GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. – Ben Ingebretson was a reliable Republican voter. Ingebretson, a Christian pastor who works for a faith-based nonprofit, said he shared Republicans’ views on small government and agreed with the party’s calls for fiscal conservatism.
But after Donald Trump became the face of the party, Ingebretson, who lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, drifted away from his political roots. In 2020, he voted for President Joe Biden. And in February, he was among the 34% of voters in his county who voted for Nikki Haley in the Republican primary, even though her presidential campaign seemed doomed before the Michigan election.
With a rematch between Trump and Biden set to take place in November, the 66-year-old Ingebretson expects to vote for Biden again, although he rates the incumbent president’s performance only a C. world, but not his student loan forgiveness and stimulus spending during the pandemic.
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“I have much more confidence in Biden to lead with character,” Ingebretson said, though he added, “I wish both parties would bring better people to the table.”
Ingebretson’s political transformation and exasperation is not unique to the Grand Rapids region, a longtime Republican stronghold that has shifted to Democrats. Kent County, which includes Grand Rapids on Michigan’s west side, helped Trump narrowly win the state in 2016 and helped hand the state to Biden four years later.
With Michigan set to once again play a potentially decisive role in the election, Kent County finds itself at the center of this year’s presidential race again. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have both visited in recent months, and both parties are working to ensure their voters show up in November. For Biden, who has seen declining support among Arab-American and Black voters, building on his 2020 gains in Kent County could help offset losses in other parts of Michigan.
Still, many voters say they are disappointed by their choices and frustrated by ongoing political tensions.
“West Michigan voters lean toward the practical and responsible. I think they are still coming out, maybe not as high in numbers, but I think we can work on that,” said Sen. Winnie Brinks of Grand Rapids, a Democrat and the House majority leader. “And as we see developments like Trump’s conviction for crimes, that matters to people.”
For generations, the Grand Rapids area was synonymous with the Republican Party. Gerald Ford, whose presidential museum sits on the banks of the Grand River, represented West Michigan in Congress before ascending to the Oval Office in 1974.
But Trump’s reshaping of the party has tested that West Michigan conservatism.
Justin Amash, a longtime Republican with libertarian views, left the party for a time while representing the region in Congress. Betsy DeVos, whose family has long donated large sums to Republican politicians and civic causes in West Michigan, served as Secretary of Education under Trump but resigned after the 2021 riot at the Capitol. Peter Meijer, who voted to impeach Trump, served one term in Congress before losing the 2022 Republican primary to a Trump-backed candidate who later lost to a Democrat.
Still, Trump has many fans in West Michigan, and some Republicans believe even wavering conservatives are likely to return to the party in November. Bryan Posthumus, a Republican state representative from a rural part of Kent County, said he thought Democrats had engaged in “lawsuits” by prosecuting Trump, and that Trump’s convictions for falsifying corporate records would likely bolster support among Republicans who supported others in the fight. primary.
“I think the convictions unnerved many of them” and pushed them back toward Trump, Posthumus said.
Kent County, which has a population of about 660,000, has a higher median income, lower poverty rate and lower median age than Michigan as a whole. Long a center for furniture manufacturing, Grand Rapids avoided the industrial decline that affected many Michigan cities by diversifying its economy. It is Michigan’s second-largest city and has a significant health care sector, a range of manufacturers and, outside the city limits, the headquarters of the marketing company Amway.
Across the political spectrum, many voters say Christianity plays an important role in their own lives and in civic life. It’s the kind of ancestral Republican territory that, in Michigan and much of the country, has become much friendlier to Democrats.
Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat who went to high school in suburban Grand Rapids, won Kent County by 10 percentage points in her 2022 reelection race. In that same election, voters in the county supported adding abortion rights to the state constitution by a margin of ten points.
So far, statewide polls have shown it’s a tight race for November. Democrats around Grand Rapids acknowledged that enthusiasm for the president was limited, but expressed cautious optimism.
“People are recognizing, yes, he may not be the ideal candidate, but he is the candidate we have,” said Gary Stark, who was chairman of the Kent County Democratic Party during the 2020 election but who emphasized that he was on personal title spoke. .
But the tenor of the national discourse has left many feeling exhausted.
“If you support Trump, they hate you, but if you support Biden, they hate you,” said Kari Coffman, a warehouse worker and political independent who lives in a small town outside Grand Rapids, and who said she had not yet decided which candidate to support.
Coffman, who lives with her two-year-old son and her father, said she enjoyed her job, which she has held for more than a decade, but struggled to afford basic necessities for her family, even after getting a raise from a new union. contract. As grocery prices have risen, she says, she has cut back on non-essential items like soda.
The campaign discourse, she said, seemed to focus less on workers like her and more on Trump’s criminal cases and Biden’s age, both of which she has little interest in.
“They really need to look at their middle class,” said Coffman, 35, who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and can’t remember if she voted in 2020. “They really need to see how people are having a hard time here.”
In interviews, some voters already leaning toward Biden said Trump’s criminal conviction in New York strengthened their opposition to the former president. National opinion polls have shown a slight move toward Biden after the verdict.
Brenda Vazquez, who works as a veterinary technician and pharmacy technician, said her belief that Trump was not a “fit president” was already deeply ingrained, but that his belief was welcome news. Vazquez, who lives in a rural area just outside Kent County, called herself a conservative Democrat and said she was leaning heavily toward Biden, though she said she was open to an independent candidate.
“I was happy to hear it because I think he feels like he’s kind of untouchable,” she said of Trump’s belief, adding, “I hope this will change some people’s minds .” But she also said she saw no signs of that happening.
As the presidential race heats up, Democrats are emphasizing their support for abortion rights, which Harris spoke about during a visit to Grand Rapids in February. Trump has focused on immigration, highlighting during a visit this year an immigrant who lived in the Grand Rapids area without legal permission and was accused of killing his girlfriend.
About 71% of Kent County residents are white, up from 88% in 1990. Many of them are descendants of Dutch immigrants who came to West Michigan generations ago. More recent waves of immigration, especially from Mexico, are changing the region and its politics. About 11% of Kent County residents are Hispanic, up from 3% in 1990, and about 10% of the county’s residents are black, a share that has remained relatively stable in recent decades.
Gricelda Mata, who owns a Mexican restaurant in the suburbs and is active in the West Michigan Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, said she wanted state leaders to allow people living in the country without legal permission to obtain a Michigan driver’s license.
“I see the human side of it. I see the economic side of it,” says Mata, who emigrated from Mexico as a child and opened her restaurant in 2000. Mata declined to say who she would vote for in November, but said she thought: “It’s a shame we only have two candidates. .”
Nearly everyone expressed dismay about the state of American politics and what these divisions could mean for the country’s future. John Cakmakci, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers 951, based in suburban Grand Rapids, said he often heard from his members that concern about national issues had become a top concern in their lives. That has not always been the case.
Amid the rancor, some weary residents have shifted to the political sidelines.
After Kent County helped elect Trump in 2016, Michele DeVoe Lussky became a leader in the local Indivisible movement, an outspoken part of the liberal “resistance” that emerged across the country. But over time, while her political activism gave her a sense of agency, she concluded that it was “actually perpetuating our problems.”
Lussky, 54, who now works as a creativity coach and breathwork counselor, voted for Biden in 2020, and her views on many issues still align with those of Democrats. But she has decided that she cannot support the two-party grip on political power, and that she would like to see a more compassionate, less rigid party system.
This year, she said, she will not cast a vote for Biden or Trump.
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