And Not In North Carolina Either
This morning’s Ipsos poll of likely voters— released with ABC News— shows Kamala up more with likely voters (beating Trump by 6 points) than with registered voters (beating Trump by 4 points). Macomb County, north of Detroit, is the third most populous county in Michigan, a treasure trove of votes for anyone running statewide. Almost 900,000 people live there, over 85% of them white. It’s a classic swing county. Obama won it twice and so did Trump. In 2018, Macomb County backed Democrat Gretchen Whitmer for governor and Democrat Debbie Stabenow for Senate. And in 2022, the county was Whitmer territory again by around 5 points.
In 2022, the part of Macomb in the 9th congressional district went for Republican Lisa McClain with 63%. It was much closer in MI-10, where most of Macomb County is:
John James (R)- 137,084 (48.6%)
Carl Marlinga (D)- 136,499 (48.4%)
James and Marlinga will face each other again in 2 months. And though Marlinga did well when it was an open seat, he’s a very weak candidate… and without a sizable blue wave, he’ll lose to James more convincingly in November. So far he’s raised $624,842, almost all of it spent in the primary. James has raised nearly ten times what Marlinga has— $6,145,454. The only outside spending so far has been in support of James. The DCCC is ignoring the district entirely even though only 0.2% separated the two in 2022 (585 votes). And yet Kamala desperately needs Democratic turnout in Macomb County. It will be tough for her to win statewide without it. That alone should push the DCCC to help Marlinga. But the DCCC, as you know if you’ve been reading DWT for any length of time, is institutionally dumb as a rock and the very definition of “failed organization.”
All that remains though… is a contest about which party is more crippled by itself, the Democrats or the Republicans. In Michigan, the GOP has been taken over by a faction that doesn’t allow anyone with a 3-digit IQ. Pure Q-Anon. The Democrats caught a lucky break! Yesterday, Dante Chin and Janet Adamy explained the breathtaking Republican mess in Macomb County. “Macomb,” they wrote, “is one of four counties in Michigan that the Trump campaign has pegged as especially important to winning a state where the former president needs every vote that he can get. But the GOP effort to boost turnout in Macomb County has been slow to gear up and beset by infighting. Some local party leaders are refusing to follow the Trump campaign’s ground strategy, which relies on an app to identify persuadable voters, pledging to instead use their own approach to decide which homes to visit. Loyal Trump foot soldiers, the local leaders complain, couldn’t even start knocking on doors in August because the campaign hadn’t yet replaced printed material pegged to a rematch against President Biden. ‘People should know what’s going on here,’ Mark Forton, chairman of the Macomb County Republican Party, recently told Trump supporters during a video appearance. Forton warned them about flaws in the campaign’s ground game, grousing about being allotted just 250 signs to distribute.”
Michigan’s Republican Party has been torn by infighting for more than a year as chamber-of-commerce Republicans gave way to populists who are deeply skeptical of elites and institutions of power. Republicans removed the state party’s chairwoman earlier this year for mismanaging the organization’s finances.
Macomb, which includes a swath of blue-collar suburbs, is one of 20 counties in battleground states that the Trump campaign has identified as vital to retaking the presidency. Although Trump won more votes in those counties in 2020 than in 2016, the Democrats gained even more votes compared with 2016. Trump’s margin in those counties declined by 686,000 votes.
The county is one of four in the state the Trump campaign has pegged as especially important.
The Trump campaign strategy in these places centers on winning over persuadable voters and turning out solid supporters with a low propensity to vote by investing more time and money into a targeted pitch aimed at them. National polling shows that voters view Trump as better than Vice President Kamala Harris at handling some key issues, including the economy and immigration, even if they don’t like him personally.
“You have to make sure that their decision-making calculus is being made on the policies and what is going to make their life better,” said James Blair, national political director for the Trump campaign.
Campaign officials said the ground operation, which they described as more tactical than in previous years, wasn’t behind schedule. They said they appreciate the efforts of county party officials, who they said might see the contest from a local perspective that doesn’t account for the entirety of the campaign’s efforts across the state or country. The campaign blamed the delayed materials on the last-minute change in the Democratic ticket, noting that talking to voters is integral to persuading them, regardless of whether campaign literature is available.
The campaign’s approach is part of a new ground operation, called “Trump Force 47,” which puts an emphasis on efficiency in the face of an extensive Democratic field operation. Outside groups, including one backed by Elon Musk, also are pouring money into turnout efforts. The Trump campaign said there are more than two dozen Trump Force 47 offices in the state.
The Harris campaign, meanwhile, said it has opened 52 offices in Michigan. The campaign said those offices are working closely with the Democratic Party on the ground, and volunteers have been knocking on doors for months.
Trump campaign offices like the one the former president visited in Macomb County in late August, where he was greeted by cheering volunteers, are aligned with his national strategy. Some county-level GOP offices, like the one in Macomb, are not.
Michigan’s Republican Party has been in turmoil for more than a year. In January, Kristina Karamo was replaced as party chair by Pete Hoekstra, a longtime congressman and former Trump administration ambassador to the Netherlands. Karamo had mismanaged the party’s finances and was widely derided for saying demonic forces were controlling her political opponents. The fight left the party with less money to spend on organizing, and lingering ill will among Karamo’s supporters.
Forton, the 77-year-old party chairman in Macomb County, is one of a crop of local leaders who are deeply loyal to Trump yet skeptical of the Republican Party and its power structures. How well these disparate factions of Trump backers hold together their uneasy alliance this fall could help determine who wins crucial pockets of the closely divided state.
