The Assignment with Audie Cornish

'Welcome to the third installment of All Over the Map. I'm John King. Today, we turn our attention to the Upper Midwest, Wisconsin and Michigan. Two once-reliably blue states. Now, though, some serious cracks in the Biden coalition. Let's connect the dots a little bit. We began this journey in Pennsylvania, the cornerstone of President Biden's "blue wall." The Commonwealth? Well, that's a home game for Biden. It's his birthplace. Remember, he won Pennsylvania in 2020, and it absolutely is a must win for him this time around. Table stakes, you might say, for any and everything that comes after. Next, we went to Georgia, the site of a historic upset in 2020 when Joe Biden and two Democratic senators were elected. It's a new battleground, a tight one, but the demographics are shifting the president's direction. But Wisconsin and Michigan, well, they're trending the other way. They're Biden's to lose. He's the incumbent, and people are not happy right now with the way things are going. We're about to hear from two voters who live right there in the communities where the president is struggling the most.

Politics and the community have a disconnect, especially in certain markets.

'Eric Jones jumped out at me right away when we first visited Milwaukee back in October. We met at this really cool place, the Bronzeville Collective. It's a collaborative storefront named after the historical majority-Black neighborhood where it's located. Eric's a real estate agent and he's an entrepreneur, speaks the language of politics fluently. Political science major, but he's deeply rooted on the street in Milwaukee. You see him pop up all around, and this city is absolutely critical to President Biden's reelection map. The Trump campaign, though, is also setting its sights on at least trying to chip away from the Biden advantage in the Black community in Milwaukee. And, of course, more broadly, the Trump campaign understands from 2016, the path to the White House runs right through Wisconsin. That's why the Republican National Convention is right there in Milwaukee. It starts next week. Eric and so many people in his community are focused on one thing the economy, jobs, the middle class life that has disappeared for a lot of people.

If you had two minutes with the United States and he was saying, I want you help turn out people in Milwaukee, what does he need to do?

What he needs to do is get dollars into these communities. You bring opportunities. You bring jobs. You get votes. Plain and simple. It starts with the dollar and it ends with the dollar. The bigger issue? New blood is what both parties need. New blood that are working towards the middle and not working towards the edges and the fringes of the parties. That's what they need.

Good luck waiting for that.

I'm trying to tell you.

Thank you for your time.

I appreciate you, brother.

I appreciate it.

'It's always fascinating to go back and re-interview the folks we've met during this project all across America because people, their opinions, the conditions that affect them, they're always changing. Eric was gracious enough to make time for a call with us to follow up just a couple weeks ago, eight months after we first met. So when we met you eight months ago, don't let me put words in your mouth, but you were a little frustrated.

Correct. I was.

You were hoping that both parties came up with new blood.

They did not.

They did not. Let's start with you. Where are you right now?

'I'm a liberal, so I'm not what you would consider a moderate or somebody who can be moved. However, a lot of Black people like Donald Trump. So the interesting perspective since his conviction has been a bit of outrage I didn't really see coming. I'm not a felon, but I have people who are felons, who have family members that have had legal issues, and I've heard people say, so, wait, I can't rent an apartment with a felony and he can be president with 34? I can't own a gun, but he can - he can be the leader of the free world and put his finger on the nuclear button, if you will? So, I think in their eyes, it reeks of privilege and a bit of a disconnect with the average American.

'Trump and his people have tried to flip that argument, saying that they think this might actually help him in inner-city communities where Black voters have been mistreated by the system, disrespected by the system. And so, Trump argues, you know, the rigged system, the bad system, the stacked system got me just like it got you. But that's not what you're here.

