Chirag Wakaskar/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP Images
Bernie Sanders takes a selfie with his supporters during a campaign appearance in Detroit.
DETROIT – As the dust has settled after Super Tuesday, the now two-man race for the Democratic nomination comes to Michigan. One of the three Rust Belt states (along with Wisconsin and Pennsylvania) that narrowly put Donald Trump in the White House, Michigan may now determine the course of the Democrats’ primaries.
The tide has shifted dramatically in just the past week; Joe Biden now appears to be the front-runner, both here and across the nation. The most recent statewide poll (taken from February 28 through March 3) found Biden favored to win Michigan by approximately six points. In February, when the field was more crowded and Biden was not the only remaining moderate, Sanders was atop the polls here.
Still, Michigan could be friendly turf for Sanders. He famously carried the state in a stunning upset during the 2016 primary against Hillary Clinton. Though Clinton had been ahead in the polls by a substantial margin, Sanders beat her in nearly every district outside Detroit. It was a narrow win statewide, but regionally he performed well in the more rural parts of the mitten as well as the politically unique Upper Peninsula. Polls had been undercounting young voters, who disproportionately turned out for Sanders.
Today, Sanders is treating Michigan’s primary with the utmost seriousness. The Vermont senator has canceled campaign events in Southern states that also vote on Tuesday to focus on Michigan.
Despite winning the state, in 2016 Sanders didn’t win Detroit, the biggest population center in Michigan and the poorest big city in the country. With a city population of 670,000 and a metropolitan area reaching about 4.3 million, whoever takes Detroit wins a significant portion of the electorate.
The city itself is predominantly a city of color: 79 percent of the population is African American. And it has faced not only bankruptcy, but decades of declining population and increasing poverty. Hundreds of public schools have closed in Detroit as the population has dwindled, and residents have been subjected to a foreclosure crisis, partly due to the city unlawfully overtaxing homes. Water shutoffs to households that can’t pay their bills have been rampant, and one area of the city, made up of mostly poor people of color, is infamously known as the “most polluted ZIP code in Michigan.”
Many Detroiters feel their city needs investment and support, which has shaped the differing approaches of the two remaining Democratic campaigns. While Sanders’s supporters have tried to articulate why his vision makes him the best candidate to solve the problems in the city, Biden’s supporters are focusing on the candidate’s previous work in and for Detroit, and the fact that he’s a known quantity.
The Sanders effort has been active in Detroit for quite some time. Note the use of the word “effort” and not “campaign,” because the official campaign only arrived about three weeks ago. But many activist groups in the city have used their volunteer capacities to campaign for Sanders for months.
As a member of the Greater Detroit Democratic Socialists of America (the national DSA endorsed Sanders one year ago), Danielle Aubert has canvassed for Sanders a number of times with Detroit DSA, which began walking precincts for him last fall. She notes that the Sanders campaign has been able to leverage the city’s already-existing activist infrastructure.
“None of the other campaigns have that,” she says. “[In] the movement, we all know each other already. We know the Medicare for All people, the College for All people, [the] Sunrise [Movement]. Then when the campaign shows up, they’re quickly trying to set up an office—but we have already found each other.”
The Biden campaign, by contrast, has been nowhere to be found when it comes to organizing in the city. Then again, on Super Tuesday Biden won a number of states in which he had no campaign presence whatsoever. Browse the Biden website for events near Detroit, and you’ll see only one volunteer-organized phone bank for this week. The number of events on the Sanders website—hundreds in the city and surrounding suburbs—is overwhelming.
Too late to put a campaign in place, Biden is banking on his experience, name recognition, and relationships with elected officials and opinion leaders. According to Ronald Brown, an associate professor of political science at Wayne State University in Detroit, it’s a safe bet that this will pay off. Detroit knows Biden, says Brown; he is, in the minds of many, a safe choice.
Too late to put a campaign in place, Biden is banking on his experience, name recognition, and relationships with elected officials and opinion leaders.
“The vote for Biden is not an anti-Sanders vote, it’s an anti-Trump vote,” says Brown. Black voters in particular, Brown reckons, will turn out for Biden because they believe he’s the strongest choice to defeat the president. Indeed, a recent poll from WDIV/The Detroit News showed that the most important concern for Michigan voters when deciding on a nominee was whether that candidate could beat Trump; 39.3 percent of voters said beating Trump was their primary issue, followed by 18.5 percent saying health care. When asked about the most important issues facing the country, older voters were more concerned about Trump than younger voters, while younger voters were more likely to pinpoint health care as their top concern.
What’s been termed “the black vote,” of course, is not a monolith. Brown particularly points to older, middle-class African American women, who are deeply involved in their neighborhoods, sororities, and churches; who vote at a high rate; and who are probably the strongest pro-Biden constituency in the state.
