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DETROIT — Rep. Elissa Slotkin walked into a Harris for President field office in the Sherwood Forest neighborhood of Detroit and asked for a vibe check.

“What are you hearing? Are you getting people? Are they hanging up on you? Are they talking? Tell me, I want to hear, I need the spot report,” Slotkin said to the volunteers.

A request had gone out for women who support Vice President Kamala Harris’ Democratic White House bid to show up to phone bank that night. They heeded the call: Of the 30 or so volunteers, the vast majority were women. They were young and they were old; they were Black and they were White; they were gay and they were straight. They had lists of voters to call and a bullet-point script. There was a buffet of cheese, charcuterie and homemade brownies, along with a Michigan red wine called Sweet Revenge, whose label suggests it is “best served cold.”

“We can’t wake up a week from this coming Wednesday and say, ‘Oh, Michigan dropped the ball,’” Slotkin said.

“No, no, no, we’re not dropping the ball,” a volunteer responded as the crowd collectively shook their heads.

A retired public school teacher told Slotkin that she realized that a lot of high school students eligible to vote “haven’t had their parents or their teachers tell them to come out and register” so she had started dropping off registration materials at high schools on the city’s west side. Another woman said she had recently met a young person who had invented an app about politics and wondered whether it could be used to mobilize younger voters. A grandmother said she and her husband had found out their grandchildren planned on voting for Republican former President Donald Trump. “We were kind of shocked, you know? And then we realized we really hadn’t talked to them. So at dinner, we talked to them, we helped them to understand more what is going on with the candidates. It’s a very important talk: pick up your grandchildren, talk to your adult children,” she said.

It was just two days before early voting began in the presidential battleground state and most polls showed Harris and Trump in a dead heat in Michigan. Slotkin was polling slightly ahead of Harris in her own statewide race: One of just a handful of competitive U.S. Senate contests in the country, its outcome will help determine whether her party holds onto its tenuous control of the upper chamber in Congress. A lot was on the line. But Michigan Democrats were feeling good about the vice president’s chances here. As reports suggested Harris had a potential problem in at least one of the “Blue Wall” states, Michigan Democrats told The 19th it wasn’t them and to check on Pennsylvania or Wisconsin.

In 2016, Trump won surprise upsets in the three states in his race against his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. President Joe Biden won them all in 2020, and they are seen as critical to Harris’ path to victory even if she ends up doing well in some or all of the Sun Belt states of Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina.

“After several cycles of this, we understand what the job is, and folks are very focused on doing the work,” said Lavora Barnes, chair of the Michigan Democratic Party. “This is just what Michiganders do now: Our Democrats work until the polls are closed and the votes are counted, they keep working.” 

Women in Michigan seemed to have unlocked how Democrats can win comfortably in the type of swingy areas of Rust Belt states where Democrats often struggle. Two years after Trump carried Michigan by 0.3 points — he won Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by 0.7 points — Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer won her first statewide election in 2018 by 10 points. When she won in 2022, she outperformed Biden and predictions, winning by nearly 11 points. 

Key to both of Whitmer’s victories was her ability to drive up turnout in blue areas, put together suburban-urban coalitions, and overperform even in some rural areas. In 2022, Whitmer won exurban Macomb County, outside Detroit, by five points when Trump beat Biden by eight points there just two years prior. She also won Eaton County, which is partially in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District, after Trump won it twice. 

The district is represented by Slotkin, who has won three times despite redistricting and her electorate leaning Republican. The former CIA analyst, who served on the National Security Council under Republican President George W. Bush and in the State Department while Democrat Barack Obama was president, has said that she, like Whitmer, wins in part by losing by less in her district’s more conservative-leaning areas. For both her and Whitmer, women in these areas are key. Slotkin told the volunteers phone banking for Harris that she predicts a similar dynamic this year in her own race and, if their efforts pay off, the presidential.

“I think that in Michigan there is going to be — I don’t have a good name for it — the secret women’s vote,” Slotkin said to murmurs of assent. 

“We have started to see all these signs that women, particularly in some of the red areas of our state, really Republican areas, are not telling their husbands how they vote, they’re not telling their neighbors how they vote — and they are with Kamala,” she continued, noting that when United Food and Commercial Workers International Union canvassers handed out campaign literature, many women would point silently to who they planned on voting for, without saying the vice president’s name.

“We can have a whole other conversation about why they don’t feel like they can say it, but you know what? They’re doing it, right?” Slotkin said. 

