“I think most people are for Trump,” says Connie Calabro, carrying shopping bags as she comes out of a Whole Foods. She’s 88, a devoted Catholic with a big laugh and Carol Channing energy. A longtime Trump supporter, she says the pro-Trump chorus got louder post-State of the Union. “His speech was great! One thing I’m really proud of is, he got religion back in schools. I love that. And jobs! The unemployment rate was down.”

“People need to get past ‘orange man bad,’” says a small business owner from Lake Orion, walking through downtown Rochester with his wife. They asked us not to use their names. “I’d lose all my clients,” the wife laughs. She says her customers are split about 50/50 between Democrats and Republicans. (We hear this kind of thing a lot: people wary of voicing any political opinion on the record. We’ll be diving more into that later.)

Trump’s tax cuts have “saved our family twice now,” the husband says. “We saved a lot of money. So when they say [the tax cuts are] for the 1%, it’s complete bullshit. It’s not. It’s for normal people. Now, maybe we’re a little different because we own our own businesses. But we’re definitely middle class.”

The changing suburban vote

But parts of northern Oakland County are changing: Slotkin turned both Rochester Hills and Rochester blue in 2018. And these college-educated, suburban voters – especially women – who were part of the “blue wave” two years ago, are even more motivated to defeat Trump in 2020.

“I actually think that having Trump on the ballot is probably going to help [Democratic candidates in 2020],” says Kevin Church, a member of the North Oakland Democratic Club.

“And maybe those sort of ‘part-time Democrats,’ I call them – or you know, Democrats that, they come out once in a while. But with somebody like Trump on the ballot, they’re going to say, ‘I need to get out on November 3 and get rid of him.’”

Church, who spoke to us at a campaign event for Jody LaMacchia, a Democrat running to unseat incumbent Republican John Reilly in the Michigan House, says he sees women as the key to defeating Trump in 2020.

“The Democratic women, especially the ones that I hang out with here, they are fired up and ready to go. And the thing that Elissa [Slotkin] did was get a lot of independent and even Republican-leaning women to go over to go to her side.”

U.S. Rep. Slotkin, a former CIA analyst and Department of Defense official in both the Bush and Obama administrations, upset Republican incumbent Mike Bishop by only about 13,000 votes. Since then, she’s become a rising Democratic star, and is consistently pulling in staggering fundraising numbers for her re-election bid. But her support for impeachment put an easy target on her back for Republicans.

Is it all about turnout? What about swing voters?

There’s a debate amongst the folks who run election models: Will the outcome of the 2020 election depend more on turnout, or on the candidates’ abilities to persuade “swing” voters?

So far in our reporting, swing voters have been hard to come by. But we did find one in the 8th: His name is Joe Jakubowski, he’s 65, lives in Rochester Hills, and is spending his semi-retirement taking care of his aging mom, playing a lot of music, and even trying out a little improv.

“I’ve probably been a Democrat most of my life … but I have voted Republican. I voted for Trump,” he says. “But I also voted for Obama both times…. It depends on the individual and what’s going on in the world these days.”

With Trump, he saw someone who could be a bull in a china shop. “I thought I saw a change agent, really. To try to cut through some of the bureaucracy. And boy, was I right there!” he laughs. “But maybe not in the way I thought, originally.”

Like so many voters, Jakubowski is fed up with the current political system. But he feels Trump has gone too far. “His wholesale cutting of regulations in all areas, I mean, you can go oil and gas industry, you can go environmental – it’s really, the beneficiaries are not the people, it’s the corporate world.” Look at what’s going on with the Attorney General, William Barr, Jakubowski says. “C’mon…. Everybody’s a ‘yes man’ now, everybody that Trump has in his administration.”

Now, his vote is up for grabs. He likes Bernie Sanders – another candidate he hopes might be able to flip the whole system on its head.

“I’m trying to get somebody with some honesty!” Jakubowski exclaims.

Over these next several months, we’ll be talking to as many voters as we can in the 8th. We want to know what they believe, what they want from politicians, and why they vote how they vote. And if you’re a “swing” voter in the district, or if you’ve sat out previous elections but are committing to cast a vote in this one, we want to hear from you. You can reach us at the8th@michiganradio.org.

Photos by Katie Raymond for Michigan Radio