DEARBORN: Democrat Kamala Harris lost Michigan by more than 80,000 votes amid a nationwide shift to Republicans, as union workers, Black voters, Arab Americans and Muslims either failed to show up at the polls, or cast their ballots for Donald Trump. It was a bracing loss, given the state is run by a high-profile Democratic governor who expanded voting rights and it had only backed a Republican president once before in the past 22 years — Trump in 2016, and then by fewer than 11,000 votes.

What happened in Michigan highlights issues that ail the Democratic Party nationwide, community leaders, voters and political experts say. Working class voters, people of color and immigrants voted in lower numbers or moved to Trump, high grocery and housing prices loomed large, and national party leaders ignored local organizers.

"There's only so much you can do in 107 days," Democratic strategist Ameshia Cross said, referring to the amount of time Harris' campaign had after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race. "However, I do think that there should have been more time spent in Michigan."

Harris visited the state 11 times, and high profile Democrats campaigned here, including both Barack and Michelle Obama. Cross faulted the "consulting class" of the Democratic Party for relying too much on polling instead of local organizers. "Listening to people on the ground is always going to be more vital than the modeling and the projections that we've seen," she said.

Harris snubs Arabs, Muslims

Michigan is home to at least 300,000 Arab Americans and Muslims, who overwhelmingly supported Biden in 2020. Both Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Trump spent considerable time in Dearborn, the biggest US city with a majority-Arab population. Harris never visited. Harris did meet privately in August outside the city with Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, a Democrat who later declined to endorse any candidate, and with selected community leaders who did endorse her.

Dearborn backed Trump by 42 percent to Harris' 40 percent, with Stein receiving over 15 percent, city data showed. In 2020, Biden won 69 percent of the city's vote to Trump's 30 percent. The issues may have reverberated in other states too. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest US Muslim advocacy group, said Stein won 53 percent of the vote in an exit poll of 1,575 verified Muslim voters. Trump won 21 percent and Harris 20 percent.

Trump's campaign blasted text messages and mailers to a list of 100,000 mostly Democratic-leaning Arab Americans in Michigan in the last months, portraying Trump as a "president of peace" and linking Harris with the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. They seized on Harris' town halls with former Representative Liz Cheney, whose father former Vice President Dick Cheney played a large role planning the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and they sent a mobile billboard truck with the words "Stop Kamala, Stop the Wars" driving around Dearborn.

Harris did not meet "Uncommitted" organizers who mobilized 101,000 votes during the Democratic primaries, and Democrats did not allow a Palestinian speaker at the August party convention, angering these groups and progressives. "We have failed leadership. It's exhausting, it's daunting, it's frustrating, because it didn't have to be this way," Lexis Zeidan, a Democrat and co-founder of the Uncommitted National Movement told reporters in Dearborn.

Begging for yard signs

In Detroit, the largest majority-Black city in the US, where the Harris campaign had hoped to offset expected losses among Arab and Muslim voters, city data showed turnout fell to 47 percent from just under 50 percent in 2020, despite new laws on early voting and absentee ballots. Hazen Turner, a 24-year-old Black auto worker who canvassed for Harris in Detroit, said many of his friends and co-workers felt defeated by rising costs and their inability to get ahead. “A lot of the young Black universe, they don't really have faith in the system," he said. "The more we work, we really don't have anything to show for it."

Sherry Gay-Dagnogo, a Detroit school board member and former Democratic member of the Michigan House of Representatives, said officials with the coordinated party campaign were dismissive of her concerns. She said she had to beg for yard signs to help energize voters in the city who were less inclined to vote. "I'm telling them we're getting 20 to 30 pieces of mail from Trump daily, and we've heard nothing from Harris," she said. "And then you see on TV they're raising a billion dollars. Like, what the hell?" — Reuters