This election cycle, while still covering the campaigns and the candidates from the inside, I also want to offer something from the outside: a letter to Washington from the rest of America.

My aim with this series is to explore this country, and its electorate, in all its messy and self-contradicting glory. That requires avoiding the easy clichés: Not every disaffected voter eats in a diner off the interstate, and not every campaign-trail encounter represents some broader truth about a crazy-quilt country of 330 million people. It requires talking to everyone—left and right, rich and poor, gay and straight, urban and rural, engaged and disengaged, black and white and brown. It requires careful, earnest, respectful listening. Above all, it requires leaving the Beltway behind, searching for the people and the places that will shape this nation’s future in November and beyond.

For my first dispatch, I wanted to write from a world as far removed from the nation’s capital as possible. After a bit of wandering, I found just the spot.

Tim Alberta/Politico

January 18, 2020 | Birch Run, Michigan

Dear Washington, The snow was coming down sideways as I encountered a growling pride of pickup trucks jockeying for position in what was once a parking lot, searching for a place to stop searching. Some drivers had given up on circling and sat idling in anticipation of a coming vacancy. Others got creative, dropping into low gear to mount glacial embankments where yellow lines were once visible. The one thing nobody did was speed off entirely. They had come too far, defying the elements, and now the destination was in sight: the Mid-Michigan Gun & Knife Show.

I came here for two reasons.

First, nowhere is the disconnect between you and the rest of America more apparent than when it comes to guns. People in D.C. go to baseball games. They walk dogs. They golf. Many of them even go to church. But they don’t arm themselves. It’s a strange reality of your culture: Even the conservative Republicans I knew, people who reflexively defended the Second Amendment, were not gun enthusiasts. After living there for more than a decade, I couldn’t name more than two professional acquaintances who owned a firearm, much less knew how to operate one. (Occasionally, a colleague would share a social media posting of an exotic visit to a firing range, showcasing their brush with a .22 as if they had just tamed a Bengal tiger.)

Second, despite Michigan being one of the premier battlegrounds of the 2020 election, its political fault lines are a bit fuzzy. For our purposes, think of the state as four distinct regions: Southeast Michigan is anchored by predominantly black Detroit and Wayne County, and sprawls into the mixed-class, densely populated suburbs of Oakland, Macomb, Washtenaw and Livingston counties; West Michigan is home to Grand Rapids, which is politically and economically diverse, and to a surrounding ecosystem that is overwhelmingly rural, religious and conservative; mid-Michigan is the unevenly populated land mass wedged between those two population centers; and Northern Michigan is the vast expanse of earth that occupies everything from the “thumb” of the mitten upward, including the Upper Peninsula.

We know what to expect in three of the regions: Trump will once again dominate the scattered votes of Northern Michigan by a 2-to-1 ratio. He will juice turnout in West Michigan. And he’ll try to run up the score with blue-collar voters in Southeast Michigan while praying to avoid both elevated turnout in Detroit and an exodus of moderate white suburbanites.

These results speak to interconnected trends. It wasn’t long ago that your average working-class white voter in mid-Michigan, be they involved in agriculture or manufacturing, was a quintessential swing voter—if not a loyal Democrat.

The wild card is mid-Michigan. The story here is two majority-minority cities, Flint and Saginaw, surrounded by small suburbs and rural towns that are mostly white. But it’s not a simple story. In 2008, Barack Obama carried Genesee County (home to Flint) by 32 points; eight years later, Trump closed that gap to single digits. Meanwhile, Trump won Saginaw County in 2016 after Obama carried it by 17 points and 12 points in his two statewide victories.

These results speak to interconnected trends. It wasn’t long ago that your average working-class white voter in mid-Michigan, be they involved in agriculture or manufacturing, was a quintessential swing voter—if not a loyal Democrat. But the party’s decadelong leftward drift on cultural issues, paired with Trump’s not-unrelated ascent, pushed huge numbers of them into the GOP column in 2016. This alone would not have delivered Michigan to Trump had black voter turnout been anywhere close to Obama-era levels. But the falloff was so dramatic with Hillary Clinton atop the ticket—20 percent in parts of Flint and Saginaw, not to mention Detroit and Lansing—that the door was cracked open just wide enough.

In a state Trump carried by fewer than 11,000 votes, out of more than 4.5 million cast, even the smallest ripple could be enough to tip the boat. Mid-Michigan may lack the raw numbers of Grand Rapids and metro Detroit, but its political volatility is far more pronounced. Given how dramatically the region swung from 2008 to 2016, it offers an ideal case study for the two questions that will define the 2020 election: Can Trump sustain enthusiasm among rural and suburban whites? And can the Democratic nominee recover it among urban black voters?

