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Can Donald Trump win back suburban voters?

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On a hot and muggy evening in Rochester Hills, a suburb of Detroit, the local Republican club is meeting to hone battle plans for the 2024 election. Leading the workshop is Amy Hawkins, an energetic millennial activist and supporter of Donald Trump. She tells the crowd of mostly 60-somethings that the Republican Party needs an attitude adjustment. Don’t shun those who disagree with you, she urges; instead, recognise that “we don’t all have to sing from the same songbook.” Don’t show up in MAGA hats to yell at local school-board officials, she implores; do bake them cookies and tell them you’re praying for them. “What if we became known as the happy party?” she muses.
It is easy to see why Ms Hawkins has chosen to recalibrate Trumpism in this enclave of stately homes occupied by voters with college degrees. When Mr Trump won the White House in 2016, he took Michigan by a mere 11,000 votes. He lost the state’s white, college-educated suburban voters by five points. In 2020 that deficit swelled to 17 points and he lost Michigan to Joe Biden by 154,000 votes. Suburbanites’ rebuke of Mr Trump accounted for three-quarters of the swing against him. To win this year, Mr Trump will need to lure at least some of them back.

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He has work to do. According to national polls from YouGov/The Economist, the former president is polling nationally at 43% among white suburban voters with a college degree. That is three points less than the share he won in 2020, according to Catalist, a progressive political-data firm. How, then, did Mr Trump build a steady lead over Mr Biden this summer? Among educated white suburbanites, at least, it is not so much that Mr Trump is winning; it is that Mr Biden was losing, and the question now is whether a new Democratic nominee can reverse that trend. In 2020 the president won 53% of white, college-educated suburban voters nationally. Across June and July 2024 Mr Biden polled at 43%.

Now that Democrats are to replace him with a younger candidate, will the picture change? There is clear evidence that Kamala Harris, the presumptive nominee, would have an opportunity to improve on Mr Biden’s recent performance. In 2022 Michigan’s popular governor, Gretchen Whitmer, won re-election by a comfortable 11-point margin. She swept the state’s suburbs by 17 points. While there are no apples-to-apples figures available about Mr Biden’s standing in Michigan when he left the race, it is clear from national numbers that his margin was much smaller than that. Ms Harris could attempt to close the gap.

Michigan, suburban counties*, 2023

Share of total votes cast by

suburban voters†, 2020, %

*50% or more of the population live in a suburban zipcode
†Defined by Catalist

Sources: Catalist; Jed Kolko; The Economist

Michigan, suburban counties*, 2023

Share of total votes cast by suburban voters†, 2020, %

*50% or more of the population live in a suburban zipcode
†Defined by Catalist

Sources: Catalist; Jed Kolko; The Economist

Michigan, suburban counties*, 2023

Share of total votes cast by suburban voters†,

2020, %

*50% or more of the population live in a suburban zipcode

†Defined by Catalist

Sources: Catalist; Jed Kolko; The Economist

This summer, particularly after Mr Biden’s cataclysmic debate performance on June 27th and until he ended his campaign on July 21st, Mr Trump has maintained a steady lead in national polls and in every swing state. Yet as the ceiling on his vote-share shows, Mr Trump remains vulnerable in the suburbs. A Democratic comeback would probably pass through swing-state suburban counties like Oakland.

Rochester Hills may appear as if it belongs in a 1960s John Updike novel, but the suburbs are not what they used to be, politically or demographically. For one, they are more racially diverse. Since 1980, the number of white residents in Oakland County has held steady but the number of non-whites has grown from 60,000 to 320,000 in 2020. The county has shifted left during this period; greater diversity is probably one factor, along with changing views among college-educated white voters.

Top: Craig Rood, 45, outside his home in Northville, Michigan, on July 2nd 2024. Mr Rood said his greatest concern in the election was the threat Donald Trump posed to democracy.
Bottom: Rose Smith, 67, in Farmington Hills, Michigan, on July 6th 2024. She said the most important issue in the election for her is how mental-health services are delivered. Image: Nic Antaya

Polarisation along educational lines has also changed how suburbanites vote, just as it has in cities and the countryside. Consider Michigan’s tale of two suburban bellwether counties. Between 1972 and 2012, Oakland, where half of adults have college degrees, and its working-class neighbour, Macomb County, where a quarter have degrees, were regarded as lockstep predictors of Michigan’s vote in presidential elections.

Oakland voted for the candidate that won the state ten out of 11 times, while Macomb did so nine times. The average difference in candidate margins across the two counties was just four points. But Mr Trump changed all that. In 2016, Oakland and Macomb diverged by 20 points and Mr Trump won Macomb with 54% of the vote. (Hillary Clinton prevailed in Oakland.)

A step to the left

Presidential vote margin by county, percentage points, sized by population

Since that election, Republicans have found themselves on shaky ground in Michigan. Their once-strong state party fell into disarray, riven by internecine struggles and swamped with debt. And Republicans would surely prefer to forget about the past three elections in the state. In 2018, the first midterm election after Mr Trump took office, Republicans “got slaughtered in Michigan”, says Jason Cabel Roe, a veteran party strategist in the state. Ms Whitmer won the governor’s race, and Democrat women won races for attorney-general and secretary of state. Two more women Democrats, Haley Stevens and Elissa Slotkin, won competitive congressional races, marking the first time since the 1930s that Oakland County had no Republican representatives in the House. “It was very much the year of the woman,” Mr Roe adds.

