Trump Played a Magic Trick on the Midwest. Is It Still Working?

A merica can be complicated, but not always. Sometimes, it is just light and darkness.

Four days ago, I was listening to Donald Trump tell a half-full arena in Youngstown, Ohio, that America is being destroyed by “low-IQ Somalis.” This was after he declared former Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown “the candidate of the Marxists, the communists, and  the anti-American radicals,” but before he urged a female protester being beaten by his supporters to go on a diet. 

Ladies and gentlemen, we have found the darkness.

Three car rentals later — don’t ask — I am in Escanaba in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It has taken 12 hours. I check into my hotel and contemplate watching 48 hours straight of Brooklyn 99 and then telling my editors I’ve found nothing. But then I get out of bed and drag myself to the League of Women Voters candidate forum being held in the Escanaba city council chambers. Before going inside, I pop two Tylenol migraine pills — 65 grams each of sweet, sweet caffeine — and gird myself for the Michigan State House District 108 debate. 

My phone tells me the House District 108 is 84 percent white and switched from Democratic to Republican during the Obama presidency, surely just a coincidence. The moderator asks a question about the area’s chronic battle with population loss. (The U.P. is twice the size of Massachusetts but has barely 300,000 residents.) The Republican candidate, a nice enough girl dad, drones on about job creation through industry growth and higher tax revenue. 

I search on my phone for the nearest tavern where a man in white Stan Smiths and a BC Lions baseball cap can grab a drink without being fed into a woodchipper. The Republican is still droning. And then I hear Rachel Keys’ voice for the first time. 

“They’re tripping over themselves to figure out how to fix the population, and in the meantime, in 6,000 square miles and six counties, the 108 has one place that women can go to have babies,” Keys, the Democratic candidate, says. She wears oversized glasses and dangling earrings featuring the rebel loon, a bird that has come to represent the resistance movement. “This has been an issue for the last two decades, and none of our male Republican leadership seems to think that it’s an issue.”

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Her confidence startles me. But 6,000 square miles for a House district? Where are we, Kamchatka?  It seems impossible so I look it up. Turns out it is quite possible. 

Keys’ home is in Bay Mills on the Ojibwe reservation, just a few miles from the Canadian border. The district’s westernmost point ends in Menominee on the Wisconsin border 215 miles away. That’s four and a half hours each way on a good day and that’s why Keys has put 27,000 miles on her car in 2026.

Back at the debate in Escanaba, I notice to the right of me a woman is scribbling out a form for the “audience asks questions” portion. I am tired and borderline irritable. I mumble to myself, “It’s going to be transgender in sports, I know it’s going to be transgender in sports, please don’t let it be transgender in sports.”

I am shushed. Turns out I was mumbling out loud.

The question: Do you think any changes should be made to the current rules for Michigan high school athletics regarding matters involving transgender student athletes participating in female sports teams?

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The Republican says he doesn’t understand the science but is definitely against it. Keys theatrically sighs. 

“To the best of my knowledge, in the six counties that the 108 covers, there isn’t a single transgender student even trying to play sports,” says Keys. “I feel like this is just identity politics trying to take over serious issues right now. I’m a 40-year-old woman. I honestly don’t really follow high school volleyball all that much.” 

A moment passes and Keys speaks again. 

“Now, I’ve been very vocal on the corporate welfare tax structure that we have, it needs to change.”

Keys is a first-time candidate in a 60-40 Republican district, so there’s not a ton of cash. She raises money for the long drives and $5 gallon gas by doing GoFundMe car karaoke. It usually nets her about a hundred bucks. Once, she made over a thousand. Then, she realized that the stylish black pantsuit with bare shoulders that she was wearing made it look like she was singing topless. She took it down. 

Then there’s her source of employment. Keys’ day job is running the 180-year-old Point Iroquois Lighthouse on Lake Superior, hard on the Canadian border. 

I double-check. She runs an actual lighthouse. 

It is 160 miles and a three-hour drive each way from Escanaba. 

I do not care. I need that lighthouse. We need that lighthouse.

LET ME EXPLAIN how we got here.

Every American election is now billed as the most important one of our lifetimes. I don’t know if it’s true. I do know every election takes a little more of our souls, leaving us angrier and, somehow, more hateful. 

Early in October, I made plans to hit the uber battleground states of Michigan and Ohio. I wondered whether Trump fatigue had really settled in as we headed toward the midterms. Could these two bellwether states flip from red to blue? Pundits and pollsters theorized that white working class voters were finally realizing that Donald Trump is an expert at pushing his dirty thumb into their wounds but not actually healing them. 

It makes sense. Second Term Trump is basically the president being the main character every single day on Reddit’s AmItheAsshole. 

The answer is always yes. Waging war against Canada? Sure. Hiring a defense secretary in favor of public executions? Absolutely. Holding hands with Bibi and going to war with Iran? Check. Two protesters gunned down during ICE raids in Minneapolis? Affirmative.

