Michigan Memo: How Trump Won & What Happened Downballot
Preview of the first in the post-2024 political geography series, plus a deeper look at the Senate and the House headed into 2026
Over the next several months I’ll be unpacking what happened in 2024 through the lens of last year’s series on the political geography of the battleground states. Up first is Michigan, which we just learned this week will feature a marquee open-seat Senate race in 2026.
As a thank you to paid subscribers, this is a first look at my 2024 analysis of the Wolverine State for the presidency, the Senate, and the House, featuring multiple charts and for the first time, a Congressional Mega-Chart, comparing top-of-the-ticket performance to House candidates in 2022 and 2024. There is a clear story in here on where Republicans need to focus if they’re going to be successful in the 2026 midterms.
At some point in the next few months, I’ll make the final version of this analysis public. Subscribe or start your free trial today to get a jump on 2026!
The Presidential Race in Michigan
Donald Trump won Michigan by 1.4 percentage points, his strongest improvement in a Blue Wall state, while Republicans suffered a wrenching defeat in the Senate race, with Elissa Slotkin edging out a 0.34 percentage point victory. Michigan swung 4.2 points at the presidential level in 2024.
The swings by 2024 political geographies ranged from a staggering 53 point swing to Trump in Arab Detroit neighborhoods to a 1.3 point Kamala Harris gain in lakeside tourist areas, her only gain statewide.
The swing in Arab-majority neighborhoods wasn’t enough to swing this battleground state on its own, but it did play a large role in Trump’s victory. These precincts in Dearborn and Hamtramck cast just 1 percent of the state’s vote, but accounted for 15 percent of the raw votes swung, making up about half of Trump’s margin of victory. Meanwhile, working class white and Black Detroit neighborhoods swung more than 5 points, and even the well-to-do suburbs swung by almost 3 points. Up to 5 percent of the population in much larger areas is Arab, and these voters could very well have supplied the rest of Trump’s margin.
The largest single net contributors to the pro-Trump swing were the working class Detroit suburbs, which swung a weighted net of almost 47,000 votes, averaging 2020 and 2024 vote totals.
Outside of Detroit, Trump eked out smaller gains in the state’s rural regions, generally between 1 and 3 percentage points, with his largest gains — 3.7 points — in East Central Michigan, the outlying areas around Saginaw and Bay City. Outside of the lakeside tourist areas, Trump’s smallest gain was in the Grand Rapids-based Dutch West Michigan region, a former GOP stronghold resistant to Trump’s brand of Republicanism, where he managed a 3.6 point victory.
Statewide Races
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