ANN ARBOR, Mich.—On a recent Sunday, after a long day traversing her district, Rep. Debbie Dingell found herself deep inside the liberal bubble—and dying to burst it.
The third-term Democrat was standing in a wood-paneled room at the Pretzel Bell restaurant on the Main Street of this college town, at a fundraiser for a field organizing program to “turn Michigan blue.” The crowd of progressives had plenty of questions but none of them about the 2020 presidential campaign. Instead, the questioners at the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus event were in full resistance mode, spoiling to fight Donald Trump as if it were still 2017. One woman asked why people weren’t holding mass demonstrations like the first Women’s March. Another demanded to know why Trump administration officials who defied House subpoenas during the Ukraine investigation hadn’t been arrested. Dingell, 66, in a matching red dress and blazer set off by two strings of pearls, leaned forward, listening intently — but after a man called for beating Trump through “protest and economic boycotting,” her answers grew shorter. Finally, as another man filibustered about Russian election interference, Dingell’s patience wore out.
“We have to talk about issues,” she declared. “I love Ann Arbor, and I love all of you, [but] we’ve got to talk about working people’s issues! We have to take [Trump’s] budget and talk about how it applies to everyday Americans and how he’s trying to screw ’em!” The president, she warned, is rolling back clean water standards, auto fuel-economy standards, Endangered Species Act protections, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. She told them a story of meeting a second-grader who had said his parents don’t cook dinner because they can’t afford it. “No child in this country should go to bed hungry!” she said. “We have to take these specific examples that people understand, and fight for them, and put it into everyday terms that people understand!
“And that’s what we didn’t do in 2016! I am going to tell you that. You all thought I was crazy when I said he could win.”
Four years ago, Dingell was Michigan Democrats’ Cassandra, a disbelieved prophet of doom. She warned Hillary Clinton — and any Democrat who would listen — that Trump could win Michigan, though the state hadn’t gone Republican in a presidential race since 1988. She knew this because she heard it in her district, from angry union retirees over Saturday morning coffee in Dearborn, and saw it on the proliferating Trump signs in working-class suburbs along the Detroit River. Dingell’s sprawling district, though safely Democratic, mirrors the party’s divisions: progressives vs. moderates, white-collar vs. blue-collar workers, climate activists vs. manufacturing unions, the college-educated vs. the high school grads.
Dingell saw that her district, like her party, was pulling apart, and that Trump was capitalizing on that division. She warned Democrats that working-class voters liked Trump’s message on trade, that Clinton wasn’t talking enough about workers’ job insecurity, retirees’ lost pensions, voters’ fears for their future. Trump won Michigan’s 16 electoral votes by only 10,704 votes, perhaps his least likely victory in his near-sweep of the Upper Midwest. In Dingell’s district, Clinton won, but with 11,589 fewer votes than Barack Obama had in 2012. The defeat still stings.
This year, Dingell is sounding the same alarms. Trump, she estimates, has a 50-50 chance of winning Michigan again.
This time, no one dismisses her. In fact, the Democratic presidential candidates have all come to her for advice. “I am blunt with all of them. They’re friends,” she said. She tells them: “Talk about issues that matter to working families.” She’s still mad about the Democrats’ July 2019 debates in Detroit. “They came to Detroit and they didn’t talk about auto issues. They didn’t talk about labor issues.”
Dingell is staying neutral in Tuesday’s Michigan primary between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. “I’m focusing on winning in November,” she said. “I want to be able to pull people together. We need to turn out every vote we can, so that we do not have four more years of what we’re witnessing.” That will require staying on message. “We can’t beat Donald Trump by being anti-Trump,” Dingell warned the Ann Arbor crowd. “We have to beat him by being for working men and women across this country.”
Dingell, of course, has every reason to be anti-Trump, to want to make this election a moral referendum on the president as a human being. On a necklace, Dingell wears a ring with the congressional seal. It belonged to her late husband, John Dingell Jr., the longest-serving congressman in history, who represented Detroit’s western suburbs for 59 years. In 2014, when he retired, she ran for the seat and won, becoming the first congressional spouse to directly succeed her living husband in Congress. He died a year ago, at age 92.
Then, in December, Trump — perhaps enraged by Dingell’s New York Times op-ed explaining her vote for impeachment the day before (but also no doubt annoyed at the barrage of anti-Trump tweets John Dingell had aimed at the president over the years) — mocked Dingell and her late husband at a rally in Michigan. He even suggesting John Dingell might be in hell. “Maybe he’s looking up,” Trump taunted. Trump attacked her again on Twitter in February, after his Senate acquittal, implying she should’ve voted against impeachment because he had lowered flags to half-staff after her husband’s death. “I’m in the top 10 in Donald Trump’s target lists,” Dingell said.