Knock twice if you’ve heard this before. Personally, I remember reading a Rolling Stone story by some dickhead about how a 2024 Trump rally seemed tired and played out. Surely, the writer babbled, the MAGA fever was breaking in America.  

Friends, that dickhead was me. 

The Michigan/Ohio story was my idea and yet I was dreading it. I’d hit my personal right-wing fatigue after spending the past year writing about the murder of Melissa Hortman, getting tear gassed in Los Angeles at an anti-ICE rally, and then being intimidated/tailgated by said ICE on suburban Minnesota roads while reporting on feds pulling over American kids on their way to high school dance class. And then I watched all six episodes of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s Great American Road Trip. In one night.

I am, as Graham Greene put it, a burnt out case. So I put the trip off for a week and retreated to a friend’s empty house in Livingston, Montana. I needed to take in the beauty of Yellowstone and Paradise Valley, see the big sky and watch the bison roam before heading to the terrordome of the battleground state. 

Then, one morning, I headed out for a walk not far from where Robert Redford filmed Where a River Runs Through It. The sky was blue and autumn leaves rustled on quiet streets. Then, I heard gunshots and see something that looks like a tear gas cloud. I fast-walked back home.  

I opened my laptop and read that Ben Shapiro and friends are in Livingston shooting a film that makes ICE the heroes of Minneapolis. Paradise is being paved over for a Daily Wire film. I left for Youngstown, Ohio, the next day.  

Maybe the fever isn’t breaking.

Second Term Trump is basically the president being the main character every single day on Reddit’s AmItheAsshole.

I’VE BEEN TO Youngstown enough that I have my favorite restaurant. Station Square Ristorante is a 40-year-old Italian joint just off I-80 and within stumbling distance of a Hampton Inn. It’s Italian old school, something out of a Scorsese movie. I spent my 2020 Covid birthday here, downing vodka and eating ravioli at the bar, my seat partitioned from other carousers by plexiglass. A bow-tied man in a dinner jacket played tunes on a Casio keyboard. 

I’ve made a point of stopping here for the night on various cross-country drives even when it didn’t make geographical sense. I never could quite put my finger on why I kept coming back until this trip. The Johnny Walker wisdom was running high one night and it came to me: The people are happy. The food is great, the pours are strong and they are laughing with their friends and families celebrating their nonna’s 80th birthday or Angelina and Mikey’s engagement.

This is not the vibe of the rest of Youngstown. It reminds me of Flint, Michigan, where I went to high school, a grimy and proud company town where too many promises have been broken and too many good people have moved away. 

“There were so many things that were supposed to happen here,” says Marty Loney, the local union president of the Western Reserves Building Trades. “There was going to be an indoor racetrack and blimp factory. None of it ever happened.” 

We’re in Loney’s office. His gray beard seems stalled in a permanent frown which is not surprising after a lifetime in Youngstown. This election, Loney is bucking his own bosses. The statewide union has endorsed Republican Vivek Ramaswamy for governor while Loney’s chapter is supporting Amy Acton, the Democratic nominee. Ramaswamy called Loney directly to see if he would change his mind. 

“I answered the phone, he told me who he was and just started talking, then went for 10 minutes. I couldn’t get a word in,” says Loney. “Finally I said, ‘Hey, listen, you called me. Let me give you my spiel now.’ He didn’t like that idea. The last thing he said to me was, ‘If you guys would seriously consider changing your endorsement, I may come up to see you.’” 

Loney’s face flushes red and he stares at some union pins on his desk he wants to give me as a memento.

“Fuck that, I ain’t doing that. If anybody knows anything about people in Youngstown, it’s your word, your bond,” says Loney. “When you get a chance to talk to folks like that, and you see them act the way they do…” Loney trails off for a second. “Well, that’s why they have that kind of money because they screwed over too many damn people.” 

He takes a breath. 

“And I’m done seeing that happen to the state of Ohio.”

The question is whether the rest of Youngstown feels the same. The town has been in economic freefall for nearly 50 years since the steel mills began closing in 1977. Then came NAFTA, a global free trade treaty that made it easy for American corporations to shift well-paying blue collar jobs overseas. Union jobs in Youngstown dropped from 90,000 to 20,000 in half a century. 

That’s why I’d been here before. In 2017, Lordstown, a General Motors plant 15 miles outside of Youngstown, was teetering toward closure. The plant had once employed 12,000 but now was down to 4,000. At the time, gas was cheap and Lordstown built the fuel-efficient Chevy Cruze. Everyone wanted trucks and SUVs. 

That summer, Trump came to town, fresh off his first election. He boasted things were going to be different on his watch before a full house at the Cavelli Centre in downtown Youngstown.

