There was a temptation for Republicans to dismiss Slotkin’s victory as an outlier, to not sweat a 30-point margin slipping to a 19-point margin. But there can no longer be any doubt about the trajectory of Livingston County and the trouble it poses for the GOP: In Tuesday’s Democratic primary, there were 27,458 votes cast in the county—compared to 17,591 four years ago. For Democratic turnout to jump 56 percent in any affluent, well-educated suburb is incredible; for it to happen in a deeply, fundamentally conservative place like Livingston County is astounding. Some people might think a difference of some 10,000 votes is no big deal. But in a state that was decided by some 10,000 votes, it’s a very big deal.
Biden had a spectacular showing on Tuesday, winning every single county in Michigan and blowing Sanders out in three other states that voted, essentially sealing the nomination by leaving his lone rival no plausible path forward. But the big takeaway from the day’s big prize, Michigan, isn’t that Biden is a spectacular candidate. The big takeaway is that he doesn’t need to be.
Two things happened on Tuesday in Michigan. First, Democratic turnout exploded. Second, Biden performed far better with key demographic groups than Clinton did four years ago. If either one of those things happen in November, Trump will have a difficult time winning the state again. If both things happen, the president can kiss Michigan’s 16 electoral votes goodbye—and with them, more than likely, the electoral votes of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
There goes the White House.
Far-fetched? Hardly. Beating Trump in November does not require an electoral juggernaut. This is because Trump himself, despite his frequent boasts to the contrary, is no electoral juggernaut. The president won the Electoral College in 2016 by a whisker. He carried three states—Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania—by a combined 77,744 votes. Notably, in those states, Clinton won roughly 600,000 fewer votes than Barack Obama did in 2012. The reason: a failure to mobilize black voters, and dismal performances among both affluent suburbanites and working-class whites.
The question that has hung over this Democratic race is one of electability—the search for someone who could address those specific shortcomings, in those specific states, and defeat Trump. Biden still has plenty of detractors in the party. He still makes many Democrats queasy every time he starts speaking off the cuff. But after Tuesday there can be no disputing his capacity for winning in November. Last night proved it beyond doubt: Joe Biden is no Hillary Clinton. And that may be enough to take down Trump.
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On March 9 of 2016, the morning after the Michigan primaries, I published a reported analysis in National Review: “Michigan Shows Trump Could Redraw Electoral Map vs. Clinton.” This wasn’t clairvoyance, by any stretch: Between studying the exit polls and splicing the election results, it was impossible to ignore the storm brewing in my home state. Trump was supercharging turnout and forging a unique appeal with independents and white working-class voters; Clinton was flopping with those same groups while struggling to energize black voters and young people, two vital pieces of the coalition that had lifted Obama to victories in 2008 and 2012. If this was happening in Michigan, I wrote, it was happening in Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania too.
Nothing I’ve ever written provoked so much scorn. Emails rained down by the hundreds. Didn’t I know about the “Blue Wall” of states Democrats couldn’t possibly lose? Yes, I sure did. But the evidence of change was too compelling to ignore. And so, even though I reserved the right to later change my mind—which I did, buckling to the onslaught of lopsided polling and predicting that Trump would lose in November—there was ample reason to suspect that those primary results might foreshadow the November election.
In that sense, Tuesday felt like a mirror image of 2016.
There is no question Trump has advantages heading into the fall: He has a sprawling campaign apparatus, an unprecedented amount of money, and, as always, the attention of the world and a knack for knowing how to exploit it. By every tangible metric, the president will be tougher to beat as an incumbent than he was as a rookie candidate.
And yet, the evidence of his vulnerability is too compelling to ignore. This is particularly true of a matchup with Biden in the three states that will help determine the outcome this November. If the 2016 primary “resembled a giant, mitten-shaped red flag” for Democrats, as I wrote the other day, this 2020 primary resembled a giant, mitten-shaped red flag for Trump.
Start with the suburbanites.
Livingston County isn’t the only longtime GOP stronghold with a new Democratic congresswoman. One county over, in Oakland, Haley Stevens won the 11th District much the same way Slotkin did in the 8th—by limiting her losses in the most conservative precincts. Running for governor on the same ticket, Gretchen Whitmer won Oakland by a whopping 17 points—more than twice Clinton’s margin of victory in 2016, bending sharply the trajectory of a county that for decades has been a bastion of country club, center-right Republicanism.
If Tuesday was any indication, things won’t get easier for the GOP this fall. Voters overran the polls in Oakland County. Four years after a total turnout of roughly 180,000 in the Democratic primary, Oakland had counted more than 250,000 votes on Tuesday—with 90 percent of precincts reporting. When the final votes are tabulated, Oakland will have witnessed a turnout increase in the neighborhood of 45 percent.
