second group – the group of Trump supporting younger men, perceptions of Trump strength and Democratic weakness repeatedly hit the bell.   Most in the groups agreed with this statement:

Democrats are not strong enough to lead in this tough world. We need leaders who will stand up to enemies and make tough decisions. Joe Biden was too old to face down dictators and Kamala Harris would not even fight for her own positions. I may not agree with everything Trump does or the way he does it, but at least he is strong and not worried about offending anyone.

One thing to keep in mind with these voters:  They were Trump supporters, but they aren’t necessarily MAGA in their beliefs, and many of them don’t care for him personally.  

In fact, when asked to describe their views of Republicans, they criticize them for being too close-minded, too strict in their own beliefs, too focused on religion and limiting the rights of others, and they are uncertain about Elon and all that is happening now. And almost every one of them laid out a scenario where they would vote for a Democrat in 2028 (more on this in a second)

But their core frustration is that the government isn’t working for anyone anymore.  In Trump, they see action, and because of that action, they are willing to give him some time – though they are expecting real change in their personal lives.   Among Democrats today, they see a focus on issues that don’t impact their lives, and an unwillingness to take strong stands when needed.

The Big Takeaways

Information Deficit

One reason we have a real challenge with these voters:  We aren’t communicating where these voters get their news.   

None of these voters picked any of the news sources that drive coverage among residents of urban, coastal communities.  Rather, these voters get their news from social media sources, and Google/YouTube headlines. 

As a non-Beltway hack, I have long worried my DC, NY, and LA friends simply don’t understand just how bad the disparity is online, a disparity I see every day in my feeds.

The decades-long operation on the right to flood the zone with content - first over radio, and now over the internet, has left them with a substantial advantage.   We are not going to succeed unless we start to compete in this space.  

There isn’t an easy or cheap solution to this problem.

Our Problem Isn’t Trump or Oligarchs – It is Us

One of the lessons of these groups is while these voters are going to judge Trump on his actions – there isn’t a ton we can do about it if we aren’t offering a reasonable alternative.   Voters already voted Republican and Trump despite their concerns.   What these voters want to see from us is something they can support.

These voters were clear:  they want to see us offer a broader message focused on economic realities.  We do well when we talk about lowering health care costs, or cutting middle class taxes.   They wanted to see us less focused on niche social issues, and more focused on unifying the country.  

One specific thing we did test with each of these groups:  What kind of Democrat they would like to see.     We offered three nameless scenarios – a Clintonian “common-sense” and bipartisan frame – an Obama/Biden focus on working class families – and a third that was a candidate who was focused on taking on billionaires and oligarchs. Every single person in these two groups chose one of the first two.

This doesn’t mean these voters aren’t worried about disparities or the government being too focused on the whims of the wealthy – in fact, they were.  But what it does indicate is they want a Democratic candidate who is offering real solutions, who is willing to use strength and bipartisanship to get things done. 

Focus on What We Can Control

Trump is a unicorn (as was Obama – as these groups repeatedly mentioned him as what they would like to see from Democrats), and Trump is dominating the news space.

Every single day I get asked by someone what we can do about Trump, and my response is what these voters said to us in Macomb:   Win voters at the ballot box.

Voters like the ones we spoke to in Macomb County aren’t hysterical about their vote choice, nor are they regretting it, nor are they fired up about it.  They made a choice.

To provide some scale, in the 617 counties across the 9 states mentioned earlier, Republicans have gained nearly 5,000,000 votes compared to Democrats – some 86,000 alone in Macomb County.  This didn’t happen in one night, or because of one thing.  In this county alone, Trump won by 30,000 more votes than he did in 2020 – but even his 2020 election night was substantially more Republican than the county was in 2012.

Our side is living and breathing everything coming out of the 18 acres at the corner of Pennsylvania and 17^th.   We are holding up handmade signs inside the State of the Union.   These voters just want us to tell them we are going to lower their health care costs – and show that we can do it. 

As a friend of mine observed the groups summed it up more succinctly — “Hope is not dead. We just have to be smarter about how we talk about it, and who carries it.”

Going Forward

These groups are just the start.  Over the next year, we are going to look at two buckets of counties:   places like Macomb that have trended the wrong way – and places like North Carolina and Arizona, where we have had some success, but need to figure out how to move these states into a bluer column to address a changing map.

Counties/Areas we hope to take a look at over the coming months:   Miami-Dade County, the county that has moved more than any in the country towards the Republicans over the last decade or so;  Clark County, a county that used to provide Democrats a buffer to carry Nevada, but increasingly no more, and a place like Pima County, Arizona, a border county in a swing state that has trended the wrong way.  

We also want to look at places like Detroit and Philly,  where lower base turnout and GOP gains among Black Men have taken away traditional (and needed) Democratic margins, as well as places like Scranton, the Joe Biden hometown that is the poster child for the evaporation of the working-class Democratic coalition.  

And we hope these are just the start.

And PS: Detroit is a really cool city.