Black and Arab American voters could swing Michigan's 2024 election

The entire nation will vote on the next president of the United States this fall, but the election will likely come down to seven key swing states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. With the outsized importance of these states, it's worth taking a closer look at the data we have in each of them — not just where the presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump stands today, but also each candidate's path to victory and what issues could tip the election. Third in our series is the Great Lakes State, Michigan.

The history

Michigan’s status as a presidential swing state is a somewhat new phenomenon. While Republicans have frequently won state and local offices over the last few decades, the state only recently became a true battleground at the presidential level. From 1992 to 2012, Democratic presidential candidates consistently won Michigan by around 5 to 10 percentage points. But in 2016, Trump flipped the state, winning by a razor-thin margin of 0.2 points.

Michigan Democrats have fared quite well since then, winning every statewide office twice and flipping the state legislature along with multiple U.S. House seats. In 2020, President Joe Biden won the state by 3 points, his largest margin among the core seven swing states that year. But Republicans are still gunning hard for the state’s 15 electoral votes, and the 2024 data shows they have a realistic chance of winning them this year.

The 2024 polls

Harris currently leads Trump by about 2 points in 538’s presidential polling average of the race.* That’s an inversion of where the race stood before Biden dropped out, however, when Trump was leading by a little over 2 points.

The demographics

Black voters make up about 13 percent of Michigan’s electorate, and in 2020, 92 percent supported Biden, according to exit polls. But so far in 2024, Harris seems to be running way behind that benchmark. An average of polls conducted in Michigan since Sept. 4 shows the Democratic share of the Black electorate dropping by a precipitous 21 points on margin since 2020.** That would be a truly seismic shift in Michigan politics, but there are reasons to believe those numbers may not fully materialize come Election Day.

In 2022, national polls estimated a huge drop in Democratic support among Black voters — but the decline ended up being only a couple of points. Indeed, in Michigan’s governor’s race, the 2022 Democratic share of the Black vote mostly held steady from 2020, either rising or falling a couple of points, depending on the estimate.

Every year is different, and polling errors from one cycle don’t necessarily carry over to the next. So we can’t say with any certainty that the same phenomenon is happening again this cycle … but we can speculate. A 21-point shift on margin among Black voters would be a political earthquake in Michigan, and as of now, the likelier explanation is probably something closer to 2022, when polls struggled to capture a full picture of the Black electorate.

Recent polls also show a large drop in Democratic support among young voters. An average of polls conducted in the state over the last month shows Democratic support among 18- to 29-year-olds declining by 13 points on margin from 2020.

Young voters are key to any Democratic victory, but especially so in Michigan, which had the highest youth turnout in the nation in the 2022 midterms. College students in particular are sure to play a pivotal role in both the presidential election and in key U.S. House races across the state. While polls sometimes have a hard time capturing a representative sample of young voters, after a year marked by intense student protests over the Biden administration’s handling of the war between Israel and Hamas, Democrats have their work cut out for them to claw back support among the demographic.

And young voters aren’t the only key demographic in Michigan that has been upended by the war in Gaza. Arab Americans make up about 4 percent of the state population (the highest share of any state in the country), and many prominent Arab American leaders in the state have harshly criticized the Biden administration’s response to the conflict. These critiques helped galvanize the Uncommitted Movement, which encouraged votes against Biden in the Democratic presidential primary earlier this year. And since becoming the Democratic nominee, Harris has been dogged by pro-Palestinian activists in Michigan, with protestors interrupting an August rally in Detroit.

In 2020, Arab Americans nationwide leaned heavily toward Democrats. But according to a new national poll conducted by John Zogby Strategies for the Arab American Institute, that advantage isn’t likely to continue this year. Trump and Harris are about tied in the low 40s in the survey of Arab American voters, a far cry from the 24-point advantage that Biden had in 2020. While support for Trump among the demographic has grown about 7 percent since 2020, much of the change comes from collapsing Democratic support, which has dropped by 18 percent since 2020.

Part of that could be because GOP policies on Israel are even less appealing to many anti-war activists than the Democrats’, so many disenchanted Arab American voters may choose to either stay home on Election Day or vote for a third-party candidate rather than mark their ballots for Trump. Indeed, third-party candidates are pulling 12 percent of the vote among Arab Americans nationally in the Zogby poll, much higher than the 3 percent they received among the demographic in 2020 and far more than we’ve seen in polls of the general population. This was a national survey, not specific to Michigan, but given the state’s competitiveness, any Democratic decline among this group of voters could still help the GOP’s chances.

