To win next week’s Detroit mayoral election, challenger Coleman Young II has invested heavily in a narrative about the gaps in the city’s recovery.

Poor Detroiters aren’t feeling it, he has said over and over, and are being left behind in the “new” Detroit that’s attracting investors and residents.

You can easily see the truth in what Young has been saying, in the narratives around the many unimproved Detroit neighborhoods, the city’s sky-high poverty rate and persistent un- and under-employment.

But is that message resonating? And is it landing with weight among the poor Detroiters Young hopes will help get him elected?

A precinct-by-precinct Free Press analysis of Aug. 8 primary election results says no.

There was no statistical correlation between Detroit’s high-poverty areas and support for Young in the primary, which drew 14% of the city's registered voters.

Young did not carry the majority of precincts in any of the city’s notoriously poor areas, such as the 48205 ZIP code on the east side or 48204 on the central west side. And he posted among his worst showing in 48209 and 48217, areas of deep southwest Detroit that are hard hit with residential and industrial abandonment.

In the city’s poorest precinct, near Chandler Park on the east side where 83% of the people live in poverty, Young got 26 votes, while Duggan got 25.

In the second-poorest precinct, on the west side in the Dexter-Linwood neighborhood, which has a poverty rate of 77%, Duggan got 32 votes while Young got 23.

And in the Oakwood Heights neighborhood in southwest Detroit, where 70% of the residents live in poverty, Duggan got 26 votes, or 79% of the ballots cast, while Young got 6 votes, or just 18%.

Those are all among the prime areas described by Young’s message. If he is not connecting with those voters, it’s hard to see how Young has a chance of winning.

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No pattern of support

Overall, Young’s performance in the primary was abysmal; he won just 27% of the vote to Mayor Mike Duggan’s 68% -- a difference of 41 percentage points.

But the absence of patterned support among the city’s most impoverished residents suggests his path to victory in the general election will have to come from something other than what his focus has been in the campaign.

Indeed, Young's performance in the primary was so bad that it’s near impossible to draw conclusions about where, or how, his support might gather for a formidable run on Election Day next week.

“If you look at the precincts that Young captured, his base of support appears to be spread randomly throughout the city – it’s like randomly throwing darts at a dart board," said Brady Baybeck, associate professor of political science at Wayne State University.

No clear base

Young’s overall vote totals in the 2017 primary fell beneath those for Duggan’s chief rival in the 2013 primary, Benny Napoleon, who got 30% of the vote. Napoleon’s support was largely clustered in the area around his home, where he has lived most of his life.

Young, by contrast, lost most of the precincts in the district he represents in the state Senate, and he lost in the precinct where he is registered to vote, in the Islandview neighborhood near Belle Isle.

A recent poll shows Young’s primary support holding steady, but not growing as he needs it to. Duggan had support of 63% of voters, while Young had 28%, just one percentage point higher than he did in the primary.

Racial breakdown of the vote

Overall, the city’s poverty rate is around 36%, according to the most recent census data, but Young’s vote totals do not rise in a significant way among poorer precincts.

Young didn’t have an advantage among black voters, either, even though all 29 of the precincts he won were predominantly African-American. In isolation, that statistic might suggest a slight preference for Young among black voters.

But Duggan surpassed Young’s support overall in predominantly black areas of the city. And he also got some of his strongest support and largest margins in precincts with large numbers of white and Latino voters, who make up about 17% of the Detroit population. Duggan ran the table in southwest Detroit, winning all the precincts from Michigan Avenue down through Delray and deep into 48217, the furthest southwest area of the city. He won all of those precincts by 23 percentage points or more.

The only true racial preference that emerges from the data is that while all Detroit voters heavily prefer Duggan to Young, white and Latino voters prefer the mayor even more strongly.

“Detroiters are beyond the us versus them, black versus white divisiveness,” said Kurt Metzger, demographer and founder of Data Driven Detroit, who is also the mayor of Pleasant Ridge. “By and large, there is enough positive momentum even in the neighborhoods to give Duggan another four years.”

A chance to win?

Young’s chances of winning seem remote from the Free Press analysis and recent polling, but they are, of course, not 100% out of reach, particularly if Young can drive up voter turnout for the general. In the 2013 general election, in which Duggan was first elected, 25% of registered Detroit voters cast a ballot.

Detroiters can almost all remember the election of 2005, when Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick seemed doomed in his re-election bid, and pulled a win at the last minute with relentless street-level campaigning.

Kilpatrick played to his direct connection with voters, and he won. Time is short, but Young has been running the same kind of grassroots campaign. If he can turn his message about poverty into a similar, genuine connection with the city’s poor residents, history suggests he could also become the city’s mayor.