WARREN, Mich. — James Klotz is eating more chicken and less beef than he would like these days — a tradeoff based on supermarket prices — but he's confident that President Donald Trump's policies will soon bring prosperity.
"Things are still a little high, but we're still working on Biden's bullcrap," the 84-year-old Vietnam War veteran said as he took a break from raking leaves and seed pods on a crisp, overcast afternoon in this inner suburb of single-family homes and strip malls just north of Detroit. "And next year, when the beautiful bill goes into effect, things are going to get back more to normal, I believe."
It was here, in a community emblematic of fast-changing demographics and the partisan battle for working-class voters, that Trump in late April touted the achievements of the first 100 days of his second term and promised that his signature One Big Beautiful Bill law would brighten the country's horizon.
"In the next fiscal year, it will all be done," Trump said that day. "We will end inflation, slash prices — we’ve already ended inflation — raise wages, and give you the greatest economy in the history of the world. That’s already happening. With our tax bill, the average family’s take-home pay will be at least $5,000 more than it was just a couple of months ago."
His ability to sell that message of renewal here and around the country figures to factor heavily in next year's midterm elections, which will determine whether Republicans maintain their trifecta in Washington — control of the White House and both chambers of Congress — and Trump avoids having a significant check placed on his power. The congressional seat here, which Republican Rep. John James is leaving open to run for governor, is one of three in the state that the Cook Political Report rates as potentially competitive.
The economic turnaround Trump predicted hasn't happened — at least not yet — residents of Warren and surrounding towns in Macomb County, the onetime land of "Reagan Democrats," said in interviews at a coffee shop and a dog park a few days before Thanksgiving.
Their sentiments track with the 63% of registered voters, including 30% of Republicans, who said in the recent national NBC News poll that Trump has fallen short of their expectations on the cost of living and the economy.
While Democrats and Republicans in Michigan disagreed over whether they expect the economy to improve in the next year, there is a universal sense that the dollar just doesn't go as far as it should. With Black Friday and the Christmas shopping season hurtling toward them, Trump's backers and critics alike were keenly aware of the costs of everything from homes to dog food.
"You know, people usually have, like, a list of things they want to purchase on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, you know, but that’s — I’m not trying to spend too much money at the moment," said 28-year-old Riduan Rafique, who stopped in to Bin Castle, a Yemeni coffee shop here, on a break between his three jobs. Rafique is married but said he lives in the same house with his parents and four sisters.
“Working-class people, middle-class people, they’re having a hard time just keeping up with the mortgage, keeping up with the groceries, keeping up with daily life,” said Rafique, who did not vote in last year's presidential election. The pain hasn’t been felt all at once, he added, but results from a squeeze of factors including a tight job market and the cumulative effects of inflation. “Even though, like, we can’t really say that it’s going up drastically, there’s still a price in increase of inflation year to year, which is affecting, like, people’s budgets.”
Trump says he sees things differently.
“Our country is doing really well economically, like we’ve never done before,” he said Tuesday during an annual turkey-pardoning ceremony at the White House.
Warren isn't even among the hardest-hit communities of Michigan, where unemployment rates reached as high as 6.9% in Saginaw, 6.8% in Flint, 6.3% in Battle Creek and 6.2% in Bay City in August — the last month for which data is available — according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills metropolitan area, the rate stood at 3.7% in August, right after spiking to a four-year high of 4.9% in July.
The area, like many close-in suburbs around the country, has seen significant change in recent decades. Once an all-white town, Warren's demographics have diversified substantially in the nearly 50 years since it became a flashpoint in the national debate over integration. White residents still make up a majority of the population, but just 54% to 61%, according to various estimates.
Klotz has noticed.
“Now, this is changing, you know, we got different people,” he said. "They come over here with all this money, buy all these places up because you can't buy land no more, you know. And they ended blowing up the prices."
Unemployment and underemployment are less of a problem for retirees like Klotz and Ray Rosati, 63, who worked as a truck driver until retiring several years ago. But sticker shock is not.
"I'm paying like, $300 a month just for dog food," Rosati said as he let his three pups run in a park reserved for man's best friends. "I thought gas prices would be a lot lower than what they are now, but they seem to be lagging."
At about three bucks a gallon for regular unleaded, depending on the station, gas here is roughly in line with the national average, but still stubbornly higher than during Trump's first term.
"With all the 'Drill, Baby, Drill' rhetoric, I thought that, you know, maybe they'd be lower by now," said Rosati, who voted for Trump last year and still supports the president.
"The economy is important, but there's other stuff going on too that really needs to be taken care of," he said, citing "the crackdown on immigration" as Trump's "best attribute."
Eighty miles west, in Williamston, where freshman Republican Rep. Tom Barrett will be defending his seat for the first time next year, prices and disenchantment with Washington are both still running high. In 2024, Trump and Barrett narrowly won the 10th District, while Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat who left the House seat open to run for the Senate, eked out a victory among the same voters.
Over his morning coffee at Ellie's Country Kitchen in Williamston, Earl Lechler, a 66-year-old retired mechanic, said the recent federal government shutdown frustrated him because he wants politicians to work together to solve problems. He voted for Trump in 2024 and thinks the president needs more time to implement his plans. But he said he's also thinking about voting against other incumbents.
"I'm half-tempted to vote for somebody new that hasn't been in there, just because I think we need new blood in there," Lechler said. That's the kind of sentiment Barrett and other Republicans in competitive districts will have to tamp down to keep their seats in next year's election.
National Democrats see the district as a strong pickup possibility, and several candidates — including Matt Maasdam, a former Navy Seal and military aide to President Barack Obama, and former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Bridget Brink — are competing for their party's nomination.
For the most part, though, Michigan voters have not yet focused on the political races — including a U.S. Senate contest — that are certain to dominate their airwaves in the coming months. Right now, many are trying to make ends meet. And even those who can express concern about the future.
"You don't have to be, you know, deep into politics or deep into whatever to understand that things have gone up in price quite a bit," said Jamie Fraser, a 28-year-old business development liaison for a long-term acute-care facility who lives in Sterling Heights, close to Warren. She said she has $120,000 in student debt — which costs her $1,700 per month — and considers herself among the lucky.
"On a personal level, I'm fortunate to be OK, but I do worry about a lot of families, not just in the area, but in general, being able to afford food for the holidays, being able to take care of their families and actually enjoy the holidays as it is," she said.
