It took General George Armstrong Custer to get Katybeth Davis on the ballot this November. For years, Davis passed a statue of the vanquished US cavalry commander perched imperiously on his horse outside her church in the heart of Monroe county, Michigan. She was angered at the place of honour given to a man she describes as a genocidal killer of Native Americans and a rapist. But the 36-year-old construction company supervisor felt there wasn’t much she could do about it in her mostly white and increasingly conservative county that swung heavily from Barack Obama to Donald Trump four years ago. Then the Black Lives Matter protests swept the country following the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police in May, shifting US politics and bringing a focus on who and what America commemorates. Davis, who calls herself “super-mixed race”, with African, Native American and European ancestry, seized the moment. She led protests to remove Custer that, to her surprise, drew sizable crowds and swiftly widened to represent demands for broader change. Before long Davis found herself running for elected office for the first time in her life, to be a township trustee in the blue-collar county just south of Detroit – and campaigning against another leader, Donald Trump.“I think we’re all sick and tired of being sick and tired. He’s politicised everything. He’s politicised a medical pandemic,” she said. “I can’t just sit around and watch it on the news or read it on Twitter any more. Now I have to do something.”Davis is not alone. The surging death toll from coronavirus under Trump’s chaotic leadership, and the groundswell of protest against racial injustice, have mobilised voters in Monroe county who long felt powerless. Monroe, a county already transformed by the loss of thousands of jobs with the closure of a Ford car factory in the last recession, was an important part of the puzzle that gave Trump victory four years ago.


All data is taken from the source: https://www.theguardian.com/
Article Link:https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/22/michigan-swing-voters-monroe-county-trump-biden


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