The issues

The most important issues to Michiganders this election are in some ways the opposite of what you might expect. Of course, the economy dominates Michigan voters’ concerns in the same way it does nationwide. But an issue like abortion, which appeared to have been mostly settled in the state, still ranks high in voters’ minds, on par with voters nationally. Meanwhile, an issue like the war between Israel and Hamas, which is especially important in Michigan, may not be as singularly motivating as expected.

Michigan was one of the first states in the country to legalize abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Voters in 2022 passed Proposition 3, a constitutional amendment that guaranteed the right to an abortion up until fetal viability. The year after that, the state legislature expanded reproductive rights even further, making Michigan one of the most protected states for abortion rights in the Midwest.

After this dramatic expansion of abortion rights in the state, some signs indicated that Michiganders would be less motivated by the issue in 2024 than voters in other states. But new polling shows that abortion is still one of the top issues for Michigan voters. In The New York Times/Siena College’s latest poll of the state, 16 percent of registered voters said that abortion was the most important issue in determining their vote in November, the second-most frequent response behind the economy.

That figure mirrors a recent nationwide poll from the same pollster that showed 14 percent of voters listing abortion as the most important issue. National and state-level polling from Emerson College also shows abortion mattering to Michiganders roughly as much as it does to voters nationwide.

That’s probably welcome news to Democrats in the state, who are trying to capitalize on the issue by warning that the state’s new abortion protections could be steamrolled by a national abortion ban if the GOP wins control of Congress. But some Michigan Republicans remain skeptical that the issue will end up motivating many voters in the state come Election Day, given the network of protections already in place.

But while abortion ranks higher in importance among Michiganders than some expected, another issue that has rocked state politics in the last year is barely registering among voters’ top priorities.

As I wrote earlier, the war in Gaza has been a mobilizing issue for many Michiganders, particularly Arab Americans and young voters. But less than 1 percent of respondents in The New York Times/Siena College Michigan survey said that “the Middle East/Israel/Palestinians” was most important to their vote.

That certainly doesn’t mean that less than 1 percent of the state’s residents care about the topic (the survey only asked what the most important issue was for respondents), but it does indicate that the war may not be top-of-mind for Michigan voters as a whole in the way that many observers predicted — in line with what we’ve seen nationally, including among younger voters.

The downballot races

The presidential race isn’t the only close contest in Michigan this year — the state is hosting competitive fights for a U.S. Senate seat, two U.S. House seats and control of the state House.

In the state’s U.S. Senate race, Rep. Elissa Slotkin is hoping to keep the seat in Democratic hands following the retirement of Sen. Debbie Stabenow. She faces former Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican who used to represent much of the same Lansing-area turf that Slotkin now holds, following the state's redistricting. 538’s polling average of the race shows Slotkin with a lead of about 5 points.

While the state’s U.S. Senate seat may be a harder win, Republicans are trying to at least capture a few of Michigan’s U.S. House districts. In the 7th District, the GOP is hoping to capitalize on Slotkin’s departure from the House by boosting former state Sen. Tom Barrett, who lost to Slotkin in 2022. Barrett seems to have an advantage in the polls over his Democratic rival, former state Sen. Curtis Hertel Jr., though two of the three publicly released polls of the race were internals from the Barrett campaign.

In the 8th District, former Trump administration official Paul Junge is locked in a close race with Democratic state Sen. Kristen McDonald Rivet to replace retiring Democratic Rep. Dan Kildee. Junge is a twice-failed candidate for Congress but has outraised McDonald Rivet. No matter who wins, it will be the first time in almost 50 years that a member of the Kildee family has not held Michigan’s Flint-based district.

Further down the ballot, Democrats in the state legislature are hoping they can hold on to control of the state House of Representatives after winning the chamber by the narrowest of margins in 2022. As of August, Democratic state House candidates had outraised their Republican counterparts by about $4 million, giving them a massive cash advantage in a set of races that often fly under the radar. But Democrats are playing defense in more districts than the GOP is; Republicans only need to flip two seats to win control of the chamber and end the Democratic trifecta that has governed the state for the past two years.

Footnotes

*All numbers in this article are as of Oct. 3 at 2 p.m. Eastern.

**Based on polls of likely and registered voters only (if a poll included results among both populations, we used likely voters). If a poll included both a head-to-head matchup between Harris and Trump and a version including third parties, we used the head-to-head version. Finally, if a polling organization (defined as a partnership between a pollster and sponsor, or a pollster alone if their work was not sponsored by an outside group) had more than one survey in the relevant time frame, only the most recent version was included. All polls conducted and released between Sept. 4 and Oct. 3 at 2 p.m. Eastern are included.