Macomb County, with its high concentration of white auto industry workers, first gained attention as a political barometer in the 1980s, when its voters drifted from the Democratic Party to the GOP, becoming known as “Reagan Democrats.” After helping elect Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, the county swung back toward Republicans. Trump won it by nearly 12 percentage points in 2016 but gave back ground in 2020, when he took it by roughly eight points.
… Forton, who once sat uncomfortably on the party’s fringe, is now closer to its center. Earlier this year, he and some other Michigan Republicans flew to West Palm Beach, Fla., to meet Trump.
Forton said he extended his hand to the former president and made him a promise. “We’re going to take Macomb,” he recalled telling Trump at the lunch meeting. “I promised him we’re going to do even better this time.”
In late August, dozens of eager volunteers streamed into the Macomb County Republican Party office, located in a Clinton Township storefront between Dena Marie’s Salon & Spa and Jet’s Pizza. Supporters offered to help in any way they could.
Describing the November matchup as the “election of a lifetime,” Forton told the volunteers: “We’ve got to be bigger than ever.” But door knocking, he said, would have to wait. The Trump campaign hadn’t provided new campaign materials after Harris replaced Biden on the ticket. Calls to the Trump campaign aimed at speeding it along had gone unanswered, he said.
Forton also disparaged the official campaign’s use of an app that directs door-knockers to skip houses it deems a lower priority.
“We don’t use apps,” he told the assembled volunteers. “Every four years, there’s a new app with a new name, none of the information gathered from four years before. I get people coming to the office back then saying, ‘The apps don’t work. We’re walking down the street. Why pass this house to go to that house? We don’t know who’s behind the door.’”
Forton said he plans to direct his volunteers to knock on all the doors in key precincts, regardless of what the Trump campaign or the party tells him.
Blair, the Trump strategist, said the campaign values county party chairs like Forton. The campaign played down tensions with the county party and plans to help such offices have what they need to succeed this fall.
Trump’s strategists contend economic factors in Macomb County present an opportunity. In August, Jeep-maker Stellantis said it would lay off roughly 2,500 workers at a plant in Warren as the company’s market share shrinks and it prepares to roll out battery-powered models.
Blair said voters would view such changes as the result of policies backed by Harris and other Democrats. “She has been for the electric-car mandates and the Green New Deal and these sorts of things,” he said. “The auto workers increasingly understand that that is putting them out of business slowly over time.” Harris’ campaign said she doesn’t support an electric-vehicle mandate, although she backed zero-emissions legislation several years ago.
Democrats hope to draw on goodwill Biden generated last year when he became the first sitting president to walk a picket line in support of striking United Auto Workers.
…Forton’s skepticism toward parts of his party was on display in July as he rode a ferry from Muskegon, Mich., to Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention with a half dozen other Trump loyalists from across the state. It was the morning after Trump survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pa.
“People are waking up and realizing that this whole government is against them,” Forton said as his seatmates speculated about who was behind the shooting. Theories ranged from the “deep state” to Democrats who had concluded that taking out Trump was the only way Biden could win after his disastrous debate performance.
“He’s the only man standing up against this whole global cabal,” Forton said about Trump.
Forton was worried there might be a movement afoot within the GOP to replace Trump as the nominee.
Forton, a former auto worker, left the GOP more than two decades ago to back Pat Buchanan, an anti-interventionist, in his Reform Party presidential bid. He saw George H.W. Bush as a globalist who couldn’t be trusted. In 2000, he ran as the Reform Party’s candidate for the U.S. Senate in Michigan. But he gradually returned to the GOP, and its “America First” turn under Trump fired him up.
Forton is critical not only of Democrats— he complained about Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer restricting large gatherings in churches during the Covid-19 pandemic— but also of many Republicans, whom he blames for heavy government spending.
“We are in the middle of a communist takeover of America,” Forton said from his seat on the ferry. “The founders would be locking and loading today if they saw how we are taxed.”
On the second night of the convention in Milwaukee, Forton stood near the stage and listened to House Speaker Mike Johnson describe what the party stands for, including limited government and fiscal responsibility. Afterward, Forton balked at Johnson’s assertions, finding them insincere.
“I don’t trust my government,” Forton said. “I’m sorry. I don’t trust half of my own party.”
At monthly meetings of the Macomb County GOP this year, Forton warned about encroachments on Americans’ rights. Slides were projected cautioning about dangers allegedly posed by the World Health Organization, plugging gatherings of the John Birch Society and showing campaign messages from local GOP candidates.
In 2022, long-simmering tension between establishment Republicans and other factions came to a boil over Forton’s opposition to the Covid vaccine. During a raucous meeting of the county GOP, Forton was ousted as chairman, only to recapture his post when a judge found he had been elected to a two-year term and couldn’t be removed.
By this August, Forton had grown concerned that the party’s infighting was hurting efforts to re-elect Trump. When new campaign materials failed to arrive after Labor Day, Forton decided he would send volunteers door-to-door armed with the obsolete fliers targeting Biden instead of keeping his ground operation on hold— at least until the material ran out.
It’d not just Michigan where the extremist nuts are screwing up the GOP ground game. Tom Sullivan wrote a very interesting essay about the failing Republican ground operation in North Carolina, where he lives. Nationally, the Trump campaign has offloaded crucial components of a successful campaign— like the Get-out-the-vote effort— to outside parties, like the incompetent grifters at Turning Point USA (Charlie Kirk’s joke of an organization).
The result in North Carolina is fantastic— for Democrats. No one seems to know what they’re doing. He reported something I’ve been hearing all over the country— even in strong Trump areas that were covered in signs and flags in 2020, there’s almost nothing now. No yard signs, no flags, no parades. Trump physical literature is being sent to Democrats, a complete waste of money. Nothing’s happening:
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