Michigan becomes quagmire for Biden

President Biden is heading to one of the states most pivotal to his 2024 reelection bid — and also the one that may prove to be his biggest obstacle.

Biden will arrive in Michigan on Thursday, visiting a critical battleground where the president has had something of a mixed reception. While it helped propel him to victory in 2020, an endorsement from one of the country’s largest labor unions only came after a very noticeable delay.

And in one of the nation’s most populated Arab American communities, which helped him win that first term, Biden faces feelings of deep betrayal for how he has handled the Israel-Hamas war.

“It’s a competitive state, and the Arab American issue is one that’s got to be taken seriously,” Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) told The Hill in an interview. “We have to talk to them, and we’re gonna. Those issues are very serious ones.”

Dingell, a Biden ally whose husband also represented Michigan in Congress for nearly 60 years, also outlined other issues facing Democrats there, while noting her own history with trying to convince her party that her home state could be up for grabs.

“Nobody believed me when I said Michigan was competitive in 2015, 2016,” she said. “I have one thing on my side: People recognize Michigan’s competitive this year.”

Another voter contingent Democrats need to work on, Dingell said, was young voters, who have sometimes expressed in polls less than stellar enthusiasm for Biden.

“We got to excite young people and get them to turn out the way that they did two years ago,” she said, referring to the 2022 midterms that proved far less detrimental to Democrats than had been expected.

“It is wonderful that [United Auto Workers President] Shawn Fain has endorsed the president. He has made the very stark contrast between Donald Trump and Joe Biden and why the UAW has endorsed him. But now we got to get into every union hall and make sure the workers themselves understand the contrast,” she said.

Fain himself acknowledged that despite the high-profile endorsement, he did not expect a bulk of his own union members to vote for Biden. Democrats lost many union workers in 2020 in states such as Ohio to former President Trump, whose anti-free trade message and other rhetoric resonated with the labor vote.

In 2016, union households had already somewhat started the shift from blue to red. That was also the year Trump secured victory in Michigan, with a dozen counties flipping from Democratic to Republican to help catapult him to his first term in the White House. It was the first time a Republican had won the state since the 1980s.

Recent polling in several battleground states have shown a close hypothetical match-up between Biden and Trump in 2024.

Biden trailed Trump 48 percent to 42 percent cumulatively across all of the swing states in a hypothetical match-up, according to a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll released Wednesday. In Michigan, that poll found Biden trailed Trump 47 percent to 42 percent.

But a MIRS-Target Insyght poll in January found Biden led Trump, 45 percent to 41 percent, among registered voters in Michigan. 

Couple that with Biden’s support among Arab American voters plunging to just 17 percent in October, just after the war in Gaza started, with 25 percent in a poll conducted by the Arab American Institute saying they weren’t sure who they would vote for if the election were today. 

Biden won Michigan by 154,000 votes in 2020. More than 200,000 registered voters in the state are Muslim, according to NPR, and additionally, 300,000 Michiganders’ ancestors were immigrants from the Middle East or North Africa.

Arab Americans make up the majority of the population in Dearborn, a Michigan suburb with a population of about 100,000. Muslim voters in particular there told The Hill in October that they are torn over what to do come November if the choice is Biden against Trump; Biden won 64 percent of the Muslim vote in 2020, and Trump won 35 percent, according to exit polling by The Associated Press.

Corwin Smidt, an associate professor in the political science department at Michigan State University, noted the general election is still roughly nine months away, which means it’s too soon to know whether there could be some kind of resolution in the Israel-Hamas war, or a shift from Biden on the situation in Gaza that could change Arab Americans’ views on the president.

But Smidt also noted that many surveys showing Biden with floundering approval numbers or trailing Trump could be a sign of voters expressing their discontent with the president more than indicating they support Trump.

“It seems like more of a case of whether they’re going to be mobilized to turn out to vote,” Smidt said.

Smidt pointed to strong approval ratings for Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), who is a co-chair for Biden’s reelection bid, to illustrate how the Democratic Party in the state remains strong, compared to the chaos that has engulfed the state GOP. 

Meanwhile, the Biden campaign has stepped up its organizing in Michigan in recent months, hiring Ed Duggan — a former adviser to Whitmer and the son of the Detroit mayor — to serve as the campaign’s state director there.

Biden is expected to further ramp up his travel to battleground states in general as the election cycle gets underway. He has visited Pennsylvania and Wisconsin already, and he will reportedly visit Nevada in the near future.

The Biden campaign has largely brushed off negative polling, saying it’s too soon for polls to be indicative of how Americans will vote in November.

Dingell echoed that notion, but noted Michigan’s importance, which Biden should be factoring into the campaign trail.

“Anybody who knows me knows that I will be nagging very hard for continued presence in Michigan. It is a purple state,” she said.

Updated at 8:10 a.m. ET