Post-election in Saginaw, Michigan, the swing county in the swing state that swung right

Saginaw county’s Democrats were sure that the lessons had been learned and that this time it would be different.

The Kamala Harris campaign flooded this bellwether county in the crucial battleground state of Michigan with canvassers and advertising, a reaction to Hillary Clinton’s complacent and, as it turned out, misguided belief that she had the area sewn up in 2016.

The vice-president and Tim Walz campaigned in Saginaw. Leftist hero Bernie Sanders rallied the local university’s students. Door knockers and phone bankers urged people to the polls in the hope and expectation of at least eking out the narrow win Joe Biden enjoyed in Saginaw county four years ago.

But through it all, there were warnings from those closest to key groups of Saginaw’s voters – union organisers, Black community leaders, social workers for lower-income families, Latino activists – that denouncing Republican demagogue Donald Trump and making vague promises from Harris of a better future were not enough.

They cautioned that Harris was not getting through to large numbers of those who struggled the most in a county marked by large economic disparities because she was failing to directly address their concerns, not least inflation and the cost of living.

Others said that Harris looked too much like one of the machine politicians so many voters have come to despise, particularly as she avoided taking a stand on key issues or bent to the prevailing political wind.

All of them warned that it could cost her the election in Saginaw county, and beyond.

And so it proved.

Trump won Saginaw county decisively. The vice-president lost by three times as many votes as Clinton in 2016 and did even worse when compared with Biden four years later.

Trump beat Harris by more than 3,400 votes on about the same turnout as 2020. In that election, the then president lost to Biden by 303 votes.

This year, Trump won an outright majority in Saginaw county with nearly 51% of the vote, more than 1% up on his 2020 tally.

On election night, the leader of the county Democrats, Aileen Pettinger, a retired firefighter, bounced into a watch party at a local union hall confident that female voters angry about the US supreme court ruling on abortion and the broader assault on women’s rights had won it for Harris.

Local Democrats worked hard to try to bring female Republican voters on board over access to abortion, even leaving Post-it notes in women’s bathrooms reminding them that no one would know if they secretly voted for Harris.

But as the results trickled in, the party began to feel like a wake. People drifted away. Whoever was in charge of the music stopped playing Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now. A silence fell as hope bled away.

Across town at the Republican watch party, Trump supporters burst into a rendition of the Christian hymn How Great Thou Art after the former and future president gave his victory speech.

The initial election results for Saginaw appear to show that Harris lost Biden voters to Trump in some of the poorer areas of the county, including minority neighbourhoods, as well as mostly white suburbs. Harris also failed to mobilise the large numbers of people who usually do not vote in Saginaw. The turnout in the main city was only about 50%.

A month ago, Jeff Bulls, president of the Community Alliance for the People in Saginaw told the Guardian that many voters in lower-income parts of Saginaw were disenchanted with the political process because they did not see that it improved their lives.

Bulls warned that Harris’s failure to address issues such as inflation and the cost of housing in a way that would make a difference to those struggling to get by was undermining her campaign. After Harris’s defeat, Bulls said “it’s not unexpected for me”.

“She wasn’t really speaking to real people’s issues. You have a lot of poverty here in this county, whether it’s in the city of Saginaw or whether it’s rural people out there. And if you don’t speak to that, you’re not going to inspire people to vote for you, and I felt like her campaign was mostly about just blaming Trump or saying he’s racist. She wasn’t really inspiring people with her own policies, with her own vision, and I think that cost her,” he said.

Similar warnings came from union organisers who saw members going with Trump, even though Biden kept telling them how good the economy was, because rising inflation had hit them hard. As loyal Democrats, some couched their warnings carefully in public, not wanting to give ammunition to the Trump campaign.

Others were more forthright, including Carly Hammond, a Saginaw organiser for the US’s largest union confederation, the AFL-CIO. She told the Guardian a month ago that the Harris campaign was failing to address the deep distrust of politicians in general, and the Democratic party in particular, among many working people.

“It’s the Donald Trump voters in unions that I see. I think most of them are still in the same place,” she said in October.

“The trend that I see with labour people who are Trump supporters is a tendency to be very upset with the status quo, which everyone should be. People are going to stick with Trump until they see and they feel like things are getting better for them.”

Hammond, whose grandfather worked at one of the many car factories that were once dotted around Saginaw but have since closed, said the Democratic campaign was the biggest election mobilisation she had seen but that Harris lacked “concrete plans” to motivate voters.

After the result, Hammond issued a statement saying she was “angry that neither presidential candidate had real acknowledgement of, or plans to address, the real suffering and struggle so many Americans are going through”.

Black and Latino community leader organised get-out-the-vote campaigns in the last days before the election as they warned of disenchantment and lack of enthusiasm for Harris.

Dan Soza, whose father was the first Latino elected to the Saginaw city council, is a child welfare officer who is deeply alarmed by Trump’s threat of mass deportations. He said that Harris failed to connect with large numbers of Latino voters in the city on what they cared about most: the economy.

“There was never any really specific plans. OK, the $25,000 for new home buyers was specific, but where was the specific plan for inflation? Not that the other side added any better answers, but they just never really came out with any concrete plans on what they were going to do,” he said.

Soza said that the rise in Latino men voting for Trump in other parts of the country was replicated in Saginaw. He said a lot of that had to do with “fear of a female leader, machismo”.

But he said the Democrats also made a mistake in thinking that opposition to Trump’s stance on immigration would play well with Latino voters in places such as Saginaw, where there is a long established Latino community, mostly of Mexican origin, when many of those crossing the border are from Central and South America.

“Immigration isn’t as important to them as we think. They took to heart issues like the economy,” he said.

The scale of Harris’s loss was emphasised by the success of other Democrats in Saginaw.

Kristen McDonald Rivet decisively beat a Republican former prosecutor, Paul Junge, for the open seat in the US House of Representatives covering Saginaw and neighbouring counties. McDonald Rivet took about 51% of the vote, meaning that some people split their vote to support her and Trump.

But Bulls is not alone in thinking that the Democratic party needs a wholesale rethink of what it stands for if it is to win back voters in Saginaw.

“The Democratic party has to have a come-to-Jesus moment and really revisit who they represent because they’re not speaking to kitchen-table issues. There’s a lot of rhetoric around the middle class. We largely don’t have a middle class, especially in the Black community. We have working class. We have people that are in poverty, and they’re not speaking to them and their struggle, to real issues that poor people are really, really dealing with,” he said.

“I would hope that there’s a reckoning and that they revisit who they actually represent, because right now it’s not us.”