2 weeks ago

This bellwether county heads to the polls – which way will it swing?

They lined up in the dark and rain before the polling stations even opened across Saginaw, the bellwether county in the crucial battleground state of Michigan.

Some just wanted to be able to vote and get to work on time. But there was also a determination among many people that, whatever issues they cared about, this American election mattered more than most.

And Saginaw voters matter more than most, too. America’s complex electoral system has created a battleground suite of seven US states that will decide the election – with Michigan among them. Saginaw is one of the closest-fought patches of turf in Michigan.

From polling stations inside the Bethel AME church on the solidly Democratic east side of Saginaw city, one of the poorest areas of the county, to the wealthy Donald Trump-supporting city of Frankenmuth, many voters saw themselves as turning out to protect their way of life at a time of deep national division in the US.

Among those who said they voted for Kamala Harris, the issue of women’s rights after the supreme court overturned the constitutional right to abortion two years ago came up repeatedly and most often. Cheyanne Laux, who voted at the church, said it decided her vote.

“Trump obviously has proven in the past that he clearly doesn’t have the rights of women in his mind. The abortion issue, that’s the main thing for me, so voting Democratic lines up with keeping that right,” she said.

Others who voted for the US vice-president spoke about fear of the damage Trump would do to democracy if he is returned to the White House.

For their part, supporters of Trump saw an existential threat to the US in what they regard as uncontrolled immigration and spoke about the former president as the man to bring back jobs to an area badly hit by the closure of car factories over recent years.

Tom Harris voted for Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden in the last two elections. This year he cast his ballot for Trump.

Harris works at one of the few remaining car factories in Saginaw and is a longstanding member of the United Auto Workers union.

“I was a diehard Democrat all the way because that’s what the union told me. It took my brother-in-law saying why he liked Trump. He says, ‘I hate the man as a person but he can run the country.’ So I started looking at Trump a little differently,” he said.

Harris said Trump as president did better on the economy and avoided involvement in foreign conflicts. He compared the global situation then with now, saying that Russia was too scared of Trump to invade Ukraine while he was in power.

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For voters such as Shelley Coon in Frankenmuth, Trump was the man to protect their children from what they described as the Democratic party pushing an ungodly agenda in schools.

“The final decision for me was I don’t want our children to be taught what the Democratic party is teaching in the schools, all that 52 genders, non-binary stuff. No, that’s just going too far. For me, that was my final decision. I know there was a whole bunch of topics but that was really the make or break,” she said.

“I don’t vote the leader. You have to go by the policies and we’re getting too far from religion, Christianity.”

Michigan saw a huge surge in turnout at the last presidential election as Democrats flooded to the polls to get Trump out of the White House. Seventy-two per cent of registered voters in the state cast a ballot, the largest proportion for any election in Michigan since John F Kennedy won the presidency 60 years earlier.

Both recognise that turnout will again be key this year and are trying to push it to new heights. Trump told supporters at a rally in Saginaw that they needed to vote in order to make his victory “too big to rig” as he continued to push his false claim that the presidency was stolen from him in 2020.

Meanwhile, Harris ended her campaign with a flood of advertising in Michigan attacking Trump as a continuing threat to women’s rights in the hope of getting ambivalent female voters to the polls or women who previously voted Republican to switch sides.

Saginaw county will be a litmus test of how successful that strategy has been. Trump took the county in 2016 by 1.1% of the ballot on his way to winning Michigan by just 10,704 votes and with it the election. Four years later, Trump’s vote went up in Saginaw but he still lost it to Biden by 303 votes because Democrats who stayed home in 2016 turned out in large numbers.

Chelsea la Coppola, who moved to Saginaw Township two years ago from another swing state, Arizona, said that her vote was primarily decided by “women’s rights, right to choose”. La Coppola said she thought the issue would drive a lot of people she knows to vote.

“It’s a big factor for them along with the democracy piece. Everybody’s worried what’s going to happen if Trump gets back in office,” she said.

