Why Kamala Harris Lost Michigan — And Another Democrat Won

EASTPOINTE, Mich. ― Election Day was less than a week away when I joined Edwin Woodson for some canvassing through a working-class neighborhood just north of the Detroit city line. It was unusually warm and sunny that afternoon, and so was Woodson. “I know we’re making progress, we’re hitting our marks,” Woodson, 65, told me as he started working his way down the block. “I really think this is going to make a difference.”

Woodson works for the Michigan Liberation Action Fund, an independent organization focused on criminal justice issues that partnered with a national group, Community Change Action, to promote progressive candidates in the election. His team’s focus on the day I observed was to boost turnout in a traditionally Democratic-leaning neighborhood, which, like most canvassing operations, meant knocking on a lot of doors with nobody home.

But a few residents answered. One woman said she hadn’t decided whether to vote. Woodson spent about eight minutes speaking with her, complimenting her smile and teasing out bits of her life story, eventually telling her to think about the importance of the election for her children’s future. “If I get a chance to drop a bug in their ear, I really think I can change their minds,” he said.

On the porch of another house, Woodson found a 3-year-old girl, her mother and grandmother. The mother had voted early by mail, but the grandmother hadn’t. Woodson, in between cooing at the 3-year-old, learned that she wasn’t sure of her polling place, which had changed. Woodson looked it up on his tablet computer and gave her the correct location.

The seriousness and joy Woodson brought to his effort were particularly striking given reports that the conservative counterpart to these efforts was a disorganized, poorly targeted fiasco, operated by out-of-state workers in it solely for the paycheck. It was one more reason to think he was right when he predicted Democrats would win their races, up and down the ticket.

That is, of course, not what happened in the presidential race. Democratic nominee Kamala Harris lost Michigan, along with the other six “swing states” that determined the presidential election. But Woodson wasn’t totally off either. Democrat Elissa Slotkin prevailed in the election for an open U.S. Senate seat.

Slotkin eked out her win with around 20,000 votes, pending final counts of absentee and disputed ballots, which works out to less than half a percentage point in an election where more than 5.5 million Michiganders cast ballots. But this is 2 points better than Harris’ likely final tally, which would be roughly consistent with the differential polls had detected all along.

The best explanation for the outcome may be the simplest one: that Harris as the vice president could not escape her association with the Biden administration, which voters held responsible for post-pandemic inflation. Officials from incumbent parties all over the globe have suffered the same fate, regardless of their political leanings or records.

A possible corollary to that theory is that Harris ran a relatively effective campaign. Backing for that theory comes from another data point ― namely, the fact that her numbers held up better in the swing states, where she’d invested the most time and money.

“I’m convinced, based on everything I’ve seen, that no Democrat would have won at the top of the ticket this cycle,” Democratic state Sen. Mallory McMorrow told me, pointing to the data on Harris’ relative importance in swing states. “The campaign did everything it needed to do. It just wasn’t enough.”

But in such a divided country and in such divided states, it’s worth asking what other factors affected the race ― in part, because it can help explain why a candidate like Harris lost but a candidate like Slotkin won. And although it’s impossible to answer that question definitively without the kind of data that won’t be available for weeks and maybe months, it’s not too early to spot some important clues.

When it comes to the presidential race, the story of Harris’ defeat starts in places like Oakland County.

Oakland is an upscale, predominantly white suburb northwest of Detroit that has been moving steadily blue in recent elections, just like similar counties all over America. It’s also the heart of “Whitmer country,” because it’s where Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer ran up the big margins that allowed her to win reelection by double digits two years ago.

Harris won Oakland County comfortably, but the margin was 3.5 points lower than Joe Biden’s in 2020. And though that’s not a huge difference, Harris lost ground from Biden’s 2020 performance in nearly every other Michigan county as well. That includes Kent County, another former GOP stronghold trending Democratic thanks to an influx of highly paid, well-educated professionals. Harris also fared worse in Muskegon and Saginaw counties, swing working-class counties that Biden had narrowly won in 2020. Former President Donald Trump won them back in 2024.

Harris’ number declined in two other metro Detroit counties, Washtenaw and Wayne. In Wayne especially, part of that story was a marked shift toward Trump in the heavily Arab American cities of Dearborn (which Trump won) and Hamtramck (which Trump lost but barely).

And in more conservative parts of the state? Harris did worse there, too. In Livingston County, a more rural area where Republicans typically outperform Democrats by 2-to-1, Trump increased his margins by 1.4 percentage points ― another small shift that might not have mattered in isolation, but made a difference because it was part of a larger pattern.

One more factor that helped Trump was turnout. “In Michigan, turnout in rural counties was up significantly, while Dem areas were way below expected turnout levels,” Bernie Porn, the longtime Michigan pollster and head of EPIC-MRA, said. “It was the largest turnout as a percentage and raw number in history, but not among Dem areas and among Blacks.”

