Alice Lopez left the union hall so disturbed by what she had just heard that she determined she would persuade her daughters to vote even though they had never done so before.
A friend had taken Lopez to a meeting arranged by Latino community leaders in bellwether Saginaw county, Michigan, to discuss Project 2025, the authoritarian plan to impose rightwing control across the entire US government if Donald Trump wins, in an attempt to jolt complacent and indifferent voters into turning out on Tuesday.
Lopez, a health department caseworker, listened with increasing alarm as the impact of the project on workers’ rights, its strategy to wreck public education and public broadcasting, and its plan to turn the justice department into a political weapon against Trump’s opponents was laid out.
“I didn’t know any of this. Everyone should know,” she said.
Lopez said that she is even more determined to keep Trump out of the White House but is concerned that people around her will not turn out to vote because they don’t understand the threat.
“I’m not only worried, I know for a fact that people aren’t voting. I have two daughters that have never voted. I am going to do everything I possibly can to convince them that this year of all years, I’m going to ask them to do it for me, just to do it for me, because that’s two votes right there,” she said.
In another part of Saginaw, Black community leaders were sounding similar warnings at a meeting in a church amid simmering fears that ambivalent and disenchanted voters will stay home in a key county in a battleground state.
Barack Obama won Saginaw county twice. Donald Trump then beat Hillary Clinton by a little more than 1,000 votes in 2016. Four years later, Joe Biden took the county by an even narrower margin of just 303 votes.
But in that election, Trump’s votes went up. He only lost because Democrats who stayed home in 2016 turned out in large numbers to remove Trump from the White House four years later. Kamala Harris may well need the same kind of turnout this year to win.
The Harris campaign sees reasons for optimism. The vice-president’s entry into the race injected a new enthusiasm among some younger voters in Saginaw. The supreme court’s quashing of abortion rights continues to anger many female voters. Then there is the fear factor: there is no shortage of Americans scared for the future of their democracy if Trump returns to the Oval Office.
But will it be enough to push Harris across the line in Saginaw county? Some minority community leaders fear not.
There is a general recognition that Harris has run a much better ground game than Clinton did eight years ago when she was so confident of winning that she barely bothered to turn up in Michigan and then lost the state. But there is concern that Harris has played it too safe on policies, which has reinforced a sense that she will change little if elected, and is too reliant on Trump to undermine his own campaign or scare people into voting against him.
Campaigners are focussed on minority communities in Saginaw because they have traditionally had a lower turnout than more prosperous parts of the county with large white populations, which provide Trump with most of his votes. For that reason, some Harris supporters believe areas such as inner Saginaw city have the greatest potential to find extra votes.
Rosa Morales thought the Democrats weren’t paying enough attention to Latino voters in Saginaw, where she was born and lives.
“Where are the resources? It’s like they take us for granted. I’m worried, it’s so narrow,” she said.
“You’ve heard about the division or disunity among Latinos. That has widened. It’s more palpable this election. Usually we have voted Democrat but that has been eroded.”
Morales saw a union organiser speaking about Project 2025 and arranged a similar talk aimed at the union hall. Only about 30 people attended but the speakers hoped that, as with Lopez, it would jolt them into pressing their families, friends and neighbors to vote.
Maria Echaveste, deputy chief of staff in Bill Clinton’s administration, was at the meeting after traveling from California to whip up the vote in Michigan because she said she “could not sit back” because the constitution and rule of law were at stake.
“We had one term of Trump, we saw what happened. He’s been very clear about what he intends to do if he gets the White House,” she told the audience.
Echaveste also had a warning for people in the Latino community if Trump gets back in and they haven’t voted.
“We lose this, they’re going to be looking for someone to blame, and they’re going to blame Latinos,” she said.
Lopez wasn’t sure whether she would be able to persuade her middle-aged daughters.
“I think they don’t vote because they don’t really believe that anything will change, that anything can change, that our government has gotten so corrupt or controlled that their votes don’t matter. They’re disillusioned. They’re just tired of the whole thing. I don’t know how many people feel that way, but I know I can speak for my two daughters that have not voted,” she said.
A 10-minute drive away, Black community leaders pressed a similar get-out-the-vote message at the Mt Olive Institutional Missionary Baptist church. They too were deeply worried about turnout.
Terry Pruitt, the head of the NAACP’s Saginaw branch, told the audience he was concerned that many Black voters did not appreciate what is at stake in this election and that whoever wins “will be making decisions that will impact us for decades” including with appointments to the supreme court.
“When we stay on the battlefield, when we really fight hard, guess what? Most of the time we win,” he said.
“I’m looking out there, and it’s almost like talking to the choir, because I know what y’all going to do, alright, so the calling to action has to go beyond these doors. Every day, figure out who it is you’re going to talk to, those 10 people, to remind them that we’re in voting season. On election day, those 20 people you go call and say: ‘Friend, relative, co-worker, I voted. I’m asking you to do the same thing.’”
Terry Reed runs a community organisation aimed at keeping young men out of trouble in a city with one of the highest crime rates in Michigan.
“This vote, this upcoming election, is more important than anything we’ve ever imagined. Not only is it about you as grown folks, it’s about these kids,” he told the audience.
“What if that person we need in office missed it by one vote because y’all was at home sitting around and you could have made a difference? Do you want that on you? Do you want that on these upcoming kids?”
The church’s pastor, Joshua Daniels, hosted the meeting. Officially, it was a non-partisan get-out-the-vote initiative but he, like other speakers, made clear he was backing Harris.
“We gotta put her there not because she’s Black, that can’t be our motivation, but because she’s just a better option,” he said. “Tonight we are encouraging everybody to go vote.”
Daniels told the Guardian he organised the meeting because “a lot of people really don’t believe in the value of their vote”.
“Many people in the African American community specifically believe: ‘What is one vote going to matter? My vote won’t count.’ And so we’re trying to mobilise them to let them know your vote does matter, your vote has value, and we need you to exercise that,” he said.
Heidi Wiggins, who is running for Saginaw city council and will vote for Harris, was in the audience at the church. She is worried about apathy and that “people might assume someone else is going to take care of it”.
“People are disenfranchised. They don’t believe anything works. They don’t believe anyone’s going to hear their voice or changes are going to be made. So to get through that is very difficult when people have to work two or three jobs, when there’s three or four generations living in one house, and they’re trying to figure out how they’re gonna buy a gallon of milk,” she said.
“Their focus is survival but we have to remind people that it does matter what they do. They can change what’s going on and what’s happening to them if they do make their voice heard.”
But plenty of people in Saginaw are sceptical of that claim after concluding that it makes little difference to their lives whether a Democrat or Republican is in the White House.
Community leaders say there are plenty of legitimate criticisms to be made of the failures of successive Democratic administrations to improve the lives of those with the least or to reform a system heavily weighted in favor of the wealthy and corporations. But for now, they say, the focus should be on defeating Trump.
Echaveste also implicitly criticised the Democratic party for failing to connect with Latinos and minority communities in places.
“I’m going to spend the rest of my life being the squeakiest wheel to the political parties about the fact that they don’t invest in our community,” she said.
“We’ve got a generation who is despondent, who says: ‘Look, what’s the point?’ I got a 23-year-old daughter who I’m forcing to vote. But she’s like, is Harris really going to be a difference? And the only reason she’s going to vote is she knows Trump is going to be worse.”
