How Trump and Harris are extracting votes in Oakland County, Michigan

Welcome to 7 Counties in 7 Days, a field trip to 7 key counties in 7 battleground states. Today’s stop: Oakland County, where Democrats hope Michigan will win by a large margin

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. – It’s late afternoon and a handful of volunteers are sitting around a table at the Republican Party headquarters in Oakland County, an affluent suburb a dozen miles northwest of Detroit.

Custom software on their phones pre-sorts voters into columns and automatically dials them, displaying call status on a large flat screen mounted on the wall.

“We’re calling out these people in the middle,” said Nate Wilkowski, field director for the county GOP. “We know they will vote, but we don’t know how they will vote.”

A few days later, a similar scene unfolds four miles away in Lori Goldman’s dining room.

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These volunteers are Democrats sitting at her table with their laptops open. Another brand of software sorts and connects voters while they sip soft drinks and nibble Detroit-style pizza.

“When Hillary Clinton was running, I had the largest weekly phone bank in Michigan,” said Goldman, a real estate broker by day who founded a group called Fems for Dems. “We have a lot of people who called Hillary’s bank and we’re doing it again.”

Volunteers don’t take calls personally because they’re fighting for every vote in a state that’s teetering on a knife’s edge in presidential polls.

Oakland County became an important battleground in the fight to win Michigan. The area is over 900 square miles and its 1.3 million people exceed the population of eight states.

The population grew in the 1960s and 1970s as white flights contributed to urban sprawl.

Driving north and west takes visitors through the tight-knit bedroom neighborhoods bordering Detroit to more spacious suburbs with lakeside mansions, shopping malls and glass office towers. Behind them lie rural villages with dirt roads and wells.

Oakland is Michigan’s richest county, accounting for approximately 20% of the state’s GDP. He has bounced back from Covid-19 better than many places. By December 2022, the median household income exceeded $92,000, an increase of approximately 13.5% compared to 2020. At the end of 2023, the unemployment rate was 2.9%.

“I think Oakland County is more like the modern Democratic Party: well-educated, affluent and more diverse,” said David Dulio, who teaches political science at Oakland University. Trump and Republicans face a challenge in Oakland. “But you know, if they can keep those margins low, they can get by.”

In the second half of the 1920s^vol Oakland’s century was marked by moderate Republicanism. Mitt Romney grew up here in the 1960s when his father, George, was governor of Michigan.

By 2000, however, Oakland had become more racially and politically diverse. Now it’s reliably Democratic – but the margin of victory matters.

In 2016, Donald Trump lost in Oakland County to Hillary Clinton by about 54,000 votes, but won a narrow statewide lead by about 11,000 votes.

In 2020, President Joe Biden doubled Clinton’s lead in Oakland en route to winning Michigan by about 154,000 votes.

Vice President Kamala Harris visited Oakland County on September 19 for a town hall hosted by media mogul Oprah Winfrey. Officials in both parties have said they expect Harris to win more votes in Oakland County than Donald Trump.

The question is: how much longer?

“We certainly plan to meet Biden’s margin and hope to exceed it,” said Nancy Quarles, a former state representative who chairs the Oakland County Democratic Party.

That means increasing turnout among the party’s traditional base, including women and suburban minorities.

Abortion was a winning issue in the county, where 64% of voters approved a 2022 ballot initiative to write reproductive rights into the state constitution.

“I feel like in some ways women’s rights are being wiped out because of all this abortion and taking away women’s right to choose,” said HyDeia Gray-Woods, 30, of Pontiac. “I feel like this is crazy.”

Gray-Woods said she sees good things in both candidates but favors Harris.

“I’m not going to lie, I’m really praying that Kamala wins,” she said. “But the more I’m here in this community and I see Oakland County and the tri-county area, I feel like Trump might have it, and that’s just because of the disconnect that minorities have with voting and being able to vote. “

Other voters see Trump as a defining issue.

Mark Grozde, 61, of Birmingham, is retired. He holds an MBA and has worked for 29 years in product development at Ford. He usually votes Democratic, although he has voted for some Republicans over the years.

