SOUTHFIELD, MI – Years ago, after Harry Truman’s famous upset victory over Michigan native Thomas Dewey, one of the Democrat’s strategists looked at the returns and shook his head.
“The suburbs are murder,” he said – and for years, he was right. In many elections, the suburbs were murder for Democrats. They would pile up margins in big cities, only to see them whittled away by voters who lived in houses with lawns.
Right up until the 1990s, Republican candidates for President or statewide office in Michigan could count on getting a nice cushion of votes from affluent Oakland County, which since 1990 has had considerably more people than Detroit.
Last week, however, the suburbs of Oakland County were once again murder … though this time their victims were the Republican Party … and especially Donald Trump.
Oakland County had been trending Democratic since the mid-1990s, as the Republican Party moved towards the right. Its voters tend to be affluent but highly educated and increasingly diverse, both ethnically and culturally. They voted twice for Barack Obama.
Four years ago, Hillary Clinton won Oakland County by 53,817 votes, slightly better than President Obama had the previous election.
Last week, Oakland County gave Joe Biden a margin of nearly 110,000, more than twice as much. That accounted for more than half of the Democratic nominee’s statewide victory margin.
Democrats also swept every other statewide office, with the single exception of sheriff, a job popular incumbent Mike Bouchard has held for two decades. Until last year, the country had some national notoriety for its chief executive, L. Brooks Patterson, who made a career of bashing Detroit in terms often thought to be racist.
“What we are gonna do is turn Detroit into an Indian reservation, herd all the Indians into the city, and throw in the blankets and corn,” he told a national magazine in 2014.
Oakland residents tolerated this, because he delivered efficient government services and balanced budgets. Last year, however, he died, and voters elected Dave Coulter, a gay, liberal Democrat both to finish his term and for a full, four-year term in the job.
Republicans do have, in Michigan as elsewhere, a problem with minorities and highly educated voters. In smaller, affluent cities elsewhere, from Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids to the northern Michigan resort towns of Traverse City and Petoskey, President Trump did less well than he had four years earlier.
“He’s just been horrible!” said 77-year-old Nancy Porter of Charlevoix, whose husband Jeff, a retired dentist, nodded in agreement.
But there are indications that last week’s election was less of a problem for the GOP than for Trump. Despite a record turnout of more than 5.6 million voters, Democrats made no gains in the state house of representatives, where they had hoped to win control, or in Congress, where they did hang on to the two new seats they won on 2018, but ran behind expectations in nearly every other contest.
The ‘Secret Society’ That Really Elects the President: A few days before the election, a reader wrote to tell me that all the campaigning didn’t matter. “You know very well that there’s a secret society made up of people you know nothing about who are the ones who really elect the President,” he said.
I asked him what he meant, and he said “You know, the Electoral College. Have you ever met an elector? Have you ever even heard the name of one?
Well, yes and yes. Debbie Dingell, for example, who was a Democratic elector in 2012, before she succeeded her husband John in Congress. The Electoral College is controversial and little understood, but there isn’t much mystery about it. The political parties in each state pick a slate of electors, one for each congressional district and two for the U.S. Senators.
In both Michigan and Ohio and every other state except Maine and Nebraska, a presidential candidate who carries a state gets all of their electors. That means Donald Trump won 18 in Ohio, and Joe Biden won 16 in Michigan. Technically, if you voted for Biden, say, you voted for 16 people picked by the party.
All of them are pledged to support their party’s nominee for President. Generally, they are people with a long history of service to their respective political parties. (For the part of Michigan nearest Toledo, the elector is one Connor Woods, the former chair of the Jackson County Democratic Committee.)
Eventually, when all the votes have been counted, the official totals will be certified, and one party’s slate of electors will have been duly elected. On December 14, they will all drive separately to Lansing and ceremonially cast their votes for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Meanwhile, a group of 18 Republican electors will go to Columbus at the same time, and vote for President Trump.
Could they “go rogue” and vote for someone else? In Michigan and Ohio, it is against the law to do that. While there is no penalty listed for betraying your pledge, anyone who did so would certainly be expelled and shunned by their fellow party members.
Nevertheless, occasionally, an elector does. The record for “faithless electors” was set four years ago, when five of Hillary Clinton’s electors and two of Donald Trump’s voted for other people.
That, however, did not affect the outcome. I can find no trace that any Michigan or Ohio elector has been faithless, at least not in the last century. Nevertheless, you never know.
(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
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