Source: Politics<\/p>\n
In the aftermath of the 2020 election, the Republican National Committee opted not to order an autopsy into what exactly led to the party\u2019s decline in suburban communities that were, until recently, considered deep red.<\/p>\n
But if RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel wanted to understand what happened, she could do worse than to look back at the place she was raised: Oakland County, Michigan. <\/p>\n
\u201cOakland County was kind of the quintessential suburban Republican stronghold over the postwar period,\u201d says Jeff Timmer, a longtime GOP strategist who was executive director of the state party from 2005-2009. It was (and is) a huge source of campaign donations for the party and its candidates. It had massive influence in Lansing, and an influential bipartisan delegation in Washington. It was a must-visit locale for every aspiring Republican presidential candidate.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I ran the Michigan Republican Party, we always pointed to Oakland: \u2018These guys have got their shit together,\u2019\u201d says Timmer.<\/p>\n
To put it bluntly, the shit is no longer together.<\/p>\n
Ten years ago, Republicans held two of the four GOP-drawn U.S. House seats in Oakland (the other two were safe Democratic); now, all four are in Democratic hands. Democratic women now represent the Romney family\u2019s hometown in the state House, state Senate and U.S. House (Rep. Haley Stevens). Ten years ago, Brooks Patterson, the silver-tongued sun-God around whom all local politics orbited, was county executive, and Republicans held four of the six countywide elected posts; Democrats now hold five of them, including the executive. After GOP-controlled redistricting in 2012, Republicans had a 14-7 majority on the Oakland County Board of Commissioners; now, Democrats have an 11-10 edge and will control the county-level redistricting process for the first time in a half-century.<\/p>\n
The change is happening in lush, sylvan communities like Birmingham and Bloomfield\u2014a place at least three generations of Romneys, McDaniel included, have called home. Here, generations of families with auto-baron surnames set roots. Here, they enrolled their kids at affluent public schools or even-more-affluent private schools with idyllic names like Country Day and Cranbrook. Here, they donated to and elected Republicans. At least, that is, until recently.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s how I describe it to literally anyone from out of state,\u201d laughs Mari Manoogian, a Democratic state Representative whose district encompasses much of the community. \u201cThey\u2019re like, \u2018Wait, you\u2019re the state representative for Mitt Romney\u2019s hometown?\u2019 And I\u2019m like, \u2018Yeah!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
This was \u201c\u2018Romney Republican\u2019 territory, but the Republican Party has gone so far away from that,\u201d says Mallory McMorrow, the Democrat who represents the area in the state Senate. \u201cEven looking at the types of things Mitt Romney is proposing on the federal level right now, I think if he were still at home, he\u2019d be a Democrat. The party has shifted so much.\u201d<\/p>\n
To the casual observer, this change happened overnight. But the change is less the flip of a switch than a stovetop dial cranked on high\u2014it took a while to heat up but the pot is boiling now.<\/p>\n
Between Barack Obama\u2019s campaign in 2012 and Joe Biden\u2019s in 2020, the margin of victory for Democratic presidential candidates in Oakland grew by roughly 55,000 votes. Few have noticed it, but Oakland\u2019s share of the statewide Democratic vote now exceeds that of the city of Detroit. Oakland now accounts for roughly 1 in every 7 votes statewide. And those votes are being cast for Democrats at much higher rates than they used to be.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a problem for Republicans in a state that has played a pivotal role in the last two presidential elections. But Oakland is also a national warning light for the Republicans at the highest levels of the party.<\/p>\n
Oakland County \u201crepresents the dominant trend in the country because it combines the most affluent and college graduates in increasingly diverse suburbs becoming increasingly and emphatically Democratic,\u201d says Stanley Greenberg, the Democratic pollster whose study of neighboring Macomb County in the mid-1980s put it on the map and elevated \u201cReagan Democrats\u201d to the forefront of American politics. But that era no longer really describes the central battlefield of America\u2019s suburban politics. Macomb can have its \u201cReagan Democrats\u201d; Oakland has the \u201cBiden Republicans.\u201d <\/p>\n
And there are Oakland Counties all around the nation\u2014affluent, longtime Republican suburbs that have been trending Democratic for a long time, but where the Trump years marked a tipping point. \u201cLook at why the Republicans are so obsessed with reversing Maricopa [County, Arizona]\u2014but also Gwinnett [County, Georgia]\u2014both key to Biden and Democrats winning the states and Senate,\u201d says Greenberg.<\/p>\n