'No. I'm hearing if this happened to me, I would never be able to do what I want to do as far as a professional career. And even in conviction of 34 felonies, you could still be president. And it makes people wonder, is the system really the same system for different tiers of society? The conventions hurt him because Donald Trump likes to make people feel that he's like them, and that convention is proof he's nothing like them. I've got conservative friends that say, I shouldn't have to vote for him, but if he's the nominee, I have to either vote for the party that I don't like or I gotta vote for him. So I'm seeing a lot of different reactions, to be honest with you. Clearly, I want Joe Biden to win. I don't hide that. My fear is that Joe Biden has alienated enough of his base to make it a lot closer than it should be. And I've always had the thought that the Republican Party was a better-ran party than the Democratic Party, because they're a more unified party. And here in Wisconsin, a lot of their base, I think, are more independents than they like to admit, to be honest with you. They align liberal, but they're not what you would call a hardcore liberal.

If President Biden is going to win Wisconsin again and get big turnout in Milwaukee again, he obviously has to improve from when we first met, righ? That was your take, then.

Definitely.

One of the things you said was this: we need someone who, frankly, gives a damn and hopefully President Biden the rest of the time he has moving forward will reward the constituents who gave him his job eight months later. Has he done that? Has he improved on that in any way?

'I believe bringing jobs to the state helps, I do. Some of the improvements, honestly, it's more about the fact that Trump doesn't look as good. You know, sometimes the best thing you can do is to not mess it up. He can still screw it up. Biden can still screw it up. But if he can roll out some policies that are more life-altering to what we call in hip hop, "the bottom," because there's always more people at the bottom than the top. The votes come from the bottom. The money comes from the top, right? If I was advising Joe Biden, it would be to find a way to get as many dollars to the bottom as possible, because there are still people saying that "Uncle Donald" gave them a stimulus check. And that's a joke, if you think about it, because any president in that situation would have had to do the same thing. But his name was the name that was signed on the check, not the United States government. And that's how they look at it.

We both have calendars. The election is not that far away. People are skeptical. They don't believe it until they see the jobs. And sometimes that takes months and months and months. So if they don't believe it 'til they see it, does he have time to actually change that dynamic you're talking about?

The optimist tells me yes. The realist tells me probably not. The only thing that he might be able to do is have policies and things that he's attempting to do that he would need another term to put into place, and he's going to have to have some very compelling promises because he hasn't had enough time while he was actually in power, to do enough things for the people to remember that he did to actually gain the vote. And I think that's something that he might want to campaign upon is, hey, if you give me the job, in the first six months, this is what's going to get done. And if he does that, then we obviously might get more than eight years of Democratic governance at the highest office. You have to know your marketing to be present in your market to get the results that you want. I'm not sure that VP Harris has been in this market enough, and I don't think that she's tapped into her resources enough, and I think she needs to come here and be more relatable and have more boots on the ground. And that's something they can do. They can put money and dollars into the campaign and they can be more present. They should be here once a month until until November, to be honest with you.

What about if, between now and November, somebody in the barbershop, somebody when you stop in the Brownsville Collective, somebody you're showing a home to says, you know what, Eric, I hate both the Democrats and the Republicans. I don't like Biden or Trump. I'm going to vote third party. I'm going to vote for Robert Kennedy Jr. I'm going to vote for Cornel West. If he's on the ballot, what happens if even a modest number of Black voters in the city of Milwaukee go third party this time? What happens?

'Biden's screwed. Simply put, he cannot win the city and I don't think he can win in most urban markets with a third party candidate stealing votes. I don't think most political scientists or even theorists really understand how fragile the Black vote really is. It doesn't take much for them to get off of you. It really doesn' and because of slavery and Jim Crow, most black people really don't trust the system to begin with, right? They don't have much faith in the system. The number one thing I hear from Black voters who are pro-Trump is, we've given them a vote on what have they done with it anyways? We might as well back the winners. And when they don't even want to back the winners, they want to back the idealist, like a Cornel West, like a RFK , Jr., to vote for an independent is a vote for chaos. If you think about it, right? It's a vote for chaos. And if a person doesn't like the order that you bring into their lives, chaos actually seems like a better option, and I think that's the issue that Biden is going to have. If a third-party candidate gets any prominence or any traction, and if he doesn't do the work, that very well can happen.