With the Democratic primary only just kicking off, there will be plenty of time to speak with black voters about that second question. For now, I decided to start with the first. That’s how I wound up in Birch Run, a township in Saginaw County, for the Mid-Michigan Gun & Knife Show.

Michael Schenk poses with a hunting rifle. | Tim Alberta/Politico

MICHAEL SCHENK leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Wait a minute,” he said, squinting as if he couldn’t see me standing two feet away. “You think there are Democrats”—he glanced from side to side—“here?”

I had assumed there would be. Growing up in Michigan, guns never struck me as partisan issue, at least not in the mold of taxes or abortion or labor laws. Lots of people owned them, Democrats and Republicans alike, and those who didn’t never seemed to have a problem with those who did. No successful politician that I could recall went around campaigning on gun control. But Schenk had a point. It didn’t take long inside the expo center, looking out over endless rows of firearms and ammunition boxes interrupted by Gadsden flags and Make America Great Again hats, to realize this wasn’t just a gun show. It was a tribal gathering, a reunion of right-wingers who wanted to talk and listen as much as buy and sell.

On its face, this wasn’t surprising. Some of the most prominent conservative-oriented groups in America have thrived in the post-9/11 era by fostering a notion of shared identity, none more effectively than the National Rifle Association. What was surprising, I thought while scoping out the venue, was the speed and extent to which Trump became central to that identity. In certain wings of the hall there was more MAGA merchandise for sale than weaponry: Trump shirts, Trump socks, Trump bumper stickers, Trump posters, Trump flags, Trump scarves. There was even Trump currency—his likeness on a $2020 bill.

And people were buying this stuff. Lots of it. Some of them didn’t need to: Scores of attendees, more than I could count at a certain point, came wearing a hat or a shirt supporting Trump. It reminded me of NFL fans wearing their team’s jersey to a game. I’ve long believed this president to be more of a cultural phenomenon than a political phenomenon. But it struck me today that perhaps he’s something even more. In an era when communities have been ravaged by economic displacement and technological advances, Trumpism offers a sense of fraternity, a sort of membership card to something edgier than the Knights of Columbus or the Lion’s Club.

“When I was a kid, we were all poor, and it seemed like everyone was a Democrat. These days, I don't know any.” Michael Schenk

Schenk, a 56-year-old mountain of humanity from the nearby town of Vassar, was dressed for the occasion. A bright orange hunting cap matched a frayed shirt that was buttoned halfway down to display his ample chest hair and was cut off at the shoulders to bare his tattoos. Camouflage overalls and brown work boots completed the ensemble. A final accessory was the most vital: Wrapped around his midsection was a large, tan-colored back brace, which he wears around the clock. This, along with “living off Vicodin,” helps manage the permanent pain of injuries he suffered over years of work as a lineman and tree trimmer. Schenk hadn’t come to purchase any artillery; rather, he wanted to peruse the collection of pro-Trump baseball caps and possibly find a sturdier back brace designed for outdoorsman activities. (He bought two.)

The question Schenk asked me was rooted in genuine curiosity. “When I was a kid, we were all poor, and it seemed like everyone was a Democrat,” he said. “These days, I don’t know any.”

Many of his friends and neighbors voted GOP for the first time in the 1980s with Ronald Reagan atop the ticket, Schenk said, but it wasn’t a lasting switch. Most of the people he knew remained independent, moving back and forth between parties, over the ensuing decades. Personally, he sat out a number of elections since the 1992 defeat of Ross Perot, “the last person I really trusted in politics,” Schenk said, “until Trump came along.”

Schenk can’t see himself ever voting for a Democrat again. The party, he said, “looks down on people like me.” But this doesn’t mean he’s a loyal Republican. Schenk is best understood as a Trump fanatic, someone who can’t muster a single criticism of the president. “He’s building the wall, he’s keeping his word, and if you haven’t noticed, since he took over, ISIS ain’t done nothing to nobody,” he said. “All while these Democrats are a thorn in his ass every day.”

Schenk looked around and sighed. “It didn’t used to be like this,” he said, nodding toward a towering vendor’s stand draped in Trump apparel and anti-Democratic Party paraphernalia. “I never remember these things being so political. But, you know, that’s what happens when one party stops respecting America.”

He turned back to me. “I dunno,” Schenk said. “You think you’ll find one Democrat here?”