The clearest example of this change was in the city of Detroit. The rule of thumb for Democrats is that they win when turnout in the predominantly Black, heavily Democratic city is higher than 50%. Biden had barely cleared that mark in 2020. Hillary Clinton barely missed it in 2016.

A week before Election Day, Detroit’s clerk filled Democratic leaders with hope when she predicted city turnout would be between 51% and 55%, based on early voting returns. She was wrong. Turnout ended up around 47%, lower even than Clinton’s showing.

Figuring out why Harris performed worse is a tougher question, though close observers of Michigan politics already have plenty of plausible theories. One is about the role reproductive freedom played in the election ― or, more precisely, the role it did not play.

Democrats had hoped the issue of abortion rights would boost Harris’ numbers, especially in places like Oakland County, in the same way that it supercharged Whitmer’s numbers in 2022. But Whitmer wasn’t the only one on the ballot in 2022. So was a state constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights. It passed.

Harris and her supporters did their best to remind voters that conservative agendas, like the right-wing Project 2025 blueprint for Trump’s second term, called for national restrictions and bans that would supersede Michigan’s new protections. It appears plenty of voters didn’t believe Trump would support such measures ― or at least gave the matter less consideration than other issues, such as the economy.

One of them was Lauryn Keska, 31, who works in a restaurant and lives in Livingston County. She didn’t say how she cast her ballot. But as she stood outside a polling place, she said she cared most about the high cost of living. Housing prices, she explained, were forcing her and her family to move in with her father.

And though abortion rights mattered to her as well, she said, she had to weigh that against other issues. “You just have to make a pros-and-cons list and figure out what’s really important to you.”

That sort of economic frustration is why some analysts think, as does Porn, that Harris ”should have staked out at least a couple of things she would have done differently, with immigration and inflation a couple of prime issue areas to discuss different approaches.”

Debbie Dingell, the veteran U.S. House member, said one problem for Democrats like Harris was that they hadn’t done a great job of spreading the word about their investments in manufacturing and infrastructure ― which, in turn, has something to do with the fact that jobs from those investments have frequently taken time to materialize.

“They’re just starting to get the lead out of pipes,” Dingell said in an interview, citing a clean water project now underway thanks to Democratic legislation. “Our skilled trades all have jobs now, good-paying jobs, but we haven’t done a good job of communicating why that is.”

At the same time, Dingell said, Democrats have a reputation ― sometimes deserved ― of not listening to average voters, including those who have been talking about inflation for the past two years.

“I want [more Democrats] to go to Kroger’s on Sunday mornings, like I do every Sunday,” Dingell said. “People talk to me, and they are first and foremost saying they care about how much milk and eggs and gasoline cost.”

It’s unclear, for now, whether Harris did meaningfully worse among Black voters in Michigan, as many analysts had expected. But the lower turnout in Detroit is a sign of apathy, which is something leaders of the Black community in Detroit had warned about when Biden was still running for reelection ― and that I heard repeatedly in my own interviews.

“I think a lot of people feel like, Democrat or Republican, it really doesn’t matter,” Dwayne Rushin, a musician and political activist, said back in May. “That’s not a good place to be, particularly if we are trying to get folks to make sure that they get to the polls to participate in this election.”

The Harris campaign knew this and made plenty of efforts to reach these voters, both nationally and locally. Her high-profile podcast interview with Charlamagne tha God took place in a Detroit studio, where she wore a “Detroit vs. Everybody” T-shirt. She wore the same shirt a week later in another visit to the city, this time with Detroit native Lizzo.

Harris and her allies did not make the same kind of effort when it came to Arab American voters angry over the devastation in Gaza, choosing instead to keep them at a distance ― most famously, when organizers of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago refused to let a Palestinian American speak.

Among those who noticed were residents like Ahnam Nabut, who on Election Day stood outside an Oakland County polling place with her daughter, passing out literature urging voters angry about U.S. support for Israel to cast ballots for third party candidate Jill Stein. “I am Palestinian,” Nabut said, adding that she was among many in the area with family in the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank. “They want Harris to lose because she’s supporting genocide.”

The electoral impact of Gaza was more complex than outside analysts frequently realized. For every voter angry over the Israeli strikes on Gaza, there may have been another ready to back Trump if Harris seemed too critical of Israel or too forgiving of Hamas. In addition, Democrats were already losing votes among socially conservative Arab Americans because of LGBTQ+ issues.

In 2022, following a series of controversies over issues of gender and sexuality in public schools, Dearborn was one of the very few places where Whitmer lost support in her reelection bid. It didn’t affect the outcome, because she won by such big margins everywhere else, but it might have made a difference for Harris, and not just among Arab American voters.

Michigan was among the states where Republicans repeatedly ran a series of ads focused on issues tied to transgender Americans. The most memorable of these ended with a narrator warning that Harris supported government financing of transition surgery for prisoners, including a quote from Harris in 2019 saying as much.

