Name: How Michigan explains American politics
Uploaded: 2024-01-21T14:58:15.000Z
Duration: 18 min 7 s
Description: How Michigan explains American politicsLearn the English Usage: Vox,michigan,election,voted,state,trump,county,republican,detroit,oakland,turnout,chart,michigan...

for a long time, were known as “the blue wall.”

each one of those places voted for a Democrat for president,

In 2016, Donald Trump won by breaking the blue wall.

“We didn't break it, we shattered that sucker.”

and, just barely, and in maybe the biggest surprise:

“Michigan, a state that was supposed to be a lock for Hillary Clinton.”

“Michigan has been blue for a long time.”

“Michigan, isn't that one of the pillars of the infamous blue wall?”

But here's something that people missed about “blue wall” Michigan.

Even though Michigan had consistently voted

for Democrats for president over the years,

Michigan already had a Republican governor and a Republican legislature,

that Republican state government had undermined unions...

“so-called right-to-work legislation”

“Controversy surrounding this oil refinery.”

So Trump winning Michigan didn't really come out of nowhere.

In 2020, it voted for Joe Biden over Trump.

Democrats won every elected branch of Michigan's state government --

And its new blue government got to work fast:

repealing some of the Republicans’ signature legislation...

“The first state to repeal a right-to-work law in decades.”

...and pouring money into the state's transition to clean energy.

“Michigan, a national leader in the fight against climate change.”

In this video, we're going to ask why Michigan went so red, and then so blue.

What do political scientists say, what does the data say...

Because, maybe Michigan is just a swing state,

and this is what it looks like when a swing state swings.

tell us a lot about the US right now - and about our next election.

So let's go back to this timeline of big Michigan elections,

Michigan voted for Barack Obama for president,

and for a Democratic state House of Representatives.

But the next election would turn out differently.

We see a blowback to Obama's national policies.

In 2010, Republicans won control of the whole state.

And the reason that matters is because the next year, 2011,

Which means Michigan Republicans were in charge of redrawing these:

Maps that can favor one party or another, depending

on which voters they draw into which districts.

If you just sort of look at the map, it doesn't look too gerrymandered.

But once those maps took effect, in the 2012 election,

The state House of Representatives districts.

If you added up the votes across all of these districts in 2012,

Republicans only won about 46% of that vote,

but they ended up with 59 out of 110 seats,

Meaning, they had successfully skewed this map in their favor.

And for the rest of the decade, Michigan Republicans

actually never won a majority of the statewide vote

for the House of Representatives, but they always won a majority of its seats.

Which kind of tells us something about this whole period.

If not for Republican complete control of redistricting in 2012,

throughout the whole decade and even into today.

So Michigan wasn't as red as it looked either.

But redistricting doesn't actually explain everything.

This chart looks at how close the vote was in every state

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How Michigan explains American politics

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