After winning the New Hampshire primary for the second time, next week John McCain will try to repeat his 2000 win in Michigan. The map below gives some idea of his geographic base. Green shaded counties are where McCain got at least 50 percent of the vote in 2000 (when he beat George W. Bush by a 49-41 margin); purple counties are where he got less than half of the vote.
McCain’s biggest margins came in Washtenaw County (including the college city of Ann Arbor), Ingham County (including the state capital of Lansing), and Kalamazoo County (home of Pharmacia-Upjohn). These are relatively liberal and Democratic counties, and McCain’s large vote totals came largely from independents voting in the Republican primary. But McCain also won most of the more sparsely populated counties in the north, including those on the Upper Peninsula. This coalition of rural areas and smaller white-collar cities is similar to McCain’s winning coalition in New Hampshire. It may help him eke out a win here next Tuesday, but not too many primaries after Michigan have such advantages for him (many are restricted to Republican Party registrants).
McCain’s weakest areas, where opponents Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney will presumably be concentrating, were in the southwest and in the Detroit suburbs. He fell far short of a majority in Kent County (including Grand Rapids) and Ottawa County. In Oakland County, which includes the Detroit suburbs of Farmington Hills and Pontiac, he got 48 percent of the vote, but this is usually the second-biggest source of Republican primary votes in the state, so a drop of a single percentage vote can cost thousands of votes. (In Detroit’s Wayne County, the biggest county in the state, McCain got almost exactly 50 percent.)
Some questions for Tuesday: Will McCain keep his base in Ann Arbor and Lansing, or are voters there so committed to the Democratic candidates that they won’t show up? (There is a Democratic race on Tuesday, but Hillary Clinton is the only active candidate on the ballot.) Will Huckabee peel socially conservative voters away from McCain in the rural north? And can Romney bring out voters in his natural base of suburban Detroit? Or have too many high-education, high-income voters in that area drifted into the Democratic Party — which may have been the case in southern New Hampshire?
UPDATE: Newspapers in Grand Rapids and Oakland County have just endorsed Romney, underscoring that these areas are McCain’s weakest in the state. However, the two daily newspapers in Detroit have endorsed McCain. My prediction: If Wayne County again produces the biggest number of votes in the Republican primary, McCain wins. If more votes in the primary come from Oakland County, Romney wins.