Yet Dingell doesn’t plan to fight Trump on Twitter. She knows that won’t work with the voters Downriver. She’s determined to prevent the turnout collapse that doomed Clinton in 2016. “We know who those people are that didn’t vote,” she told me as we drove through Dearborn, “and we have to talk to them, and show them what’s at stake, and tell them their vote does matter. You have to motivate them to know that being involved in this political system is about the future of our democracy.”
Inside a roomy, 55-year-old United Auto Workers union hall in Flat Rock, before about 50 workers dressed in Sunday casual — Detroit Lions hoodies and ball caps — Dingell took the microphone to try one more time to rehabilitate her party’s reputation.
The union members, who work at Ford’s nearby Woodhaven Stamping Plant, listened politely as Dingell updated them on labor issues, including her support of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the revision to the North American Free Trade Agreement signed in December. “I’ve been very blunt: it’s not going to bring jobs back. But I think it will level the playing field,” Dingell said. “You all cannot compete with [workers making] $3.50 an hour. And we’ve got to stop that.”
This is a tougher audience for Dingell than a UAW hall would’ve been for Democratic politicians in decades past. Auto workers, once the backbone of Michigan’s Democratic Party, are increasingly voting Republican, and Trump is a big reason. “I listened to you all four years ago, so I know that people voted for Donald Trump,” Dingell said.
So she attacked an issue that she knows is a weakness for the president: health care. “We all want to protect people with pre-existing conditions,” she said. “First thing he did when he got elected was to [try to] repeal the Affordable Care Act and not protect people. And after that got rejected in the courts, he’s in Texas right now, in a court case, trying to take those protections away from people.”
From the back of the hall, a guy in a brown shirt, jeans and a blue jacket spoke up.
“‘Medicare for All’ — Do you know what Bernie’s trying to push on that?” he asked. It was the day after Sanders’ big victory in the Nevada caucuses, and auto workers were nervous. They have union-bargained health insurance and many don’t want to give it up for a government plan that might not deliver the same benefits. This is a tricky spot for Dingell, who supports single-payer health care — like her husband did, and like his congressman father did during the Roosevelt administration. She tried to reassure the questioner that Medicare for All won’t hurt him.
“Nobody wants to take away the health care that you have right now,” she answered. “But wouldn’t it be great if everybody had access to that kind of health care? And we don’t want to increase your costs.” It’s a tightrope and some in the audience know it.
“It’s a political answer,” said Gary Schack, the machine repairman who asked the question, outside the hall a few minutes later. “They don’t want to say anything much yet, because they don’t know who their candidate’s going to be.” Schack voted for Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary and Clinton in the general election, but this year, he’s leaning away from Sanders.
“I’m a little worried about giving away the world, like Bernie wants,” Schack said. “People that don’t have insurance need insurance. But as long as they don’t touch what I got, private insurance through the Big Three [automakers], I’m happy.”
Schack said he can’t stand Trump. “He’s a liar. He’s a bigot.” Yet he knows plenty of co-workers at the Woodhaven plant who will vote for him. “You wouldn’t believe how many people want to support him because of the economy and gun rights. Those are the two big issues in major labor networks: If you don’t touch my guns, and if I’m getting good payback on my investment.”
All over the vast Detroit suburbs, home to 3.2 million of Michigan’s 10 million residents, there are blue-collar voters like Schack’s co-workers, whose ancestral identities as Democrats have faded. “My Downrivers are my Macomb County,” said Dingell. She’s talking about Detroit’s northeastern suburbs, where pollster Stanley Greenberg studied Reagan Democrats in the 1980s and helped Bill Clinton win them back with centrist policies, including the 1994 crime bill and the 1996 welfare reforms.
“Working men and women here have the same political philosophy of Macomb County,” Dingell said on a drive Downriver. “They’re working hard. And they don’t think the government cares about them.”
Dingell stopped by the Sunday breakfast at the American Legion hall in Wyandotte, which went for Obama in 2012 and Trump, by a nose, in 2016. In the Legion’s cozy bar, post commander Mike Huber has ordered the TVs kept to Detroit Tigers and Red Wings games and off CNN or Fox, which set off heated debates among the Vietnam-era veterans. “Loud arguing can set off PTSD,” Huber said. “We want this to be a comfortable place.”
Dingell took a seat at a window table right on the Detroit River, with a view of the trees on Canada’s Fighting Island. Instead of happy hour specials, a plastic stand on the table listed the names of freighters that ply the river’s shipping channel. Dingell complimented the cook on the pancakes, then talked with the Legion’s state veterans’ affairs chairman about patients’ struggles to get good care at Detroit’s John D. Dingell VA Medical Center, named for her World War II vet husband. Eventually, she prodded the veterans, some of whom are retired from Downriver’s many auto plants, to talk about working-class Michiganders’ political anger.
