MT.CLEMENS, MI – When the flight from Detroit to the suburbs began in the 1950s, a rough pattern emerged: White-collar professionals streamed northwest, to Oakland County. Blue-collar workers went northeast, to Macomb County.
The result was starkly different voting patterns. In 1960, one of the last truly close presidential races in Michigan, Oakland County voted stoutly for Richard Nixon, but Macomb was the most Democratic suburban county in the United States, giving JFK most of his narrow margin in the state that year.
But what a difference a few decades can make: Macomb became famous in the 1980s as a major center of “Reagan Democrats,” blue-collar white workers who had become disenchanted with the Democratic Party over racial and cultural issues.
National reporters flocked in to interview disaffected auto workers. Sure enough, Macomb gave Reagan a whopping margin that year that helped him beat Jimmy Carter in the state.
Macomb voters have bounced around since, however, and usually still vote for Democrats for local offices. But four years ago, they delivered a stunning landslide for Donald Trump that, in an upset, put Michigan in the Republican Presidential column for the first time since 1988. Trump’s margin in Macomb was almost five times his statewide margin of 10,704.
But can he pull it off again this year?
Chad Selweski, who has covered Macomb for a variety of media for decades, may know it better than any other reporter. He thinks Trump might well win Macomb again – but probably by much less than his 48,000 margin of four years ago.
“(Joe) Biden has a few things going for him,” he said of the Democratic presidential nominee. “He doesn’t arouse the kind of intense dislike Hillary Clinton did,” he noted; many Macomb voters know that the Democratic presidential nominee has blue-collar origins similar to theirs.
“He also got lucky, in that the wings of the (Democratic) party seem pretty unified.” Progressives who might have preferred Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren are not sniping at the nominee, since they agree getting rid of Donald Trump is the most important goal.
“Also, Detroit hasn’t had the kind of violent protests they’ve had in Oregon and Wisconsin,” Selweski said. Urban unrest tends to drive Macomb voters straight into the arms of the Republicans.
But Macomb is actually far more complex than usually portrayed. Its population has continued to grow much faster than the state as a whole; it is now about 875,000, more than twice what it was in the 1960s, and the minority share is increasing.
While Macomb voters liked Trump, they also voted twice for President Obama. Two years ago, a majority of them chose Gretchen Whitmer, a liberal Democrat, for governor over Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, who Trump enthusiastically supported. Macomb County is, however, different. Elsewhere in Michigan, candidates with Irish names tend to be elected judges. In Macomb, it helps far more to have a Polish or Italian one.
County Executive Mark Hackel, the most popular politician in the county, is a Democrat – but one who sometimes infuriates other members of his party by endorsing Republicans or opposing things dear to the hearts of other Democrats, like mass transit.
In the world of Macomb, “different” often becomes just plain … weird. Hackel, for example, was elected sheriff right after his father, Sheriff William Hackel, was convicted of raping a woman at a law enforcement convention elsewhere in the state.
Jim Fouts, the mayor of Warren, the county’s second-largest city, was caught having an affair with an assistant more than 40 years younger than he was, and afterwards gave her a large raise.
Mr. Fouts, now 78, dyes his hair bright red, and also went to federal court in an unsuccessful attempt to not reveal his age.
Voters then reelected him with more than 85 percent of the vote. Later, tapes surfaced in which a voice believed to be the mayor’s said denigrating things about mentally challenged people, calling them “retards” who were “not even human beings.”
Other officials said they were certain it was the mayor, but voters once again reelected him.
Probably the weirdest outcome of all however, came in 2016, when Macomb voters elected one Karen Spranger county clerk. Spranger, a perennial gadfly who was apparently homeless, caused mass chaos in the county offices until she was removed from office by a judge who ruled she had lied about where she said she lived when she had been elected. Last summer, she was convicted of stealing money from an elderly person she was caring for.
If there is any constant to Macomb County’s political culture, is may be suspicion of outsiders and of candidates with new ideas.
Two years ago, they rejected a bid for county clerk by State Sen. Steve Bieda, widely regarded as the hard-working ethical conscience of the senate, in favor of Fred Miller, with a history of campaign tactics some called underhanded.
This year, most expected the Democratic nomination for county prosecutor to go to Jodi Debbrecht Switalski, a charismatic attorney with a national speaking record on opioid addiction and on ways the role of the prosecutor could be reformed.
She campaigned vigorously — but lost to an older retired local district judge. “That surprised me, but people seemed to regard her as an ‘Oakland County’ person,” because she once lived there, Selweski said. That was the case even though Switalski’s husband is a longtime Macomb circuit judge and a lifetime county resident.
Macomb County is, indeed … different.
(Editor’s Note: A version of this column appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