Eric has a very sharp sense of the way political winds are blowing, and it extends beyond his own city, beyond his state, to another longtime Democratic stronghold that is a toss up.

'Right, wrong, or indifferent, Palestine, and what Israel is doing, is bothering people. I've got friends in Detroit. He's probably going to lose Michigan because of Palestine. To be frank about, there are so many people that are pro-Palestine. All they see is blood on his hands.

When we come back, a young voter who helped Biden win last time. But this time he's angry.

'Welcome back. We're leaving Wisconsin, but we're not going far. Michigan and this year ground zero for a policy challenge that for the president has turned into a political nightmare. Talk about cracks in the Democratic coalition. This is a big one. Now, presidents don't get to choose their crises. But for President Biden, the Israel-hamas war has been especially damaging. The president has been accused of sanctioning war crimes as the United States continues to send billions of dollars in military aid and equipment to the Israeli government. Biden's been heckled by pro-Palestinian protesters at most of his campaign stops. They call him "Genocide Joe." To put it bluntly, many liberals, young voters and Arab-Americans are furious at the Biden administration, furious at the president personally. And it's precisely those groups he will need in November to win Michigan. And the candidate who wins Michigan usually wins the white House.

I grew up all around, sort of overseas. Ypsilanti. I don't know if you would know where that's at, next to Ann Arbor.

'Ibrahim Ghazal is a liberal, young, and a Palestinian-American, and he lives in Michigan. In other words, he's exactly the type of voter who would have been virtually assured to vote for the president before the war. We first met at a cafe in Dearborn, that's a small city, essentially a suburb right next to Detroit. To give you a sense of the importance of this place, well, consider this, according to census data, in 2023, 55% of Dearborn's residents were Arab-American. That's the first time an American city has recorded a majority Arab-American population.

Right now we're in Dearborn, but I live in the city of Detroit. I'm a wall student at Wayne State University. First year.

Democrat? Republican? Independent?

'Typically Democrat. I don't know about this year, but typically Democrat. Muslims in America, we're put in a weird position on the spectrum of conservative-liberal. We fall in the middle and typically voting liberal or voting Democratic just works out better for us. As a Muslim, as an American, last election, we were told to vote Biden to save America. And that's what we did. And not in a million years would I like to vote for Trump. But coming around this year, I don't know if I'm voting at all, but I definitely will not be voting for Biden.

Tell me why.

'I feel as though President Biden doesn't value my life as a Muslim-American as much as he values other lives. If our protests, if our cries for the death of, I think it's 6,000 children in the span of three weeks doesn't make him feel anything? I think that's absolutely ridiculous. We need to pave a peaceful solution, a new way forward for Palestinians in the Middle East to - I don't know what it is - a one-state solution, a two-state solution where Jews, Muslims and Christians and anybody can live together with equal rights, with equal rights. And that's what's most important. Equal rights, no matter your shade, skin, your skin color, no matter your religion. And I think that's what's most important. And that's what I want to see. Do I know how to do it? No. I'm 23 years old. I'm not an expert.

Thank you for your time. Really appreciate it.

Great talking to you.

No, it's great talking to you.

When we caught up with Ibrahim again in May, this time in Detroit, again in a busy cafe, it had been six more painful, agonizing months, with still no end in sight to the conflict. I wanted to find out what had changed? What hadn't? What, if anything, could make a difference before November. So when we were here almost six months ago, you were getting ready for school. Now you're winding up. You're not quite done.

Not done yet, no.

How's it going?

It's going. We're getting through it.

'That's a - not so sure it sounds like.

Yeah. I mean, law school exams, finals. Nothing fun.

Been tough.

Yeah.

What was it like going through that? Tough enough with a semester that, when we were here six months ago, obviously. And only the beginning of it, but a lot of turmoil on campuses and in your community.

