All politics are local.
The Farmers’ Market in Flint has been one of the brighter enterprises to flourish in a city ravaged for many decades by the industrial downturn that created the Rust Belt.
It’s a big, open-plan gathering point featuring boutique eateries and local arts and crafts. Around noon on Thursday, a Harris-Walz campaign coach pulled up near the front doors and a crowd waited to greet Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer.
An ascending star in the Democratic Party – and frequently mentioned as a possible presidential replacement during the long, uncertain weeks of July when the calls for president Biden to step aside became louder – “Big Gretch” is in some ways the public face of Michigan.
But the events of this week demonstrated that politics can be a treacherous walk for even its most sure-footed performers. For the past week, controversy followed the viral sharing of a video in which Whitmer placed a Dorito chip on the tongue of a social media influencer in a way that was quickly interpreted as a mockery of the Catholic act of the Eucharist.
Without pausing to question why any governor would randomly decide to insult a sizeable slice of her electorate, protesters assembled outside her home and Michigan’s Catholic bishops issued a rebuke, stating that whether the intent was there or not, the video “had an offensive impact”.
Whitmer apologised this week, saying her 25 years of public services showed she “would never do anything to denigrate someone’s faith”, explaining that “what was supposed to be a video about the importance of the Chips Act [which encourages the construction of new computer chip fabrication facilities] to Michigan jobs has been construed as something it was never intended to be, and I apologise for that”.
On Tuesday, she signed two Bills that will enable Michigan’s care home workers, who number some 35,000, to organise a union. And on Thursday, she was on the bus – a quaint throwback to the campaign travel of the 1970s.
Not only that, she brought some guests. Wisconsin governor Tony Evers was in her company. And as she ordered a smoothie in the farmers’ market and stood greeting Flint locals who gathered around her, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro came walking through the crowd and gave her a big hug. It was, for the normal Thursday crowd, a dazzling show of Democratic star power. And it had a purpose.
It was Whitmer’s idea to organise a tri-state tour of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, all three of which are locked into rivetingly close results according to collated polling, to galvanise the party volunteers and operatives for the final three weeks of the campaign.
As they entered the room, all three governors made a beeline for Democratic congressman Dan Kildee, who will retire from politics this year after a career that began when he was elected to Flint local council at the age of 18.
“People are asking me: ‘what the heck are you all doing together’?” Whitmer told the Democratic gathering of supporters and volunteers.
“We know that this election is going to come down to a handful of states. Our three states are going to have a disproportionate impact on the outcome of this election. Which means our work over the next 19 days is going to be more important than ever.”
As the three governors stood side by side talking and rallying the crowd, it became clear that of all the figureheads in this election, they are under extraordinary pressure to preserve the status-quo in states that had once been considered Democratic bastions.
In 2016, Donald Trump became the first Republican since Ronald Reagan (1984) to win Wisconsin, only to see Joe Biden take it back by a sliver of votes in 2020. Trump in 2016 was the lone Republican success in Michigan since George Bush in 1988.
Pennsylvania is similarly delicately poised, with the poll needle wavering from week to week as Harris holds on to a negligible lead – the FiveThirtyEight polling site has her ahead of Trump in Michigan by just 0.7 percentage points.
Shapiro, considered a likely vice-presidential pick for Harris after she succeeded Joe Biden as the unopposed Democratic candidate, made the case for Harris to the small gathering.
“I must tell you this leadership is a clear contrast in leadership styles. Someone who is bringing joy back to our politics, someone who is looking out for all of us, no matter who you love or who you pray to; someone who is trying to lift up all Americans. And on the other side, you have got a guy who is the Republican nominee for president who attacked one of the greatest American cities out there: Detroit. And I know governor Evers knows this because in the lead up the convention he attacked another great city: Milwaukee. And I will tell you something: I am sick and tired of him attacking Philadelphia.
“Think about this. A guy who wants to lead the greatest nation on earth keeps attacking his fellow Americans. This is a great country. We are producing more energy than ever before, which is strengthening our economy, our national security. We are beating the hell out of China for the first time in decades. And today in America more people went to work than ever before. This is the greatest country on earth. Donald Trump better stop s**t-talking America and stop talking down Americans and start lifting people up.”
It was a variation on the impressive and lively stump speeches Shapiro will continue to give until November 5th. And it’s a message which should resonate with voters in the fabled “Blue Wall”, the term given to the three states which Democratic strategists felt they had won over before Trump made his metamorphosis into a Republican firebrand.
Now, the combination of the nightmarish memories of 2016, when the handsome poll leads Hillary Clinton enjoyed evaporated when it came to the voting booth, have caused mid-October jitters.
Kamala Harris has concentrated her time and energy by holding rallies and interviews in all three states at a furious rate, concluding with a planned rally in Detroit on Saturday evening – just 24 hours after her opponent was due to hold a rally of his own in the Motor City. The coming weeks are likely to see further visits to the three states as the days tick down and the pressure grows.
“It’s all about us,” governor Evers told them.
“These three states. We are going to do it. We are going to win. I can’t imagine any circumstance in which we won’t win. None at all. But here is the push. With those three states that really matter, that means that 320 million people in this country are counting on all of this in this room.”
It was a grave thought on a lighthearted lunchtime. Never will the Democratic governors of their respective states have felt such pressure and obligation to keep the flimsy notion of the blue wall intact.
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