Kamala Harris in Michigan urges young people to vote: ‘Now is the time’

• Eight days before the election, the Democratic presidential ticket rallied supporters near the University of Michigan’s campus Monday evening
• Democrats are pushing college student turnout to win Michigan, but Kamala Harris did not discuss the student loan debt or other administration policies
• Artist Maggie Rogers took a break from touring to perform at the rally in a bid to attract younger voters

ANN ARBOR — With just eight days until the presidential election, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and running mate Tim Walz came to this deep-blue college town in a push to drive young voter turnout by Nov. 5.

“Now is the time,” Harris said at an outdoor rally in Ann Arbor, near the University of Michigan.  “Let's reach out to our family and our friends and our classmates and our neighbors and make sure they know the stakes in this election — and let's remind them your vote is your voice, and your voice is your power.”

Walz leaned on a well-worn football analogy to describe the state of the presidential race in Michigan.

“We got to admit it, this game is tied. Two minutes left on the clock,” Walz said, before turning to an iconic line from legendary U-M football coach Bo Schembechler: “‘The team, the team, the team’ — and boy, do we have the right team.”

Walz has leaned on the metaphor for weeks as the election nears and the race remains tight. Current polling averages in Michigan, one of the most important electoral battlegrounds in the nation, shows Harris and Republican nominee Donald Trump are effectively tied in the state with one week to go. 

Monday’s rally also featured singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers, who performed for a thousands-strong crowd in Burns Park. Rogers has a strong following among young women and had previously voiced support for Democrats.

The window for both candidates to shift the election outcome is narrowing. Close to 2.8 million Michiganders have already voted — absentee ballots have been out for more than a month and early in-person voting began statewide Saturday. 

As the campaigns prepare to making closing arguments in battleground states, Harris and Walz largely stuck to stump speech material, including support for reproductive rights.

“Women in your life that you love —daughters, partners, sisters, friends, neighbors, colleagues, whoever it might be — their lives are at stake in this election,” Walz said.

Why Ann Arbor matters

Ann Arbor is fertile ground for Democrats — solidly liberal with a large university student body. But Democrats have to also ensure those students are driven to the polls by Election Day, a notoriously difficult challenge. 

That appeal was plain in the rally with a backdrop and “vote” signs matched to U-M’s maize and blue color scheme. Walz, who visited campus last month for the Wolverine’s football game against his home state Minnesota Golden Gophers,  exhorted the crowd to scream, “Go Blue.”

Harris said she loved that students are “rightly impatient for change,” a way she’s often described young voters. She touched on school shootings and climate change as areas where young activists have demanded action.

US Rep. Debbie Dingell, noted on stage that Ann Arbor, the seat of her district, had led the state in early voting Saturday.

A shift in voting laws over the past six years has also made the college vote that much more potent: No-reason absentee voting allows students to vote in their hometowns from their dorms, and same-day registration allows others to cast ballots on campus on Election Day. 

The new rules contributed to long queues of students in the 2022 election, where some young voters in Ann Arbor waited in line until 2 a.m. to register and cast their ballot. 

Local election officials in Ann Arbor and East Lansing, which also had long lines of Michigan State University students in 2022, are hoping that more opportunities for registration and the state’s new early in-person voting option will smooth demand on Nov. 5. 

Harris’ and Walz’s speeches didn’t include much discussion of issues directly impacting college students, such as student loan debt relief, which the Biden-Harris administration has prioritized despite court challenges.

The issue may be less pressing in Ann Arbor than other Michigan college towns. A “Go Blue Guarantee” that offers free tuition to lower-income families, and the state’s Michigan Achievement Scholarship offers students up to $5,500 a year.

A new tone for Gaza protesters

Mid-way through Harris’ remarks, a few dozen protestors formed a tight circle near the stage and began chanting opposition to the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, which has prompted frequent demonstrations on the U-M campus and lingering tension.

Harris responded directly, telling the protesters, “I hear you on the subject of Gaza.” 

"We all want this war to end as soon as possible and get the hostages out. And I will do everything in my power to make it so,” she said from the stage before continuing with her remarks.

It was a marked shift in tone from Harris’ August rally at the Detroit Metro Airport, where protestors also disrupted her speech. Then, she only used a former tagline — “I’m speaking” — before continuing.

This time, she put a positive spin on the disruption, telling the crowd, “We are all here because we are fighting for a democracy and for the right of people to be heard and seen.” 

She added: “We're not about the enemy within. We know we are all in this together. That's what we are fighting for.”

The chants continued for several minutes before the protesters were escorted out of the rally by authorities. 

Amid more than a year of fighting in the Middle East, Trump has been making appeals to Arab Americans and Muslim Michiganders to back his candidacy. He brought figures from those communities on stage in his Novi rally this past weekend.

In a warmup speech at the Monday rally, Wayne County Deputy Executive Assad Turfe called electing Harris the best shot for peace in the region, arguing Trump would “only bring more chaos and suffering.”

CHIPS debate

Harris made two other stops in Michigan earlier Monday to discuss manufacturing policy  — a union facility in Macomb County and Hemlock Semiconductor near Saginaw.

The Biden-Harris administration last week announced a $325 million grant for Hemlock to build a new manufacturing facility for the production and purification of hyper-pure semiconductor-grade polysilicon. The project is expected to create nearly 180 manufacturing jobs, along with more than 1,000 temporary construction jobs. 

The award came through the federal CHIPS and Science Act, which Biden signed in 2022 in an effort to boost domestic production of microchips and deter Chinese market domination.

Trump criticized the bipartisan CHIPS Act on Friday, calling it "so bad" for the country.

"We put up billions of dollars for rich companies to come” but “all you had to do was charge them tariffs,” Trump said in an interview with podcast host Joe Rogan, repeating his disputed claim that taxing imports would spur mass domestic production. 

“You tariff it so high that they will come and build their chip companies for nothing,” Trump added.

Various US industries are still heavily reliant on imported chips, especially those made in Taiwan, the world’s leading producer.

But the CHIPS Act is helping fund “just the kind of work that’s happening here,” Harris said Monday after touring Hemlock. "We created tax credits for the private sector to do this work," she added. "That's good work."

Social Security insolvency

While Harris worked to turn out the youth vote in Ann Arbor, she and Walz also spoke to what he called the “gray hairs” in the liberal city. 

Harris alleged that Trump will “cut” Social Security. “In fact, economists say he will bankrupt Social Security in the next six years,” she said. 

Trump has vowed to "fight for and protect Social Security" and has not proposed any direct cuts. However, his various proposals to cut taxes, implement tariffs and deport immigrants would "dramatically worsen Social Security's finances," according to the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

The Social Security trust fund is already projected to go insolvent by 2035. Trump's plans would speed up that projected insolvency timeline to fiscal year 2031 — six years after he takes office, according to the analysis.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget projects that Harris' plans would also increase the federal deficit — but not as steeply as Trump’s and "would not have large effects on Social Security trust fund insolvency."