LANSING, Mich. — In terms of intensity and length, Michigan is witnessing a race for the presidency unlike anything it's seen in modern history, longtime political observers in the state said with three weeks remaining until Election Day.

Weekly visits from the candidates, a handful of close contests in the recent past, a narrowing map of competitive states nationally and political realignments are keeping Michigan in the spotlight this fall as Republican former President Donald Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris vie for the state's 15 electoral votes.

Democratic former Gov. Jim Blanchard said Michigan had become a "classic tossup state." In comparison, in 1986, when Blanchard was reelected governor, he got 68% of the vote, winning by nearly 37 percentage points.

“I don’t remember Michigan being discussed as so critical for this long in the election cycle,” said Blanchard, who was first elected to the U.S. House 50 years ago.

As of Friday, the two major party presidential nominees and their running mates this year had combined to make 37 appearances in Michigan. Trump was in Detroit for a speech before the Detroit Economic Club on Thursday. Harris is scheduled to be in Detroit on Tuesday for a radio town hall event and then back in Michigan for a series of stops on Friday and Saturday.

Trump's running mate, Ohio U.S. Sen. JD Vance, spoke in Detroit's Eastern Market last week. At one point, Vance joked about his frequent trips to Michigan.

The state's Republican Party Chairman Pete Hoekstra had told him, "I'm a little disappointed you've only been to Michigan two times this week, not three times this week," Vance said with a laugh.

The majority of the candidates' stops — nearly two-thirds — have taken place in Michigan's four most populous counties: Wayne, Oakland, Macomb and Kent. Those counties are home to just under half of the state's residents.

Michigan is one of seven battleground states this fall that are expected to decide the presidential race. At 15, Michigan would provide the fourth most electoral votes of the bloc of seven swing states, behind Pennsylvania with 19, North Carolina with 16 and Georgia with 16 but ahead of Arizona's 11, Wisconsin's 10 and Nevada's six.

Like in many of the other key states, Michigan polling has shown a tight race between Harris and Trump.

A survey of 600 likely Michigan voters, conducted Oct. 1-4 on behalf of The Detroit News and WDIV-TV, found Harris leading Trump by 2.6 percentage points, which is within the 4-point margin of error. Among the participants, 46.8% said they would vote for Harris, 44.2% said they would pick Trump, 8.3% said they would support another candidate and 0.7% were undecided.

In the last two presidential elections, Trump has outperformed pre-Election Day polling in Michigan. That includes in 2016, when he defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton by 10,704 votes or 0.2 percentage points and became the first GOP presidential nominee to carry Michigan since 1988.

Susy Avery, a former Michigan Republican Party chairwoman who has been involved in politics for more than 50 years, said the coalition of voters that backs Trump had simply changed the dynamics of multiple states, including Michigan.

“We were not considered a purple state up until Trump, to be honest," Avery said. "Now, it’s a get-out-the-vote race.”

Battleground origins

Forty-four years ago, in 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan won Michigan over Democratic President Jimmy Carter by 7 points.

The state was a "real battleground" in that election, said Rocky Raczkowski, a Republican former state lawmaker and a former chairman of the Oakland County GOP.

Traditional Democrats and members of the United Auto Workers union crossed over to support Reagan in Michigan, particularly in Macomb County, leading to the nickname "Reagan Democrats," Raczkowski said.

“I see the same type of foment … among the citizenry and amongst the ethnic groups that I did in 1980," Raczkowski said of the current presidential race.

In 1984, Reagan was reelected with a resounding victory in Michigan against Democrat Walter Mondale by 19 points. Reagan's vice president, George H.W. Bush carried Michigan in 1988 by 8 points over Democrat Michael Dukakis.

But for the 20 years from the 1992 election through the 2012 election, Democrats swept presidential contests in Michigan. In 2012, Democratic President Barack Obama was reelected, winning Michigan by nearly 10 points over Republican Mitt Romney, a native Detroiter whose father, George Romney, was once governor of the state.

David Dulio, a political science professor at Oakland University, said the intensity of the 2024 race between Harris and Trump is stronger than he remembers in past presidential elections in Michigan.

But the state has been generally competitive, outside of Obama's large victories in 2008 and 2012, Dulio said.

“That string of Democratic victories led to this creation of this facade of a blue wall, which turned out to be pretty thin in Michigan as well as other states," Dulio said.

Trump's emergence

In 2016, Trump focused heavily on Michigan, making the final stop of his campaign in Grand Rapids. Polling had repeatedly shown Clinton ahead in the state, and some pundits said she simply didn't make enough visits to Michigan, mostly campaigning in Metro Detroit and Flint.

“Some critics have said that everything hinged on me campaigning enough in the Midwest,” Clinton acknowledged in a 2017 book titled “What Happened." “And I suppose it is possible that a few more trips to Saginaw or a few more ads on the air in Waukesha (Wis.) could have tipped a couple thousand votes here and there."

Trump narrowly won Michigan on a wave of support from blue-collar voters in 2016.

