Wayne County stands out as Michigan’s most racially and ethnically diverse. And how it votes — or rather how many vote — could decide the presidential election.
Michigan’s largest county provides Democratic candidates their biggest voting bloc. But if the county represents the heterogeneity of the party’s coalition, it also demonstrates the divides tearing it apart.
No doubt, Wayne County will deliver a large chunk of Democratic votes this fall. The last time a Republican presidential candidate won the county was in 1928 when Herbert Hoover carried it. In 2020, President Joe Biden won 68% of its votes. Some residents have already turned out enthusiastically to keep the president in office for another term.
When retired auto mechanic Brian Jourdan, 65, of Detroit, went to go vote at Greater Grace Temple on Detroit’s west side during Michigan’s presidential primary in February, he decided to dress for the occasion. “It wasn’t rigged. You’re just a loser,” read the text on his blue sweatshirt in reference to former President Donald Trump’s misinformation campaign to overturn his 2020 loss. “I’m ashamed that guy was ever our president,” said Jourdan of Trump.
“Biden’s done me a lot of good,” he said, pointing to lower costs for his prescriptions that have saved him money. But he did register one complaint. “I don’t care for the Israel thing that much if I was going to be critical of him,” he said. It seems to him like the Palestinians are “always getting screwed.”
While Democrats dominate Wayne County, it has its Republican pockets too, particularly Downriver where Trump drew 93% of his votes from the county in 2020, according to a review of election data compiled by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Election Data and Science Lab. But Trump found his most ardent supporters elsewhere. Of all municipalities in Wayne County, Grosse Pointe Shores delivered the highest vote share for Trump with 65% support. The small community on Lake St. Clair — home to the Edsel Ford family mansion — boasts the county’s highest median household income.
But it’s the state’s biggest city that could prove decisive this fall.
If the path to the White House runs through Michigan, then the path through Michigan runs through Wayne County, according to longtime Democratic operative Jonathan Kinloch. “And the superhighway that runs through Wayne County is Detroit,” said Kinloch, who currently serves as a Wayne County commissioner and chair of the 13th District Democratic Party. He also served on the Wayne County Board of Canvassers in 2020 when the GOP members initially refused to certify the results and considered excluding Detroit from the vote total.
The upcoming presidential election could hinge on whether Black voters in Detroit turn out, he said. “Michigan is red until Black folks turn it blue,” he said.
But with fractures in the Democratic coalition over Biden’s response to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, turning out more Democratic votes in Detroit for the incumbent may be needed to make up for Democratic voters who stay home or skip the top of the ticket to protest the president’s support for Israel, according to Kinloch.
Biden’s support for Israel could unravel his 2020 coalition
Perhaps nowhere else in the U.S. illustrates more clearly the political fallout from Biden’s support for Israel than Wayne County. The county has the largest concentration of residents of Middle Eastern and north African descent of any county in the U.S., according to census data.
In the Democratic presidential primary, some voted “uncommitted” to pressure Biden to demand a permanent cease-fire. The “uncommitted” vote beat Biden in the primary in Dearborn, Dearborn Heights and Hamtramck, cities home to large Arab American and Muslim communities.
For those who don’t have family or friends in the Middle East personally impacted by the violence, many Arab Americans have neighbors who do or have themselves lived under occupation, said state Rep. Alabas…
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