Kamala Harris, Donald Trump take Michigan fight to key corners of state

• With 18 days left before the election, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump held competing events in Michigan
• Harris spoke in Kent and Oakland counties, key areas that shifted towards Democrats in 2020 and helped Joe Biden win the state
• Trump also spoke in Oakland County, along with separate stops in Detroit and Hamtramck

GRAND RAPIDS — In dueling Friday visits, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump swung through swaths of Michigan that could prove pivotal for both candidates’ electoral odds as they made crossover appeals in the election’s final weeks.

Trump, the Republican nominee, spent the evening around Oakland County and Detroit, Michigan’s Democratic stronghold, while Kamala Harris held rallies in Oakland County and Grand Rapids, the seat of conservative west Michigan.

At a park surrounded by the changing colors of fall in Grand Rapids, Harris made a pitch for independents and conservatives to join her campaign on the grounds of character, age and democracy.

“America is ready for a new and optimistic generation of leadership,” Harris told the crowd of several thousand. “The American people want a president who works for all the people, and that has been the story of my entire career.”

While she criticized Trump at length, her only mention of “Republicans” was to note how many GOP officials had backed her candidacy. One former Republican member of congress from Michigan, Dave Trott, had joined her campaign for a Pennsylvania event earlier this week.

Less than an hour later, Trump was at a new campaign office in Hamtramck accepting a certificate of appreciation from the mayor of the first city in the U.S. to have an all-Muslim city government. 

He then departed for Oakland County’s Auburn Hills and a roundtable where he highlighted crime and manufacturing in a county that has gone increasingly blue.

Harris has “no clue what she’s doing,” Trump claimed, before asserting that she wants to “raise everyone’s taxes” despite her pledge not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year. “She’s a disaster.”

Kent and Oakland County are both critical territories for the candidates in their quest to realign the state’s traditional political coalitions in their favor. 

Harris is looking to drive support from independents and Republicans turned off by Trump, while the Republican nominee hopes to make further inroads with working-class and minority voters.

The counties are home to some of the state’s wealthiest enclaves, and historically wellsprings of influential conservatism. But the seismic political realignment started by Trump’s political ascendency appears to have hastened a shift that helped President Joe Biden win the state four years ago. 

“You cannot win Michigan if you lose Oakland and Kent County,” pollster Richard Czuba said in a recent interview with Bridge Michigan.

In Michigan, however, voting is well underway. Nearly 1 million absentee ballots have already been returned, according to state election data, and early in-person voting is set to begin Saturday in Detroit and a week later in the rest of the state.

Harris and Trump are effectively tied in Michigan, one of six battleground states where polling has placed the two candidates within a single percentage point of each other with less than three weeks until Election Day.

‘Deeply held beliefs’

In Grand Rapids, Harris focused on themes of democracy and fairness to appeal to voters in a region that was once a Republican stronghold. 

“The stakes are even higher” to defeat Trump, given what she described as a “full-on assault on other hard-fought, hard-won freedoms and rights.” She invoked, abortion, same-sex marriage and voting access as examples.

Related:

• May the most ‘regular guy’ win? Fight is on in tight Michigan congressional race
• Donald Trump, Kamala Harris target Detroit as early in-person voting begins
• Michigan elections FAQ: Where Trump, Harris stand on health care, drug prices

On abortion, Harris said personal beliefs don’t have to hinder access to reproductive services.

“We all know one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government should not be telling women what to do with their bodies,” Harris said.

Democrats are counting on voters motivated by abortion, along with disaffected moderates and Republicans turned off by Trump’s bellicose rhetoric, to carry the state.

When Donald Trump won Michigan by less than 11,000 votes in 2016, he carried Kent County by less than 10,000 votes. But in 2020, Joe Biden earned nearly 50,000 more votes in Kent, and while Trump’s vote total also increased, Biden won the county by a 22,000-vote margin.

Harris cast a gloomy vision of a second Trump term, suggesting he has no interest in democracy, and raised some of his darkest comments about the state of the country.

“Someone who suggests we should terminate the Constitution of the United States should never again have the privilege of” being president,” Harris said, prompting chants from the crowd of “never again.”

She was referring to a December 2022 social media post in which Trump reiterated his false claims that “massive fraud” cost him the 2020 contest and argued mass cheating would justify “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

‘The enemy within’

Harris also criticized Trump’s recent characterization that Democrats are “the enemy within” the country and worse than foreign adversaries, suggesting he “would use the military to go after them — American citizens.”

Trump had made the comments during an interview with Fox News that aired Oct. 13 talking about Election Day unrest.

"I always say, we have two enemies," Trump said on Fox, adding, "We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries."

Trump said a "smart president" could handle outside adversaries "pretty easily," but "the thing that's tougher to handle are these lunatics that we have inside, like Adam Schiff."

In Hamtramck, Trump quipped, “every week they have a different concept for me.

“I'm going to be the biggest dictator in the world. I'm going to destroy the world,” Trump said. “They have so many things that they've said about me, and nothing sticks.”

Autos in the home stretch

Speaking in Oakland County, a vote-rich area outside of Detroit where he lost suburban voters in 2020, Trump attempted to appeal to voters with pledges to improve law enforcement and defend auto jobs. 

"We're going to fight alongside them," Trump said of police officers. " We have to stop being politically correct... You're always going to have some bad apples, but they are very, very few."

Courting union workers has remained a staple of Trump’s campaign in Michigan, and the roundtable in Oakland County represented another extension of that effort. 

Trump has spent months deriding the state of Michigan’s auto industry and claiming the only remedy for its problems is a heaping helping of tariffs on all foreign auto-related imports.

Trump claimed he had already begun to “save Michigan” by relaying an anecdote that production had stopped on a manufacturing facility in Mexico because of his tariff threats.

“Just the thought — ‘are you getting elected?’ — stopped somebody from destroying the rest of Detroit, from destroying the state of Michigan's auto industry,” Trump said.

Trump was referring to comments from Michigan construction executive John Rakolta, a Trump ally and former Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, who told The Detroit News that seven auto plant projects in Mexico had been halted since Trump began promising to ramp up tariffs for vehicles assembled there. 

"When the customer shelves a project, they don't say why. But they were shelved simultaneously with Trump's comments," Rakolta told the newspaper. 

Trump made similar claims earlier Friday in Hamtramck, claiming he has “saved Michigan” by threatening tariffs before he was even elected. 

Hours after Trump spoke, Harris also campaigned in Oakland County, where a strong shift towards Democrats helped Biden win Michigan in 2020. Biden Oakland County by more than 14 percentage points after Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton had won by eight points in 2016. 

Harris, too, is courting auto industry workers who have drifted toward Trump. 

In a Friday morning speech in Lansing, the vice president played clips from Trump’s own campaign remarks as evidence he was, as she put it, “no friend of labor.”

Harris spoke at the UAW Local 652, which represents workers at General Motors' Grand River Assembly plant in Lansing. 

The Biden-Harris administration gave GM a $500 million grant to retool the factory to produce electric vehicles, staving off potential layoffs after the company ceased local production of the Chevrolet Camaro. 

Republican presidential nominee JD Vance has criticized the grant and accused Democrats of giving "table scraps" to the industry. 

“We fought hard for those jobs, and we believe that you deserve a president who will protect them and not insult them,” Harris said.