“Blue-collar people are being squeezed and squeezed and squeezed,” said Huber, on everything from health care copays and deductibles to the cost of going to a ballgame. “Lunchbox Joe and Lunchbox Jane are being left behind.”
Al Stone, 71, of Trenton, a vet and small-business owner, canvassed for Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. But in 2016, he voted for Trump. “He had a lot of real plans,” Stone said. “He wasn’t afraid to — I hate to say this — drain the swamp of people who were not [holding up] their end of the bargain. That’s the way it was in my professional career. If an employee didn’t perform — guess what? I can fire you.” Stone said he is leaning toward voting for Trump again.
Chuck Blanchett of Riverview used to belong to his local Democratic club, because “the Democratic Party has always backed the working man.” But now he said he’s sick of all politicians. “They don’t do squat,” he said. “They’re trying to tell you they’re for you? No. They’re for themselves.” He reluctantly admits he voted for Trump in 2016. “He wasn’t a politician,” he said. But he won’t again. “He’s turned out to be a bully.” Blanchett said he might leave the presidential race blank in November if Sanders is the nominee. “I’m not a socialist. He’s a pure socialist.”
Sanders’ early success in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada has put Dingell in an awkward position. In October 2015, after Biden announced he wouldn’t run for president in 2016, Dingell endorsed Clinton for president. “I love Bernie Sanders, but Bernie Sanders can’t win a presidential election,” she told The Detroit News then.
But then Dingell watched Sanders out-campaign Clinton, holding rallies all over her district. Sanders won the Michigan primary with 50 percent to Clinton’s 48 percent. In Dingell’s 12th District, Sanders won by 8 points, thanks in part to Arab Americans in Dearborn who appreciated his support for Palestinian rights.
This year, Dingell said, she thinks both Sanders and Biden “have the ability to win” against Trump. “I think people have seen Bernie for four more years,” she said. Today, undecided voters “think the economy is better, but they don’t like the tone of the rhetoric or the divisiveness,” she said. “And many people feel that Donald Trump has significantly contributed to the divisive tone.”
What about voters like Blanchett, who don’t want to vote for a democratic socialist? “That’s one of Bernie’s issues,” said Dingell, who has worked with Sanders on Medicare for All. “He’s going to have to convince people that he believes in the free-market system.”
In Michigan this week, Sanders has been running an ad that shows images of abandoned Detroit — the empty Packard auto plant, a boarded-up house, a closed store — and slams Biden for his 1993 vote for NAFTA. I asked Dingell if Biden, should he win the nomination, would struggle in Michigan in November because of trade. “No,” Dingell said. “He would have four years ago, if he hadn’t come out strongly against the TPP.” (Biden supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership as vice president but now says he would renegotiate it before signing it.)
Dingell, who calls Biden “a very close friend,” said he connects better with working-class voters than Clinton. “He does understand what it’s like to be a union worker. He understands that people are worried about their job.”
Like her district, Dingell embodies the Democratic Party’s divisions. She’s progressive on some issues, like Medicare For All, moderate on others. Unlike her late husband, Dingell has defended federal auto-emissions standards. She’s the lead sponsor of several climate-change bills — on electric-vehicle infrastructure, a climate bank and climate education in schools — but she has resisted intense pressure from Ann Arbor activists to endorse the “Green New Deal,” saying labor unions need to be part of climate discussions. “We’ve got to worry about the environment. Global climate [change] is real,” she told the UAW local in Flat Rock. “But on the other hand, we’ve got to protect your jobs.”
Though Dingell worked for 32 years at General Motors, including stints as head of the automaker’s foundation and its public relations office, she is as closely aligned with the auto workers’ union as with industry executives. Most of her complaints about Clinton’s failed 2016 campaign in Michigan focus on Clinton’s awkward relationship with labor and failure to convince anti-trade voters of her newfound opposition to the TPP. “Hillary never walked into a UAW hall in this state,” Dingell said.
Drilling down on Dingell’s remember-the-workers message reveals a pro-union, pro-fair-trade Rust Belt Democrat of the Sherrod Brown variety — an increasingly endangered species as the Democratic Party has drifted away from its old working-class identity and become the party of the professional class. “We’ve got to talk about how we’re going to fight for trade deals that are going to keep jobs here,” she said.
She voted for the USMCA because it includes new U.S. content rules in imported autos, minimum wages for Mexican auto workers, environmental protections and changes to Mexican labor laws. “We don’t want trade agreements that let other countries manipulate their currency, subsidize their projects and steal our intellectual property, which is what China does,” she said.
