How Donald Trump Won Michigan: An Analysis.
"Trump Only" voters were the determining factor in Donald Trump carrying Michigan's fifteen electoral votes.
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be examining why Democrats lost in the key battleground states, as well as explain shifts that happened in other non-battleground states, such as Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, Minnesota, and New York.
Today we are going to be looking at Michigan. Luckily with Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, and Wisconsin, we have victorious Democratic senate candidates that we can compare with the Harris campaign. Simply put, why did someone like Elissa Slotkin win but Kamala Harris lose? Who were the “swing voters”? Was it voters who only voted for Trump and left the Senate race blank? Did the Gaza issue hand Donald Trump the win? We’ll be talking about all of these in this article.
But before we start, if I don’t mention any specific counties or geographical locations in this article, it’s because there wasn’t much of a shift that would have impacted the election. Also, this is mostly a geographical and voting pattern examination. I will not talk about specific issues unless political geography can help us explain the impact of an issue.
Down-ballot drop off
One of the hypotheses that has been posited is that many Donald Trump voters simply voted for Trump at the top of the ticket and then left the rest of the ballot blank, which we will call the “Trump only” voter. Statewide evidence in Michigan shows this was the case, with a 122,956-vote gap between Donald Trump and Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers. This means that 4.4% of those who voted for Trump did not vote for Rogers. Combining the vote totals for Republican congressional candidates, 139,666 voters voted for Trump but not for Congressional Republicans, which would be 5.0% of all Trump voters in Michigan. Therefore, the number of “only Trump” voters was enough by itself to hand Trump Michigan’s fifteen electoral votes.