Donald Trump, With a Little Help from His Friends, Takes Michigan

As the United Auto Workers went on strike in September of 2023, LaRouche PAC (now Promethean PAC) activists immediately headed to the picket lines at plants in and around Detroit with leaflets carrying Donald Trump’s message to auto workers: if elected, he would save their jobs from green mandates and rebuild a robust auto industry with tariffs. People in the Republican Party and the MAGA movement in Michigan were amazed at two things—first, that anyone would even think about going to picket lines of the UAW, an alleged bastion of the Democratic Party, and second, that the majority of responses were positive to Trump’s message. 

Fourteen months later, Trump won the state of Michigan by 78,000 votes, or 1.4%, which was solid enough that the state was called for Trump relatively early on November 6. Eight years earlier, Trump won Michigan by only 0.2%. 

The epicenter of change, which ensured Trump’s 2024 victory, was the Detroit metropolitan area which includes Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties. In 2016, Macomb, a blue collar and machine-tool-heavy county north of Detroit, was considered to be the county that put Trump over the top. Our friend Brian Pannebecker, who founded Auto Workers for Trump in 2016, played an important role in that effort, which continued into 2024. Macomb, as expected, did go for Trump. 

But it was Wayne County, which includes the cities of Detroit, Dearborn and Hamtramck, as well as solidly blue-collar communities south of Detroit, that shifted most dramatically in 2024. While Trump picked up votes in almost all counties across the state, it was the increased margin in Wayne County that made the Trump-Vance lead insurmountable. 

The emergence of a new political force in America is seen most clearly in a county like Wayne, with Detroit at its epicenter. Wayne County has been overwhelmingly Democratic for a century (last voting for a Republican President in 1928). The dramatic shifts among Muslim and Arab Americans and blue-collar workers, and smaller but still significant shifts among Black Detroiters puts Wayne County at the center of this historic political realignment. What drove those constituencies was the policies which distinguished the Trump-Vance ticket from the old establishment Republican party of neo-cons and free trade. Trump’s commitment to peace and to rescuing our economy from the lunacies of monetarism and radical environmentalism took hold in the Detroit area. 

Unlike most of the entrenched hacks who have often ignored Wayne County because it was unwinnable, those who think strategically know that the goal is to move the needle. As the largest county in Michigan, beating next-in-line Oakland by a half million votes, there is a greater potential for CHANGE in this county than anywhere else in the state. And, change it did.

Look at the progression over the last three Presidential election cycles.

In 2016, when Donald Trump shocked the established order by winning the Presidency, he won Michigan by only 0.2 percent, and he lost Wayne County by almost 291,000 votes. Hillary Clinton received 66.4% of the vote to Trump’s 29.2%.

In 2020, Trump increased his percentage in Wayne County to only 30.3%. Biden received 68.3 percent. (Of course, these are official figures, leaving aside whatever happened with vans arriving at the TCF Center in Detroit at 3 am in the morning, delivering cartons of absentee ballots which were then counted behind windows blocked with pizza boxes so Republican election challengers couldn’t see what was going on). Trump’s margin of loss in Wayne County was 333,000 votes, but those numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt given the pizza boxes.

Well, the needle moved in 2024. Donald Trump won 33.6% of the vote, to Harris’ 62.7% and closed the gap to 248,000 votes.

Here are the 3 election years lined up against each other.

Ignore the suspect 2020 results and look at the shift from 2016 to 2024. From 2016 to 2024, the Democrats dropped from 66.3% to 62.7% and gained less than 20,000 votes over that period. Donald Trump went from 29.2% to 33.6% and picked up 60,000 more votes in Wayne County. 

That is the beginning of a political revolution, which some of us who have been organizing with the ideas of Lyndon LaRouche, have been nurturing for decades. Others understood the potential as well. One of the most important interventions into Michigan was the production and circulation of a half-page flyer highlighting the 2024 Republican Party Platform’s commitment to become the party of industry, manufacturing, infrastructure and workers, and showcasing the Platform’s “20 Promises.” Promethean PAC was joined by the 13th Congressional District Republicans in this initiative.  Between the two organizations 40,000 copies were produced and  circulated mostly in Wayne and Macomb counties. 13th CD Chair Cheryl Costantino reported that the “20 Promises” had a great impact on GenZers who are being crushed by the Democrats’ economic policies. 