Not anymore.

He first became politically involved in telephone banking at Goldman’s house. He cited Trump’s behavior on Jan. 6, his “dehumanizing” rhetoric about migrants and statements about tariffs as part of his newfound activism.

“There is nothing the Trump campaign could say that would convince me,” Grozde said. “It’s not the GOP anymore. It’s MAGA. I don’t agree with everything Democrats stand for, but that’s the real world.

Another priority for Democrats is increasing turnout among minority voters.

The county seat is Pontiac, where nearly half of the 60,000 residents are black and more than 13,000 are Latino. He votes overwhelmingly Democratic, but has the lowest voter turnout in Oakland County.

In 2020, voter turnout across the county was almost 75%. In Pontiac it was about 47%.

General Motors had its Pontiac division headquartered there and operated several car factories in the city. These had long been closed and the city was facing bankruptcy.

Mayor Tim Greimel, a former House Democratic leader, said he is working to convince voters that their vote matters.

“I think this is about a lot more than traditional voter turnout efforts,” Greimel said. “While they are important, it is also about making sure the government delivers results so they see value in determining who holds office.”

Oakland County Republicans want to increase voter turnout, engage voters who show up sporadically and make inroads into traditionally Democratic precincts.

Last year, Trump himself provided a windfall for their efforts. He flew in to speak at the county party’s annual Lincoln Day dinner, which raised about $300,000, party chairman Vance Patrick said.

This helped strengthen the local party at a time when the state Republican Party was plagued by infighting.

Patrick considers himself a Trump loyalist focused on winning. It represents the changing face of a county event long dominated by the suit-and-tie crowd. On a daily basis, he owns a small construction company and sometimes appears at the party headquarters wearing combat trousers and work boots.

“Working class people support Donald Trump 100%,” Patrick said.

He’d love to see Trump lead Oakland, but he realizes that’s a far-fetched goal given its recent history. That’s why he looks for votes wherever he can find them.

Wilkowski coordinates a team of volunteers who he says knock on about 10,000 doors a week, a huge increase from 2020.

They choose doors based on data from a program called i360, which collects consumer data and combines it with voting histories to provide detailed voter profiles.

“We have about 1,800 data points on each person,” Witkowski said. “Do they buy wine? Do they like NASCAR? Donor history, whether they go to church, things like that.”

Patrick said it has already helped elect conservatives to the local school board.

This data is especially important in Michigan, where voters are not required to register with any party.

In an August strategy memo, the county Republican Party sought to attack disengaged Republicans “tired of the mess at the national level” by emphasizing the influence of local government on their lives.

The data shows that there may be as many as 133,000 such voters in Oakland and identifies three groups of persuadable voters, the largest of which are interested parents. The note defined them as “parents who care not only about the education but also about the future of their children in general.”

The data resulted in increased outreach to Indian-Americans, who voted overwhelmingly Democratic but show signs of shifting to the right.

At a local India Day celebration, with Democratic Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist II of Michigan as the keynote speaker, Michigan’s governor rented a booth for local candidates to greet guests and shake hands.

He also targets Troy, Oakland County’s largest city, which has a large Asian-American population. Parents protested a local school district’s decision to eliminate some middle school honors classes. Republicans are talking to these voters about parental rights in education.

“Nobody is against giving every child enough of a chance to learn what they need to learn,” said Piyush Bhatt, 49, whose daughter took honors classes at Troy Middle School last year. “…but this is the other way around, where you take away opportunities from a lot of kids because they happen to come from a certain background.”

Bhatt said he voted for Trump in 2020 and plans to vote for him again in November. He suspects other Indian-Americans will do the same.

Patrick said many Indian-Americans are first-generation citizens who may not be politically connected.

“We’re trying to reach out to those communities that don’t know where they should be and show them that Republican values are consistent with their values,” he said. “They say, ‘OK, I didn’t know which team to join.’

They’re courting marginal voters, but Oakland is a county where margins matter.

Contact John Wisely: [email protected]. On X @jwisely

(The headline has been updated in this article.)