The Capitol Theater in downtown Flint, Michigan, reopened in 2017 after 20 years of lying vacant and was supposed to be a symbol of the city’s rebirth after decades of decline. The auto industry’s struggles over these years led to high crime, municipal financial emergencies, and, as if things couldn’t get worse, lead contaminated the city’s water. From a height of 200,000 people in 1960, Flint’s population has dropped 60 percent and today hovers around 80,000. That’s one of the biggest drops in population of any American city.
Downtown, the nearly identical tents of the Harris/Walz and Trump/Vance campaigns stood separated by several hundred feet on one of the main streets, but almost no one collected posters or bumper stickers from either forlorn camp on a balmy but heavily overcast day. So Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance’s arrival at the storied venue in the critical swing state of Michigan was both unsurprising and surreal: Republicans have become the preferred party for white working-class men without college degrees, even as Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy has only exacerbated economic inequality and Republican opposition to Obamacare continues to stymie the prospects of the working class.
Several hundred people bedecked with the usual MAGA hats and Trump T-shirts filled up only two-thirds of the main orchestra seating area of the theater, and the entire balcony was roped off and inaccessible. Popular pop and country songs blaring over the sound system were punctuated by an Italian opera aria, and finally the warm-up speakers, all local politicians, made their dutiful speeches.
Alan Chin
Lisa McClain, the Republican congresswoman representing Michigan’s 9th District in Washington, speaking to a reporter before the event started, said that she was “cautiously optimistic, because the Trump campaign is bringing coalitions together: Arabs, African- Americans, Jews—traditional Democratic communities.” She agreed that she could work with Democrats on issues like protecting the Great Lakes and on veterans’ affairs. But once up on stage, her reasonable-sounding language was replaced by the consistent mispronunciation of Kamala Harris’s first name and exaggerations of the scale of recent Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) layoffs at their factory in nearby Warren, Michigan.
Similarly, once Vance appeared, he made the claim that “electric vehicle mandates would destroy 117,000 jobs,” which would be replaced by “slaves in Communist China.” He concluded with “you ought to be able to drive whatever the hell car you want to, because this is America!” The small crowd roared with applause. But the truth of such claims is far from established, with differing interpretations of which jobs are counted in what ways for differing technologies, and that researchers at the University of Michigan and at Carnegie Mellon University found that in some cases electric vehicle plants actually employed more workers than traditional factories.
But the emotional core of the Trump/Vance argument this campaign season has been over immigration. With careful lawyerly logic, he decried Mexican drug cartels and their criminal members, an argument few people of any political persuasion would have much argument against. He said, “stop this poison coming into Michigan communities”—but then, as he continued and expanded his speech against immigrants, including the withholding of compassion, which he said “belongs to the American people and not the people who shouldn’t be here”—he repeated the word “poison” five times. The dog whistle was audible across the aisle.
It’s as if Vance, McClain, and other Republican politicians want to present themselves as a mirror to the American public, claiming working class bona fides. But it’s a distorted mirror in which these credentials serve not as a springboard for empathy, as Democrats often say they embrace. Instead, it’s actually an aspirational backdrop for rejecting the working class and replacing logic. Passion and faith should be trusted more than analysis and facts. The message is simple. And for some, it’s convincing.
Carol Opalewski, a 25-year-old unemployed mother of a 2-month-old son in the middle of a divorce, drove half an hour from her home in Mount Morris to see Vance. She said that she was definitely voting for former President Donald Trump, and explained afterwards, “I loved it. Republicans are just the facts. They don’t have to have famous people show up, like Beyonce.”
In a city like Flint, with a third of its population living below the poverty line, it made a lot of sense, however contested some of the details, that Vance and other Republicans would talk about the need for more jobs and the perceived threat to these jobs from immigrants. But as Vance himself has said, “The people on the left, I would say, whose politics I’m open to—it’s the Bernie Bros.”
Yet neither he nor any of his surrogates on the Capitol Theater stage today explained why, then, they aren’t progressive Democrats like Bernie Sanders. In an election so fraught with a Republican Party united around Trump’s continuing denial of the 2020 results and his defense of the insurrectionist rioters of Jan. 6, it’s a question that might be answerable only in far more self-serving and self-aggrandizing terms.
Alan Chin is a writer and photographer who has worked all over the world, including Afghanistan, China, Iraq, and may others. He has also covered several U.S. elections.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