But four years later in 2020, the presidential campaign looked quite different in Michigan amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which prevented some political rallies that would normally take place from happening. Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, often held smaller events before crowds of only invited guests when he came to Michigan.

With a higher turnout than 2016, the Republican incumbent ended up losing by 3 percentage points, 48%-51%. Polling had consistently shown Biden to have leads over Trump in the weeks and months before the election.

The attention being paid to Michigan this year is similar to 2020, but now the polling is tighter, and there's no pandemic looming over the campaigns' travel and functions.

'Key difference'

Surveys in past Michigan election campaigns have shown one candidate with a lead outside of the margin of error before Election Day, said Richard Czuba, founder of the Glengariff Group that conducts polling for The News.

That's not the case this fall in the competitive race between Harris and Trump, he said.

“I don’t know if we have had one that was so overtly close in Michigan," Czuba said. "I think that’s a key difference here."

Czuba said that while Trump previously outperformed polls in Michigan, that doesn't mean he'll do it in 2024 because the surveys have adapted. In 2022, October polling closely reflected the final outcome of the Michigan gubernatorial race between Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Republican Tudor Dixon.

Adrian Hemond, CEO of the Lansing-based consulting firm Grassroots Midwest, said the 2024 presidential race is close, and there aren't as many swing states as there used to be for candidates to compete for.

The presidential race is being constrained to a smaller number of battlegrounds, said Hemond, who previously worked for Democrats in the state Legislature.

In the past, Ohio and Florida, which both have more electoral votes than Michigan, were pivotal states where candidates spent time and resources. Now, those states favor Republicans.

“Certainly, in the modern era, this is the most intense," Hemond said of Michigan's 2024 presidential race.

Harris' path to 270 electoral votes focuses heavily on the so-called "blue wall" states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Combined, those states have 44 electoral votes. That could be enough with Democratic-leaning states to give Harris the presidency.

If Trump wins Wisconsin, Michigan or Pennsylvania, along with Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, he'll likely be the next president.

Focusing on Wayne

So far, the presidential candidates and their running mates have made the most Michigan visits to Wayne County, the state's most populous county with an estimated 1.75 million residents in 2023 and a traditional Democratic stronghold.

Biden got 68% of the vote in Wayne County in 2020, while Trump got 30%.

The county is crucial because Democrats need voters to show up there to win. Biden got 597,170 votes in Wayne County four years ago, more than one-fifth of his statewide total of 2.8 million.

One of Biden's largest events of the 2020 campaign was a drive-in rally in Detroit on Halloween with former President Barack Obama and singer Stevie Wonder.

On Tuesday, Harris is scheduled to participate in a Detroit radio town hall, targeting Black male voters. It will be her seventh campaign trip to Michigan this year. Plus, Harris is expected to campaign in Detroit on Saturday, the first day the city elections department is opening select voting centers for early, in-person voting. And Obama is planning a campaign trek to Detroit on Oct. 22, the Harris campaign said Saturday.

On Friday, the Harris team released a Detroit-focused TV advertisement highlighting a negative comment Trump made about city, when he visited a day earlier.

“It will be like Detroit," Trump told the Detroit Economic Club. "Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president," Trump said. "You’re going to have a mess on your hands.”

Behind the tactics

The candidates and their running mates have visited Kent County seven times. That county was once a GOP stronghold, but Trump lost to Biden there in 2020 by 6 points, 46%-52%. Intense general election campaigning by the Trump campaign, including then running mate Mike Pence, in conservative parts of west Michigan are credited in part with helping deliver the state to Trump in 2016.

Trump and Vance held their first campaign rally after the Republican National Convention in Grand Rapids, which is in Kent County, on July 20. Harris' running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, campaigned in Grand Rapids on Sept. 12.

Likewise, Saginaw County, Michigan's 11th largest county, has been the venue for two of Trump's 12 visits this year. Saginaw is a swing area of the state that could be crucial to Trump's effort to flip Michigan.

In 2020, Biden narrowly won Saginaw County against Trump, 49.4%-49.1% or by 303 votes. Saginaw County is also located in a competitive U.S. House district, the 8th, where Democrat Kristen McDonald Rivet of Bay City and Republican Paul Junge of Grand Blanc Township are facing off for an open seat.

Likewise, in the Lansing area 7th District, Democratic former state Sen. Curtis Hertel of East Lansing and Republican former state Sen. Tom Barrett of Charlotte are in a heated race for the U.S.. House. Trump spoke in Potterville, in the 7th, on Aug. 29, and Harris is expected to visit Lansing on Friday.

The pace of the visits shows the national focus on Michigan.

But Jenell Leonard, owner of the Michigan-based consulting firm Marketing Resource Group, cautioned that it's the behind-the-scenes elements of the race that could decide who wins in November.

The side that can identify and activate its votes will be the victor, said Leonard, a past chairwoman of the Clinton County Republican Party.

“I do believe it’s going to come down to infrastructure and organization," Leonard said.

Absentee ballots became available in Michigan on Sept. 26.

As of Friday, about 543,812 Michigan residents had already submitted their ballots. That's about 10% of the 5.5 million people who voted in the presidential race in 2020.

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