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Michigan State University’s political science experts including Matt Grossmann, director of MSU’s Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, as well as Nura Sediqe and Meghan Wilson, assistant professors in the Department of Political Science followed the election closely. Here, they answer questions about how these trends and key demographic groups impacted the outcome.
Responses are excerpts from a podcast recording of MSU Today with Russ White.
Impact of different constituencies
What role did Arab American and MENA voters play in the election?
Sediqe: A team of co-authors and I ran an online panel survey of around 1,000 Arab and Middle East or North Africa, or MENA, voters about two weeks before the election. What we were seeing was really the policy issue that shifted. So, we looked at the ideology from general white voters and, as you would expect, liberals voted for Harris and those who identified as conversative voted for Trump.
But for Arab and MENA voters, you saw an uptick for Jill Stein from people who said they were ideologically liberal and ideologically conservative.
What role did Hispanic voters play in the election?
Grossmann: Republicans made gains across Hispanic voters, regardless of college education or education level, and that there might be something moving higher education Hispanic voters toward the Republicans. There also did seem to be a remaining difference with income there and among Hispanic voters. So I’m a little disappointed that we didn’t end up getting better explanations for the Hispanic shift in 2020. In political science, we know that there was some ideological sorting. We know that there was some class sorting, but this year, seeing those broad-based patterns, again, makes me want to dig in more.”
What role did Black voters play in the election?
Wilson: They’re steadfast in the belief in democracy. They are not single-issue voters. They vote for communities, and I think it’s really important that they vote in communities, especially in Michigan. I think that there are some who might detract, some that might move away, but overall, they are steadfast right now. I think they want more. I’ve said this multiple times, they do not believe that the Republican Party will do anything, but they also don’t believe that government right now will do anything. They believe that the Democratic Party will do that, and I think they will remain steadfast until something changes.
What does the election suggest about the education divide?
Grossmann: One thing that was consistent with what we expected is that the education divide continued to grow, and it was college graduates, white college graduates, that were the main constituency that stayed with the Democrats from this year to the previous year. We’re not getting less polarized by ideology or by education level.
I think it is useful to separate the national trend from the changes in the voter coalition. So the national trend was just right pretty much everywhere. The correlation between county-level votes between the two elections was 0.99 — very close to the same geographic pattern. But around the world, we’ve seen incumbent parties all lose share this year in the post-COVID inflationary economy.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t need to look at the ongoing trends in changes in voter coalitions that really did continue this year, where we saw younger college voters continue to move toward the Republicans. We saw the extensions of trends, especially among Hispanic voters, toward the Republicans. So, I think both the national shift and the changes in coalitions are important.
Michigan’s statewide results
How did Michigan’s turnout and results compare to other states?
Grossmann: Michigan turnout was one of seven states that was up from 2020. National turnout was down somewhat, but probably not quite as much as I expected it to be — 2020 was a century high. So that was a hard match to beat. Third party voting was down nationally and in Michigan. So, there’s not necessarily a lot of evidence that people were kind of actively making a choice to sit out. The evidence is that Harris did better in swing states and in Michigan than she did nationally. She lost less ground. So, explanations about the state of the campaign will result in people having to grapple with that.
The preelection polls here were pretty accurate in not assuming a lot of split ticket voting but identifying where there might be some split ticket voting. So very few voters were selecting Elissa Slotkin and Donald Trump, but it was more than the voters selecting Kamala Harris and Mike Rogers, potentially enough to make the difference. The other big pattern is that more Trump voters did not vote in the Senate race than vice versa. So, some people always vote in one race, but not the others. And that may have made a difference here, but it was a pattern.
How will local politics become more important, especially for Black voters?
Wilson: We saw that Mike Duggan is not running for another term for mayor. We might see him in Lansing, but I think people saw that they can engage more in local politics. I think that Black voters, hopefully, have seen a lot of things come to them at the local level. They’ve seen that a Democratic mayor can do a lot for them at the local level, and so I think that they’re going to continue to engage there at the national level.
It’s important to make sure that especially Black and Brown cities feel supported by the government. I want to make sure that they still feel engaged with the government. I want them to turn out for the mayoral election and for the gubernatorial election. My interest is going to be in making sure that there’s not suppression of engagement at the local and state level because that’s where my work is focused on and where I see the biggest impact on individuals’ lives.
Why did some Arab and MENA voters back away from Biden?
Sediqe: Up until this election cycle, American Muslims in Michigan tended to have similar policy preferences as other Michigan residents whether it was the economy, health care or immigration. But this time it was Gaza, and it was Gaza for Arab Americans, South Asian Muslims and Black Muslims.
People in Southeast Michigan are socially networked that all knew someone who had family that passed away in Gaza so a lot of these cries for government help on the issue played a role very interpersonally. And the communities are sort of very networked together, so it is very unique to them, but in a state where the margin is so close, it deems sort of paying attention to. These folks have been generally very steadfast Democrat. They felt a sense of betrayal for advocating for a party that they’ve been a part of. For example, the mayor of Dearborn was one of Biden’s biggest supporters but wrote an op-ed calling for more support. So this is very personal and very specific to this community in a way that isn’t reflective of the national trends. Continued foreign policy engagement here, it’s going to be interesting to see how it affects midterm and the next presidential election.
What could Michigan’s House flipping to Republicans mean?
Grossmann: There was a shift rightward in state elections, as well as in the national election in Michigan. Since I was partly involved in the redistricting process, I would say that it succeeded in reflecting the votes to seats. As more voters voted Republican, that meant that Republicans gained one U.S. House seat, as well as a few state House seats — it was not an overwhelming number but enough to shift control of the Michigan House.
The implications are not necessarily as extreme as people might think. The full Democratic majority, which had been in office for the first time in 40 years of full trifecta control of the governor’s office and the state legislature, had been very active in the first year, but had not been very active this year. This trend suggests that the sort of number of things that they agreed to with a slim Democratic majority had dwindled after the initial barrage of overturning the major things that the Republicans did and enacting a few things on the governor’s agenda. Obviously, you would expect the governor’s agenda to even slow down more when she has to deal with divided government, but there are some things she might get agreement from the Republicans on as with the Democrats, especially on economic development policy, which appears to be her main agenda item.
Read on MSUToday.
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