I rode through your beautiful roads coming up from the airport. And I was looking at some of those big, once-incredible, job-producing factories, and Melania said, “What happened?” I said, “Those jobs have left Ohio. . . but they’re all coming back.” Don’t move. Don’t sell your house.”

The Lordstown plant was still savable, but Trump did nothing. Instead, he lowered federal fuel efficiency standards, leaving GM with no need for the gas-sipping Cruze. Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown — a man Trump describes as a Marxist — wrote a letter to GM CEO Mary Barra urging her to take some of the $6.9 billion the company realized in Trump tax cuts and either revive the Cruze or assign Lordstown a new car. GM never responded. The factory closed in 2019. 

In my 2020 story, I traced the lives of Lordstown workers who were members of UAW 1112. Some re-located to faraway plants, some took jobs making half their pay, some fell into depression that ended in suicide. The closed GM plant went through a series of new owners, the first being Lordstown Motors, an electric car operation that brought then-Vice President Mike Pence to town.

“This is just a great day, an exciting day, where not too long ago we had heartbreaking news,” said Pence referencing the closing of the GM plant.

In the end, Lordstown Motors sold exactly 38 cars, 35 of which were recalled. The only sign that Lordstown Motors was ever here is a small slope on the property that was built for a demonstration of the company’s electric truck climbing ability. It got stuck on its only attempt. 

On a beautiful October afternoon, I drive over to Lordstown to speak with the leaders of UAW 112. Their Lordstown office is huge and forlorn, built for another time. Now it’s a historic relic, a Mangiot Line fort that the Germans just blitzed on their way to Paris.

I sit down at a conference table with George Gorantis, the current president of UAW 1112 and Josh Johnson, a UAW man in his thirties. Gorantis jokes that Johnson had been present at the closing of the last three steel mills operating in Ohio, eliciting a laugh from Josh Ayers, the burly shop chairman at Ultium Cells. 

Ultium is a new plant building batteries for electric cars that GM funded as a consolation prize for Lordstown after the Cruze was discontinued. Understandably, the trio are more eager to talk about the battery plant than re-open old Lordstown GM wounds. 

And they have a right to be proud; the UAW has achieved great things for their workers. The plant opened in 2022, with workers initially earning $16.50, less than could be made at a nearby Amazon distribution center. Safety procedures were lax and workers began quitting, uncertain of how their interaction with acid and liquids in the production process might impact their future health. 

But then Gorantis and the national UAW went to work. In June of 2024, the UAW and the plant reached an agreement that upped wages to $35 an hour by the end of the contract. Safety stewards were hired and things were looking up.

“You could just see in the parking lots, people were doing better,” says Gorantis. “People had new or newer cars that didn’t break down and sit in the lot. They could quit their second jobs.”

Shortly after the June agreement was reached, UAW 1112 members faced another challenge. Donald Trump of “don’t sell your houses” fame was campaigning for president again. He spoke long and loud about his hatred of electric vehicles. It bordered on the pathological. He promised to dismantle the policies encouraging Americans to buy them, including a $7,500 federal rebate available to new buyers. 

This wasn’t complicated: If Trump was re-elected in 2024, the electric car business would suffer along with battery plants like Ultium Cells. And that’s exactly what happened. Trump eliminated the electric car incentives and sales dived. In January of 2026, over 1,300 union workers were laid off from Ultium. 

I ask the trio if they had impressed on their members the importance of not voting for the guy who had a visceral hatred of their industry just for self-preservation reasons. 

The room goes silent for a moment. Then Ayers, the UAW shop steward at Ultium Cells, speaks up.

“I voted for Trump.”

(The area broke 54 percent for Trump).

Johnson chimes in. He voted Libertarian.

“I’m an old school conservative Democrat,” says Johnson. “My parents, my grandfather are all Democrats, but this new woke shit. I don’t like it. I don’t like all this bullshit they talk about.”

Then Gorgantis speaks.

“I voted for Harris, but I did vote for Trump in 2016.”

I ask Ayers why he voted for Trump. 

“There was a belief that under the Biden administration, the inflation, the cost of things, was going up,” says Ayers, tugging at his baseball cap. “I think there was a hope that there would be a repeat cycle of when Trump was in office in ‘16 to ‘20. Unfortunately, it’s not working out that way.”

I ask if he has second thoughts.

“I don’t regret it,” says Ayers. He cites his support for Trump’s wars against Iran and Venezuela as good things. He mentions Trump’s promise that we would be soon harvesting Venezuela’s oil reserves. “It could be a great thing,” says Ayers. 

We make small talk and Gorgantis mentions that Ultium Cells is now bringing back a lot of their workers who had been laid off in January.

I want to say that it would have been even better if they had not been laid off to begin with, but it seems pointless. Instead, I shake their hands and then climb into my gas-powered 2026 SUV rental and drive away.

