Democrat Kamala Harris lost Michigan by more than 80,000 votes amid a nationwide shift to Republicans, as union workers, Black voters, Arab Americans and Muslims either failed to show up at the polls, or cast their ballots for Donald Trump.
It was a bracing loss, given the state is run by a high-profile Democratic governor who expanded voting rights and it had backed a Republican president only once before in the past 22 years — Trump in 2016, and then by fewer than 11,000 votes.
What happened in Michigan highlights issues that ail the Democratic Party nationwide, community leaders, voters and political experts say.
Working-class voters, people of colour and immigrants voted in lower numbers or moved to Trump; high grocery and housing prices loomed large; and national party leaders ignored local organisers.
Exit polling offered insights into challenges Harris faced in her three-month campaign.
The economy was the top issue in Michigan, as across the country but the Arab American and Muslim vote, immigration concerns and a high concentration of Black voters also played a big role, said Ameshia Cross, a Democratic strategist.
"There's only so much you can do in 107 days," Cross said, referring to the amount of time Harris' campaign had after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
"However, I do think that there should have been more time spent in Michigan."
Harris visited the state 11 times, and high-profile Democrats campaigned here, including Barack and Michelle Obama.
Cross faulted the "consulting class" of the Democratic Party for relying too much on polling instead of local organisers.
Local opposition to US support for Israel's wars in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon also loomed over the campaign.
The Harris team said the vice- president held closed-door meetings with Arab American and Muslim leaders, and pointed to outreach efforts that included a large ground presence with 52 offices and more than 375 staff.
Michigan is home to at least 300,000 Arab Americans and Muslims, who overwhelmingly supported Biden in 2020.
Green Party candidate Jill Stein and Trump spent considerable time in Dearborn, the biggest US city with a majority-Arab population. Harris never visited.
Dearborn backed Trump by 42 to Harris' 40 per cent, with Stein receiving over 15 per cent, city data showed. In 2020, Biden won 69 per cent of the vote to Trump's 30 per cent.
The issues may have reverberated in other states too.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest US Muslim advocacy group, said Stein won 53 per cent of the vote in an exit poll of 1,575 verified Muslim voters. Trump won 21 per cent and Harris 20 per cent.
Trump's campaign blasted text messages and mailers to a list of 100,000 mostly Democratic-leaning Arab Americans in Michigan in the last months, portraying Trump as a "president of peace" and linking Harris with the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine.
They seized on Harris' town halls with former representative Liz Cheney, whose father, former vice-president Dick Cheney, played a large role planning the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Harris did not meet "Uncommitted" organisers who mobilised 101,000 votes during the Democratic primaries, and Democrats did not allow a Palestinian speaker at the August party convention, angering these groups and progressives.
In Detroit, the largest majority-Black city in the US, where the Harris campaign had hoped to offset expected losses among Arab and Muslim voters, city data showed turnout fell to 47 per cent from just under 50 per cent in 2020.
Hazen Turner, 24, a black auto worker who canvassed for Harris in Detroit, said many of his friends and co-workers felt defeated by rising costs and their inability to get ahead.
"A lot of young blacks don't really have faith in the system. We work a lot but don't have have anything to show for it."
* The writer is from Reuters