Identity politics in its purest state votes tonight in Michigan, which in World War II was 'the factory of democracy' due to the industrial capacity of its main city, Detroit, to manufacture weapons and which today is an amalgam of divergent and transitional political cultures.
There are two paradoxes: Arab voters paving the way to the White House for a candidate, Donald Trump, who established several systems when he occupied the White House to prohibit the entry into the United States of citizens of Muslim countries, and workers affiliated with unions voting against the first president in US history to have visited a picket line, and the first president in eight decades to have shown sympathy towards the union movement.
The Arabs paving the way for Trump can be summed up in one word: Gaza. His Government's unrestricted support for the offensive launched by Israel after the savage attacks on October 7 in that territory has destroyed its reputation among the approximately 3.1% of the population is of Arab origin, according to the local newspaper 'Detroit Free Press'.. In the 2020 elections, about 240,000 Arabs voted. The vast majority did so for Biden, who won that state by just 150,000 votes.. If those 240,000 voters of Arab origin stay home or support the left-wing independent candidate Cornell West, Biden runs the risk of having to say goodbye to victory in Michigan.
The opposition reaches the ranks of its own party. Michigan Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who is of Palestinian descent and is one of five leaders of the Democratic left, has called on Democratic voters to vote “uncompromised” in the primary.. Given that these are virtually a test of Biden's popularity, if a high percentage of ballots appear with that word, it will be a severe psychological blow to the president's campaign.. Michigan is also one of the seven key states in the November elections. And neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump can afford to lose a vote there.
Among the unions, the situation is confusing. Biden has supported the United Auto Workers (UAW) of the automotive sector – the state's main industry – in its epic strike against the so-called 'big three' American automakers, General Motors, Ford and Stellantis (although the latter is Franco-Italian and based in the Netherlands to reduce its tax bill). His support has gone to the highly symbolic extreme of standing on a picket line of strikers to express his support for the union, something that no American president has ever done.
The UAW strike achieved unimaginable concessions from auto manufacturers, and adds to the fact that Biden's laws to relaunch industrial and technological production in the US demand that companies that benefit from state aid accept the rights of their workers to join unions, something that in the US is not a labor right recognized throughout the country. He also shot the president of the plant, Shawn Fain, to fame.. Now, the union is going after electric car makers, especially Tesla, who don't allow their workers to organize. The company run by Elon Musk has lost several cases in court for employment and racial discrimination.
However, a portion of union members disagree with Biden's policy on issues such as immigration, the DGTBQ+ collective, women's rights, and, in general, the style of the president and his team.. This creates a division between the management of the plants and the workers.. In the case of the UAW, this division is evident, although not as evident as in the case of the truckers union, the famous Teamsters, often linked to the mafia and protagonists of countless Hollywood films due to their ties with the mafia, where there is a clear fracture between leaders and their members. That blue-collar white vote is one of the reasons for Trump's popularity, and no state reflects that battleground as clearly as Michigan..