The rates of voter participation, both in Detroit and across Michigan, differ widely. “There are black youth in the city, there are black elders in the city, black people with different disabilities,” says Jeffrey Nolish, a local activist and Sanders supporter. Many may not make it to the polls. In 2016, across the state, just 18 percent of the voting-age population cast ballots in the primary.
Biden, who was endorsed last week by Michigan Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, has also picked up a number of endorsements from Detroit city leaders, including Mayor Mike Duggan. I mention this to Sheila Cockrel, CEO of Citizen Detroit, a voter education group, and former city council member, and she quickly adds that Biden also was recently endorsed by former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm. Granholm, Cockrel says, pointed to “Biden’s role working [with] President Obama with the auto bailout and also Biden’s specific work getting huge amounts of resources into the city of Detroit—and I mean huge.”
Biden visited Detroit numerous times during his tenure as Obama’s vice president, and was reportedly critical in securing funds for the bailout of auto giants Chrysler and GM, which saved approximately 1.5 million jobs, many in Detroit. “He has a set of relationships and a reputation for looking out for Detroit,” says Cockrel.
For its part, the Sanders campaign has reached out to lower-propensity, nontraditional voters. Monique Becker, a young black entrepreneur, recently hosted a canvass in her neighborhood in which the volunteers distributed not just campaign literature but also voting rights handbooks from the ACLU to familiarize residents with voting and with how they can push back if they encounter obstacles in the process. It is easier to vote in Michigan as of this election: There is now same-day voter registration, voters are automatically registered when they interact with the DMV, and voters can request absentee ballots for any reason.
Becker told me about one canvassing experience with an older black woman who asked her what would happen to Obamacare under a Medicare for All system. “I told her those folks would still have coverage,” says Becker, “but what I was sensing was her real question wasn’t about the specifics of the Affordable Care Act, but about the legacy of President Obama and what that means for the black community.” Biden, says Becker, is the candidate of those in the black community wanting to perpetuate Obama’s legacy. But she told the woman that Bernie would build on Obama’s legacy, while Biden would merely safeguard it.
“Biden isn’t energizing crowds in the way that Bernie does—but Bernie isn’t necessarily energizing people in the way that Obama did,” she says. Bernie does have popular surrogates in Detroit and Michigan, including local Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who ran the Detroit health department before running for governor in 2016, a race he ultimately lost to Whitmer.
“Biden isn’t energizing crowds in the way that Bernie does—but Bernie isn’t necessarily energizing people in the way that Obama did.”
One voting bloc that has consistently supported Sanders is also heavily represented in Michigan. Dearborn, a suburb of Detroit, is home to the largest Arab American population in the United States. “When we saw Bernie Sanders get up on stage and say how the Palestinians deserve to live in dignity—he was the first to say that out of all the presidential candidates. And he was talking about that before anyone was,” says Adam Abusalah, who is Palestinian and a student at Central Michigan University. In 2016, Arab Americans in Michigan went hard for Bernie. Abusalah says that support will be repeated in 2020. Volunteers have been independently canvassing for Sanders in Dearborn, and the official campaign opened an office there as well.
As Sanders campaigns across the state, he’s sure to raise the issue of Biden’s support for free-trade deals, like NAFTA and the China PNTR, that devastated working-class communities across the state. His campaign recently put out ads in a number of states, including Michigan, highlighting Biden’s vote for NAFTA as a senator, as well as ads attacking Biden on his years-old comments supporting cuts to Social Security.
As Brown predicts, however, this may not be an issue-based race.
Minus the excitement of Obama’s initial presidential run, turnout hasn’t reached 2008 levels in the past two elections. And Detroit is a place where excitement over politics doesn’t happen often. “In Detroit, we’ve been screwed over time and time again. By our own politicians,” says Gabriela Santiago-Romero, a Detroit native who is running for Wayne County Commissioner. Santiago-Romero “busted her back” working for the Clinton campaign in 2016, and says she’s “still bitter, still traumatized, still hurt by the Democratic Party.”
“Do I want to put my energy behind [supporting a candidate] when I already did in the past and I got nothing for it? That’s how a lot of people feel,” she says. “We all voted for Obama. And three of my family members got deported.” She says when she would canvass for Clinton in Detroit she would speak with black men and they would say things like “I voted for Obama, but my family is still in jail.”
“I understand believing and trusting and buying into something and being left empty-handed,” she says. She wants to believe that Sanders really means what he’s saying about inequality. And Santiago-Romero doesn’t know if she’ll vote for Biden if he’s the nominee, focusing instead on local efforts.
Until Tuesday night, the Sanders campaign’s grassroots approach plows on in Michigan. “There’s a lot of fear in Michigan,” says Sanders supporter Nolish, fear that may be driving people to vote for Biden as the one candidate they think can beat Trump. “There’s a lot of panic here. People want to see that Democrat who delivers in 2020. I firmly believe we can’t let that fear and panic dictate our North Star. I believe that a Bernie win can bring about better days.”
