The playbook for Democrats in Michigan has been the same for decades. To carry the crucial swing state, they need to run up huge margins in its largest city, Detroit, where President Biden received 94 percent of the vote in 2020.
But as Vice President Kamala Harris prepares for a Tuesday stop courting Black voters in Detroit, some Democratic officials there worry that her campaign has not been doing enough.
In interviews with 10 current and former elected Democrats who have represented Detroit, several said Ms. Harris’s campaign in the city had seemed to lack urgency, had failed to produce enough yard signs or had not sufficiently mobilized local officials to vouch for the vice president in their neighborhoods.
Adding to the challenge for Democrats, many of those officials said, is that Republicans seem to be trying harder than in past cycles to reach Detroit voters. Former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign has been plastering the city with mailers, and Mr. Trump has made repeated visits, though he made a dig about Detroit during a speech there last week.
“There’s some shifts in the atmosphere that are happening,” said State Representative Stephanie A. Young, a second-term Democrat who described recently spotting a Trump yard sign near her Detroit home, the first she could ever recall for a Republican presidential candidate.
Ms. Young, who said that she had received 14 pieces of pro-Trump mail in a recent two-week span but nothing from the Harris campaign, said that “folks take Detroit for granted,” adding that she had tried without much success to register her concerns with leaders in the Democratic Party. “I’m like, ‘You guys aren’t paying attention to this,’” she said.
Sherry Gay-Dagnogo, a Detroit School Board member who previously chaired the Detroit Caucus in the Michigan House of Representatives, said she worried the Harris campaign was faltering in her city. Ms. Gay-Dagnogo, a Democrat, signed an open letter to Ms. Harris this month that said it was important to “bring your awareness to gaps that must be closed in the campaign” and argued that “it will be the Black vote that wins Michigan.”
The ground game, Ms. Gay-Dagnogo said, needed urgent improvement. Harris yard signs have been hard or impossible to come by. One day in late August, without any professionally printed campaign literature available, she said, she knocked on doors carrying black-and-white printouts about Ms. Harris. Campaign literature is now widely available, but Ms. Gay-Dagnogo said there did not seem to be a consistent effort by the campaign to deploy trusted local leaders who can help win over and turn out persuadable voters.
“We’re in big trouble if we don’t get the message to the right folks,” said Ms. Gay-Dagnogo, who added that the campaign should try harder to reach residents who did not vote four years ago.
Harris campaign officials said that they were holding frequent events in Detroit, planning additional candidate visits and engaging with community groups. They attributed the yard-sign shortage to voter enthusiasm, saying they had handed out more than 90,000 in the state and ran out within a day when a new shipment of 1,000 signs arrived in Detroit last weekend.
“Vice President Harris isn’t asking, but earning, the support of the Black community in Detroit by showing up, and our campaign is bringing her message everywhere, from Black small businesses and events with local influencers to barbershops and the church,” Marloshawn Franklin, the Harris campaign’s Michigan political director, said in a statement.
Some of the Detroit Democrats interviewed said they were impressed with the Harris campaign’s work in the city, and suggested that the concerns were overstated.
Joe Tate, the Democratic speaker of the Michigan House of Representatives and a Detroit resident, said he had been pleased with the efforts, including an influx of national surrogates for Ms. Harris, and sensed that voters were broadly enthusiastic about her candidacy. Mr. Tate, too, said he had received pro-Trump mailers.
“The amount of time that the vice president has spent in Detroit and continues to,” Mr. Tate said, “I think is something that should be commended. I think I haven’t seen that going back to 2016.”
More than 75 percent of Detroit residents are Black, and Black voters have long picked Democrats in overwhelming numbers in Michigan and nationwide. But there are signs that might be changing, with Ms. Harris significantly trailing Mr. Biden’s 2020 share of Black voters nationally in a recent New York Times/Siena College poll, even though Black voters continued to prefer her over Mr. Trump by more than 60 percentage points.
Michigan is closely divided, with Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump nearly tied in a New York Times average of recent statewide polls. Mr. Biden carried the state in 2020, and Mr. Trump in 2016.
Mary Waters, a Detroit City Council member, said she worried that Democrats were not doing enough to expand their base of support in the city, not emphasizing the right issues and not effectively combating voter apathy. Like others, she criticized the shortage of Harris yard signs.
“People want yard signs — have pickup spots for them. I mean, don’t treat them like they’re gold,” said Ms. Waters, a Democrat and former state legislator. “This is serious business. You know, people should not have to jump through hoops to get a yard sign.”
The vice president, who is Black and South Asian, has said repeatedly that she does not take the support of Black voters for granted, and her campaign has held events in Detroit that have specifically targeted that community, including Ms. Harris’s event on Tuesday and a gathering last week in Northwest Detroit where Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist II of Michigan was among the speakers.
Asked about critiques of the Harris campaign’s approach with Black Detroiters, Mr. Gilchrist, a Detroit resident who is the first Black person to hold his position, said that he saw the Harris campaign doing the right things in the city.
“But there always can be additional things,” Mr. Gilchrist said, and “this campaign has shown that it will take feedback and that it will try to act.”
Alexis Wiley, a former Democratic National Committee member who owns a communications company in Detroit, was complimentary of the Harris campaign’s ground game in the city, even as she said the pro-Trump TV ads attacking the vice president “are brutal.” But there is still work to be done, she said, in getting Detroiters to turn out for Democrats in a city where turnout is often low.
“The heart of the frustration is, how in the world do we figure out how to get Detroit out?” Ms. Wiley said. “I don’t know that we’ve cracked it. But I would also say Kamala Harris is trying hard as hell to crack it.”
Detroit’s population has plummeted over the last half-century, largely as a consequence of downturns in the auto industry, disinvestment and white flight, and the city went through the country’s largest-ever municipal bankruptcy a decade ago. Some voters question openly whether either political party is looking out for them, or whether their vote matters. But the city has stabilized in recent years, with a growing downtown and increasing home values. Detroit remains Michigan’s most populous city, with about 630,000 residents, and the population total ticked upward in the Census Bureau’s estimate this year for the first time since 1957.
If there was any doubt about the potentially decisive role that Detroit will play in this year’s election, just check the candidates’ schedules.
Ms. Harris’s visit to Detroit on Tuesday will mark her fifth stop in the city or one of its suburbs since Mr. Biden dropped out of the presidential race. Last week, her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, held an event for Black voters in suburban Detroit. Mr. Trump has campaigned in Detroit four times this year, and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, spoke to voters in the city last week.
Showing up, though, may not always be helpful. Mr. Trump, whose supporters four years ago tried to disrupt the counting of ballots in Detroit, offended some residents during his latest speech in the city when he said that “our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president” and that “you’re going to have a mess on your hands.” The Harris campaign quickly cut an ad using the former president’s words about Detroit against him.
But for Mr. Trump, even incremental growth in his support among Detroiters could help him carry Michigan. Kwame M. Kilpatrick, a former Democratic mayor of Detroit who was convicted of felonies and sentenced to 28 years in federal prison, and whose sentence was commuted by Mr. Trump in the final hours of his presidency, said he has sensed enthusiasm when pitching Mr. Trump to younger Black men in the city.
If the former president could win 16 percent of the vote in Detroit, Mr. Kilpatrick said, it could help push Michigan into Mr. Trump’s column.
“I want people to understand that this is not a thing where it’s going to be some kind of tsunami for Trump — he doesn’t need it,” Mr. Kilpatrick said of Detroit. “What he needs is to engage the right voters and understand what they’re talking about and move those people to the polls on Election Day.”
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