Yeah. Well, I mean, just from a personal experience, going through law school and and dealing with this, I have some relatives, distant family in Gaza, and they're all the way from the north of Gaza. And they moved on to Rafah. They were staying in a friend's home, and around 60 people were staying in the building, and it was bombed. So they lost 25 members of their family in one bombing by Israel. And so it's been stressful just seeing people that look like me and just human beings, seeing human beings on my on my phone screen being killed day in, day out. And what's worse is as an American, I have to see my government funding it. So, stressful.

So walk through that. The personal toll because of your blood, your ties and then being part of a generation that has said, hey. Whoa. What's going on?

'Yeah. I mean, from a personal, I mean, I think every human, number one, should be connected to this issue. I think when we allow for one group of people to be oppressed, we open the floodgate, we open a floodgate, a door for us to choose. Society chooses who gets to be oppressed and who doesn't get to be oppressed. And so, I think every human should should care about this. Not just Palestinians, not just Muslims, not just Arabs, whether Christian, Jewish or Muslim. There's a lot of tension, rightfully so. As I said, I think Americans are waking up to that. Their government is, you know, taking part in this killing of Palestinians by funding the Israeli government with arms. And I think people are waking up to that, and they want their tax money to be spent wisely and morally. And so, I think it really speaks to the values of the American people. I think as Americans, we value we value dignity and self-respect. Our values are telling us to speak up. Our values are telling us, as Americans, to criticize our government so we can realign our American moral compass.

You were very disappointed in the president when we first spoke. Have you seen anything over those six months that makes you less disappointed? He does talk more publicly now about getting more humanitarian aid, and he does have the United States military building the pier. Enough small steps? How would you grade that?

I mean, there's a big difference between speaking and doing. I think you would agree. When the president, when President Biden says something on camera, there really needs to be more humanitarian aid or we're concerned about mass starvation in the north of Russia, but then continues to arm Israel with weapons with a blank check. That's concerning to me. I mean, he may be concerned about, humanitarian aid, but he really isn't doing much. And if we want to speak about the pier, I believe, they're building to send in humanitarian aid. That's a step. But there's no point in sending humanitarian aid if you're going to continue bombing of people.

How does that disappointment affect your politics? When we were here the first time said you voted for Biden last time. That you had a really hard time doing it this time. So now we're here six months to Election Day. Any chance you vote for Joe Biden?

So, I guess the question is not who I'm going to vote for. Rather, the question should be what is Biden going to do to earn the vote of the Democratic base? People who care about morals and and where our foreign aid is going towards? What is he going to do to earn our vote and sending unconditional aid to Israel with a disregard to all of the human rights violations that have been recorded by international agencies continuously, not just denying, but preventing independent probes and investigations into possible war crimes that have been committed and been reported. That's an issue. If you're going to conduct war, conduct it within the rule of law, international law. And that's all people are asking for and nothing more.

So he has not earned your vote?

No.

As we sit here today.

No.

How hard would it be for him to earn your vote based on what you've seen over the last 6, 7 months?

'He, I mean, when you're, when you are funding something, you call the shots. And so, in order for Biden to earn my vote, he needs to condition the arms trade with Israel. It's as simple as that. And, you know, turn the vote of any American values. Like we said, these these concepts of dignity and self-respect, and the pursuit of happiness for all people, then he should condition aid to Israel.

Classmates, colleagues, friends on campus, just more broadly in the community, adults, older people as well. His standing is where?

'With older people, I would definitely say they're not voting for Biden. I think the older generation, at least for Arab-Americans, are much more connected with where they immigrated from and from their countries. For Americans like me who are born in this country, we feel much more attached to this country than we do to to the countries our parents came from. And so I think for younger voters who are stuck in the sense that it's Biden or Trump, I mean, give an analogy, if somebody spits in my face and then tells me, don't vote for the other guy, he's going to spit in your face and he's a little bit more racist than me. I don't think I'm going to want to vote for either of them.

