In Pivotal West Michigan, Voters Are Exhausted and Underwhelmed

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Ben Ingebretson was a reliable Republican voter. A Christian minister who works for a faith-based nonprofit, Ingebretson said he shared Republicans’ small-government views 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 cast ballots for Nikki Haley in the Republican primary, even though her presidential campaign seemed doomed before the Michigan election.

With a Trump-Biden rematch locked in for November, Ingebretson, 66, expects to vote again for Biden, though he grades the incumbent’s job performance as just a C. He said he approved of Biden’s vision for America as “a beacon” in the world, but not his student loan forgiveness and pandemic-era stimulus spending.

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“I have far greater confidence in Biden to lead from a posture of character,” Ingebretson said, though he added, “I wish both parties were bringing better persons to the table.”

The political transformation, and exasperation, of Ingebretson is not unique in the Grand Rapids area, a longtime Republican stronghold that has shifted toward Democrats. Kent County, which includes Grand Rapids on the western side of Michigan, helped Trump narrowly win the state in 2016 and helped flip the state to Biden four years later.

With Michigan again set to play a potentially decisive electoral role, Kent County finds itself back at the center of the presidential race this year. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have each visited in recent months, and both parties are working to ensure their voters turn out 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 underwhelmed by their choices and frustrated by enduring political tension.

“West Michigan voters tend toward the practical and responsible. I think they still turn out, maybe not quite as high of numbers, but I think we can work on that,” said state Sen. Winnie Brinks of Grand Rapids, a Democrat and the chamber’s majority leader. “And as we see developments like Trump being convicted of felonies, that matters to people.”

For generations, the Grand Rapids area was synonymous with the Republican Party. Gerald Ford, whose presidential museum sits along the banks of the Grand River, represented West Michigan in Congress before ascending to the Oval Office in 1974.

But Trump’s remaking of the party has tested that West Michigan brand of 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 West Michigan civic causes, served as education secretary under Trump but resigned after the 2021 riot at the Capitol. Peter Meijer, who voted to impeach Trump, served a single 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 that 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 that Democrats had engaged in “lawfare” by prosecuting Trump, and that Trump’s convictions for falsifying business records were likely to solidify support among Republicans who supported others in the primary.

“The convictions, I think, knocked a lot of them off the fence” and nudged them back toward Trump, Posthumus said.

Kent County, which has about 660,000 residents, has a higher average income, lower poverty rate and lower median age than Michigan as a whole. Long a hub for furniture making, Grand Rapids avoided the industrial decline that struck 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 city limits, the headquarters of the marketing company Amway.

Across the political spectrum, many voters say Christianity plays a significant role in their own lives and in civic life. It is the sort of ancestral Republican territory that, in Michigan and across much of the country, has become much friendlier turf for Democrats.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat who went to high school in suburban Grand Rapids, carried Kent County by 10 percentage points in her 2022 reelection race. In that same election, county voters supported adding abortion rights to the state constitution by a 10-point margin.

So far, statewide polls have shown a tight race for November. Democrats around Grand Rapids acknowledged there was limited enthusiasm for the president, but they expressed cautious optimism.

“People recognize, yeah, he’s maybe not the ideal candidate, but he’s the candidate we have,” said Gary Stark, who was chair of the Kent County Democratic Party during the 2020 election, but who emphasized that he was speaking in a personal capacity.

But the tenor of the national discourse has left many feeling exhausted.

“If you support Trump, they hate you, but then 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 decided which candidate to support.

Coffman, who lives with her 2-year-old son and her father, said she enjoyed her job, which she has held for more than a decade, but struggled to afford the basics for her family even after getting a raise from a new union contract. As grocery prices have increased, she said, she has cut back on nonessential items like soda pop.

The campaign discourse, she said, has 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 said she did not recall whether she voted in 2020. “They need to really see how people are struggling here.”

In interviews, some voters already leaning toward Biden said Trump’s criminal conviction in New York reinforced their opposition to the former president. National polling has shown small movement toward Biden after the verdict.

Brenda Vazquez, who works as a veterinary technician and pharmacy technician, said that her view that Trump was not an “appropriate president” was already entrenched but that his conviction was welcome news. Vazquez, who lives in a rural area just outside Kent County, called herself a conservative Democrat and said she was leaning strongly toward Biden, though she said she was open to an independent candidate.

“I was glad to hear it because I think he feels he’s kind of untouchable,” she said of Trump’s conviction, adding, “I hope that will change some people’s minds.” But she also said she saw no signs of that happening.

As the presidential race ramps up, Democrats are emphasizing their support for abortion rights, which Harris spoke about during a February visit to Grand Rapids. Trump has focused on immigration, and during a visit this year drew attention to an immigrant living in the Grand Rapids area without legal permission who was charged with killing his girlfriend.

About 71% of Kent County residents are white, down from 88% in 1990. Many of those 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 around 10% of county residents are Black, a share that has remained relatively steady 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 Michigan driver’s licenses.

“I see the human side of it. I see the economic side of it,” said 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 unfortunate that we only have two candidates.”

Almost everyone expressed dismay about the state of American politics and about what those divisions might mean for the country’s future. John Cakmakci, the president of the United Food and Commercial Workers 951, which is based in suburban Grand Rapids, said he often heard from his members that anxiety about national issues had become a top concern in their lives. It was not always that way.

Amid the rancor, some weary residents have moved 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 popped up across the country. But over time, though her political activism helped her feel a sense of agency, she decided it “was actually perpetuating our problems.”

Lussky, 54, who now works as a creativity coach and breathwork facilitator, voted for Biden in 2020, and her views on many issues continue to align with the Democrats. But she has decided that she cannot support the two-party hold on political power, and that she would like to see a more compassionate, less rigidly partisan system.

This year, she said, she will not cast a ballot for Biden or Trump.

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