OAK PARK, MI – Keith McClellan has seen his share of presidential campaigns, ever since he went door-knocking for a guy named John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Hammond, Indiana in 1960.
That was the first year McClellan, then a young teacher, was old enough to vote. His efforts were pretty much useless then, he chuckles; in Hammond, as in Indiana itself, “we got creamed.”
He was more successful eight years later, when he helped successfully organize Robert Kennedy’s winning primary campaign in Indiana, barely a month before RFK was assassinated.
McClellan, now 82, has seen plenty of Democratic ups and downs since, in a long and varied career that has included serving as a labor organizer, running several nonprofits and being a professor of urban studies. Today, politics has become a family affair for him; his wife, Marion McClellan, is mayor of the small Oakland County suburb of Oak Park; her son, Andy Meisner, is county treasurer and running for county executive.
Last week, when I caught up with Keith McClellan at the annual Oak Park-Huntington Woods annual Democratic picnic, he said that there was something different in the air this year.
“They are focused and engaged — particularly suburban women — in a way I have never seen them engaged before,” he said, adding “and I don’t see their energy abating.”
Democrats do have a problem, he freely admitted with blue-collar voters, especially men. “I don’t think we will ever succeed in turning around a lot of the guys I grew up with,” said McClellan, the son of a machinist. They largely seem to be sticking with Donald Trump, he acknowledged. In Michigan, that was dramatically apparent in 2016 in places like Monroe County on the Ohio border.
Monroe, which had voted narrowly for President Obama four years before, went for Trump by more than 20 points.
But Republicans have the opposite problem in large, well-educated and affluent suburban counties like Oakland, which has nearly 1.3 million people. This was a Republican bastion till 1996.
Now, however, the GOP’s policies on social issues are decidedly out of favor here. Hillary Clinton was the first Democrat to lose Michigan since 1988. But she won Oakland County by almost 54,000, a slightly better showing than President Obama had four years before.
Last year, when the “blue wave,’ was clearly stronger in Michigan than most places, Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic candidate for governor, did lose Monroe, though by a closer, 53-45 percent margin. But she won Oakland by an astonishing 103,000, and carried the entire state by a near-landslide 406,000 votes.
She did particularly well with women in the county, who also helped elect the new governor and two other suburban women in their 40s to powerful statewide posts – Jocelyn Benson, now secretary of state, and Dana Nessel, Michigan’s attorney general.
Nessel, known for her fiery rhetoric and take no prisoners style, was the featured speaker at the Oak Park-Huntington Woods event, and was greeted as if she were a rock star.
She pledged to continue her fight to close down the oil-carrying pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac, promised to continue efforts to force big utility companies to roll back rate increases, and a host of other things. Nessel, who has never shunned controversy, did something else that once would have been inconceivable: She endorsed Karen McDonald, a former judge, in next year’s primary race for Oakland County prosecutor.
That was stunning because there is already a Democratic prosecutor in the county – the somewhat reclusive, 73-year-old Jessica Cooper, who many more progressive Democrats feel tends to be too quick to favor the police and too resistant to change.
But will this split the party? “No, I really don’t think so, at least on the presidential level,” McClellan said. “Donald Trump has been a terrific unifying factor for Democrats,” he said. Indeed, three years ago, such gatherings as these almost inevitably seethed with hostility between supporters of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.
That was not apparent at all at this suburban gathering. I talked to supporters of Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, as well as even more who are undecided.
Nobody said they would refuse to support any Democrat if their first choice wasn’t nominated. The universal sentiment seemed to be best expressed by a man who told me “I would vote for your dog against Trump, even if you don’t have a dog.”
Huntington Woods and Oak Park are adjacent, but very different towns. Huntington Woods, which is smaller, is highly educated, affluent, largely Jewish, and voted 79 percent for Hillary Clinton. Oak Park is almost two-thirds black, but even more one-sided; its citizens cast 12,800 votes for Clinton, 2,276 for Trump.
They are not in any sense a microcosm of the state. But the enthusiasm of the Democrats at that picnic, combined with last year’s election returns may serve as a warning for Republicans.
President Trump, whose statewide margin in Michigan was a minuscule 10,704 votes, can win the state without these towns.
But if he loses Oakland County by the 100,000-plus votes Bill Schuette, his endorsed candidate for governor did, winning the state next year will probably prove impossible.