So how do you wrestle with that? Would you go third party?

I don't know. I mean, you know, they say a third party vote is just a throw away, throw away vote, and it's just going to help Trump. But I don't.

It can be on that kind of math, but it could also be a vote on principle that I can't vote for either one of them. I can't look myself in the mirror. Would you get there?

I think I would. No, I don't know who I'm going to vote for. I still don't know who I'm going to vote for. And I think that's on Biden to decide how he's going to earn a big population of young voters in this country.

But we did see in 2016 here, that the third party candidates probably cost Hillary Clinton Michigan. And does that history matter to you that, you know, Trump couldn't get to 50, but in Michigan and in Wisconsin, some other places, the third party candidates without a doubt lowered the bar for victory and Trump won.

Yeah. I mean, if that means that Biden's going to have less of a chance of winning. And once we, like I said, holding him accountable for how he's spending our tax dollars, I think that's a good thing.

And yet, despite all that disappointment, frustration. You haven't fully closed the door to voting for him, which is kind of extraordinary. Why?

So, the only reason I haven't closed the door is because I think Biden still has an ability to change course and set a precedent for the future. I think if Biden wins this election and he somehow expects American Muslim voters or just voters in general who care about this issue are going to vote for him, we have now set a precedent that our president can fund a foreign government to commit human rights violations and get away with it without any consequences. And I think that's the most important thing as an American, we have the right to vote. We have a right to choose who our leaders are. And so, if we as Americans cannot uphold our values and vote in a way that shows presidents, you cannot just spend our tax dollars as you wish, there's going to be consequences. I don't know where I'm going to be in six months from now. All I know is that there's more than 35,000 dead Palestinians in Gaza, two thirds of them being women and children. I know that Palestinians are dying on the on a daily basis through my tax dollars. And so I think my government needs to if they want not only to uphold American values. I think also, if Biden wants to get certain votes, he needs to change course.

You ready, Allentown Allie?

I think so.

Has she been properly introduced?

I'm Allie Malloy, and I'm the senior producer of All Over the Map. So, John, Eric and Ibrahim have almost nothing in common on paper. Different states, backgrounds, different political priorities. But they both share this window into their wider communities, especially exposing these cracks in the Biden coalition.

They're both great reporters, Allie, actually, because they're on the street every day. They're talking to friends. They're talking to colleagues. And let's be careful. This is anecdotal. Nobody listening to them should think they speak for everybody in Michigan or everybody in Milwaukee. However, we talked to a bunch of other people in both of those places, and they're right on. And so, let's start in Milwaukee. People feel left out. They feel forgotten. And their community has changed. The factories aren't there anymore. When the factories go, the jobs go. The city tax base shrinks, the schools shrink, the parks don't get tended to. They just feel forgotten. Now the president's in Washington, DC, right? Is it his fault? Doesn't matter. And remember, he came there and asked for their votes. He told them how important they were. He told them he wouldn't forget them.

One interesting thing that really stuck out to me, John, when we were in Milwaukee in October, getting to this factor of the Black communities and the lack of interest in turnout. We went door knocking with this organization. And what was striking was how many people in that community just said, I'm done. I'm not interested in Biden. One woman, I'd love for you to tell a story who lived through the civil rights movement. And yet she said to us, what?