The 13th CD Republicans also produced yard signs that said, “Vote Peace, Vote Trump,” and another flyer which carried that message in a variety of languages, including Spanish, Arabic, Bengali, and Polish. 

On Saturday, November 16, the 13th CD Republican Party (in which Promethean PAC organizers are very active) conducted a post-election review of their outreach strategy. In attendance were leading representatives of the Bengali and Muslim communities who are ready to build and expand the Trump/Republican presence in Wayne County.

Similarly, Promethean PAC endorsed State Representative candidate, Ron Kokinda, expanded Trump’s message into his blue collar districts south of Detroit, some of which have a growing Yemeni presence. Kokinda’s campaign succeeded in knocking his entrenched Democratic opponent’s vote down from 60% to 51% in a district which has always been considered unshakeably Democratic.

Manufacturing, Muslims, “The Hood,” and Trump

All of this activity took place within the political universe created by Donald Trump. In late 2022, shortly after the announcement of his candidacy, Trump began releasing a series of videos under the heading of Agenda47. Few paid attention to them, but our PAC did. We conducted classes, presented slide shows and produced flyers which drove home the message that Trump’s policies represented a complete break from the policies of war and free trade. That message began to resonate among trade unionists. Trump traveled to Michigan during the UAW strike and gave a speech which called on Americans to join “the ultimate strike against the globalists.” 

As the campaign intensified in 2024, Trump and J.D. Vance, in dozens of visits to Michigan,  continued to pound on the key economic questions impacting Michiganders: stopping inflation by unleashing energy production and reviving America’s status as a manufacturing superpower, using tariffs to bring back auto jobs, and ending the insane EV/green mandates.

Those economic messages moved constituencies across the state. 

But, as even the political pundits and media analysts have admitted, one of the major, if not the major, element in Trump’s victory in Michigan was the shift in the Muslim vote. People in these communities abandoned first Biden, then Harris, in droves as the Administration’s failure to stop the carnage in Gaza continued. Throughout 2024, the Trump campaign quietly dispatched representatives like Mahmoud Boulos (Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law) and Rick Grenell (a former top Trump Administration official) to open up dialogue with the huge Muslim- and Arab-American community in Michigan, most of which is centered in Wayne County.

This reached a crescendo when Hamtramck Mayor Amer Ghalib, a Democrat, endorsed Donald Trump on the basis of Trump’s commitment to peace. Ghalib’s endorsement was rapidly followed by Dearborn Heights Mayor Bill Bazzi and Detroit-based Imam Belal’s endorsement. Ghalib and others conducted town halls to discuss why, despite continuing differences with Trump and his people, he had made the endorsement.

As has been widely reported, the voters in Dearborn, MI (which contains the largest population of Muslim/Arab people in North America), delivered a stunning 47% of the vote to Donald Trump, doubling the support he had received in 2020, and defeating Harris who only received 37% of the vote. 

The other small, but significant shift, was seen in Detroit itself. After Pastor Lorenzo Sewell opened up his church in “the hood hood” to Donald Trump on June 14, the dialogue with Black Detroiters intensified and Trump picked up percentage points in Detroit, which is a largely Black city. At one of Trump’s last rallies in Detroit, the audience proudly and happily waved signs that said “Make Detroit Great Again,” with many remembering when Detroit had the highest per-capita income in the country.

The destruction of Detroit under decades of local Democratic administrations is the subject of continuing discussions at Pastor Sewell’s church. In November 2025, Detroit will select a new Mayor and City Council under clearly changing political conditions.

With his campaign, his movement and his victory, Donald Trump has cracked the political control over Wayne County and Detroit. Now, the challenge for this movement is to revive that “Arsenal of Democracy” spirit with American System economic policies and make Michigan the “Arsenal for the Future.” 

Rebuild the USA: The Trump Presidency and Beyond

After all the years of campaigning, Americans have finally come to the agreement that we will Make America Great Again. But, how do we actually implement the intention, and with a minimum of mistakes along the way?

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