Former President Donald Trump has won the critical swing state of Michigan, NBC News projects, netting the Republican 15 Electoral College votes over Vice President Kamala Harris.
Michigan has been one of the nation’s most hotly contested battlegrounds since it helped Trump pull off a surprise victory in 2016. It had been seen as a linchpin of Harris’ path to keeping the White House in Democratic hands. No Democrat has won the White House without Michigan since Jimmy Carter in 1976.
Trump campaigned aggressively in the Upper Midwest state, which was also home to a contested Senate race, with promises to revive the domestic manufacturing that once gave the Rust Belt its name and claims that Michigan’s massive auto industry would not survive without him in power.
He was looking to flip working-class voters who may have previously identified as Democrats and to turn out low-propensity voters in rural areas, while Harris needed to maximize base turnout in major cities like Detroit while appealing to independents and some former Republicans in the suburbs.
He made significant inroads with non-white voters, primarily Hispanics, according to NBC News exit polls, when compared to 2020, as well with voters under 30 years old.
The state is also home to one of the nation’s largest concentrations of Muslim and Arab Americans, many of whom had been threatening to defect from the Democratic Party over the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza and southern Lebanon.
Muslim and Arab community leaders organized a movement dubbed “Abandon Harris” encouraging voters to withhold their support for the Democrat. Left-wing third-party candidates like Jill Stein and Cornel West positioned themselves as anti-war alternatives for voters who disliked Harris over her support for Israel but detested Trump, with each selecting Muslim activists as their running mates.
Hillary Clinton in 2016 became the first Democratic presidential nominee to lose Michigan in decades, when Trump edged her out by just 10,704 votes. Biden won back the state in 2020 by a more comfortable 154,000 votes (about 3 percentage points), restoring the so-called blue wall of Democratic-leaning Upper Midwest states.
Trump’s victory this year will likely ensure that the state remains a key battleground going forward.
