This year’s mayoral election in Detroit has seen a lot of candidate debates, especially compared to last election cycle, where no public debates were held. Yet the election has failed to garner much enthusiasm from voters. Many are apathetic, find the choices lackluster, and believe that no matter who is in office, things won’t change for the majority Black working class and poor in Detroit. The election stands in stark contrast with New York’s mayoral race, which saw a high participation of young voters. Unlike New York, none of Detroit’s candidates have been speaking to the issues that could mobilize the youth.
The mayoral race was a crowded field with many different personalities. The voices that were centered in the debates were Rev Solomon Kinloch, Todd Perkins, Sauntel Jenkins, Mary Sheffield, James Craig, and Fred Durhal III. Mary Sheffield has led the pack from the very beginning, both in polling and in fundraising, so her victory in the primary was a surprise to no one. Solomon Kinloch won second place to face off against Sheffield in November.
The spot for second place was largely between Kinloch, Jenkins, and Craig, and to a certain extent Perkins. Kinloch had been second place in the polls for months, but a recent story about an incident of domestic abuse of his ex-wife could have negatively impacted his performance Tuesday night. However, that doesn’t seem to have been the case: Kinlock’s primary results hovered around the same percentage he held in opinion polls.
Kinloch had another issue that likely affected his outcome: many of his most ardent supporters live in the suburbs and are ineligible to vote in the election.
Low Voter Turnout Expresses Feeling of Alienation Among Working Class and Poor
Perhaps the most interesting (and consequential) issue to come out of this race has been the extremely low voter turnout in Detroit for local elections. Only 20 percent of registered voters cast a ballot in the last mayoral election, in 2021. Even mayoral candidates have spoken openly about the issue of voter apathy.
Nancy Kaffer, Khalil AlHajal, and Kristi Tanner tackle this issue in a series of articles published by the Detroit Free Press. Their latest article, published on August 3, argues that those residents who feel left behind and abandoned by the city see no point in voting. The areas of the city with low voter turnout happen to be the same parts that haven’t seen much investment. Politicians typically ignoring these low-turnout areas is yet another confirmation of the experience of abandonment that many working class and poor Detroiters feel.
Jarrell Gaskins, an eastside resident who helped establish the Teppert Street Block Club, told the Free Press that “his neighbors crave deeper involvement with Detroit politics and business development.” His street is in a neighborhood that has seen better days and is not slated for development any time soon, and he explained that “around here, you don’t see the candidates.”
There also are historical answers for low voter turnout. The housing crisis of 2008 had a major impact on Detroit. It exacerbated the city’s revenue shortfall, and public infrastructure began to fall apart and cease to function. In response to this growing crisis, the Michigan state legislature took away local governance from Detroiters and put the public school system and the city government under state control via the Emergency Manager law. To this day, a state-appointed Financial Review Commission continues to monitor Detroit’s annual budget and has the power to reactivate state oversight of the budget if it deems it necessary. To many, this is another example that Detroiters have no real say over their city or their lives.
That feeling continued under the Duggan administration, which lacked any real mandate due to low voter turnout. Duggan frequently gaslit Detroiters who insisted that not enough resources were going to the neighborhoods by saying that the neighborhoods weren’t being abandoned or forgotten, and that the best way to grow the city was to build a strong downtown. But the evidence proves otherwise. A report by the Citizens Research Council of Michigan, commissioned by the Detroit city council, pointed out that “hopes that investments in downtown would lead to housing nearby and throughout the city have not been experienced except for anecdotal recent developments.”
In other words, the amount of new housing created in nearby areas is so low it barely makes an impact on struggling neighborhoods. The report recommended a moratorium on tax captures that funnel money away from the neighborhoods and into downtown Detroit because “it is clear that investments in the downtown have not lifted the city to share in any levels of prosperity.”
These facts are likely behind the results of a recent poll showing that nearly 70 percent of respondents feel that Detroit focuses too much on the downtown area, at the expense of local neighborhoods.
The city budget projections for next year is yet another reason for voters to feel pessimistic about the mayoral election. With the Trump administration’s cuts to federal funding, many of the programs strengthened or established with ARPA (the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, also known as COVID-19 relief) funds are at risk of being eliminated or drastically diminished. Indeed, one of Sauntel Jenkins’s refrains throughout the race has been to remind Detroiters that “tough times and decisions are ahead.” None of the candidates have been able to address this issue head on in a positive way, which would mean raising a challenge to take on the city’s billionaires. In fact, all of the candidates have been vying to build greater partnerships with the billionaires to continue the “progress” Detroit has experienced since the bankruptcy.
