‘Untapped voters’: Experts explain how campaigns turn out vote in Michigan, other battlegrounds in final days
Election swing state Michigan will be decided by which campaigns can get the most voters out to the polls in the final week of the race, according to multiple experts.
“The campaign’s No. 1 priority and the party’s priority right now is getting our people out to vote,” Jimmy Keady, the founder and president of Republican consulting firm JLK Political Strategies, told Fox News Digital.
The comments come with just one week to go in a dramatic election season, with just a handful of battleground states in play that will decide the fate of the race.
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Perhaps the most important of those states is Michigan, a swing state that narrowly went to Donald Trump in 2016 before flipping back to Joe Biden in another close race in the 2020 election.
Polls indicate yet another tight race brewing in the state, with the RealClearPolitics polling average showing a razor-thin 0.1 point lead for Trump as of Monday. Meanwhile, the latest Fox News Power Rankings lists Michigan as a toss-up, and Trump is only a slight betting favorite in the state, with ElectionBettingOdds.com showing the former president with a 53.2% chance of carrying the state as of Monday.
According to Keady, the part of the race in which candidates attempt to persuade voters is mostly over, with Michigan coming down to who has the ground game to get the numbers out between now and next Tuesday. Republicans will also be focused on turning out low propensity voters, Keady said, a demographic the party has targeted in the hopes the group could potentially push them over the top.
“A lot of these campaigns are going to be focused a lot on low propensity voters … voters that are voting in like one out of four elections, making sure that they’re hit several times, making sure we’re dragging people out to the polls to vote,” Keady said.
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Jason Roe, a GOP strategist working in Michigan, echoed a similar sentiment, telling Fox News Digital that the time to persuade undecided voters is mostly over.
“There’s not a lot of undecided voters left, but there’s untapped voters who’ve never heard from a Republican campaign,” Roe said. “In addition to getting mail-in ballots returned and people to vote early, finding and mobilizing low propensity voters and getting them to the polls is everyone’s focus.”
Keady also believes that such a strategy could help down-ballot Republicans in Michigan, where races such as the Senate campaign between former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers and Democrat Rep. Elissa Slotkin will help determine which party controls the Senate.
“Michigan and Nevada are one of two of the seven swing states on the map that basically have straight ticket voting,” Keady said. “Getting low prop voters out to vote that are Republican and conservative means it’s going to help down-ballot.”
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That optimism is shared by Rogers himself, who told Fox News Digital that issues such as the “open border, job-killing EV mandates and rising gas and grocery prices” will help motivate voters out to the polls in hopes of avoiding “more of the same.”
“Over the next week, Team Rogers will be burning the shoe leather to earn every vote,” Rogers said. “We will be hosting numerous rallies and stops across Michigan sharing our message of getting America back on track.”
Keady also noted another opportunity unique to Michigan in the battle to get blue-collar and union voters out to the polls with just a week to go.
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“We are seeing a lot of union members move to the Republican side because of their economic policies … particularly when it comes to manufacturing jobs,” Keady said. “The campaigns absolutely have to be moving through their microtargets and talking to these union voters.”