Unlike Benton Harbor, these places are white. Benton Harbor is 87% Black, the median household income is $26,592 and 43% of its citizens live below the poverty line.

Compared to its neighbor city St. Joseph, Benton Harbor is a place of unrelenting hard luck. A place where good paying factory jobs disappeared not too long ago. Where the rate of violent crime is the second highest in Michigan. Where whites fled and the population declined by half over a few decades. Where downtown businesses vanished. Where one rescue after another has stumbled or failed. Where ready finances lately have been hard to come by for basic things like clean water (as in Flint, Benton Harbor has faced severe lead contamination) and good schools. And where citizens turn out to vote at a rate far below the national average.

Before the other volunteers from Indivisible and I head out on a round of canvassing, we get a briefing on what the Democrats have done to save Benton Harbor and make a difference in Michigan. We learn how the Dems repealed the state’s right-to-work law, rescinded the state tax on retiree pensions and put abortion rights into the State Constitution.

We also learn who is on the ticket up and down the ballot, and why we’re throwing our support behind the incumbent 36-year-old state Rep. Joey Andrews, a former regional advisor to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign who, in 2022, won Michigan’s 38th district, which now covers this part of Berrien County.

Andrews is an easy-going lawyer and labor activist from St. Joseph, an 83% white community with a median household income of $80,000 that is separated from Benton Harbor by the St. Joseph River. He reminds us to emphasize how the Dems—supported by Andrews—gave over $12 million to keep the Benton Harbor public school system out of debt, which would have cost the town an estimated $500,000 to $600,000 per year through 2045 to pay it back.

Such legislative victories, Andrews says, were only possible because the Dems have a leadership trifecta in Michigan, with control of both chambers of the State Legislature and Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Currently, the Dems control the state House by just one seat, so keeping him in Lansing really matters, and getting out the vote in Democratic strongholds like Benton Harbor is key in a county that Donald Trump won in 2020 by 6,000 votes.

After learning what to say, we are ready to spell it out as we set off on our walk.

At house after house we knock, wait and nearly always a head slowly peers out, someone cautiously cracks the door, and we politely repeat the words that usually produce a welcome:

“Hi, we’re here for Kamala.”

Usually, we get a nod and thanks and a promise to vote. But one or two say they don’t plan on voting. Sometimes we hear a less than committed voice to do so.

That is to be expected, considering that in the 2020 presidential election, only 37% of registered voters in the Benton Harbor turned out to vote—30 points below the 67% who turned out nationally. Those who did vote favored Biden over Trump, 95% to 5%.

This lack of political engagement is perhaps not surprising. What comes across from those I spoke to is that people here are focused not on Lansing, MIchigan, or on Washington but on their daily struggle for existence here in Benton Harbor—and, at times, across the river in St. Joseph, the county seat.

An elderly neighbor asks, “Why can’t they do something about how young black men are treated in the county courthouse?”

For a 10-minute video tour of Benton Harbor’s neighborhoods, check out Michigan’s Most Dangerous Small Town / Benton Harbor, MI, a 10-minute video on CharlieBo313, a YouTube channel with 350,000 followers. CharlieBo313 features the work of Charlie Moore, a Black man who films neighborhoods across the United States that have been excluded from The American Dream. “I’m just documenting the type of environment similar to what I grew up in,” Moore told The Atlantic’s Stephen Kearse.

Stephen Franklin

A former labor writer, national and foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, Stephen Franklin is a Pulitzer Prize finalist with another journalist at the Detroit Free Press. He teaches as an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Labor and Employment Relations. He is the author of Three Strikes: Labor's Heartland Losses and What They Mean for Working Americans.