These key suburban populations are mostly white but increasingly diverse, highly educated and relatively affluent. They aren\u2019t scared by immigration; they support it in their own communities\u2014especially with highly skilled immigrants, attracted to work at businesses lured to these suburbs, in many cases, by business-minded Republican politicians. They are repelled by white-grievance politics and culture-war clashes, and concerned about the rise of violent right-wing anti-government plots, like the Jan. 6 insurrection and the thwarted plan to kidnap and execute Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. They used to think of themselves as Republicans, but nowadays the GOP seems disconnected from the things they care about; it talks less about affordable child care or student debt than banning transgender student athletes or making it harder to vote. It\u2019s the inverse of what President Ronald Reagan said in Macomb County all those years ago: They didn\u2019t leave the Republican Party; the Republican Party left them.<\/p>\n
In an email to POLITICO, a spokesperson for the RNC pushed back on the idea that the Republicans are having difficulties in the suburbs, pointing to GOP gains in the 2020 House elections in California, Florida and New York. The spokesperson noted surges in Republican support in, among other places, North Carolina and the Florida panhandle, and said that a plurality of registered voters in suburban Michigan \u201cfeel the socialist agenda Democrats are pushing will bankrupt the country.\u201d<\/p>\n
Just as the Reagan Democrats didn\u2019t suddenly materialize with the 1980 election, the Biden Republicans didn\u2019t spontaneously sprout up in 2020; their emergence is part of a longer story\u2014or, more precisely, several interlocking stories. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s the story of how demographic trends are changing America\u2019s suburbs, not simply in making them more diverse, but in making them more highly educated at the same time educational attainment has become a defining predictor of how Americans vote. It\u2019s the story of how the GOP playbook\u2014which often defaults to the tactic of demonizing cities as bastions of out-of-touch liberal elites\u2014has missed an important shift: Suburbs aren\u2019t at war with their cities any longer, and claiming they are has alienated potential Republican voters.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the story of the Democrats who\u2019ve remade Oakland County politics, chief among them boy wonder politician-turned-elder statesman Dave Woodward, the longtime party chair who focused on building local power cycle after cycle. And it\u2019s the story of Democratic women, like McMorrow and Manoogian, who\u2019ve built on that foundation with major victories in traditionally Republican areas. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s the story of a Republican Party in something of an identity crisis; of downballot Republicans who have found success while embracing diversity and are utterly flummoxed why the rest of the party is moving in the other direction; of the once-in-a-generation talent named L. Brooks Patterson, who made Oakland County into a Republican political behemoth first by perfecting the art of culture war, and later by trading away grievance-based politics for business-oriented conservatism only to see that traditional approach banished from the Trump-era GOP. <\/p>\n
And, critically, it\u2019s a warning of what happens when a political party is associated with one charismatic figurehead and doesn\u2019t invest in candidates with their own identities; and of the strategic blunder of responding to a tidal shift of demographic change by rewriting voting rules instead of fixing a tone-deaf message.<\/p>\n
This is the story of how Oakland County went blue\u2014and what that tells us about the Republican Party\u2019s continuing collapse in America\u2019s suburbs.<\/p>\n
L.<\/span>Brooks Patterson, the man who would ultimately be credited with transforming Oakland County into a political juggernaut, arrived there as just one of hundreds of thousands of white people fleeing Detroit in the \u201960s. <\/p>\n By that time, Oakland had already earned a reputation as a bedroom community for auto executives\u2014most famously George Romney, the sitting governor and former head of the American Motors Corp. But that\u2019s a bit too simplistic. Oakland was always a mix of a few distinctly different types of communities: yes, uber-wealthy enclaves for powerful people with names like Hoffa, DeLorean, Romney and Saarinen, but also inner-ring, densely populated middle- and working-class suburbs like Hazel Park, Royal Oak and Southfield; rural farming communities and small towns in the north and west; the large, diverse city and industrial center of Pontiac; and waterfront houses at the constellation of inland lakes everywhere in between.