In battleground Michigan, shifting allegiances are upending both parties’ once-reliable voting blocs

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Before the votes had been counted in Michigan, political realignments that will shape the result were evident around the battleground state. One of the biggest of those, and the biggest focal point of Kamala Harris’s campaign here, was the Democrats’ growing dominance among college-educated women, and to a lesser extent college-educated men. It’s been particularly pronounced in the suburbs surrounding Detroit, including affluent communities once reliably Republican.

Democrats concede that their momentum with those voters stalled earlier this year, when Joe Biden was still running. But that changed with Ms. Harris’s entry into the race, combined with the Democrats’ strong focus on reproductive rights as a campaign message. By election day, it was taken as a given by strategists from both parties that she would win once-competitive Oakland County (one of the biggest suburban counties in the country) by a large margin.

Another shift that seemingly continued in this campaign, however, was (predominantly white) men without college degrees who used to reliably vote Democrat, have strongly turned toward Donald Trump’s version of the Republicans. That includes many members of organized labour in the manufacturing-heavy state, even when their union leaders (as in the case of the United Auto Workers) endorsed Ms. Harris. And it was expected to give Mr. Trump the edge in Macomb County, which neighbours Oakland County, and used to be blue.

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Another, more surprising – if also possibly more temporary – shift away from the Democrats came from the state’s large Arab-American population. Mr. Trump seized on anger over the Biden administration’s handling of the Gaza war to reach out to those communities, and despite his history (including attempting to ban Muslim immigrants), it seemed to work. The local Democratic club president in Dearborn, home to the country’s largest Arab-American community, predicted no more than half those voters would go his party’s way; he expected the rest to go to Mr. Trump or third-party candidate Jill Stein, or only vote in down-ballot races.

Some voting blocs remained more solid. One of them is rural voters, mostly in Western Michigan, who make up the most reliable part of the Republicans’ base. Another of those blocks is Black residents of Detroit and other urban centres. Democrats were not only confident that those voters had remained overwhelmingly with them, despite Mr. Trump’s attempts to make inroads, but also optimistic that turnout had returned to levels seen when Barack Obama was their candidate in 2008.