Appearing together in the home town of Michigan’s largest university, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz sought on Tuesday to burnish their credentials with young voters and soothe Democrats who had grown nervous as the apparent deadlock in the race to keep Donald Trump out of the White House has dragged on.
Much of the rhetoric at the evening rally in Ann Arbor, a city synonymous with the University of Michigan and its nearly 53,000-strong student body, was aimed squarely at the first-time voters who have traditionally been a treasure trove of votes for Democrats. Speaking at a city park just south of the university campus, Harris offered comfort to a generation where many view their challenges as existential.
“I want to speak specifically to all the young leaders, all the students who are here today,” Harris said. “So, I love your generation. I really do, and one of the things about it is you are rightly impatient for change.”
“You are impatient for change because, look, you have only known the climate crisis and are leading, then, the charge to protect our planet and our future. You, you young leaders who grew up with active shooter drills and are fighting, then, to keep our schools safe. You, who now know fewer rights than your mothers and grandmothers, are standing up for reproductive freedom, and for you, then, I know that these issues that are at stake, they are not theoretical. This is not political for you. It is your lived experience, and I see you, and I see your power.”
It was a similar tone taken by Maggie Rogers, the 30-year-old Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter who was the rally’s warm-up act and one of several music stars the Harris campaign has booked for their recent events.
“As I’m standing here with you today, I can’t ignore the headlines that I’ve been seeing on my phone any longer. I have to face the reality of what’s happening in the next eight days, and to tell you the complete truth, it’s terrifying,” Rogers said.
“These are such wild and unprecedented times, and the energy feels so high, and the future feels so uncertain, and I don’t always know what to do with that feeling, but there is something to me that is greater than fear, and that’s action, all of you being here today, right now, and voting – voting is the key to the future.”
Early voting began in Michigan two days ago, and Walz and Harris both encouraged young people to get in their ballots. Whether they do could prove crucial to securing Democratic victories up and down the ballot in a swing state where polls show no clear frontrunner.
Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which make up the trio of Democratic states in the “Blue Wall” along the Great Lakes, have been counted on for decades by Democrats to get their candidates into the White House.
That confidence was blown apart in 2016, when Trump narrowly won all three in his upset victory over Hillary Clinton, only for Biden to reclaim them, again narrowly, four years later. The margins this year are expected to be slim – polls have shown Harris and Trump tied or barely ahead in each state, just as they have for the four battleground states in the Sun belt.
Walz acknowledged the tension, telling the crowd: “If you’re feeling any of that anxiety, any of that nervousness, any of that worry, we’ve got the solution for you: get out there and vote for Kamala Harris. I know, I did it last Wednesday with my son, who voted the first time, and it works.”
Among the Blue Wall states, Michigan gave Biden his largest margin of victory in 2020, and its governor, Gretchen Whitmer, is among the rising stars in the party who was briefly viewed a successor to him until Harris stepped in. But Biden’s support for Israel after the 7 October attack and its subsequent invasions of Gaza and Lebanon have alienated the large community of Arab Americans and Muslims around Detroit, who otherwise were expected to support Democrats.
Harris has said little different from Biden about the conflict, noting that she supports a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of hostages taken by Hamas on 7 October. But her campaign found time at the Ann Arbor rally to hear from Assad Turfe, the highest-ranking Arab American official in the Detroit area, who said his community should back the vice-president.
“Vice-President Harris has called for a ceasefire that brings the hostages home, allows displaced families in Lebanon to return to their villages and gives the Palestinian people the dignity and self-determination they deserve. When she wins, she will continue doing everything she can to bring relief to innocent civilians and secure lasting peace for the region,” said Turfe, the Wayne county deputy county executive.
“We know what Trump thinks of Muslims and Arab Americans and how he treats us,” Turfe continued, mentioning the ban Trump imposed during his presidency on people entering the United States from Muslim-majority countries, and his recent comments in support of Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
“If he gets another chance to occupy the Oval Office, he will only bring more chaos and more suffering.”
However, it wasn’t enough to prevent about a dozen people, mostly young, from interrupting Harris’s speech, shouting “stop the genocide” and waving placards that read “abandon Harris”. The vice-president, who has experienced this repeatedly on the campaign trail, responded as she often does: “We all want this war to end as soon as possible and get the hostages out, and I will do everything in my power to make it so.”
The war in Gaza is an issue that matters to Haley Litman, a University of Michigan psychology major who attended Harris’s speech. But she said withholding her vote from the vice-president would solve nothing.
“There’s definitely been protesting on both sides, and it is an issue for me. However, I think choosing Kamala provides us with an opportunity to address the issue. If we were to elect Trump, I feel like there is no chance of addressing that issue,” she said.
