US Vice President Kamala Harris prepares to outline her economic policy in a speech in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, 16 August 2024. EPA-EFE/JIM LO SCALZO 
Karen Majewski is a historian, a businesswoman and a former mayor of Hamtramck, an independent city inside Detroit, the kind of independent woman that is the backbone of the modern Democratic Party.
She cried her eyes out four weeks ago when she heard that Joe Biden dropped out of the race - for about ten minutes.
“And then something just flipped. Like the moment of trauma which was so deep was over. I said OK, let's go. Let's do this thing.
“There was a zeitgeist, and we all felt it, and where that came from, I don’t know. So many of us are just so ready to end this nightmare - Trump, Maga, the whole threat to democracy and our way of life in our country and our Constitution and it was like, you know, we have been waiting for that clarion call and that felt like this was it.”
Majewski speaks for a palpable shift in the national mood that has carried Harris into a slight lead over Donald Trump in the polls, a stunning reversal from four weeks ago when Biden was foundering towards almost certain defeat.
Harris is surfing a wave of optimism into the Democratic National Convention this week, driving the powerful narrative that this is a change election. Donald Trump is the past. Her greatest applause line is “We are not going back.”
Winning Michigan plus the other “blue wall” states of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, will be enough to deliver the election to Harris.
But, if Harris loses Michigan, she will almost certainly have lost the election.
One state, two countries
Metropolitan Detroit has been the centre of the motor car industry since Henry Ford built his first Model T factory here in 1908 and it has traced the ups and downs, and agonies of modern industrial capitalism.
The city experienced a long and brutal decline starting in the sixties, losing more than half of its population as car factories moved elsewhere, and white flight, which rendered parts of the city into an apocalyptic post-industrial wasteland.
Now Detroit is experiencing something of a renaissance and for the first time in decades it is growing again. The city is still marked by vacant lots and derelict neighbourhoods, but it has been energised by a younger generation drawn by cheap housing, great music and an alternative lifestyle - and a black population that truly owns the city.
The city is reliably Democratic, but the shift in recent weeks has been those traditional Democrats who were wavering over Biden, younger blacks and Hispanics, starting to come home to Harris.
The Trump campaign should be even more concerned that Harris is also narrowing the gap with white workers without college degrees, a demographic that Tim Walz has specifically been targeting.
Bidenomics was an attempt to rebuild the Democratic Party’s relationship with its traditional base, the industrial working class, and one of Harris’ most steadfast champions in Michigan is Shawn Fain, the powerful president of the United Auto Workers.
But this was always going to be a close election, and Harris is still up just four points in the state, according to the latest New York Times/Siena poll.
You can see why when you leave Detroit and head up Interstate 75 through rural Michigan which feels like you’re in another country. It's not long before you start passing the Trump signs.
Michigan is also known for its extreme right wing militias. One group known as the Wolverine Watchmen plotted the kidnapping of the state’s popular Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer before they were busted by the FBI.
Only 67 miles outside Detroit is the city of Howell, where white supremacists marched last month chanting “We love Hitler, We love Trump”, and where Trump will be holding a rally this week.
One group of Democrats that is not enthused by Harris is the vast and politically vocal North African and Middle Eastern community, now numbering more than 300,000.
Many of them are furious with the administration for its support of Israel in Gaza and will be joining the protests outside the convention in Chicago this week.
They could impact the election if they stay away in large enough numbers, though some could be swayed back by the realisation that having Trump back as President will be a lot worse for them than Harris.
The very stable stumblebum
Kamala Harris’ glidepath to her crowning moment at the Democratic Party convention this week has been greased by a stumblebum opponent who is unable to get out of his own way.
Trump questioned Harris’ racial identity in front of a convention of black journalists; he claimed at a rambling and disjointed press conference that he had a larger crowd size at the January 6th, 2021, insurrection rally than Martin Luther King’s march on Washington in 1963; and in between the lies and deranged nonsense that he spews out on Truth Social, he has become obsessed with Harris’ appearance.
“I am much better looking than her. I’m a better-looking person than Kamala,” he told a rally in Pennsylvania this weekend.
On stage, he is like fat Elvis at Las Vegas, sweating and belting out the same old tired numbers.
Harris and Walz by contrast are playing to full houses everywhere.
Karen Majewski was at Harris’ rally at a hangar at Detroit Airport on August 7th attended by 15,000 people, and was struck by how excited and spirited the crowd was. “There were tons of women, a lot of black women, a lot of young women, young and older men - and the UAW was there in force.
“The energy was dynamic, exciting and joyful.”
That rally really got to Trump, who constantly betrays anxiety about the size of his crowds. He posted: “Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport? There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!”
George Conway, the former husband of Trump’s former campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, described the post as delusional and said that it could only have been written by a deeply psychologically disturbed individual.
“If he were a member of your family, you’d be staging an intervention and taking him into a psychiatric hospital.”
Trump by all accounts is angry and in denial. He is struggling to adjust to the fact that not only is his opponent no longer Joe Biden, but he is being beaten by a black woman whom he apparently holds in contempt.
His desperation to regain some of the spotlight led to his long “interview” with Elon Musk on X last week which late night comedian Stephen Colbert described as “a big night for weird old rich guys with no friends.”
The Trump campaign’s army of social media influencers, Russian bots and Maga faithful came out in force afterwards to proclaim the discussion to be something like a high level chat between Einstein and Gandhi.
But the posts seemed so similar and cloned that it was obvious that they all got the same memo.
What everyone else heard was Trump slurring his words, sounding like a kid who “won’t take out his plastic vampire teeth,” in the words of comedian Seth Myers. Memes of Donald Trump as