When Detroit started to empty out in the 1950s, white-collar workers, intellectuals and Jews tended to go northwest, to Oakland County. Blue-collar, ethnic white Detroiters, many of whom had lived in Detroit’s East Side, went northeast to Macomb County.
Back then, white-collar voters were mostly Republican; blue-collar ones Democratic, especially if they happened to be Catholic. So when John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon for president in 1960, Oakland was solidly for Nixon.
But the ethnic Poles and Italians of Macomb gave JFK 63 percent, his highest percentage in any suburban county outside the South. Flash forward twenty years, when the Washington Post discovered “Reagan Democrats,” working-class, white voters who were abandoning the Democrats, at least for President, and the nation focused on Macomb as their natural habitat.
Some of this was, indeed, racial. Some of these voters disliked and resented African-Americans and affirmative action. They sometimes unfairly blamed blacks if they felt themselves slipping on the economic ladder.
Today, these voters are in an even more precarious economic condition, and tend to blame immigrants, rather than blacks, for taking their jobs and prosperity. The gap between the blue-collar ethnic whites of Macomb and the national Democratic Party is also social and cultural. Hillary Clinton not only failed to connect with these voters; she didn’t even seem to try.
Donald Trump knew instinctively how to appeal to their worst impulses, bashed liberals, immigrants and the media, and beat Clinton by virtually the same margin in Macomb by which Reagan beat Jimmy Carter nearly forty years ago. But to see Macomb solely as the home of the angry white racist blue-collar voter is neither true nor fair.
Macomb County voters gave a majority to Barack Obama twice, and also voted for Al Gore over George W. Bush. This is also not pure lunch-bucket land anymore; in fact, it never was. While there isn’t a separate, four-year university there, you can stay in Macomb and earn higher degrees from other universities through partnerships at Macomb Community College.
Meanwhile, MCC has also led the way in training and retraining programs for those newly entering the workforce, or newly displaced. It’s no coincidence that President Obama visited there twice, or that Macomb’s population continues to grow.
Macomb is also slowly becoming more diverse. The African-American population, once nearly non-existent, now may have reached 10 percent. The county is also in many ways like a layer cake. At the top is farmland and communities like Memphis and Romeo that might as well be up north. There are the new wealth McMansions of Macomb Township, solid suburbia in Utica and Sterling Heights, and the blue-collar ethnic grittiness of Warren.
There’s also a bit of coastal wharf-rat feel in Candice Miller’s Harrison Township, which calls itself Boat Town. Macomb is also a place with a uniquely strange political culture, permeated in some places by kickback corruption that went out of style elsewhere decades ago.
Those running for judge in Wayne or Oakland Counties do well if they have a name like Kelly or O’Brian. In Macomb, try Viviano or Szymanski.
And it’s hard to imagine Warren’s Jim Fouts or Karen Spranger anywhere else. Macomb County is many things, but if you look below the surface … it’s seldom boring.