'She said she was happy to see a young Black guy at her door working the neighborhood. But she said, I don't want to talk politics. I'm not doing politics right now. I might not vote. And so when you hear that generation who watched people jailed, people beaten, people killed for their right to vote, lived it, say, I might not vote or I don't think it matters. That is mind blowing because that's the most reliable voters in the Democratic coalition, older voters and more reliable older Black voters, or the foundation of any Democrats support in Urban America. And so to hear that woman say I might not vote tells you a ton about the disconnect. And then the kid knocking on her door, a twentysomething activist whose job is to keep people engaged in the community, including making sure they're registered to vote, says even he's not sure if he would vote for Biden, because what has he done for me? And so, you have an elderly woman and a young kid, inner city of Milwaukee, both, I don't know, well, those are two incredibly important pieces of the president's coalition. So how despondent are you? How disconnected, how disrespected do you have to feel to come to that? And so, Eric's right about the president's challenge. He needs to get people invested in him, and he needs to try to recreate the connection that I care about you. Ibrahim the same thing, he says he talks to the older people in his community. He thinks they're gone. He just thinks that they will not vote for President Biden. Is he right? That's why I will go back. What I found most interesting about him is that of all the young college-age students we talked to, he's the one who has the most personal connection. He has relatives in Gaza, he's Palestinian. And yet, he says he won't completely give up on voting for President Biden because he knows if it's Biden versus Trump, he's with Biden on just about everything when it comes to the policy issues that matter to his life. But this one personal thing, it's just eating at him. So he can't vote for Biden now, but he won't give up yet, which is, again, why we circle back to see if somehow Biden can somehow convince him, I know you're really mad at me about this, but look at that other list. Right now, a lot of younger voters won't look at that other list, they're so mad about Gaza. That's a huge challenge for the president.

'So, John, Michigan was Biden's easiest battleground in 2020. He won by 159,000 votes, but very different this time around. Obviously, the seismic impact of a Gaza-Israel war on a key demographic for him.

Two key demographics.

Right.

'It was the easiest of the battleground states, 159,000 votes. However, there are more than 300,000 Arab-American voters in the state of Michigan. So right there, you can wave goodbye to your margin last time if you lose those voters, or if you lose a sizable chunk of those voters, then you add in the younger voters who we saw on the college campuses in Detroit and in Ann Arbor, a critical part of the Biden coalition in 2020, a huge piece, even bigger when Governor Whitmer won reelection in 2022. So for me, the question is, by the time you get to September, October, November, and people are voting, early voting, and then into Election Day, if their anger at the president over Gaza is a cause? He's in deep trouble. If it's one of the issues on their list and it's abortion and it's climate, you know, and it's tolerance and it's he's not Trump, then okay. Yeah, you probably get most of them back if they vote. But if it's a cause and you're a younger voter and you've never voted before or you've only voted once. That's it, right? Their decision will change this election.

So, John, we often talk about how this election is unlike any other election. But the race has been pretty much stable because people aren't excited. What do you make of that?

'I do think that's the key point. It's been the most stable when it comes to polling race. Certainly in my memory, I would argue that static nature of the race, the stability of the race, is because so many people are unhappy with their choices. So, you're hardcore Biden, you're hardcore Trump, you're locked in. If you're eh for Biden, eh for Trump, there's no reason to go back-and-forth. However, I would also argue just beneath the surface of that stability, there are a lot of different pieces bubbling that have the potential, I think, to add volatility to the race: the Covid hangover, the cost of living frustration, the Israel-Hamas war and how that plays out, the reemergence of Trump when people start to tune in and see more of him, does that do something? The abortion debate, something we're not even thinking of yet that will happen in the country or in the world between now and Election Day. The question is, do any of those pots boil? They're all bubbling. Who does that help or hurt? There's a lot going on in people's lives, and they have a lot of questions, and they're not getting the answers. And they don't see these two, most people, as the best guys to give them the answers. If you just listen, the value, especially of this format, where you can listen to these voters in more detail, hear their voices, not just their words, hear their voices and their emotions as they speak. You can agree or disagree with them. That's not the point. But you learn when you listen to them.

Absolutely.

This podcast version of All Over the Map is a CNN Audio production. This episode was produced by Dan Bloom, Grace Walker, and Allie Malloy. Our editor is Graelyn Brashear and our senior producer is Haley Thomas. Dan Dzula is our technical director, and Steve Lickteig is executive producer of CNN Audio. Support from Nicky Roberson, Jacqueline Kalil, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, Jon Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, James Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Wendy Brundige. I'm John King. Thanks for listening.