I share my UAW encounter with other people in Youngstown, without mentioning the specific shop. I ask former Senator Brown, who is now running for Senate again, at a Youngstown campaign stop about Democrats meeting resistance in once favorable places where culture issues still seem to supplant personal well-being. (He’d just been to the UAW 1112 office a week earlier.)

“You win them back by talking to them, by listening to them, as I always have,” says Brown. “By going to their plant, going to their churches, going to their town halls, and listening to people. And how are we going to fight back? Voters didn’t vote for this war. They didn’t vote for higher grocery prices. They didn’t vote for gas prices to go up $1. Farmers didn’t vote for and truckers didn’t vote for diesel prices to double.”

It is a politician’s answer, probably smart with two weeks to go.

Marty Loney just sighs when I tell him about my other Youngstown encounters. He mentions an analogy he uses with his members.

“Here we are, 10 years later, no further ahead, right?” says Loney. “So we’ve gone through those lies and those promises, and that’s exactly what we’re getting here again. Let me ask you a question: If your wife made all the money in the world, and came home and lied to you every minute of the day, every day of the week, would you still be married to her?”

It’s a good metaphor, but I kept finding people in Youngstown willing to stay in an abusive relationship. 

“Here we are, 10 years later, no further ahead, right? So we’ve gone through those lies and those promises, and that’s exactly what we’re getting here again.”

BUT MAYBE FEWER of them. The Covelli Centre in downtown Youngstown was filled with nearly 7,000 people in 2017 for Trump’s “”don’t sell your homes” rally. But now it is October 2026 and the thrill is gone. The back portion of the arena is blocked off by a giant American flag. Other sections with perfect views of the stage are empty. Charitably, there’s maybe 3,500 people here.

I should point out I’ve been to too many Trump rallies. There was the Covid-infested Tulsa rally of 2020 (RIP Herman Cain) and, more recently, the 2024 Return To Butler rally where Elon Musk jumped up and down like a spastic robot being fed the wrong voltage. Still, today is easily the saddest. 

The event kicks off with Republican state treasurer candidate Jay Edwards offering the invocation. 

“Lord, thank you for the Mahoning Valley, for the steelworkers and the union families who never gave up on this place, even when the mills went quiet. Lord, let the furnaces roar again.”

Edwards recently represented a district 175 miles to the south so maybe he doesn’t know that Youngstown’s last blast furnace was dismantled in 2017. There is no place for it to roar.

Eventually, Youngstown congressman Michael Rulli walks to the podium. He reminds everyone that it is Columbus Day and thank Christ we are free to celebrate Columbus again even if the explorer never actually set foot on mainland America. (OK, I added that last part.) 

Rulli is restless and paces the stage.

“Last weekend, I was on the plane with the president on Air Force One, and he says, ‘I have a special surprise for you, Rulli,’ he says, “I’m coming to Youngstown because I didn’t forget them.”

The crowd cheers, perhaps not realizing that the question isn’t whether Donald Trump has forgotten they exist, but whether he has done anything for them.

Vivek Ramaswamy speaks next. He swears Ohio will soon, economically, make Texas and Florida jealous. He offers no details. He moves to more comfortable ground.

“As Americans, we believe in merit — that the best person gets the job regardless of their skin color,” says Ramaswamy. He then steals from MLK. “That you are judged not on the color of your skin, but on the content of your character and your contributions.”

(A week later, the content of Ramaswamy’s character is revealed when he airs an attack ad against Amy Acton featuring Acton’s mother, a woman who abandoned her daughter in 1978, sticking with her husband, a man indicted for sexually assaulting Acton when she was a child.)

Eventually, Trump emerges to the Lee Greenwood song and begins by praising the physical attributes of Republican senator Jon Husted.

“I looked at his ass, and I looked at the whole, and then I looked at his hands. Look at his hands! He’s got these claws.”

Trump then turns to what he believes is Ohio’s most pressing problems: the 60,000 Somalis who make up 0.5 percent of the state’s population.

He plays dumb about the recent raid on Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar’s home but describes her as a “disaster.” He then cites a series of crimes in Minnesota that may or may not have involved Somali Americans.

“This is not what we want in this country,” says Trump.

The Youngstown crowd begins to chant.

“Deport! Deport!”

Trump smiles.

“Somalia, they love Mercedes,” says Trump. “They come in, they have nothing, and they’re the number-one buyers of Mercedes-Benz and BMWs in the state of Minnesota. The whole thing is crazy. It’s crazy, low-IQ people.” 

“Deport! Deport!”

Trump then brings up Springfield, Ohio, 200 miles away. That’s where Ohio native JD Vance declared Haitian Americans were eating the cats and dogs of their neighbors, a charge that Vance admitted later was complete bullshit. 

“If you want to stop Ohio from being plundered, ransacked and destroyed like Minnesota’s being destroyed — we’re going to stop it just like we did with Springfield.”

“Deport! Deport!”