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Whether at the phone bank in Sherwood Forest or the next afternoon at a canvassing kickoff in Trenton — a mostly White but diversifying, working-class community home to a coal power plant and auto manufacturers on the Detroit River’s west bank — every single woman who spoke to The 19th brought up the loss of federal abortion rights as a reason why they were going all in to elect Harris and other Democratic candidates this year. 

In Sherwood Forest, Terrolyn Campbell Wheeler, who is in her 60s, said she had been phone banking two to three times a week. While she has always voted, and encouraged those in her neighborhood and social circles to do the same, this year she said she “can’t sit still.” She is doing everything she can to elect Harris as the country’s first woman president — and stop a Republican abortion agenda she sees as extreme. “This is not for our generation, we’re moving it forward for the next generation, the little girls, we had 50 years of Roe — they have nothing,” she told The 19th.

In Trenton, Leslie Notargiacomo, 75, came to the canvassing kickoff after Slotkin dropped off a yard sign at her house — she was recovering from a back surgery that would prevent her from coming to a rally. She said she was there for her two granddaughters — for all of her grandchildren and great grandchildren, really — because she thinks “everybody has to do a little bit of something” and she’s “never seen an election this bad.”

Sitting nearby was Laurie Jacobs, 66, who said that when she went canvassing recently, the trainers told them to think about their “why.” Hers was her two daughters of childbearing age. “Canvassing and phone calling does not come easily for me but you reach a point where you just have to do something, you’ve got to push through it,” said the ultrasound tech, who said she has watched patients get moved “straight from the ultrasound room to surgery” after diagnoses like ectopic pregnancies. 

When Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was decided, Michigan had a 1931 abortion ban that kicked in. It was quickly challenged by Whitmer and Planned Parenthood and the courts put it on hold. Several months later, Michiganders codified abortion protections into the state’s constitution via a ballot measure, which passed by a 13-point margin — even stronger support than what sent Whitmer back to the governor’s mansion. Whitmer and the state legislature, newly controlled by Democrats, fully repealed the ban in April 2023.

Protecting abortion rights and other issues related to reproductive health has long been a public priority of Whitmer’s — and her focus on the issue has not cost her support from moderate voters. In 2013, when she was state Senate minority leader, there was a Republicans bill to exclude abortion from health insurance plans that would necessitate a separate policy — in a speech that got national attention, she called it “rape insurance” and told her story for the first time publically of being sexually assaulted in college. Last year, as governor, she signed legislation to repeal it. Michigan Democrats also enacted a law to protect in vitro fertilization (IVF).

Trump and his fellow Republicans’ strategy on abortion rights in the 2024 elections has largely been to talk about it as little as possible, dismiss Democrats’ focus on the issue as alarmist or extreme, and convince voters that electing them would not result in reproductive rights being further restricted. Rep. Hillary Scholten, a first-term Democrat, said the issue is still important in her Grand Rapids-area district that is nearly evenly split between the two parties. 

“I had the personal experience of talking with so many women and moms, Christian moms like myself, who had always sort of been raised in the pro-life tradition, you know, we vote to protect the vulnerable, and watching Roe v. Wade get overturned caused so many of them to realize everything what it was protecting and everything that was at stake, and now so many of these same women are still voting to protect the vulnerable, but in a much different way,” Scholten said. 

Dobbs prompted a “complete shift in how we vote to protect the most vulnerable here in West Michigan … it was not just a single election, there has been a foundational shift in the way they view this issue, and they recognize it is still under threat. [Legal abortion] went away once. It could easily go away again,” Scholten said, pointing to anti-abortion efforts to overturn Michigan’s Prop 3, which enshrined abortion rights, as well as Democratic attempts in the U.S. Congress this year to protect IVF that failed due to Republican opposition.

Scholten is expected to easily win her race in Michigan’s 3rd Congressional District against lawyer Paul Hudson, despite Democrats only having the barest of advantages. Polls this month show Slotkin leading her Republican opponent Mike Rogers, a former House member and a one-time Trump critic who was endorsed by him in his primary, by anywhere from two to eight points.

Slotkin agreed that for a lot of Michiganders, protecting abortion rights remains an “animating issue,” including for the type of moderate Republicans — many of them women — who crossed the aisle before to elect candidates like herself, Scholten and Whitmer. It could be what brings lingering undecided voters to Harris’ side in the final days of the race, she said. 

“I think for a lot of women, once you cross the Rubicon, there’s no going back,” Slotkin said. 

“I think I’m feeling better than I was three weeks ago, because … I think at the end of the day, turnout is going to be high, and we’re going to get those independent women, and that’s the recipe for winning in the state,” she said.

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