In Michigan, Trump voters still have the president's back

Todd Spangler | Detroit Free Press

Show Caption Hide Caption Michigan's Trump voters still have the president's back Despite stumbles and poor job ratings, President Donald Trump can still count on support from Michigan backers.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump may be dogged by record-low approval numbers, but his core supporters in Michigan still seem to love him.

Four months after the president was inaugurated, those who voted for him in the last election seem little affected by questions over his campaign’s involvement in attempts by Russia to sway the election, a series of missteps on health care reform, a controversial travel order and more.

“He causes a lot of his own problems but I don’t think he’s getting a fair shake,” said Randall Shelton, a 64-year-old independent in Allen Park and self-described “angry white voter” who backed Trump in last year’s election. “As he said, it’s a witch-hunt. He never got a fair shake right from the get-go.”

It’s an opinion that’s easy to find among Trump supporters: He is trying to do what he promised. It’s Democratic obstructionism, biased media reports and, in some cases, even Republican intransigence — mixed with the president’s own idiosyncrasies and inexperience — that is hurting him.

And they seem willing to give him a pass.

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"He’s here to clean up this country and keep us safe and make us financially stable,” said 77-year-old Mary Hasse in Three Rivers, south of Kalamazoo. “He's the president of the United States. He should be able to say whatever he wants to say. …. Leave the man alone, let him do his job.”“

While Trump’s job approval ratings nationally have hovered in the high-30s or low-40s, much of that is based on an almost complete lack of Democratic support and self-described independent voters giving the new president poor grades as well. More than 80% of Republicans — according to a recent Gallup tracking poll — have been giving him positive ratings.

A poll done by EPIC-MRA of Lansing of likely Michigan voters last week shows results consistent with the trend: Thirty-five percent gave Trump a positive job rating, down from 39% in February. Those giving him negative marks went from 56% to 61%.

Republican support wasn't as strong as it is nationally — 67% gave him favorable ratings compared with 29% that said he's doing only fair or poorly — but it's still a clear majority of GOP voters. Ninety-two percent of Michigan Democrats gave him a negative job rating, as did 54% of independents. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

"From all the polling I’ve seen, the Trump voters are pretty happy,” said Lansing political consultant John Truscott. “There’s no surprise here. He’s doing exactly what he said he would do during the campaign.”

In recent weeks, the bad news for Trump has piled up: His firing of FBI Director James Comey — with the agency in the middle of investigating Russian efforts to sway the election and potential links with members of the Trump campaign — was widely criticized, especially after reports that he suggested Comey drop a probe into Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

Meanwhile, Trump’s plan to largely ban travel from seven majority Muslim nations continues to be held up over questions of its constitutionality. And while the U.S. House was finally able to approve Trump-supported legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act — a.k.a. Obamacare — the new plan suffers from such low popularity it has been all but shelved as the U.S. Senate takes up the issue.

On Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office said the replacement will save $119 billion over 10 years, but increase the number of uninsured Americans by 23 million, most of them lower-income Medicaid recipients.

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Tax reform is stalled. An administration budget plan that eliminates funding for Great Lakes restoration and cuts social safety net spending has been declared all but dead-on-arrival in Congress. And Trump’s approval ratings are historically low compared with other presidents four months into their first term.

But for all of that, voters like Shelton — who helped Trump win the White House by delivering Michigan for a Republican for the first time since 1988 — still have his back, believing that the new president, in his rough, unpolished way, is attempting to deliver on campaign promises in the face of Democratic obstructionism, media bias and Trump’s own self-destructive habit of venting his anger on Twitter.

Examples are numerous but one is when, after firing Comey, Trump wrote that the FBI director “better hope there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press” — a comment that raised recollections of Watergate and questions of whether Trump was taping White House discussions.

“If he’d stay off that stupid Twitter and keep his mouth shut and do his job … I think he’d get a portion of these people (who are criticizing him) to fall behind him,” said Shelton, a former General Motors worker who has been on disability with a knee injury since 2002. “(But) I’m tired of hearing people say, ‘He’s not my president.’ Oh, yes he is. I didn’t like having Obama for eight years but he was my president, too.”

“He gets blocked every turn he takes,” continued Shelton, railing against the Washington establishment, Democrat and Republican alike. “They didn’t want Trump. They want somebody they can control.”

Rust Belt delivers

Trump pulled off his surprise victory last year with a message of economic populism and protectionism that resonated across the Rust Belt, turning Michigan and Pennsylvania for a Republican for the first time in 28 years, Wisconsin for the first time in 32. Together, those states — each of which turned on a razor-slim margin —delivered the election for Trump despite his losing the nationwide popular vote to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes out of about 137 million cast.

The victory sent shock waves through the Democratic establishment — reinvigorating protest movements, filling congressional town hall meetings with angry constituents, and sparking a hugely successful series of women’s marches after the inauguration in January.

As Trump’s critics began to a coalesce, his approval numbers, never high, started sinking on news of the travel order and plans to replace the Affordable Care Act. But his core supporters began to argue that on health care, on a Southern border wall to crack down on illegal immigration, on cutting taxes and stopping immigrants and refugees from majority Muslim countries from entering the U.S., and on proposals to renegotiate or tear up trade deals like NAFTA, Trump was trying to keep promises to them.“

Truscott said no one should take Trump’s numbers now as being too predictive of the future, recalling that when he worked for former Gov. John Engler, in the first year of his first term, Engler’s chances of re-election against a generic opponent slipped to 17%. He went on to win two more terms.

“It’s possible to recover. You do the right things and you follow the right policies, the public will eventually come along,” he said. “What I’m seeing is (Trump supporters) are not thrilled with him on the style points but they kind of like the policies.”

Some support waivers

Not everyone is convinced of the argument that support for Trump — even among those who backed him during the election — is as strong as recent media reports make it seem.

Last week, under the headline, “Donald Trump’s Base is Shrinking,” FiveThirtyEight.com’s Nate Silver — a Michigan native who has become famous analyzing data and polls to identify trends — said the polling evidence suggests the number of Americans who strongly approve of Trump has dipped from about 30% in February to about 22% now, even as the number of those who strongly disapprove has increased.

The EPIC-MRA poll from last week bolstered Sliver's argument in Michigan as well, showing that the number of people who believe Trump to be doing an excellent job fell from 18% in February to 12%. The percentage of likely voters in Michigan with a very favorable opinion of him dipped from 22% to 17% over the same time period.

But the anecdotal evidence supports the idea that Trump supporters, having voted for him — in many cases showing enormous support, even in some places won an election or two before by Barack Obama —aren’t ready to give up on him yet.

Take Macomb County, for instance.

Trump’s election last year saw raw voter numbers for Hillary Clinton in Democratic strongholds like Detroit and Flint fall off compared with those for Obama while Trump — a Republican with no previous election experience — ran up support in old manufacturing hubs along the I-75 corridor and through the Thumb.

Nowhere was that level of support more evident or important than in Macomb County — where white, working-class voters embraced Trump’s message of forcing automakers and other manufacturers to keep jobs in Michigan. Trump won Macomb — a county won by Obama by 4 percentage points in 2012 and 8 percentage points in 2008 — by 12%, a nearly 50,000-vote margin.

So how do they like him now? Just fine, says Brian Pannebecker, a 57-year-old hourly production worker at Ford’s Sterling Heights plant who played a key role in pushing Trump’s campaign on the idea of a big rally at Freedom Hill Amphitheatre in Macomb County the weekend before the election.

Pannebecker, who lives in Harrison Township, said Trump may be “his own worst enemy” with his Twitter rants and the timing of the Comey firing. But he believes media bias toward Trump is to blame for much of the president’s woes.

He said the controversy over Comey’s firing, for instance, wouldn’t have happened “had the media not tried to insinuate and get people to believe Donald Trump and upper (level) people in his campaign were coordinating and colluding with the Russians.”

Comey told Congress the FBI was looking into contacts that members of Trump’s campaign team had with Russian officials as well as any evidence of collusion but so far there has been no publicly released evidence of links between Russian efforts to impact the election and Trump.

Pannebecker argues that the media is mistreating Trump by suggesting through the tenor of its coverage that “this alleged Russia-Trump connection … is the point of the investigation (when) it’s not.” As for the overall Russia investigation, he said he thinks “it’s all laughable” but should play out.

“The support (among Republicans) is rock solid,” said John Wolfsberger, chairman of the Macomb County Republican Party. “I think people are tuning out (the critics). I don’t think people are finding it at all credible. … If anything, it’s making them angry.”

Of course, in politics, the interpretation of the news is always in the eye of the beholder.

The New York Times first reported the existence of a memo written by Comey that seemed to indicate that Trump was urging him to drop the investigation into his security adviser, Flynn, after he was fired for misrepresenting meetings he had with the Russian ambassador to the vice president. In the meeting, Trump, according to the memo, apparently said to Comey, “I hope you can let this go now.”

To Wolfsberger and others, that sounds entirely innocent.

“I would interpret that as Trump feeling there was nothing to investigate. …. In any event, he was leaving it to Comey to decide whether or not to end the investigation. I don’t see anything in that phrase that looks remotely like applying pressure.”

Still on their side

South of Owendale, up in the Thumb, Joe Salcido — he’ll only say he’s retired and over the age of 65 — has an easy explanation of why Trump resonated the way he did with voters in that part of the state.

“You know, the guy is thinking in the same terms as the everyday, common working guy,” Salcido said. “He talks the same way, he says the same things. … He’s basically mimicking the way that we feel.”

“When we get the perspective (of commentators) on TV, it’s like a whole different world,” he said. “It’s, ‘what are they talking about?’ It’s not like that here.”

Trump flipped a dozen counties won by Obama four years before. In 17 counties across the state — including Huron, where Salcido lives, Trump improved on Mitt Romney’s showing against Obama in 2012 by 10% or better, even as Clinton’s percentages were underperforming Obama’s in all but one county — Washtenaw — in the state.

Salcido said that level of support — both for Obama in 2008 and for Trump in 2016 —was about change. Obama, he said, “talked about hope, he talked about change,” and then people from rural areas — including a lot who had voted for him — felt tagged as racists when they opposed some of his policies.

And now he says he feels like a bias that was hidden before — especially in the media, but also among Democrats who talk about being nonpartisan — seems out in the open to him.

If Trump’s approval numbers keep sinking, it could threaten his party’s majorities in Congress and leach over into state races, including the race for governor in Michigan next year. As partisanship continues to grip Washington — even with Republicans in control — it raises doubts about Trump’s ability to govern, that could doom his agenda and ultimately hurt him, even with supporters.

Business leaders have already suggested they are less interested in partisan games than results — such as getting tax reform passed in short order, something that is less and less likely to happen this year.

“I think there’s no doubt that we’re living in an era of extreme partisanship and Republicans will stick with Trump no matter what,” said Susan Demas, editor and publisher of Inside Michigan Politics. “Clearly, he hasn’t made any headway with Democrats.” But she believes it’s likely that as Trump and Republicans continue to press their agenda — and especially plans to replace health care, which covers about a million people in the state — it will eat away at what independent support he has as well.

Expect the most loyal Trump supporters to keep defending him, though.

“Nobody's giving him a chance other than the people who actually like him,” said MaryAnn Simon, an 82-year-old Trump supporter in Harrison Township. “I think he's a good man and he's accomplishing a lot but nobody seems to care. He always gets the bad end of the deal.”

Contact Todd Spangler: 703-854-8947 or tspangler@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter at @tsspangler.