At one point, a woman protester stands up and starts shouting about the Epstein files. The Trump crowd does not wait for security. I watch them punch the woman in the face and chest.

Trump smiles. He then gets the protester’s gender wrong.

“Oh, he’s got to go on a diet. He’s a fat guy. Wow. Wow. Got to go on a diet fast.”

The audience begins a new chant.

“USA! USA!”

It is not until 40 minutes in that Trump begins to brag about what he has done for Youngstown.

“The big steel company, Vallourec, is investing $48 million to expand operations right here in a place called Youngstown.” 

A few days later, Jobs Ohio — a state economic development corporation — reports that once operational the new Vallourec project will create 40 jobs.

A few minutes later, Trump begins raging about “the transgender mutilization of your children.” 

I’m out. 

My serotonin levels are crashing and the only thing that can help is a Station Square stop. Last call is 9 p.m. I jog out to my car. There’s a problem. Security for Trump’s motorcade has already cut off my exit ramp. I am screwed. Then I see a dirt path at the back of my parking lot used for maintenance vehicles.

Fuck it. I head down the rutted road at 40 mph. My high beams terrorize two rabbits and they scurry for the ditch. I emerge a half mile away under an overpass. I then run some very yellow lights pulling into the restaurant with 20 minutes to spare.

I grab a barstool and order pumpkin ravioli and down a vodka on the rocks. Next to me are two men. We will call the older one Rosencranz and the younger man Guildenstern. Rosencranz sees my press pass. He asks me if I went to the rally. I say yes. He sees the name of my publication and elbows Guildenstern.

“We were gonna go,” slurs Rosencranz. “But we got into uh, a loud discussion with some protesters and then it was too late, they wouldn’t let us in.”

They’ve been drinking ever since. Rosencrantz is 69 and worries about his middle-aged son who has no girlfriend and low ambitions. Guildenstern is 43 and wants me to know that the Trump in Youngstown is not actually Trump. He tells me there are many Trumps.

“It’s all a magic trick,” says Guildenstern. “If you don’t get that, I can’t help you.”

The bartender asks me if I want dessert before the kitchen closes. I look at my new friends. We agree on a last drink instead.

We throw another one back. The bartender is patient with us, but the time has come. We stumble into the Ohio night. The traffic of I-80 flies by, a highway that once brought supplies and workers to Youngstown’s dark satanic and profitable mills.

Rosencrantz’s eyes fills with tears.

“Maybe this place sucks, but I love it. It’s my home.”

Guildenstern throws his arm around me.

“Remember, it’s a magic trick.”

 And then Rosencrantz and Guildenstern jump into their cars and peel out of the parking lot.

I hope they made it home safe.

“It’s all a magic trick. If you don’t get that, I can’t help you.”

I LIKE TO THINK I have gimlet-eyed cynicism about politics, but sometimes I’m just a dumb golden retriever swallowing a pill because it is covered in peanut butter. While in Ohio, I received a text from an operative with Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign telling me he would be doing a bus tour with Alexandria Cortez-Ocasio in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. I was cordially invited.

Visions of John McCain’s Straight Talk Express danced before my eyes with reporters asking El-Sayed and AOC questions about working class swing voters between stops. I told the aide I’ll be there and made my way from Youngstown to Escanaba. 

I did not read the fine print. Reporters are not allowed on the bus and while AOC would speak at the rallies, she would take exactly zero questions from reporters. (She did take a question the next day outside of a Culver’s hamburger joint in suburban Detroit from our friends at TMZ).

Still, I learned some things.

Like Youngstown, Escanaba and the rest of the U.P. was once a Democratic stronghold full of union jobs and blue districts. Obama won it by six points in 2008, but since then it has slid MAGA with Trump taking the area by 19 points in 2024. An 89-year-old man helps explain why.  

It’s the day before El-Sayed and AOC arrive. I meet Leah Belanger and Nino Green, her elderly father, for lunch at The Dew Drop, a restaurant in Gladstone, about three miles up the road from Escanaba. (Later in the week, Mike Rogers, El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, will hold a rally down the street before a few dozen people.) 

Green is all bushy eyebrows and cupped hands bending his ears so he can hear the conversation better. He is a lawyer and moved from Detroit to the Upper Peninsula in 1966 as part of LBJ’s War On Poverty, opening legal clinics for the poor. He ran unsuccessfully as a Democrat for Congress in the early 1970s and worked for a half century as a labor lawyer, representing unions and unfairly dismissed workers. He’s a living history of the U.P., first watching the logging and unionized paper mills provide steady jobs for the hardy few willing to endure the heartless winters.

Now, Green says it is slipping away. Many of the construction jobs in the area devolved into non-union gigs. I mention the nearby hotel I’m staying at with stunning Lake Superior sunrises. 

“You’re in the new wing,” says his daughter. “That was a non-union job.”  

Green grumbles into his coffee. 

