Donald Trump returns to Michigan with hopes of repeating the battleground victory he found in 2016

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Donald Trump appeared in Michigan on Sunday as he looks to reclaim the territory that helped propel him to the White House but lost his grip four years later.

Campaigning for a return to the presidency while facing a federal indictment for alleged mishandling of classified documents, Trump spoke in suburban Detroit, where he lost between 2016 and 2020 and will need to win again if he becomes the 2024 Republican nominee. He will need to reverse a recent trend in Michigan that has seen Democrats make some of their biggest national gains since Trump’s re-election loss.

[ Federal indictment of former President Donald Trump unsealed ]

Trump spoke at the Oakland County GOPs Lincoln Day Dinner, where he was honored by the party as its Man of the Decade. Trump frequently attacked President Joe Biden throughout his speech on Sunday, saying Biden was a disaster for Michigan and auto production in the state. Trump also criticized Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a co-chair of Bidens re-election campaign, for approving state funds for a foreign company.

It was his first campaign appearance in Michigan, one of three states, along with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, that fell in 2016 to put Trump in the White House and Biden, a Democrat, four years later.

Trumps popularity in Michigan has taken a hit since 2016.

By Trumps calculations, he needs to win Michigan again to become president. But he was very disruptive here, said Dave Trott, a former GOP congressman. Trump is largely the reason the Michigan Republican Party is dead.

Last year, Trump-endorsed candidates in Michigan were among the loudest in repeating his baseless claims that the 2020 election was rigged.

Trump’s pick for attorney general, Matthew DePerno, has spent the final months of his campaign under scrutiny over whether he should be criminally charged for trying to gain access to voting machines after the 2020 election. Secretary of State candidate Kristina Karamo, a former community college professor, was chosen by Trump as the Republican nominee for secretary of state after saying she saw election fraud as a poll challenger in Detroit.

In November, statewide candidates he supported were soundly defeated, including Tudor Dixon, who lost to Whitmer by more than 10 percentage points.

Michigan Republicans controlled all levels of state government from 2011 to 2019. Now, they are out of power for the first time in 40 years. The change is particularly visible in Oakland County, home to the largest number of Republican voters in the state.

People who know election politics in Michigan will say it’s pretty important that if Republicans are going to carry the state, they have to win Oakland County, Trott said.

While Trump lost the county in 2016 and 2020, Biden received nearly 100,000 more votes than Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton did there and won the state by about 155,000 votes, or 2.8 percentage points.

Trott, who represented Oakland County in the US House from 2015 to 2019, first endorsed Trump in 2016 but later said Trump was unfit for office. Trump’s support among Republicans in the Legislature has declined, with 25 lawmakers already publicly supporting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as president. Trump said Sunday that DeSantis has no personality and that his campaign is falling like a rock.

Among state GOP officials, however, support for Trump has not wavered. In February, Republican precinct delegates elected Karamo to lead the party after he lost by 14% in the midterms. One of the first steps of the new party leadership was a vote to change the state’s traditional process of allocating all presidential delegates based on a primary open to the public.

Under a new plan widely expected to help Trump, Michigan will award only 16 of the states’ 55 delegates based on primary results on Feb. 27. The distribution of the remaining 39 delegates will come four days later. in closed-door caucus meetings, conducted by the same party members who chose Karamo to lead the party.

The plan gives Trump a significant leg up on the rest of the field. He is a grassroots favorite in the state and has made Michigan his political playground for the last seven years, said Jason Cabel Roe, a former executive director of the Michigan GOP.

Karamo said he will remain neutral in the primary. He argued that the party was forced to make the change after Michigan Democrats voted to move the state’s primary from the second week of March to February 27, a violation of Republican National Committee rules that could result in the loss of delegates.

When asked if Trump or his team lobbied for the president’s major change, Karamo declined to answer. He said he does not discuss conversations with the various campaigns.

We want to protect the voice of Michigan voters. So whether or not it helps one candidate more than another, that’s completely irrelevant, Karamo said.

According to Karamo, the Michigan GOP has worked on the plan with the RNC and expects the national party to approve the new primary setup.

The RNC said its conversations with the state party focused on policies and process rather than the substance and language of Karamos’ specific plan, the kind of guidance they’re offering each state party as they begin drafting. of their individual paths for delegate selection.

We look forward to reviewing each state and territory’s plan, RNC spokeswoman Emma Vaughn said in a statement.

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