Michigan, vote margin relative to state average*,

percentage points

Sources: Catalist; Michigan Department of State

It got worse for Republicans in 2022. As Ms Whitmer won her second term easily, a ballot initiative to enshrine abortion in the state’s constitution passed by 13 points. Democrats took control of the state House and Senate, and established their first trifecta in 38 years, controlling the governorship and both chambers of the legislature.

With abortion rights in the state already established, that issue—a probable rallying point for Ms Harris’s campaign—has less salience in Michigan. Suburbanites are most concerned about the economy this time around, according to polling from Emerson College. Generally, Mr Trump polled better than Mr Biden on that issue. Yet so far, there has been little enthusiasm for this election. In the summer of 2020 polling from YouGov/The Economist showed that some 70% of white, college-educated suburban voters were extremely or very enthusiastic about that year’s election. Across June 2024 only about half said the same. In an initial poll after Mr Biden left the race, enthusiasm among Democrats rose to 54%, compared with 43% in a previous poll.

Top: Joe Rizzo, 86, at the tennis courts at Dwight D. Eisenhower High School in Shelby Township, Michigan, on July 6th 2024. Mr Rizzo said inflation had eaten away at his savings and had become an important political issue for him.
Bottom: Cheri McQueen, 61, at Red Knapp’s in Rochester, Michigan, on July 5th 2024. Ms McQueen said she plans to vote for Trump in November because of his economic record while president. Image: Nic Antaya

Ms Hawkins’s pitch in Rochester Hills for a kinder, gentler form of Trumpism reflects recent attempts by the national Republican Party to consolidate and extend its candidate’s lead by toning down MAGA pugilism and welcoming never-Trumpers back into the fold. The effort was on display at the party convention in Milwaukee. It is not a natural script for Mr Trump and he did not stick to it for long, but some of his allies on the front lines understand what it takes to win in blue-leaning areas. “The formula is to trim yourself a little bit on the rhetoric and the issues that you talk about,” Mr Roe says. The “guiding principle is to give non-Republicans permission to vote for a Republican.” Even one carrying the baggage of Donald Trump.

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China to impose 34% retaliatory tariff on all goods imported from the U.S.

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Chinese and U.S. flags flutter near The Bund, before U.S. trade delegation meet their Chinese counterparts for talks in Shanghai, China July 30, 2019.

Aly Song | Reuters

China’s finance ministry on Friday said it will impose a 34% tariff on all goods imported from the U.S. starting on April 10, following duties imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration earlier this week.

“China urges the United States to immediately cancel its unilateral tariff measures and resolve trade differences through consultation in an equal, respectful and mutually beneficial manner,” the ministry said, according to a Google translation.

It further criticized Washington’s decision to impose 34% of additional reciprocal levies on China — bringing total U.S. tariffs against the country to 54% — as “inconsistent with international trade rules” and “seriously” undermining Chinese interests, as well as endangering “global economic development and the stability of the production and supply chain,” according to a Google-translated report from Chinese state news outlet Xinhua.

Separately, China also added 11 U.S. firms to the “unreliable entities list” that the Beijing administration says have violated market rules or contractual commitments. China’s ministry of commerce also added 16 U.S. entities to its export control list and said it would implement export controls on seven types of rare-earth related items, including samarium, gadolinium and terbium.

CNBC has reached out to the White House for comment.

Beijing, which also entertained a tenuous trade relationship with Washington under Trump’s first term, had warned that it would take “resolute counter-measures” to safeguard its own interests after the White House disclosed its latest sweeping tariffs on Wednesday.

Other U.S. trading partners had held off from announcing retaliatory tariffs amid hopes of further negotiations, with the European Union nevertheless voicing a readiness to respond.

The mutual U.S.-China levies are set to impact a trade relationship worth $582.4 billion in goods in 2024, according to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

Analysts expect the U.S.’ protectionist trade policies to steer China toward other trading partners and see it implement further stimulus measures in an effort to galvanize the economy. China has been battling a property crisis and weak consumer and business sentiment since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic.

China’s retaliatory tariffs announced Friday exacerbated declines in global markets which had already been thrust into turmoil by fears of inflationary, recessionary and global economic growth risks following the White House’s tariffs.

Mohamed Aly El-Erian, chief economic advisor for Allianz SE. 

El-Erian says U.S. recession risks are now ‘uncomfortably high’

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Economics

Donald Trump is attacking what made American universities great

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The conservative counter-revolution began with a secret memo, at least as the tale is often told on America’s political left, with the mix of fear and envy characteristic of the conspiracy-minded. In the summer of 1971 Lewis Powell was an eminent corporate lawyer, soon to be nominated and confirmed for the Supreme Court, when he drafted a confidential proposal for the US Chamber of Commerce. Powell laid out a costly, co-ordinated, years-long programme to counter the left’s influence in the media, the courts, the boardroom and, above all, universities. “There is reason to believe that the campus is the single most dynamic source” of an intensifying assault on free enterprise, he warned.

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Economics

How Donald Trump is shaping other countries’ politics

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He is boosting the centre and centre-left and delighting the hard right

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