Automatic voter registration in Michigan was pushed for and passed by Democrats, who then foolishly didn’t reach out to rural voters.
Mark Yonkman is the founder of the newly created Super PAC Reclaim the Rural Vote and a rural vote messaging expert. Mark’s background straddles not only the rural and urban worlds but the black/white, gay/straight, and farm/professional worlds as well. Read more of his Rural Whisperer columns here.
Michigan adopted automatic voter registration beginning with the 2020 election year. That program has now borne fruit, and as expected, virtually every rural voter is now registered.
Where I am from, voter turnout was 80%, and 80% voted Republican. In Detroit, on the other hand, increased registration has simply made the turnout number worse, declining from 53% in 2008 to 47% in 2024. Automatic registration has significantly benefited Republicans and is now a permanent fixture of Michigan politics.
Michigan now has automatic voter registration upon obtaining or renewing a state ID or driver’s license or leaving prison. To opt out of automatic registration, the voter must specifically check a box opting out. I can’t imagine any rural voter doing so.
In my township of 275 households, at least 99% of eligible voters are now registered (my daughter is Deputy Clerk, and I was an inspector of election). We have 795 residents and 698 registered voters, leaving about 100 residents who are children.
The only gap is the young person who hasn't yet renewed their state ID, as each lasts for 4 years. Indeed on Election Day, we did have two 18-year-olds come in and register in person.
Using Census data (which both my daughter and I also worked on) and our local registration data, we are as close to 100% as you can get. This will now continue in perpetuity.
These rural voters have turnout rates of between 65% and 80%. And now often vote 80% Republican. And don't let national rural turnout data fool you. The rural South and West bring national percentages way down. Voter turnout in the rural Upper Midwest, on the other hand, eclipses urban turnout. We saw this in the past election, and if anything, the gap became more extreme.
Michigan also automatically registers convicts upon release from prison. While perhaps 60% of convicts say they are Democrats or lean Democratic, that same cohort doesn’t necessarily vote.
Like the general population, white convicts vote more frequently than black convicts. White convicts are also more Republican. While there isn’t solid data on this issue yet, preliminary work by the Marshall Project for 2024 indicates that of the released convicts who actually vote, perhaps 55% vote Republican.
In Detroit, automatic registration did not have the same impact on turnout as it did in rural Michigan. In 2024, Detroit turnout was 47% (compared to 53% in 2008), with most precincts reporting less than 20% turnout, some as low as 12%.
As someone who used to live and work in Detroit, and who was a foster home for the City of Detroit, this is exactly as I expected. People don’t vote because they don’t want to, not because they had so much trouble getting registered. That was always a red herring.
Automatic registration bears this out and explains the decrease in voter turnout – Michigan succeeded in registering a whole bunch of urban people who will never vote. So your turnout percentage goes down.
Youth turnout was even worse at 42%, as compared to 51% in 2008. And also becoming more Republican. I suspect that some of that number is because 20% of youth voters are, in fact, also rural voters and likely turn out at a higher rate than urban youth and vote more Republican than urban youth.
Still, the decline from 51% to 42% isn’t so much that young voters are less engaged, it is simply that far more young voters are now automatically registered. They just don’t vote, which has always been the case, so the overall percentage goes down.
Minnesota and Pennsylvania also have automatic registration. In Pennsylvania, 34% of automatic registrants were Republicans and 30% were Democratic. I don’t have data for Minnesota, but I note that Minnesota’s legislature turned red in the last election, though a court decision and special election later this month may return the legislature to being more evenly divided.
My back-of-the-envelope math indicates that when you add up the voting power adjusted for turnout of the Youth, Black, Arab, Latino, and Gay groups targeted by Democrats, you get a voting bloc that is just about on par with the rural voting bloc.
Yet, the Harris campaign didn’t reach out to rural voters and never visited rural Michigan. She instead went to the one wealthy cosmopolitan city in Northern Michigan, Traverse City, where I was born.
It may have seemed rural to her coming from academia in Berkeley, California, followed by a life in Washington D.C., but to us, that is the Big City. It is, in fact, a Micro Metropolitan Statistical Area. Trump didn’t have to visit rural Northern Michigan this cycle. He visited the county seat in Wexford County in 2016 (where my township is located), and people still talk about that visit. Did she ever bring up rural broadband, which we were thrilled to get, in the weeks leading up to the election?
One other gift Michigan gave Republicans is straight-party voting. What this means is that in rural county after rural county, a Democrat who wants to run has to run as a Republican.
This simply depresses the Democratic brand even further and explains in part why Michigan has the highest percentage of uncontested elections, at 80%.
Even though most of these are at the local level, it is striking when one enters the ballot box and sees that literally everyone in your county running for office is Republican. Few people figure out that some in that mix are actually Democrats. Michigan has essentially created a one-party system in many of its counties.
I was curious to see how the Republicans got straight-party voting passed. However, I was amused to see that actually Democrats had pushed for and passed this.
The poorly reasoned argument being that urban voters need it to be easy otherwise they won’t vote (which isn’t very flattering to urban voters). I don’t think that voter turnout in Detroit declining from 53% to 47% bears this out.
This is one of several headwinds that Michigan Democrats have going forward. Business as usual simply will no longer work.