“People have to get out there and put their body on the picket line,” says Green. “Today, people are not interested in doing that. It’s changed, and the Democratic Party has changed. The Democratic Party has become the party of the status quo.”

He relates his conversation last year with a Democrat who was thinking of running for Congress. 

“I asked him, ‘You want us to send you to Washington to do something. Are you for Medicare for All? ‘Well, no, I’m for the public option.’ Well, how about ICE? Are you going to get rid of ICE? ‘Well, I think that’s going too far.’

Green grimaces and then his old eyes light up.

“That’s what’s so refreshing about Abdul,” says Green. He ticks off El-Sayed’s support of Medicare for all and abolishing ICE. “He tells you what he’s going to do.”

I ask Leah what the main objection to El-Sayed is among Yoopers, as Upper Peninsula residents call themselves. She is matter of fact.

“They won’t vote for him because he’s Muslim,” says Belanger. “It is as plain and simple as that.  Policy doesn’t matter. People are very open about it.” 

Belanger is not wrong. A recent poll suggested 37 percent of Michigan voters were less likely to vote for a Muslim-American. Belanger excuses herself for a cigarette break, but first says she believes El-Sayed coming to visit Escanaba tomorrow is going to help.

“He’ll meet people, and they’ll figure out he’s not the boogeyman that the Republicans want to make him out to be,” says Belanger. 

She fumbles for her lighter. 

“Well, some people will figure it out.”

THE NEXT MORNING, I run into Rachel Keys in the grass parking lot outside the Escanaba El-Sayed/AOC rally. She pops out of her Subaru with a Canadian flag decal and adjusts her business suit after another long drive. Keys did not stay over in Escanaba after the debate. Instead, she drove the 150 miles back to Bay Mills, got her son off the school and then returned to Escanaba by 10 a.m. 

“AOC is here, I’m fan girling a bit,” says Keys. She had been an early supporter of El-Sayed, first meeting him at Bird’s Eye Outfitter in Sault Ste. Marie with a couple dozen other people. (At the rally, El-Sayed says hello and remembers Keys’ native name is Madagaminkwe which translates to “turbulent waters.”)

“He believes in things I do,” says Keys. “The healthcare situation up here is desperate, we have to do better.” She begins rattling off things that can be done immediately. “Do you know about Michigan’s momnibus bill?” asks Keys. 

She promises to tell me tomorrow at the lighthouse.

The good vibes end five minutes later. There’s a vocal contingent of anti-El-Sayed protesters outside the rally. Perhaps idiotically, I approach a man who is wearing a MAGA visor that has a Trump-style wig attached to it. He is shouting something about El-Sayed being a Muslim double agent. 

I ask him if I can talk to him and he demands identification. I pulled out a photo ID and a business card. He scoffs.

“You could have just printed this up.” 

He then looks at my left hand.

“If you’re a reporter, why is your hand shaking?”

I tell him I’ve had a tremor in that hand for probably two decades.

He has a different opinion.

“You’re on meth!” He then starts chuckling with his fellow MAGA supporters. “This guy’s on meth!”

I head inside. AOC is introduced and gives a pitch to red voters thinking of going blue in 2026:

“Abdul doesn’t take money from the pharmaceutical lobbyists, from the insurance lobbyists. He doesn’t take money from Wall Street. And what he says, is that if working people come together across geography, race, difference, and fight, so that we all can guarantee healthcare in America, so that we all can support our schools in America, and we all take on these monopolies that are driving up our prices and making our lives impossible, then we will have a better world, and a fairer shake.”

After the rally, I relate to El-Sayed a shorthand version of my conversation with the Ohio union workers still voting on culture issues rather than economic ones. I ask what his final pitch is to those voters in Michigan. 

“You shouldn’t have to pay $5 for gas,” he says, wearing a black shirt and jeans. He looks exponentially more tired than when I last saw him in early September. “You shouldn’t have to decide whether you can even buy meat at the grocery store because it’s so expensive. You shouldn’t have to worry about seeing a doctor in the richest, most powerful country in the world.” 

El-Sayed’s brow furrows. 

“They don’t want to talk about any of that. They keep just pointing to my name and my faith.”

He is not wrong. I drive through the rain to the next stop in Iron Mountain, a town in Dickinson County that Trump won in 2024 with 67 percent of the vote. Outside, there are more protesters than in Escanaba. A man screams that El-Sayed’s Muslim faith means he will bring Sharia law to Michigan. 

He tells me his name is Dennis and smiles. His grin fades after I ask him if has any proof on the issue. 

“Islam teaches that you can lie for Mohammed and that’s what he is doing every day of his life.”

A woman protester joins the conversation.

“We have already lost Dearborn and Hamtramck,” says the protester, mentioning two suburban Detroit towns with large Arab-American communities. 

I note that both towns are nearly 500 miles away. She doesn’t back down.