Tracy Goetgeluck, voting in Saginaw city, said she had two daughters in their early 20s and that abortion rights were “huge for them”.

“For my daughters and a lot of their friends, their main purpose for voting is because of them feeling that their own rights will be taken away if Trump were president again, and that’s really scary to them. Even my son, because he’s so close to his sisters, is voting because he doesn’t want his sisters to have that taken away from them,” she said.

Katherine Harris also said that “the abortion issue is just huge for me” but as a supporter of further restrictions and a voter for Trump. She acknowledged that the issue could work against the former president, particularly among female voters angry at the supreme court stripping out their rights.

“I do think it could harm him with a lot of younger women because in our society we don’t hold ourselves accountable for our actions, and so it’s a lot easier to go and get the abortion rather than live up to what we did,” she said.

Erica Rapini was solidly for Trump but her first-time voting daughter, 21-year-old Mikayla, kept her views to herself, saying only that making up her mind who to vote for “felt like I was taking a test”.

“It’s hard to decipher what is true and what’s not true in the media and stuff like that. So I really had to do some research,” she said.

Her mother was more certain in her views.

“My biggest issue is the crime coming over the southern border and the lack of response from the current administration,” she said.

Even though Saginaw is about 1,500 miles (2,400km) from the Mexican border, Trump’s repeated and false allegations that immigrants are driving a crime wave has hit home with many conservative voters along with the swirl of rumors and fabricated claims pushed on social media.

Katherine Harris swears that undocumented migrants were being shipped by the bus load to Bay City, about half an hour away, where her sister lives. That claim was so widespread that the mayor of Bay City issued a statement last week denying it and saying they were legal migrant workers.

Like many Trump voters, Harris said she wasn’t bothered by the tone of his vitriolic attacks and threats against his opponents.

“I tell everybody, I’m not here to be his friend, I’m here for him to provide for our family, the way that it should be. I don’t agree with his Twitter, I don’t agree with some of the comments he makes. But he can run the country,” she said.

But what some Trump supporters brush aside as largely irrelevant, voters such as Goetgeluck see as disqualifying and disturbing.

“I didn’t want another round of Trump. He scares me a lot. He doesn’t seem to think of our people. He is about himself. Before him, our country was respectful of each other. Since he started campaigning against Hillary Clinton things got really nasty, our elections are just nasty. That’s not what our country is about. It didn’t used to be anyway,” she said.

Not many voters spoke about Kamala Harris with enthusiasm, saying that the important thing was to keep Trump out, and more than a few voters just wanted to get the election over.

La Coppola said that the atmosphere had been so fractious she avoided overt displays of support for the Democrat.

“You’re worried about crazies showing up to your house, so you don’t even want to put a sign out. You don’t want to put a bumper sticker on your car. You don’t want to do anything that could set the other side off,” she said.

That concern extends to the election’s aftermath given Trump’s continued efforts to undermine confidence in the legitimacy of the election if it goes against him.

Goetgeluck is worried about what will happen if Trump loses and he once again refuses to accept the result as he did when he encouraged supporters to storm the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.

“I was standing in line and two people behind me, who I could tell were going to vote for Trump, were talking about how there’s already been false voting found in Michigan, double voting, and all this stuff and and I don’t believe that’s true. There’s rumours that get started and it just snowballs from there,” she said.

Joe Pratt, who voted for Trump but said he would have preferred the former president’s running mate, JD Vance, at the top of the ticket, is one of those who believes the last election was rigged against Trump and that this one will be too.

“There’s already people getting busted, people getting investigated. I can’t remember where it was at, but there was a huge bust of voter fraud already. Pennsylvania maybe. It was pretty bad. So right there, it’s already started. There is people’s names aren’t matching addresses. Addresses are false. People’s names are false,” he said.

There is no evidence for this claim. But Pratt is sanguine about what will happen if Trump loses.

“We all just move on with our lives. We got to ride the wave out. I mean, what else can we do at that point?” he said.

Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage