Zack Stanton is digital editor of Politico Magazine and a native of Macomb County, Michigan. Follow him on Twitter @zackstanton.

On Tuesday night, with a video filmed in a Detroit parking garage, the rapper Eminem took aim at another white man with a penchant for saying the outrageous—one who does so without Em’s verbal dexterity or spitfire precision, and who does it from the Oval Office.

“We better give Obama props, because what we got in [office] now is a kamikaze that will probably cause a nuclear holocaust,” Eminem freestyled in the clip. “He’s going to lower our taxes. Then who’s going to pay for his extravagant trips back and forth with his family to his golf resorts and his mansions? Same shit that he tormented Hillary for and he slandered then does it more.”


Then, turning his attentions to his listeners, Em issued an ultimatum: “Any fan of mine who’s a supporter of his, I’m drawing in the sand a line: You’re either for or against. And if you can’t decide who you like more and you split on who you should stand beside, I’ll do it for you with this: Fuck you,” he said, middle finger raised. “The rest of America, stand up: We love our military and we love our country, but we fucking hate Trump.”

Eminem’s left-leaning politics aren’t exactly a revelation (he released an anti-Bush song, “Mosh,” two weeks before the 2004 election), but his willing entry into the political fray is. His expletive-laden attack on Trump drew immediate parallels to Kid Rock, another foul-mouthed musician, whose support for the president and hints at a Senate run in Michigan have become an object of national fascination. In the celebrity-powered endless spectacle that is American politics in 2017, hip-hop fans called for a throwdown between the two aging white rappers—or, less seriously, for Eminem to enter the Senate race against Kid Rock.

But maybe none of this should have been too surprising. Eminem is, after all, a product of Michigan’s Macomb County, among the most politically charged places in America—a place studied and obsessed over by generations of pundits, pollsters and political scientists. And if fellow Macomb native Kid Rock can flirt with a political career, then Eminem can at the very least return volley in the war for the soul of angry white men, standing athwart history, middle finger in the air.



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For more than 30 years, suburban Macomb County has been something of a de facto national capital of white middle America, a near-mythical political wonderland just north of Detroit that gave birth to the “Reagan Democrat” movement. In 1960, Macomb was the most heavily Democratic suburban county in the United States; by 1980, it had become the most heavily Republican. What happened in between was a mix of white flight away from Detroit, fears of cross-district bussing, and angst over a sense of a declining quality of life as the auto industry imploded. Many of those voters had traditionally supported Democrats, but as time marched on, they saw their personal cultural conservatism unwelcome in a party they increasingly saw as the natural home of liberals and minorities, both of whom threatened their status. They found common cause in the campaign of Ronald Reagan and, before him, pro-segregation demagogue George Wallace (who, in 1972, won Macomb’s Democratic presidential primary with more votes than McGovern mustered in the general election).

Last year, Macomb County went for Trump overwhelmingly, delivering more votes for him than for any other presidential candidate in the history of the county. His margin of victory in Macomb was 48,348; statewide, he won Michigan by only 10,704 votes. In Macomb, Hillary Clinton received 31,699 fewer votes than Barack Obama had in 2012; if her drop-off had been only two-thirds that size, she would have won Michigan.

Predictably, those statistics meant that as soon as the election was called, the national media began its quadrennial migration north of 8 Mile, the road marking Detroit’s city limits, to see what the hell had happened. “How did [Trump] flip those states?,” asked MSNBC host Steve Kornacki on November 9. “I think you can tell the entire story [of this election] in one county—one county in Michigan,” he said, zeroing in on Macomb. The Cook Political Report noted that just three counties—Macomb in Michigan, York in Pennsylvania, and Waukesha in Wisconsin—were responsible for Trump's Electoral College win: “If those three counties had cast zero votes, Trump would have lost all three states and the election.” On November 19, NBC’s Chuck Todd visited this “epicenter of the Obama-to-Trump phenomenon,” setting up shop at a popular brewery in Warren, the county’s largest city, to host a Meet the Press panel with a small clutch of voters. The next week, Brandon Stanton, the photographer behind the superviral “Humans of New York” Facebook page, came and devoted an entire week to poignant portraits of the “Humans of Macomb County.” A few weeks after that, the Guardian reported that Trump voters in Macomb were “actively choosing to ignore the news they don’t want to hear.” Come January, CNN’s Jessica Schneider visited, proclaiming that “Macomb County really represent[s] the epicenter of the type of place that Democrats need to regain their footing.” The New York Times sent Susan Chira to find women who voted for Trump. ABC News’ Terry Moran came too, visiting a bowling alley, where he interviewed a local magician and glided onto a roller-skating rink—Macomb as a cultural time capsule.

Before he was a legend in his field, pollster Stanley Greenberg made his name examining the voters here in 1985, when local Democrats brought in the Yale professor to study what was happening and why they were losing. “Winning Macomb represents a kind of mastery of our history,” Greenberg later wrote in his 1995 book, Middle Class Dreams. “These middle-class suburbanites are conscious of being caught in the middle, doubly betrayed by those who would govern from the bottom up and by those who would govern from the top down. … What they really want is a new political contract—and the freedom to dream the American dream again.” It’s not hard to draw a line from these insights to the rise of the Clinton-era centrism Greenberg helped shape (he was the chief pollster on Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign) and the basis of much of the past three decades of Democrats’ intraparty squabbles.

If you’re a national politician who wants to make a sweeping appeal to white middle America, Macomb is where you go. It’s where Hillary Clinton unveiled her jobs and economic plan in August 2016; where Donald Trump came two days before the general election to predict he would win Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio and Florida and promise: “We will stop the jobs from leaving your state.” It’s where Richard Nixon came for one of his first general election stops of the ’72 campaign, offering voters a jeremiad against the evils of cross-district busing; where President Barack Obama came to announce his community college plan in 2009; where Michael Dukakis tried (and failed) to look presidential in an army tank in 1988; where, that same year, Ronald Reagan debuted his famous line about the Democrats’ leftward lurch: “I didn’t leave my party; my party left me.” Four years later, it was where Bill Clinton had what his campaign touted as a sort of reverse Sistah Souljah moment, imploring his suburban white audience to “give up” their prejudices against people of color: “Somebody has got to come back to the so-called Reagan Democratic areas and say: ‘Look, I’ll give you your values back, I’ll restore the economic leadership, I’ll help you build the middle class back. But you’ve got to say: ‘OK, let’s do it with everybody in this country.’ … It’s amazing how, when your life works, you don’t feel those resentments.”

In this, Macomb’s two most famous sons offer a different example of what has played out across the country over the 25 years since Clinton’s speech. Both Eminem and Kid Rock are extraordinarily wealthy white men, with lives that work. Yet both have seemingly bottomless wells of resentment, even if it isn’t directed at people of color. What differs is their politics and what they choose to be angry about. Eminem and Kid Rock are avatars of Macomb’s north and south poles, highly charged and near perfect opposites.

Born in 1972, Marshall Mathers (a.k.a. Eminem) grew up in southern Macomb in the working-class Democratic suburbs of Warren and East Detroit (known since 1992 known as Eastpointe, after its citizens wanted to disassociate from Detroit and reach for the glitter of the tony Grosse Pointe elite). He had a famously difficult childhood, raised by a single mother who has been a reliable target of Eminem’s during his rap career (on 2002’s “Cleaning Out My Closet,” he alleged that she abused drugs and had Munchausen by proxy syndrome, though in 2014’s “Headlights,” he apologized to his mother for that song’s vitriol). Outside his family, favorite targets of Eminem’s include those would-be censors trying to silence him (e.g. Lynne Cheney, Tipper Gore, the Federal Communications Commission), listeners who don’t respect him, and, of course, himself (he has a habit of bashing his own past work).

Bob Ritchie (a.k.a. Kid Rock) had an entirely different early life. He was born in 1971, the third of four children in a well-to-do family in the placid northern Macomb small town of Romeo, a Republican redoubt known locally for its annual peach festival and nearby u-pick apple orchards. His father owned Crest Lincoln-Mercury, a successful car dealership, which gave the Ritchies a life of considerable plenty: Though as Kid Rock he’d adopt the persona of a trailer park pimp, young Bobby grew up in 18-room estate with a five-car garage, horse barn, tennis court and swimming pool. As an artist, Kid Rock didn’t have Mathers’ wellspring of childhood angst to draw upon; his music is mostly about partying.

There are, in a sense, two Macombs. The county is bisected at the waist by M-59 (roughly speaking, 20 Mile Road). To the north are the traditionally Republican areas of the county (“the sticks,” as Kid Rock called it in “Trucker Anthem”), a largely rural area dotted with small towns, which has undergone massive growth under the last two decades thanks to an influx of sprawling upper middle-class subdivisions. The southern half of the county is its traditionally Democratic portion—denser, poorer, working-class, and, by and large, built in the mid-20th century and heavily reliant on manufacturing (“Garbage bag for one of the windows/Spray painted doors with the flames on ’em/Michigan plates and my name’s on ’em,” Eminem raps before name-checking southern Macomb’s largest city on his track “White Trash Party”). But these old-growth suburbs have been rejuvenated in recent years as Detroit has continued to hemorrhage residents; they have become increasingly diverse and home to growing numbers of blacks and Latinos, as well as a robust influx of immigrants from the Middle East. (“People aren’t dealing with the complexities of race theoretically,” a former Macomb elected official told me earlier this year. “In the south end of the county, older people are staying in their homes while the community changes around them.”)

What ties both halves together is a sense of something once possessed and now lost, though what that something is depends on where you stand. For a certain generation of white suburbanites, it means the loss of the idealized Detroit of their youth—or maybe one they never even knew, but which has been passed down through the oral tradition by their family elders. For others, it means the lost sense of economic security that used to come with being a white suburbanite with a high-school diploma—there’s no longer the assurance that you can work for the same auto manufacturer for decades; you can’t afford a boat or the little place up north like your parents had; and you can’t even assume that the Big Three automakers are financially sound. And, for at least a segment of Macomb, economic anxiety (which is real, despite the snickering of the blue-check commentariat on Twitter) is inextricably tied in with racial animosity. (“Not being black was what constituted being middle class,” Stan Greenberg once wrote of the opinions of a Macomb focus group he led in the 1980s. “Not living with blacks was what made a neighborhood a decent place to live.”)

It’s this divide within Macomb that explains how Eminem and Kid Rock have so ably drawn from the same endless well of grievance with such vastly different expressions of what they’re resentful about.

When Kid Rock gets angry, it’s mostly at what he sees as threats to his culture and way of life. Sometimes, this takes the form of cultural nostalgia. In “Drinking Beer with Dad,” he laments that “this whole world is heading down the drain/There’s no God in schools/totin’ guns is the latest fad/A little discipline would sure be nice/A little lesson in wrong and right/Maybe it’s time, young man, to have a beer with dad.” In “Amen,” he asks, “How can we seek salvation when our nation’s race relations/Got me feeling guilty of being white?” Other times, he’s focused on running down anyone who stands in his way. (From “I Am the Bullgod”: “You can’t cap with the master, son/So sit your ass down, ’fore I blast you one.”)

Eminem lashes out at those who have hurt him in the past, would threaten his success, or undermine what he’s accomplished for himself. Kid Rock sings about things that threaten his culture and way of life. Fittingly, those interests converged when Eminem guested on a track from Kid Rock’s “Devil Without a Cause.” Its name? “Fuck Off.”

One is a Democrat; the other, a Republican. One loathes Trump and gives his fans the “him or me” ultimatum; the other sells Trump merchandise at his concerts and continues to mull a run for U.S. Senate. But both men are products of the county that bore them.

“I never would’ve dreamed in a million years I’d see so many motherfuckin’ people who feel like me, who share the same views and the same exact beliefs,” Eminem rapped on 2002’s “White America.” “[I am] the ringleader of this circus … sent to lead the march right up to the steps of Congress, and piss on the lawns of the White House.”