Cole Thompson isn’t voting this year – he can’t because he’s only 17. But on a frigid and rainy afternoon last week, he and about half a dozen of his classmates at University of Detroit Jesuit high school fanned out in the blocks around their school to leave flyers on door handles encouraging people to vote.
“Last election, we didn’t put forth our effort and we didn’t vote and it kind of backfired on us because we wound up being a Trump state rather than a Hillary state and we should have been a Hillary state,” Thompson said. “It doesn’t matter whether or not I can vote. It’s still important to get people who can vote to vote.”
Michigan, with 16 electoral college votes, is one of a handful of states that will determine the outcome of this year’s presidential election. Detroit, the state’s largest city, will play a big role in determining that outcome. There’s little doubt that Joe Biden will win the vote in the Democratic-friendly city, but his margin of victory could shape whether he will carry the state. In 2016, turnout fell in Detroit; Hillary Clinton got about 47,000 fewer votes in the city than Barack Obama did in 2012. Donald Trump won Michigan by just 10,704 votes.
Memories of that decline have helped fuel an aggressive blitz to turn out voters in the city in the final weeks of the campaign, even as Covid-19 has made in-person canvassing harder. That effort includes not just encouraging Detroit residents to vote but also explaining how; Michigan has dramatically expanded its voting laws since 2016, including allowing for no-excuse absentee and early voting.
“I know people I’m speaking to now in 2020 that haven’t voted in eight years in a presidential campaign. They are like, ‘Thank you for telling me where to go, thank you for coming to talk to me,’” the congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who represents portions of Detroit and the suburbs, told the Guardian. “There’s an awakening that I haven’t seen before.”
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
