“In the next fiscal year, it will all be done,” Trump said that day. “We will end inflation, slash prices — we’ve already ended inflation — raise wages, and give you the greatest economy in the history of the world. That’s already happening. With our tax bill, the average family’s take-home pay will be at least $5,000 more than it was just a couple of months ago.”
His ability to sell that message of renewal here and around the country figures to factor heavily in next year’s midterm elections, which will determine whether Republicans maintain their trifecta in Washington — control of the White House and both chambers of Congress — and Trump avoids having a significant check placed on his power. The congressional seat here, which Republican Rep. John James is leaving open to run for governor, is one of three in the state that the Cook Political Report rates as potentially competitive.
The economic turnaround Trump predicted hasn’t happened — at least not yet — residents of Warren and surrounding towns in Macomb County, the onetime land of “Reagan Democrats,” said in interviews at a coffee shop and a dog park a few days before Thanksgiving.
Their sentiments track with the 63% of registered voters, including 30% of Republicans, who said in the recent national NBC News poll that Trump has fallen short of their expectations on the cost of living and the economy.
While Democrats and Republicans in Michigan disagreed over whether they expect the economy to improve in the next year, there is a universal sense that the dollar just doesn’t go as far as it should. With Black Friday and the Christmas shopping season hurtling toward them, Trump’s backers and critics alike were keenly aware of the costs of everything from homes to dog food.
“You know, people usually have, like, a list of things they want to purchase on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, you know, but that’s — I’m not trying to spend too much money at the moment,” said 28-year-old Riduan Rafique, who stopped in to Bin Castle, a Yemeni coffee shop here, on a break between his three jobs. Rafique is married but said he lives in the same house with his parents and four sisters.
“Working-class people, middle-class people, they’re having a hard time just keeping up with the mortgage, keeping up with the groceries, keeping up with daily life,” said Rafique, who did not vote in last year’s presidential election. The pain hasn’t been felt all at once, he added, but results from a squeeze of factors including a tight job market and the cumulative effects of inflation. “Even though, like, we can’t really say that it’s going up drastically, there’s still a price in increase of inflation year to year, which is affecting, like, people’s budgets.”
Trump says he sees things differently.
“Our country is doing really well economically, like we’ve never done before,” he said Tuesday during an annual turkey-pardoning ceremony at the White House.
Warren isn’t even among the hardest-hit communities of Michigan, where unemployment rates reached as high as 6.9% in Saginaw, 6.8% in Flint, 6.3% in Battle Creek and 6.2% in Bay City in August — the last month for which data is available — according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills metropolitan area, the rate stood at 3.7% in August, right after spiking to a four-year high of 4.9% in July.
The area, like many close-in suburbs around the country, has seen significant change in recent decades. Once an all-white town, Warren’s demographics have diversified substantially in the nearly 50 years since it became a flashpoint in the national debate over integration. White residents still make up a majority of the population, but just 54% to 61%, according to various estimates.
Klotz has noticed.
“Now, this is changing, you know, we got different people,” he said. “They come over here with all this money, buy all these places up because you can’t buy land no more, you know. And they ended blowing up the prices.”
Unemployment and underemployment are less of a problem for retirees like Klotz and Ray Rosati, 63, who worked as a truck driver until retiring several years ago. But sticker shock is not.
