By: Ryan Lafferty

Michigan had voted Democrat in every Presidential race between 1992 and 2012, but a razor-thin margin of 10,704 votes turned the state red in 2016 – one of the largest surprises of the 2016 election – when Donald Trump won over working-class white voters and union members, clinching the state by a mere .2 percentage points. Yet in the 2018 midterms, the “blue wave” that swept the nation was nowhere stronger than in Michigan, where a “blue tsunami” elected a Democratic governor into office, turned two seats in the House of Representatives formerly held by Republican incumbents blue, and flipped ten seats in the state legislature Democrats’ favor. While polls consistently show Biden ahead in the Great Lake State, Democrats are hoping to energize African-American voters and win back the votes of working-class communities in Michigan. Trump hopes, as he did in 2016, to dominate rural parts of the state, which overwhelmingly went in his favor four years ago. Democrats, by contrast, have sought to double down in urban centers like Detroit and Flint, hammering Republicans for their efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and blaming Trump for high rates of unemployment, where lower-than-expected turnout amongst African-American voters