“They’re coming.”

A third protester tells me that while she is an ardent Rogers supporter what she really wants is for the Upper Peninsula to break away and, along with northern Wisconsin, form the independent state of Superior.

And that cues my exit. I wonder what the hell the El-Sayed campaign is doing here three weeks out from Election Day. I know that El-Sayed performed well here during the Democratic primary, but this visit seems both Sisyphean and suicidal.

And then I enter the rally. Here, in the proposed state of Superior, there are 400 to 450 sweaty bodies shouting “Medicare For All,” a policy Democrats have been pushing spectacularly unsuccessfully for over three decades. Maybe everyone inside and outside in Iron Mountain are clinically insane. 

At least the crazy fuckers inside have their hearts in the right place.

Later in the week, Mike Rogers will try to tie El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood without proof in a debate, asking the Michigan born-and-raised El-Sayed a question: “Are you for America or for these terrorist groups?” In Caro, Michigan, a purportedly random questioner, who turned out to be a Republican operative, demands he deny the Muslim Brotherhood even though El-Sayed has done this multiple times.In Muskegon, a man in a white T-shirt festooned with a red cross — a shoutout to the medieval Crusades — yells at El-Sayed: “The problem is your book says something different than my book.”

Watching the madness unfold, I remember something that El-Sayed told me and other reporters after a rally at Northern Michigan University in Marquette.

“I know exactly what the Constitution means to me and what it guarantees me.” El-Sayed paused just a beat. “It’s exactly the same things they’re trying to take away.”

I HEAD TO Bay Mills the day after the rallies. The Point Iroquois Lighthouse is about 40 nautical miles from the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and the gales of November have come two weeks early. The wind nearly rips my car door off its hinges in the parking lot. I lean my body in like I’m walking in a swimming pool to force myself through the wind and toward the weather-beaten “employees only” entrance.

The lighthouse is quaint and dilapidated, a hipster home that just needs a $500,000 rehab. Keys welcomes me and we head toward her office, past a freezer full of bear, moose, and racoon meat. 

“I believe like my ancestors in using the whole animal,” says Keys.  “Did you know brains make the best natural lubricant for tanning hides?”

I do not. We settle into her second-story office. Lake Superior rages and crests outside her window. 

“Before radar, the lighthouse let sailors know if you keep coming this way, you’re about to fall off the earth,” says Keys.

(This is the point where I regrettably inform you that because of said radar technology, the lighthouse no longer beams a giant non-metaphorical light across the stormy waters. Apologies. Believe me, I hate myself more than you can hate me.)

Now 40, Keys is charismatic and funny, she tells me her husband won’t be much help in the closing days of the campaign because he’s bear hunting. 

Her brother? 

“He’s a MAGA guy,” says Keys. “He just doesn’t vote. He’s off the grid. He doesn’t even have a cell phone. I leave him be. If he did vote, he wouldn’t vote educated. It’s probably for the best.”

Growing up on the rez, as she puts it, wasn’t easy. She was raised by a single mom who she loved but clashed with constantly. Keys emancipated herself as a teenager and moved into nearby Ste. Sault Marie for high school. She hid her indigenous heritage by bleaching her hair blonde and wearing gray contact lenses.

“If the teachers knew you were from the rez, your papers went from A’s to D’s.” She mentions that her niece now goes to the same high school and proudly wears her tribal hoodie. “It wasn’t like that 25 years ago,” says Keys.

After graduating, Key did what any teenage American from the frozen north would do: she took a bus to Florida and worked at Disney World. Eventually, she joined the Navy and served as a missile defense specialist on the USS Iwo Jima during the War on Terror. But then her mom got sick and was diagnosed with brain cancer. All her appointments were at least two hours south in Michigan’s lower peninsula. 

Keys helped her arrange a network of friends and family to drive her to the doctor. That worked for a while. 

“Our tribe is a community, and everyone was running her 2-3 hours each way,” says Keys. “But they were missing too much work, it wasn’t sustainable.”

So Keys had her mom flown out to her home in Virginia Beach, Virginia. There, Keys obtained home nurse care and then hospice treatment. Her mom died at 55.

“I had to take her out of her home to get her decent care,” says Keys.

That wasn’t the end of her medical nightmare. Keys was seven months pregnant and returned to Bay Mills for her mother’s services. She had a heart attack on the day of her mom’s funeral. Her husband drove her to the nearest hospital in St. Sault Marie 40 minutes away. She then gave birth to a son, weighing three pounds. He was taken by ambulance to the nearest NICU unit in Marquette, 170 miles away.

“They told my husband, ‘Your wife is fighting for her life in St Sault Marie. Your son is fighting for his life in Marquette. You pick which one you’re going to be with.’”

Happily, they both survived and her son is now a third-grade Yooper hockey player. 

