As Harris Visits Detroit, Some Democrats See Ground To Be Made Up
The New York Times
Democrats have long won by wide margins in Detroit, but some party leaders said the vice president needed to do more to counter an assertive Trump campaign.
The playbook for Democrats in Michigan has been the same for decades. To carry the crucial swing state, they need to run up huge margins in its largest city, Detroit, where President Biden received 94 percent of the vote in 2020.
But as Vice President Kamala Harris prepares for a Tuesday stop courting Black voters in Detroit, some Democratic officials there worry that her campaign has not been doing enough.
In interviews with 10 current and former elected Democrats who have represented Detroit, several said Ms. Harris’s campaign in the city had seemed to lack urgency, had failed to produce enough yard signs or had not sufficiently mobilized local officials to vouch for the vice president in their neighborhoods.
Adding to the challenge for Democrats, many of those officials said, is that Republicans seem to be trying harder than in past cycles to reach Detroit voters. Former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign has been plastering the city with mailers, and Mr. Trump has made repeated visits, though he made a dig about Detroit during a speech there last week.
“There’s some shifts in the atmosphere that are happening,” said State Representative Stephanie A. Young, a second-term Democrat who described recently spotting a Trump yard sign near her Detroit home, the first she could ever recall for a Republican presidential candidate.
Ms. Young, who said that she had received 14 pieces of pro-Trump mail in a recent two-week span but nothing from the Harris campaign, said that “folks take Detroit for granted,” adding that she had tried without much success to register her concerns with leaders in the Democratic Party. “I’m like, ‘You guys aren’t paying attention to this,’” she said.
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