MARQUETTE, MI – Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is not often compared to West Virginia, but the two regions have certain key things in common. Once fairly prosperous and heavily dependent on mining, they have been losing population and power for decades.
Politically, they’ve changed dramatically too. Both were once heavily Democratic, full of blue-collar and ‘red flannel collar’ workers who revered Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. This was true as recently as 1988. Democrat Michael Dukakis was badly beaten in the presidential election, losing 40 states to George H.W. Bush.
But West Virginia, voting its loyalty to FDR’s legacy, gave Dukakis a solid majority. So did Michigan’s UP, as everyone calls it; Bush easily won the state as a whole – but decisively lost the sparsely populated UP to the Democrat.
Yet everything is radically different now. West Virginia was President Trump’s strongest state four years ago. Democrat Hillary Clinton got only 26 percent of the vote – the weakest showing by any Democrat in history. She didn’t do quite as bad in the UP—but bad enough. Clinton actually won the Lower Peninsula, where 97 percent of Michiganders live, by a bare 16,000 votes.
But Donald Trump won a landslide in the sparsely populated UP, winning 14 of 15 counties and piling up a margin of almost 27,000 votes, which enabled him to be the first Republican to win Michigan since that long-ago campaign in 1988.
Might that happen again this year?
For starters, nearly everyone agrees that Trump will win both West Virginia and the UP without even trying. Democrats think Joe Biden will probably do better than Hillary Clinton in West Virginia, but will be pleasantly surprised if he gets more than one-third of the vote.
Likewise, while the polls show Biden consistently beating the President in Michigan as a whole, the UP is still Trump country.
“I can tell you that Marquette County will go blue. Houghton County may go blue also. The rest of the place is Trump country, like it or not,” said Charley Bastian, a 69-year old long-time Marquette resident. Bastian doesn’t like that at all.
Like many Michiganders, he was born in the Detroit area; his father was from the Upper Peninsula city of Calumet, which once had six times as many people as it does today, and was the center of the state’s mining industry. He came south when the jobs disappeared.
But Charley, his youngest son, came back in his 20s, and now is the co-owner of a company called Advanced Mobile Accessories, which puts electronics equipment in cars; he is also a big music organizer in Marquette, which is sort of the unofficial capital of the region.
Marquette is unlike the rest of the UP; it somewhat resembles a smaller Ann Arbor, and the downtown is upscale and gentrified. Political alignment these days is often as much cultural as economic, and this is the one place where Trump supporters are in a minority.
Donckers, a legendary candy store and café, proudly displays photos of President Obama touring their place. Marquette County was the only one in the UP to support Hillary Clinton.
Marquette, however, is a tiny island in a mainly rural world. Though it is the biggest city in the UP, it has only 21,000 residents. Visitors from places like Detroit are often overwhelmed by how huge and empty the UP is. You could put New Jersey and Massachusetts in the same area and have a thousand square miles left over. Those two states combined have more than 15 million people.
The Upper Peninsula has maybe 300,000. Mark Dobias is an irreverent, funny and smart attorney who was born in Cheboygan, went to law school in Detroit and now practices throughout the UP and northern Lower Peninsula.
“I’ve been mainly stuck in my COVID silo,” he said, meaning he hasn’t been traveling much because of the virus. But when he has driven out, he has seen a “forest of Trump signs” across the region.
Still, he thinks he may be seeing a few cracks in the red wall. “I have no doubt that Donald Trump will carry the Eastern UP,” he said, but perhaps not by quite as much as before. He noted that a New York Times story last month found some Trump supporters wavering.
The story quoted one man, a health care CEO, as saying he was abandoning Trump because of his lack of leadership on the coronavirus crisis. Another woman who has a blueberry farm said “I’d vote for a tuna sandwich before I’d vote for Trump.”
Still, the President has some things going for him. Unemployment (8.2 percent) is actually lower in the UP than statewide (9.5 percent) something that seldom happens.
UP voters also tend to be staunchly pro-gun and anti-abortion, and President Trump unabashedly appeals to those sentiments.
Republicans may have a problem, however: Their candidate for governor did carry the UP two years ago, but by only 7,000 votes.
That helped make some Democrats think they have a chance to beat two-term Republican Congressman Jack Bergman, a retired U.S. Marine Corps general who, they charge, spends more time in Louisiana than Michigan. They nominated Dana Ferguson, a union carpenter and small businessman from the mining town of Negaunee.
But he faces an uphill battle, in part because he is pro-choice and is severely underfunded. “Nice guy,” Dobias said, adding, “the general will slaughter him.”
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(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
