Can Donald Trump win back suburban voters?

July 26th 2024 | Rochester Hills, MI

On a hot and muggy evening in Rochester Hills, a suburb of Detroit, the local Republican club is meeting to hone battle plans for the 2024 election. Leading the workshop is Amy Hawkins, an energetic millennial activist and supporter of Donald Trump. She tells the crowd of mostly 60-somethings that the Republican Party needs an attitude adjustment. Don’t shun those who disagree with you, she urges; instead, recognise that “we don’t all have to sing from the same songbook.” Don’t show up in MAGA hats to yell at local school-board officials, she implores; do bake them cookies and tell them you’re praying for them. “What if we became known as the happy party?” she muses.

Past results show her party's predicament. Republicans have won three of the past six presidential elections, but led the national popular vote in only one.

They have struggled in the popular vote in part because suburban voters, once a key bastion of Republican support, have shifted decisively leftwards.

Joe Biden won among suburban voters in 2020. This year polls pointed to his lead being wiped out—although Mr Trump struggles in the suburbs too.

Suburban Michiganders delivered the state to Mr Biden in the last election. Kamala Harris will need a similar margin to hold it this year.

Sources: Catalist; YouGov; The Economist

It is easy to see why Ms Hawkins has chosen to recalibrate Trumpism in this enclave of stately homes occupied by voters with college degrees. When Mr Trump won the White House in 2016, he took Michigan by a mere 11,000 votes. He lost the state’s white, college-educated suburban voters by five points. In 2020 that deficit swelled to 17 points and he lost Michigan to Joe Biden by 154,000 votes. Suburbanites’ rebuke of Mr Trump accounted for three-quarters of the swing against him. To win this year, Mr Trump will need to lure at least some of them back.

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He has work to do. According to national polls from YouGov/The Economist, the former president is polling nationally at 43% among white suburban voters with a college degree. That is three points less than the share he won in 2020, according to Catalist, a progressive political-data firm. How, then, did Mr Trump build a steady lead over Mr Biden this summer? Among educated white suburbanites, at least, it is not so much that Mr Trump is winning; it is that Mr Biden was losing, and the question now is whether a new Democratic nominee can reverse that trend. In 2020 the president won 53% of white, college-educated suburban voters nationally. Across June and July 2024 Mr Biden polled at 43%.

Now that Democrats are to replace him with a younger candidate, will the picture change? There is clear evidence that Kamala Harris, the presumptive nominee, would have an opportunity to improve on Mr Biden’s recent performance. In 2022 Michigan’s popular governor, Gretchen Whitmer, won re-election by a comfortable 11-point margin. She swept the state’s suburbs by 17 points. While there are no apples-to-apples figures available about Mr Biden’s standing in Michigan when he left the race, it is clear from national numbers that his margin was much smaller than that. Ms Harris could attempt to close the gap.

This summer, particularly after Mr Biden’s cataclysmic debate performance on June 27th and until he ended his campaign on July 21st, Mr Trump has maintained a steady lead in national polls and in every swing state. Yet as the ceiling on his vote-share shows, Mr Trump remains vulnerable in the suburbs. A Democratic comeback would probably pass through swing-state suburban counties like Oakland.

Rochester Hills may appear as if it belongs in a 1960s John Updike novel, but the suburbs are not what they used to be, politically or demographically. For one, they are more racially diverse. Since 1980, the number of white residents in Oakland County has held steady but the number of non-whites has grown from 60,000 to 320,000 in 2020. The county has shifted left during this period; greater diversity is probably one factor, along with changing views among college-educated white voters.

