About a year ago, you probably would’ve felt pretty good about Democrats’ 2024 chances in Michigan. Yes, the state was one of the bricks in the blue wall that fell to Donald Trump in 2016, but in 2020, it played host to Biden’s strongest margin in any state that Trump had won in the previous election. And yes, it is also a hotbed of right wing militia activity, but it was also one of those swing states where Democrats actually made gains in 2022, with the party taking control of both the state’s House and Senate for the first time in nearly 40 years, allowing popular Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer to sign abortion protections into law. None of these facts made Michigan any less of a swing state, but they at least seemed to indicate that Democrats were building a local brand that could help them defeat an unpopular opponent in 2024. 

But whatever momentum Democrats had in the Wolverine State going into this year’s election, it was disrupted by the October 7th attacks and subsequent wars in Gaza. Home to a significant Arab American and Muslim American population, Michigan became the centerpoint of many of the protests against the Biden Administration’s continued support for Israel, a backlash most tangibly illustrated by the state’s Democratic primary, in which 13.2% of voters cast ballots for “uncommitted” delegates in protest. The uncommitted movement won a majority of the vote in heavily Arab American cities like Dearborn, Hamtramck, and Dearborn Heights, and was cosigned by elected officials like Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (a Palestinian American herself), former Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, and even former Congressmen Andy Levin and Beto O’Rourke, sparking a movement that became a thorn in the side of a Biden campaign that was already trying to tamp down fears about the president’s mental acuity and ability to win the general election. Muslims may only make up 2.4% of Michigan’s population, but Biden won the state by 2.78% in 2020 – a significant defection to Trump from this group, combined with Biden’s general unpopularity, could have been enough to swing the state back to Trump. 

While the relationship between the uncommitted movement and newly minted Democratic nominee Kamala Harris is only marginally better than the one with Biden (a group of pro-Palestinian protestors interrupted a Harris rally outside of Detroit, and large protests were held outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago), the nominee swap has already had an effect on polling. While Trump was leading Harris in Michigan by just under a point in FiveThirtyEight’s polling average when she first entered the race, the Vice President rebounded in the ensuing month to take a nearly three point lead, seeming to imply that she may be able to elude some of the negative electoral effects of Biden’s Middle East policies, at least for the time being. 

There are other Michigan-specific trends working in Democrats’ favor as well. Shawn Fain, the militant head of the Detroit-based United Auto Workers, has emerged as a vocal supporter of both Biden and Harris, endorsing the Vice President shortly after she became the presumptive nominee. Unions may not be as powerful in Michigan as they once were (only 12.8% of the state’s working population is a member of one, placing it outside of the top ten in terms of other states), but Fain, the first UAW president to be directly elected by the union’s members, should be an effective mouthpiece for the Democrats here and in other Midwestern states; he’s already demonstrated his utility, by hitting Trump hard after the former president praised Elon Musk’s union busting efforts, and his influence, by helping sway Harris to select Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. While political disconnect between a union’s leader and its members is not uncommon, in a state that’s likely to be as close as Michigan, every bit of support is crucial.

But whatever support Democrats may lose among the UAW’s working class membership they’ll hope to gain in Michigan’s blueing suburbs. In addition to juicing turnout in large urban counties like Wayne and Oakland, Biden won Michigan in part due to the leftward shifts in suburban counties like Kent, which he outright flipped, and Ottawa and Macomb, which Trump may have still won, but by much smaller margins than in 2016. Whitmer imitated this strategy in her 2022 reelection effort, and was aided by the fact that the Michigan Republican Party has not exactly covered itself in glory post-2020. In 2022, two of the party’s leading gubernatorial candidates were disqualified from the Republican primary because they submitted nominating petitions with fraudulent signatures, and in 2023 the party elected “stop the steal” conspiracy theorist Kristina Karamo, who was fresh off of losing an election for Secretary of State, as chair. Karamo, who oversaw anemic fundraising efforts and compared gun control measures to the Holocaust, was such a disaster that the party forced her out less than a year into her tenure, sparking a legal battle that ended with a judge ruling that the ouster was “valid.” While the party is now in the comparatively able (although not controversy free) hands of former Congressman and ambassador Pete Hoekstra, the damage to the Republican brand (to say nothing of their on-the-ground campaigning ability) could be enough to dent Trump’s efforts in the state.

Taking all of this together, it’s perhaps not a stretch to say that Michigan has at once an incredibly high ceiling for Harris as well as its own fair share of pitfalls that she must avoid. Her twin pivots towards economic populism and border/crime hawkishness should help her maintain the blue collar/white collar balancing act required to win not only Michigan, but the rest of the former “blue wall” states, but she needs to tread incredibly carefully when it comes to the way she handles both policy and rhetoric regarding Gaza so as not to bleed support in Wayne County and help accelerate an Arab and Muslim pivot to the right that, depending on who you ask, is already in progress. Polling indicates that swing states like Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina are likely to be closer than Michigan – but a scenario in which the election stands deadlocked days after votes have been cast, and the fate of the nation rests on the Harris’ margins in Dearborn and Hamtramck, is not inconceivable.