No Real Answers for Community Concerns
The growing inequality in Detroit is hard to ignore, and almost all of the mayoral candidates have had to acknowledge it. However, the candidates who have served as city council officials have refused to acknowledge their role in creating that inequality, which includes a housing market that is increasingly unaffordable for most residents. Yet not one single candidate is willing to alienate the billionaires enough to argue for a moratorium on tax abatements and tax captures, demand that developers offer housing that is affordable to Detroiters in order to get city approval for new projects, or demand that billionaires like Dan Gilbert and the Ilich family pay more taxes.
Another big issue for Detroiters is police brutality and accountability. The Detroit Police Department (DPD) is known for its lack of transparency, so much so that activists are fighting to establish an ordinance that would require the department to release body cam footage of any incident of police violence. The fight for the release of body cam footage of the murder of Sherman Lee Butler is a concrete example of the need for such an ordinance and why the police can’t be relied on. Then-acting police Chief White broke DPD’s promise to release body cam footage within a certain time period. Only the persistent effort of activists forced the department to release it.
While Sheffield and other candidates support mental health units and community-based crime prevention programs, they fail to address incidents of police misconduct and brutality, or issues of overpolicing of Black and Brown youth in downtown Detroit. They also support policies like the curfew violation penalty for young people and the use of open air metal detectors in Greektown. This is because they don’t question either the role of the police or the capitalist society that the police are sworn to protect.
Time and again we have seen police acting as the bulwark of aggression and reaction rather than a tool for safely de-escalating conflict. When activists and the community gathered to oppose the deportation of a community member on Detroit’s west side at the behest of a reactionary Trump, DPD was there to make sure that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (iCE) was able to carry out its duties. Both Sheffield and Kinloch have made tepid statements supporting immigrants and making sure they know their rights. Essentially, they aim not to rock the boat when it comes to immigration and immigrant rights, and have stated that if they are elected, the city would abide by the laws in place.
Fighting Capitalism, the Root of Detroit’s Problems
The problems facing Detroit are created by capitalism’s drive for profits and its need to exploit and oppress people to get them. This is at the heart of the privatization efforts that make housing, water, and utilities increasingly unaffordable for many in the city, and it explains the mass unemployment and job precarity experienced by many voters.
Capitalism is experiencing an economically uncertain situation that will require them to make further attacks on the working class and oppressed. To resolve the crisis facing Detroit — which is a crisis facing the working class all across the globe — the working class and oppressed will need a socialist and militant program.
We need a program that fights for the end of speculative development in Detroit and a complete moratorium on tax abatements, tax captures, and other incentives for developers at the expense of residents. We not only need to end the corrupt and dysfunctional Land Bank, but also to dissolve the Downtown Development Authority, which has been a body directing the growing inequality of Detroit.
We need a jobs program for Detroiters tied to rehabilitating affordable housing, improving infrastructure, and restoring neighborhoods to clean and vibrant areas.
We need to fight for a police oversight ordinance that would force DPD to release body cam footage of any incident of police brutality and misconduct, and to demand the firing and prosecution of every cop involved in incidents of police brutality. More than this, we need to fight to stop the funding of a police department that continues to act with impunity and brutalize and overpolice our communities, particularly our youth.
We need more community programs for youth and crime prevention programs that focus on conflict resolution and restorative justice that are completely independent of Detroit police and controlled by the community that these programs serve.
We need to end the privatization of vital services like water and electricity. No person should have to be without running water or heat.
More than anything, we need to tax the rich instead of giving them taxpayer money or exempting them from taxes in exchange for developing high rises and fancy condos. As much as we like fun places to go downtown, we need stable housing and public resources.
The Left in Detroit may not be in a position of strength and influence right now. We don’t have the political organizing energy of New York or Los Angeles. At least not yet. However, we can learn from the experiences in these cities to strengthen the work we are doing in Detroit. We should use the elections as an opportunity to engage with Detroiters, talk with them about their experiences, and connect those experiences with the arguments that expose the root cause of their problems and why an independent movement of the working class and oppressed fighting for full dignity and liberation can transform this city, this nation, and the world.
In other words, we can find a way to give Detroiters the type of engagement and hope that the local elections have failed to do.
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