But it started Keys on the journey toward her campaign. She stayed on the reservation and got a degree in cannabis management, partially because she thought it was hilarious that her military benefits would pay her to learn about the marketing of weed. 

A great American irony is how Keys’ once-poor Bay Mills reservation became a testament to what more accessible and affordable healthcare can do for a community. In 2020, sports betting was legalized in Michigan, but the state insisted betting corporations partner with existing Michigan tribal communities. Draft Kings agreed to work with Bay Mills in exchange for a percentage of profits. The deal has been worth tens of millions. The lucre has been utilized to improve the tribe and adjacent community’s access to healthcare. There’s now an on-site dental and rehab center on the reservation, services that once were hours away. Bay Mills reported in 2025 serving 3,929 health-center patients, including 2,236 from the surrounding communities.

“We want people to move here and then we tell them that they have to drive their kids a 100 miles to see a dentist,” says Keys. “That’s no way to get families here or keep families here.”

Keys knows that El-Sayed’s Medicare for All is a noble goal, but she insists there are immediate things that can be done for her constituents. She brings up Michigan’s “momnibus bill,” which would grant rural mothers coverage for midwives and doulas. The bill has been passed by the state Senate, but Republican statehouse leaders have it bottled up in committee. And at the federal level, Keys believes U.P. citizens don’t realize how much Trump’s Medicaid cuts will impact their already meager healthcare options unless a Democratic House rolls them back. She mentions the recent shuttering of Diane Peppler centers — domestic abuse centers —  in the Upper Peninsula. 

“Those are things we need or people die,” says Keys. “If you are an abused person in Detroit, that is a very different thing from being an abused person in Paradise, Michigan, where there is nowhere to go. You don’t have a neighbor for 15 miles.”

Keys decided to run for the House seat after the 2024 candidate declined another bid. “She had a terrible time,” says Keys. “Trump was on the ballot so guys in MAGA hats just harassed everywhere she went.”

Keys says 2026 is different. She says the number of red hats and Trump flags have dropped off in the U.P., not necessarily converting to the Democratic cause but just sitting this one out.

But hardcore MAGA still remains. Keys tells me that she tries to engage with everyone, even the folks screaming at her. 

“When I walk through them, I ask, ‘Can I pray with you,’ and see if they’ll pray with me,” says Keys. Then she lets out a loud laugh. “I did that at Abdul’s rally, and the guy called me a cunt because he didn’t want my prayers.” 

Other encounters have been genuinely inspiring. “I think it’s not even right or left, it’s gender-based. Women are just so much more engaged,” Keys tells me. She mentions going door-to-door in McMillan, a rural town an hour away where houses are miles apart, where an old woman answered the door in Garfield pajamas and shot Keys a look and a question.

“Do you have a vagina?”

“Yes,” replied Keys.

“Then you got my vote.” 

We talk for over two hours before we both realize that we have to wrap things in order for Keys to make it to an El-Sayed rally this evening in Sault Ste Marie. (We talked so long that Keys missed a photo op when El-Sayed brought his campaign bus to the reservation.) 

Before I go, I look out on the other side of the lighthouse that looks out across the expansive grounds. I point out a sidewalk that ends abruptly and ask Keys what was once there.

“That’s where the guard house used to be,” says Keys. “Native Americans had to sign in and out if they left the reservation. You know the phrase he’s gone off the reservation?’ It means they have gone crazy, right?” 

She explains if more than three Native Americans left the reservation together, they could be hunted down as a suspected war party. Tribe members were allowed to leave the reservation to go hunting, but, sometimes, they were doing something else. A nearby trail leads into the wilderness where the Ojibwe would practice their prohibited religion with dancing and other ceremonies. It wasn’t until 1978 that federal legislation was passed that allowed native tribes to practice their religion freely.

We talk about the current state of play in American politics and the slurs being hurled at El-Sayed and his Muslim faith. She looks back out the window toward the now ghost guard house.

“Americans need to remember you don’t have to look to other countries to see what religious persecution looks like,” says Keys. “It’s a lot easier to look to the other side of the world and say they’re wrong, than it is to look at your own history.”

Outside, it is still all wind and rain. Fall leaves gather and fall in the gloaming. But if you look closely, there are small gaps in the gray. Occasionally, a sliver of brightness fights through. 

Here’s one: an October 27 Detroit News poll showed El-Sayed up six points in the U.P., which could bode well for Keys’ improbable crusade. If elected, Keys will have an office in the Cora Reynolds Anderson House Office Building in Lansing. That would be fitting. Anderson was the last Ojibwe in the Michigan legislature. She left office exactly one hundred years ago.

Is it the promised light? Maybe, but outside it starts to rain again. Keys says goodbye. She needs to change for the rally, check in on her son, and gas up the Subaru. Tomorrow’s event is a pumpkin-carving contest 150 miles away in Gladstone. There may be a couple dozen parents of voting age.