The story isn’t just the voting spike, but Biden’s concurrent performance. Unofficially, he beat Sanders by 22 points in Oakland County, where Clinton beat Sanders by just 4 points in 2016. And whereas Clinton won roughly 92,000 votes there, Biden is on pace to win more than 150,000.
It was a similar story in neighboring Macomb County, a more downscale suburb of Detroit, where turnout soared and Biden vastly outperformed Clinton. Nearly 130,000 people participated in the Democratic primary, up 33 percent from 2016. And whereas four years ago Clinton and Sanders fought Macomb to a virtual draw, with Clinton winning some 47,500 votes, Biden topped Sanders by 17 points, collecting more than 66,000 votes in the process.
Biden’s performance among the wealthier suburbanites in these counties should be highly worrisome to Trump. These voters—particularly whites with college degrees—are accepting of the former vice president in a way they never were of Clinton. Four years ago, exit polling of Michigan’s primary showed Sanders winning college-educated whites by 11 points; Biden beat Sanders among that demographic by 14 points on Tuesday, a 25-point swing.
If more of those upper-scale suburbanites are found in Oakland, then Macomb is home to more middle-class Metro Detroiters. Interestingly—and just as worrisome for Republicans—both groups behaved the same way at the polls. Sanders, who won whites without a college degree by 15 points over Clinton, lost them by 10 points to Biden. That’s an identical 25-point swing. This was visible not only in southeast Michigan, but in mid-Michigan, northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula, conservative rural areas that were dominated by Sanders four years ago. With most of the votes counted, Biden appeared poised to win every single one of those counties north of Ingham, many of them by healthy margins, an astonishing feat.
The story of The Trump Realignment has been an exchange between the two parties: More of the well-educated suburbanites fleeing the GOP for the Democratic ranks, with more of the blue-collar rural and exurban voters joining the Republican Party. This tradeoff, while unsustainable for the GOP over future election cycles, never figured to torpedo Trump’s reelection. But what Biden demonstrated on Tuesday was an ability to have it both ways—accelerating the GOP’s exodus in the suburbs while stopping his party’s bleeding in the exurban and rural areas beyond. If he can do that in November, he’ll win.
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But there’s an even more pressing imperative for Biden next fall: mobilizing black voters. For all his successes in Michigan on Tuesday, here’s an area where he failed to distinguish himself from Clinton—and thus, an area where his campaign might want to worry. Exit polls showed black voters accounting for 18 percent of the primary electorate, down slightly from 21 percent four years ago. Biden carried this group by 39 points, essentially identical to Clinton’s 40-point win.
Making this all the more intriguing was turnout. In Wayne County, the Democratic beachhead that’s anchored by Detroit, participation was up—but only by 41,612 votes over 2016, a modest 15 percent increase. (The statewide voting increase will clock in at more than 400,000 votes, or roughly 35 percent overall, once the final precincts are tallied.) It was a similar story in Genesee County, home to Flint, where turnout bumped up just a few thousand votes from 2016.
The numbers were better for Democrats in Ingham County and Saginaw County, both of which have sizable black populations. But given the well-documented failures of Clinton to energize this core constituency in Michigan—and considering Trump’s determination to whittle away at those all-important margins, particularly among black men—this is a problem Democrats need to address. It might be a meaningless that exit polls show Biden winning blacks by far bigger margins in the south than in the Midwest. But it’s not something Democrats can leave to chance.
Setting aside these mixed results with black voters, the breadth of Biden’s win in Michigan suggests he’ll be formidable in November. He won men and women, college graduates and non-college graduates, middle-income voters and high-income voters, union households and non-union households. There is room for improvement, not just with blacks but with young people and self-described progressives as well. But the truth is, no Democratic nominee in recent memory has had so much of the party consolidated around them this early in the nominating process.
This electoral climate is historically volatile. Having been impeached only months ago, and now presiding over a reeling economy and facing a potential pandemic as the coronavirus spreads throughout the United States, the president will be walking through a minefield all the way to November. Trump has proven to be such a masterful political Houdini, escaping from one jam after another, that he has taken on an aura of invincibility. His inner circle has come to believe Trump cannot be defeated. Nothing, they say—not the Mueller investigation, or the crisis at the southern border, or the government shutdown, or the Ukraine whistleblower, or the blue wave in the midterm elections, or even the early primary results—has demonstrated any capacity for the Democrats to take down the president.
That might be true. But Tuesday felt different—a day we’ll look back on if, in fact, Trump loses. There are six to eight battleground states that will decide the election this fall, and three that will continue to receive the most attention by far: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Finally, one of them has voted, giving us a long-awaited window into November. If the president was looking, he couldn’t have liked what he saw.
Source: politico.com
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