Saginaw: the swing county in the swing state that could decide the election

A local law says that residents of Saginaw Township in Michigan cannot publicly display political signs in support of a presidential candidate until 30 days before the US election, even on their own front lawns.

With more than six weeks until what many Americans regard as the most consequential US presidential election in decades, some Saginaw Township residents have defied the ban to declare their loyalties to their neighbors. Trump campaign signs outnumber those for Kamala Harris, but scattered among them are posters proclaiming that the former US president is a convicted felon who belongs in prison and not the Oval Office.

One Saginaw Township resident interpreted the newfound unwillingness of local officials to enforce their own ban on political signs as a desire to avoid confrontation in these politically charged times.

In 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Saginaw county by just 1.1% of the ballot as he took Michigan by less than 11,000 votes. Four years later, Biden won back the county for the Democrats by only 303 votes as he once again returned the state into the Democratic column.

This year, the Harris campaign sees Michigan as a key part of its clearest path to victory alongside two other Rust belt states, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Saginaw county will be a litmus test of whether the Democratic nominee can pull that off and keep Trump from returning for a second term that many observers fear will risk authoritarianism in the USA.

Saginaw has a once-booming industrial base in long decline but which is still important. Widespread poverty exists alongside prosperous suburbs in a city with one of the highest crime rates in the country. There are changing racial demographics and, for many, a sense of drift with no clear plan for the future.

Seen from Saginaw, however, the election can look very different.

The Guardian asked people who live in the county to tell us where we should go, who we should talk to and what we should look at in order to understand the area and its place in the election.

Some of the first cars built in America were assembled in Saginaw. Over decades, factories drew in workers from across the country to manufacture gear boxes and steering assemblies fitted into vehicles in Detroit. Saginaw city and its environs were home to a dozen General Motors plants.

By the 1980s, the industry was in rapid retreat from Saginaw. The last GM plant, today called Saginaw Metal Casting Operations, employed 7,000 people in 1970. Now it provides work to fewer than 350.

The factories stood abandoned for years, symbols of a lost prosperity, until the Biden administration provided funds to tear them down. When the jobs went, shops and hotels closed. In the heart of downtown, department stores have given way to public services including an employment office, a college and a healthcare centre for lower-income families.

As Colucci drives west, he crosses from the city, passes the sprawling golf course of Saginaw Country Club, and heads into the suburbs of Saginaw Township.

In 1980, the city was nearly four times as large as the township. Now, they are about the same size after many residents of one bled into the other. But the township has nearly twice the median income and is 89% white.

Crossing from one to the other, the quality of housing changes fast. So do the voting patterns.

Saginaw city overwhelmingly voted against Trump in both the presidential elections he contested. Clinton won 76% of the ballot in 2016 and Biden pulled in similar support four years later.

Saginaw Township was a different story. Trump beat Clinton there by three points in 2016. Four years later, he lost by a similar margin to Biden.

Nearly 75% of registered voters in Saginaw Township cast a ballot in the 2020 presidential election. Fewer than 50% of Saginaw city turned out.

In other Trump strongholds such as Frankenmuth, a small city in the south-east of the county known as Little Bavaria, turnout was 82%. Frankenmuth, which celebrates its German heritage in its architecture and its own Oktoberfest this weekend, twice voted overwhelmingly for Trump and his anti-immigrant agenda.

Still, nothing is a given.

Among those who contacted the Guardian was Mark Paredes, a former US diplomat and lifelong conservative who said he would never vote for Trump and is therefore supporting Harris.