Top: Craig Rood, 45, outside his home in Northville, Michigan, on July 2nd 2024. Mr Rood said his greatest concern in the election was the threat Donald Trump posed to democracy.
Bottom: Rose Smith, 67, in Farmington Hills, Michigan, on July 6th 2024. She said the most important issue in the election for her is how mental-health services are delivered. Image: Nic Antaya

Polarisation along educational lines has also changed how suburbanites vote, just as it has in cities and the countryside. Consider Michigan’s tale of two suburban bellwether counties. Between 1972 and 2012, Oakland, where half of adults have college degrees, and its working-class neighbour, Macomb County, where a quarter have degrees, were regarded as lockstep predictors of Michigan’s vote in presidential elections.

Oakland voted for the candidate that won the state ten out of 11 times, while Macomb did so nine times. The average difference in candidate margins across the two counties was just four points. But Mr Trump changed all that. In 2016, Oakland and Macomb diverged by 20 points and Mr Trump won Macomb with 54% of the vote. (Hillary Clinton prevailed in Oakland.)

A step to the left

Presidential vote margin by county, percentage points, sized by population

Since that election, Republicans have found themselves on shaky ground in Michigan. Their once-strong state party fell into disarray, riven by internecine struggles and swamped with debt. And Republicans would surely prefer to forget about the past three elections in the state. In 2018, the first midterm election after Mr Trump took office, Republicans “got slaughtered in Michigan”, says Jason Cabel Roe, a veteran party strategist in the state. Ms Whitmer won the governor’s race, and Democrat women won races for attorney-general and secretary of state. Two more women Democrats, Haley Stevens and Elissa Slotkin, won competitive congressional races, marking the first time since the 1930s that Oakland County had no Republican representatives in the House. “It was very much the year of the woman,” Mr Roe adds.

It got worse for Republicans in 2022. As Ms Whitmer won her second term easily, a ballot initiative to enshrine abortion in the state’s constitution passed by 13 points. Democrats took control of the state House and Senate, and established their first trifecta in 38 years, controlling the governorship and both chambers of the legislature.

With abortion rights in the state already established, that issue—a probable rallying point for Ms Harris’s campaign—has less salience in Michigan. Suburbanites are most concerned about the economy this time around, according to polling from Emerson College. Generally, Mr Trump polled better than Mr Biden on that issue. Yet so far, there has been little enthusiasm for this election. In the summer of 2020 polling from YouGov/The Economist showed that some 70% of white, college-educated suburban voters were extremely or very enthusiastic about that year’s election. Across June 2024 only about half said the same. In an initial poll after Mr Biden left the race, enthusiasm among Democrats rose to 54%, compared with 43% in a previous poll.

Top: Joe Rizzo, 86, at the tennis courts at Dwight D. Eisenhower High School in Shelby Township, Michigan, on July 6th 2024. Mr Rizzo said inflation had eaten away at his savings and had become an important political issue for him.
Bottom: Cheri McQueen, 61, at Red Knapp's in Rochester, Michigan, on July 5th 2024. Ms McQueen said she plans to vote for Trump in November because of his economic record while president. Image: Nic Antaya

Ms Hawkins’s pitch in Rochester Hills for a kinder, gentler form of Trumpism reflects recent attempts by the national Republican Party to consolidate and extend its candidate’s lead by toning down MAGA pugilism and welcoming never-Trumpers back into the fold. The effort was on display at the party convention in Milwaukee. It is not a natural script for Mr Trump and he did not stick to it for long, but some of his allies on the front lines understand what it takes to win in blue-leaning areas. “The formula is to trim yourself a little bit on the rhetoric and the issues that you talk about,” Mr Roe says. The “guiding principle is to give non-Republicans permission to vote for a Republican.” Even one carrying the baggage of Donald Trump.■

Can Donald Trump win back suburban voters?

In Michigan, Republicans are selling a kinder, gentler Trumpism to college-educated voters; it isn’t sticking yet

Vote margin, percentage points

Read more on the American voters:

A step to the left

Presidential vote margin by county, percentage points, sized by population

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Can Donald Trump win back suburban voters?

In Michigan, Republicans are selling a kinder, gentler Trumpism to college-educated voters; it isn’t sticking yet

Read more on the American voters:

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