During the campaign, Democratic aides frequently said their testing showed the ad didn’t persuade swing voters. The money Republicans put into these ads suggests their campaign officials believed otherwise.

A pair of new reports on the ads came to different conclusions over the effectiveness. But one possibility is that the ad reinforced a broader narrative about Harris, that, as the spot’s closing line put it, “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”

Slotkin faced the same kinds of attacks and, in some cases, was a target of the very same ads. She still managed to win, and did so by outperforming Harris across a wide swath of the state, running up larger margins in many Democratic-leaning areas and smaller deficits in Republican-leaning ones.

The difference is especially striking given the similarities in Harris’ and Slotkin’s messages. Both focused on protecting abortion rights, lowering prescription drug costs and investing in Michigan manufacturing. Both were relentlessly critical of Trump. Both tried to counter ubiquitous Republican attacks on immigration by saying they had been, and would continue to be, tough on protecting the border.

Still, there were some important differences, starting with their opponents. Harris was running against Trump, a candidate who has a special, almost unique appeal to certain voters.

“I heard anecdotally from election workers, people who worked at polls during the day, that they saw some voters, particularly young men, say out loud, ‘I’m here to vote for Trump and nothing else,’” McMorrow said. “I think there are a lot of voters who don’t like Republicans, don’t like Democrats, and voted for Trump because he represents blowing up the system.”

Slotkin, by contrast, was running against Mike Rogers, who had served seven terms in the U.S. House before leaving Congress in 2015. Although the affable, plainspoken former FBI agent had quintessential Midwest appeal, he also had a history of supporting conservative causes like Social Security privatization, plus a more recent history that included highly paid stints on corporate boards and living out of state in Florida.

Slotkin used that history to portray him as a plutocrat who had lost touch with the interests of everyday Michiganders. She also hammered him over his record of supporting bans on abortion ― a case she could make because, going back to her first run for Congress, she had been an ardent defender of reproductive rights. That message was particularly important for women without college degrees, a group that’s been tough for Democrats in recent years, a senior campaign aide said.

Rogers had one other big liability: He had conspicuously changed his posture toward Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

In televised debates with Slotkin, Rogers refused to condemn Trump for it, even though he’d done so loudly after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Slotkin hammered Rogers over this and, critically, framed it as a trust issue that called into question all of Rogers’ promises and made him look like just another politician.

Slotkin could make that case because of a biography that Harris didn’t have. Slotkin is a former CIA agent who went on to serve in the administrations of two presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Voters in Michigan know this story because Slotkin spent the spring and summer running ads telling them about it.

And it appeared to have made an impression on voters like Peggy Barron, of Oakland County. She wouldn’t say how she cast her ballot, but made it clear she knew about Slotkin’s biography from that ad. “It was very smart of her to point that out,” Barron said. “And I’ll leave it at that.”

Slotkin’s other biographical ad focused on her late mother’s struggles to get health insurance because of an earlier cancer diagnosis. In the ad, a virtual copy of one Slotkin used to win her first congressional race, Slotkin says her anger over seeing Republicans try to repeal the Affordable Care Act ― and its insurance rules protecting people with pre-existing conditions ― is why she first got into politics.

The ad burnished Slotkin’s image as somebody from outside of politics, motivated by public service. And it was no accident Slotkin spoke directly into the camera for both biographical spots, campaign aides told me. Their research showed voters liked hearing from Slotkin directly and thought she sounded like a “normal” person.

None of this would preclude the other possibility ― namely, that the coordinated Harris-Democratic campaign was largely successful, boosting candidates up and down the ballot, enough to make up for Slotkin’s liabilities as a Democrat but not Harris’ as Biden’s vice president.

Here again it’s too early to know definitively what was working, and not working, across the state. But one place the Democratic ground operation may have been successful might be that Eastpointe precinct where I saw Edwin Woodson and his colleagues canvassing before the election. It was among the places where Harris got almost the exact same vote share that Biden had in 2020, with roughly the same turnout level, too.

A few days after the election, I called Woodson to ask what he thought about the result, starting with the presidential race.

“I was really surprised. I thought that we had it ― I really did,” he told me. “I guess people in America are just mad or something. I don’t know.” He added that he was worried about what Trump’s election would mean for democracy. “I don’t want the system to change. I don’t want the experiment to be over.”

But Woodson said he’s been through setbacks before. “I’m a Black man in America, so it’s always been kind of rough in America anyway,” he said with a laugh.

Woodson said he was taking comfort in some other results, not just Slotkin’s win but also the election of two liberal justices to the state’s seven-member Supreme Court, creating a 5-2 majority.

On the morning after the election, he said, the entire canvassing team held a meeting to go over what had happened and to plan for the future.

“We are getting started on the first hundred days,” he said, with plans to organize around defending vital public programs. “We are not giving up. We are raring to go.”