Editor’s note: Every summer Ken Pletcher has written a letter to Sopris Sun readers from Michigan. Here is letter number four.
Hello again from the southeastern shores of beautiful Lake Michigan, part of a region sometimes called America’s Third Coast. I had planned, in this fourth letter, to write about our immediate neighbors behind our cottage, the Prairie Club, and its legacy of conservation and land stewardship, like so many organizations in the Roaring Fork Valley.
But that will have to wait for another time. With the election looming, Michigan will be one of several states crucial in determining who will be our next president. That seemed a more pressing topic.
I first voted in the 1972 presidential election and have done so in virtually every contest (federal, state, local) since, including by mail when I was at school in Japan in 1976. I consider it my duty as a citizen to do so, even though sometimes I’m not that enthusiastic about the candidates. Not voting means that someone else is deciding who will govern you. And that can have consequences.
Michigan – especially heavily Democratic Detroit – learned this in 2016, when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton here by less than 12,000 votes (out of almost 4.8 million cast). In Wayne County (encompassing Detroit and its western suburbs) thousands of residents either did not vote or, if they did, voted for a third-party candidate or, simply, did not vote for any presidential candidate.
That this made a difference in the state’s electoral vote is evident in the 2020 results, when Joe Biden defeated Trump by more than 150,000 votes here, most of those coming from a significantly higher turnout in Wayne County. One Detroit resident said, in an interview before the 2020 election, that she had “learned her lesson” and was voting for Biden, a sentiment that apparently was shared by many fellow Detroiters.
It is unclear how Michiganders (and Detroiters) are going to vote this year, but Michigan will again be a crucial swing state affecting the outcome. A survey of 1,000 Detroit residents in April found that although the great majority of them plan to vote, some 13% said they probably would not; Hispanics constituted most of the latter group, “often citing beliefs that their vote doesn’t matter and dissatisfaction with candidates,” according to the report.
On another level, Michigan has long been known for its right-wing and paramilitary groups. It was one of the centers of so-called Posse Comitatus groups in the 1970s and, from the mid-1990s, of organizations such as the Wolverine Watchmen. The Oklahoma City bombers reportedly visited one of these groups shortly before their attack in 1995.
Members of the Watchmen participated in a plot to kidnap (and possibly murder) Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020; several of them were tried and found guilty of various felonies and were sentenced to prison. Some two dozen Michiganders have been charged in connection to the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Federal prosecutor Jack Smith, in his indictment against Trump for allegedly trying to subvert the 2020 election, has put Michigan at the “epicenter” of the plot. One of the more dramatic components of that scheme involved a slate of “fake” Republican Michigan electors, who in December 2020 attempted unsuccessfully to replace the duly elected Democratic electors. All but one (who cooperated with prosecutors) have been charged with multiple felonies and are waiting to learn if they will stand trial.
I find those and similar actions around the country to be highly troubling, especially with the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding only two years away. At the annual Prairie Club Independence Day observance, a member reads aloud the Declaration of Independence. Listening to it this year, I was struck by how some of the “injuries and usurpations” leveled against George III seemed like they could have been made against Trump – and from the murmur in the crowd, others apparently also did.
We have faced serious threats to our country’s existence before and overcome them, and I believe we are facing another one now. Can our democracy prevail again? I want to believe it can but am more fearful than I have ever been. I implore people to vote – in Michigan, in Colorado, everywhere – and fervently hope that, when we do, we keep in mind the greater good for all of us.
