Kamala Harris may have rattled Donald Trump on the debate stage, but the former president’s promise to save a nation in decline resonates with undecided voters in this part of a key battleground state.
It took Paul Simon four days to hitchhike from Saginaw, or so he sang in America, his iconic soundscape ballad of the 1960s with its lost souls on the highways of a country in flux.
Back then, this city’s long, slow decline had already begun, as Michigan’s once mighty car factories pulled down the shutters, buffeted by the winds of foreign competition.
Today, the angst and loneliness of Simon and Art Garfunkel’s song are magnified many times over.
I found 57-year-old Rachel Oviedo sitting on her porch, staring out at abandoned furniture in the street and beyond, the shell of a plant that once made car parts for Chevrolets and Buicks, but finally closed its doors in 2014.
“We sit here all day long,” she told me. “We see homeless people come in and out of there, they need to tear it down and make something out of it.”
“A grocery store,” she suggested. “Because we ain’t got no grocery stores round here.”
first met her the day before Tuesday night’s debate in Philadelphia, when she told me she was still unsure of how she was going to vote.
Donald Trump, she said, felt like a known quantity and like “a man of his word”, while Kamala Harris looked promising but still somewhat unknown.
“I like her,” she said, “but we don’t know what she’s going to do.”
Most US states lean either so strongly Democratic or so strongly Republican that the result is a foregone conclusion.
And if Michigan is one of the few swing states, then Saginaw is one of the few places in it where the vote could genuinely go either way.
When they come to cast their ballots, it will be undecided voters like Rachel, in places like this, who’ll quite literally have the future of America in their hands.
Read more at BBC.com
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