What the Hell Happened to Democrats in Detroit?
Brian Pannebecker first drew Donald Trump’s fond gaze by wearing tight T-shirts to Trump rallies around the Detroit area. The shirt displayed the words Auto Workers For Trump, even though the United Auto Workers union didn’t endorse the Republican candidate. “I didn’t know who he was,” Trump said of Pannebecker at a rally in Warren, Michigan, right before he won the 2024 election over the Democrat, Kamala Harris. “All I know is he has very good, strong arms. I’m impressed by his arms. He’s a strong guy.”
Pannebecker, 65, wears a mustache that droops down each side of his chin in the style of Hulk Hogan, the Trump buff who made his name in pro wrestling. Before retiring, Pannebecker drove a forklift at a Ford plant. He became Trump’s unofficial Michigan mascot, stroking Trump’s ego with groupie-like praise while stoking resentment among the MAGA crowd. Later at the rally in Warren, a city in crucial Macomb County, Pannebecker denounced electric vehicles that could replace gasoline-powered cars and pickup trucks, warning that they would underserve the needs of consumers like himself on the drive from the Detroit area to the northwest Lower Peninsula, a year-round vacation and recreation destination near Lake Michigan where many downstate Michiganders have second homes.
“We don’t want to drive those things,” he said. “How do you pull a trailer with four snowmobiles on it up to Traverse City when it’s five degrees below zero in an EV? You can’t do it.”
It isn’t surprising that people like Pannebecker—retired suburbanites for whom hauling around four snowmobiles is the definition of freedom—should have voted for Trump. But last November, they were joined by a more eye-catching roster of Michigan voters who either took a flyer on Trump or just didn’t vote, costing Kamala Harris this state’s vital 15 electoral votes. Trump got 2,816,636 votes to Harris’s 2,736,533, for a victory margin of 1.4 percent (another 109,335 Michigan voters chose minor-party candidates). It was only the second time in the last nine presidential elections, going back to 1992, that the Democrat failed to carry Michigan (Hillary Clinton in 2016 was the other one).
This change was nowhere more apparent than in Wayne County, home to Detroit and still the state’s most populous county. Consider: In most counties, blue and red alike, Harris’s numbers weren’t very different from Joe Biden’s in 2020. In Kent County, home to Grand Rapids, Harris actually outperformed Biden by around 5,000 votes. In Washtenaw, home to Ann Arbor, she got a few more votes than Biden. Likewise in Kalamazoo County, where she did a little better than Biden. She won those counties. But even in the deep-red counties she lost, she generally did no worse than Biden had: In rural counties ranging across the state, like Sanilac, Presque Isle, Luce, and Cheboygan, she got about the same number of votes that Biden had.
