Michigan’s Swing County Still Stuck in Neutral : Many Voters Seem Unhappy With Both Presidential Choices

This is not Bush country, and it certainly is not Dukakis country.

If anything in this year of the depressed and disgruntled voter, this is Iacocca territory.

“I’m not real thrilled about either one we’ve got running this year,” says Wayne Williamson, a parts manager for a local Ford dealership. “I think we need Iacocca.”

“This race is garbage, just garbage,” adds Manny Farao, owner of a popular delicatessen.

It is in places like this--Macomb County, Mich.--that presidential elections are won or lost.

Crazy Quilt Area

A flat, sprawling area stretching away from Detroit along Lake St. Clair, Macomb is middle-America personified--a crazy quilt of contrasts, of close-in blue-collar suburbs and freshly built, affluent lakefront exurbs, of massive auto plants and apple orchards.

Macomb is also the unpredictable home to countless Reagan Democrats, a swing county of more than 700,000 that political analysts believe holds the key to victory in the crucial battleground state of Michigan.

If the Democrats are to recapture the White House, they first must recapture places like Macomb.

Repeated Appearances

With so much at stake here, Bush and Dukakis have made repeated appearances in the county--it was at a Macomb defense plant that Dukakis took his famous tank ride. President Reagan is scheduled to make his second appearance here Saturday, and journalists from around the nation have come to take Macomb’s pulse.

Right now, despite the national polls that suggest the election is over, the race in Macomb seems to be a tossup. Statewide polls in Michigan now show Bush with a fluctuating lead, but a Detroit Free Press poll of Macomb voters in late October found Bush leading Dukakis in the county by just one percentage point.

But if it is a dead-heat here, it is only because so few voters seem able to stomach either candidate. Just last Friday, Dukakis received an enthusiastic welcome at Macomb’s community college, but the audience was made up almost entirely of union members and union functionaries who were bused-in from outside the county.

With less than a week remaining in the race, most voters interviewed around the county say they remain undecided and yearn instead for a strong, charismatic leader like Ronald Reagan or Lee A. Iacocca, the Chrysler Corp. chairman who people here still credit with saving the firm and its thousands of Macomb jobs.

An ‘Either-Or’ Voter

“I’m still like, either-or,” says 28-year-old Sandy Decker of Mt. Clemens, Macomb’s county seat. ‘I don’t think either one is very strong. They both have their little issues, but as far as being a strong candidate, I don’t think either one is a popular choice.

“I will vote,” she adds, “once I decide who to vote for.”

“I’m going to vote for Bush, but he’s just the lesser of two evils,” says Peter Robinson, a 26-year-old student from semi-rural Romeo.

With 48,000 members of the United Auto Workers union working at dozens of auto plants in the county, Macomb should be a solid Democratic base--and once it was.

In 1960, Macomb was considered the most Democratic suburban county in the country. The Democrats still hold most of the local offices, but the UAW’s mostly white members here, along with thousands of other Macomb voters, have deserted the national Democrats in presidential elections lately.

And voters who have decided to support Bush--especially young voters who don’t remember any Democratic President except Jimmy Carter--say they are doing so because he represents an extension of the Reagan era.

“Hopefully, Bush will follow some of Reagan’s policies, because Reagan hasn’t done a bad job,” says 21-year-old Ray Wisniewski of Mt. Clemens, who plans to vote for Bush. “He seems like a strong candidate, I just hope he follows Reagan and is strong on defense and tough on crime.”

Hurt by Reagan Policies

Macomb’s many auto workers, however, have been hurt badly by some Reagan policies--especially by Reagan’s reluctance to get tough on trade--and congressional Democrats do well here by supporting protectionist legislation to aid the auto industry.

Yet the trade issue doesn’t seem to be helping Dukakis much here among Reagan Democrats, who feel more secure about their jobs than they did a few years ago.

Although Macomb’s 6.6% September unemployment rate was above the national average, it was down from the 7.1% rate posted during the same month last year, and was far below the devastating 17.6% peak during the recession of 1982.

So without overriding economic concerns here, many in Macomb seem ready to base their votes on social issues instead--and those are the voters that Dukakis is losing.

Remo Ranocchini, a 22-year-old Chrysler worker from the heavily-industrialized suburb of East Detroit, plans to vote for Bush, even though his parts plant is about to close and he is likely to be laid off by the end of the year. He says losing his job won’t influence his vote because he still believes the “economy is going pretty well.”

“I just lean to Bush because Dukakis is too liberal on abortion and welfare,” adds Ranocchini, who also voted for Reagan in 1984.

There is also a sense among some white voters here that Dukakis is trying to hide his liberal agenda.

Concerned About Jackson

“You know, before, Jesse Jackson was always in the news, now it’s like Jesse Jackson walked off the face of the earth,” says Sandy Decker. “It bothers me, I want to know, what did they offer him? People are saying they are going to appoint him to head welfare.”

Underlying these worries about the social policies of the Democrats appears to be a deeper fear of crime. Macomb’s voters, concerned that problems may spill out from Detroit, have made crime their No. 1 political issue, acknowledges Jay Neel, Dukakis’ campaign coordinator for Macomb.

Neel says that Bush’s negative ads about the Massachusetts prison furlough program have been “devastating” in Macomb.

Still, Dukakis seems to be holding his own here by rallying the hard-core Democratic rank-and-file, which still represents a formidable voting block.

Dukakis now has 900 volunteers canvassing 375 of the county’s 417 precincts in a massive get-out-the-vote effort, and the UAW is making a big push among its members. Bush, by contrast, has no county-level office or field organization at all and is relying almost entirely on television to get his message across in Macomb.

Some Democrats Galvanized

The Dukakis efforts in recent days are apparently starting to galvanize longtime Democrats. Other voters, meanwhile, are now leaning to Dukakis as a backlash against Bush’s negative campaigning.

“Dukakis is honest,” says Rita Reilly, a lifelong Democrat in her 60s from Warren, another of Macomb’s blue-collar suburbs. “And I think Bush is a coward, he won’t come out and face anybody without his backup people.”