In 2017, Dingell told The Washington Post, “I sometimes feel like I have no home even in the Democratic Caucus here.” The Democratic Party, she added, “is dominated on both sides by coastal states that tend to have different interests than the Midwest.” Dingell has since been named a co-chair of the House Democratic Policy Committee, and she holds her tongue about coastal Democrats these days. “I think that Nancy Pelosi is paying far more attention than others have to the Midwest and its importance,” she said during our drive Downriver. “But I think it took losing the 2016 election to get people to pay attention to issues that matter here.”
Dingell often spends part of her Saturday mornings at a Starbucks in Dearborn, chatting with a kaffeeklatsch of retired men, including some fellow members of her church. They’re cordial to her, and they’re mostly Trump voters. Andy Sarna, 68, a Dearborn native and retired truck driver for Ford Motor Co., has voted regularly for Dingell and her husband before her. In fact, he has a picture on his phone of himself and John Dingell, taken in 2005, at a celebration of Dingell’s 50-year anniversary in Congress. But he voted for Trump in 2016, because he liked the president’s opposition to NAFTA and his promises to bring jobs back and streamline the tax code. “People were fed up with the same old stuff in Washington, how nobody wanted to compromise,” Sarna said. “They wanted somebody from the outside, who wasn’t just a politician wanting to get elected.”
The coffee group moved here from an Einstein Bros. Bagels two miles away after raging conservatives shouted at Debbie Dingell too often. “I was going there for a long time, and I just got sick and tired of all the aggressiveness,” Sarna said.
“I can’t go to Einstein’s anymore,” Dingell said. “But I’m safe at that Starbucks. And everybody knows me.”
A moderate Republican until she married her congressman husband, Dingell still socializes with Republicans in Washington, a throwback custom in an era when it’s often claimed that across-the-aisle friendships have grown rare. Dingell said such friendships make her more effective in Congress. “You’ve got to figure out, how do I get the votes that I need to get something done?” Fred Upton, a GOP congressman from southwest Michigan — “my best friend,” Dingell said — called for Trump to apologize for his December comments about her and her husband.
Dingell and Cindy McCain, another Trump-trolled widow, plan to visit the Democratic and Republican conventions in Milwaukee and Charlotte, N.C. “We want to talk to people about respect and civility, and how you can disagree agreeably,” Dingell said. Her frequent cable-TV interviews include Fox News. “I want you to understand that I’m worried about how divided this country is,” she said.
That includes concern about divisions within her party. Already a senior figure in a high-turnover congressional delegation, Dingell is close to two new congresswomen of different wings of her party, both part of Michigan’s blue wave of young, Democratic women elected in 2018: Rashida Tlaib, 43, the fiery Squad member and Detroit activist, and Haley Stevens, 36, an Obama administration auto-bailout staffer who won a swing suburban district.
Stevens said Dingell’s advice has helped her navigate her closely divided district. “Debbie Dingell represents how to talk to everybody, bring everybody into a tent and how not to isolate voters. She’ll talk about how our country is divided and how it’s up to people like us to heal some of those wounds of division.”
Tlaib told me Dingell’s peacemaking skills differ from her late husband’s approach to the job. “She has a way of bringing folks together that I haven’t seen before,” Tlaib said. “[It’s,] ‘OK, I disagree with you. Let’s find something else to work on together.’” John Dingell’s ferocious temper was legend: He was called “Mr. Mean,” “petty and irascible,” and “the junkyard dog of Congress.” Debbie Dingell’s goodbye to constituents is often a platonic “I love you.”
Because of 2016, Michigan Democrats now consider Dingell a one-woman early warning system. “She’ll give us a bird’s-eye view of everything going on, to help inform everybody’s decision-making,” said Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel. “What she’s able to do is to bring people outside of their bubble and say, ‘Hey, listen, I’m all over the place. I talk to Republicans and Democrats and independents, and people who are superinvolved in the political process, and people who are totally outside of the political process. And here’s what I am seeing.’”
Right now, Dingell sees an electorate that feels better about the economy (at least pre-coronavirus) than in 2016, but is more worried about student loan debt, Social Security, health care costs and the environment — from global climate change to polluted drinking water and Great Lakes flooding.
“I think many of the Trump voters have hardened,” Dingell told me. “We have to target independents. And we have to make sure the people that didn’t vote last time understand their vote matters.” She plans to organize her district with team captains in every city and door-to-door canvassing. “We’re getting neighbors to go talk to their neighbors and figure out what’s on their mind. It’s not just social media. It’s touching every door, of both the base, the Democratic voter that you cannot take for granted, and also those that lean Democratic or are worried about where this country goes.”
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