<\/p>\n In the 1950s and \u201960s, the city of Detroit faced a battery of challenges\u2014deindustrialization, automation, racism, the growth of car culture and the attendant investments in the interstate highway system (the new I-375 spur allowed you to drive straight into downtown Detroit from the suburbs), capital flight, disinvestment, the post-war housing boom and creation of subdivisions. Between 1950-1970, Oakland\u2019s population catapulted from just under 400,000 residents to more than 900,000. In many instances, jobs and businesses followed. Oakland boomed, and the makeup of the county was defined both by its wealth\u2014even if you weren\u2019t an executive, middle-class jobs in the auto industry at the time provided quite well\u2014and its oft-antagonistic posture towards the (increasingly Black) city of Detroit. In 1970, Oakland\u2019s population was 96.5 percent white, but its politics were still relatively competitive; Richard Nixon carried the county in 1968 by less than 1 percentage point.<\/p>\n It was fertile ground for a young, ambitious attorney like Patterson to make a name for himself\u2014and, in so doing, convert it from a GOP-leaning county to the Republican Party\u2019s base of power in Michigan.<\/p>\n At the time, Patterson was an assistant prosecutor, taking the cases nobody else wanted, like that of a 30-something Pontiac woman named Irene McCabe who complained that a shopkeeper near her daughter\u2019s elementary school was selling lewd magazines to kids. When Patterson\u2019s more senior colleagues declined the case, it fell to him. He pursued it doggedly and got jailtime for the shopkeeper. But dogged as he was, Patterson had an impolitic way of telling people what he really thought. Which is why, in January 1971, shortly after his 32nd birthday, he was fired after publicly criticizing a sitting judge for a lenient sentence.<\/p>\n Out of a job and looking for steady work in private practice, Patterson heard from Irene McCabe, who had a project that could use some legal advice: a group of mostly white parents in Pontiac who wanted to stop busing, which was quickly shaping up as the hottest culture-war issue in America. They called themselves the Northside Action Group, and soon after became known as the National Action Group, or NAG.<\/p>\n Two years before, Black parents in Pontiac, Michigan, had filed suit, alleging that the school district in Oakland\u2019s diverse-but-segregated county seat drew zones with the \u201cpurpose and\/or effect\u201d of creating separate schools for Black children. In 1970, a U.S. District Court judge found in favor of the plaintiffs, ruling that Pontiac used<\/a> the \u201cneighborhood school concept as a disguise for the furtherance or perpetuation of racial discrimination.\u201d In short, Pontiac would have to start busing its students to achieve racial integration.<\/p>\n The ruling was a thunderclap. \u201cThis was a real alarm for a lot of northern cities,\u201d says Matthew Delmont, a Dartmouth historian and author of Why Busing Failed<\/a>. \u201cNow that they see a court actually order it, it seems like dominoes might start falling: You might see Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Boston and other places having to actually comply with court orders.\u201d<\/p>\n With NAG, Patterson had found the perfect vehicle to drive media attention on a hot-button issue and to establish himself politically. They filed lawsuits and held marches<\/a>, mothers chained themselves to the gate at the bus yard, parents kept their kids home during population-count days to deprive the district of funding. They dominated news coverage\u2014locally, first, then nationally. In the spring of 1972, they staged a weekslong march from Oakland to Washington, D.C. Almost always, it would be Irene McCabe at the forefront, and Patterson quoted further down in the story. <\/p>\n The setup allowed Patterson to tie himself to NAG\u2019s most popular successes while remaining at a remove in case he needed to distance himself<\/a> from the anti-busing movement\u2019s most repulsive excesses, as when, on the balmy night of August 30, 1971, just before the start of the schoolyear, a group of Klansmen firebombed 10 Pontiac schoolbuses. Patterson was quick to issue a statement. \u201cLet me emphasize that NAG members always choose to work within the law,\u201d he told reporters<\/a>. \u201cWe don\u2019t do that by blowing up buses.\u201d<\/p>\n Later that week, Pontiac began busing its students. It could\u2019ve been the end of Patterson\u2014NAG had lost its fight, and even a whiff of Klan-related violence was a pestilence on the anti-busing movement. But then something happened that changed NAG\u2019s trajectory. <\/p>\n In September 1971, U.S. District Judge Stephen Roth mandated cross-district busing not just in one city in metro Detroit, but across 8 Mile Road, the Mason-Dixon line splitting city and suburb. Black kids from Detroit could be bused to white suburbs in Macomb, Oakland and Wayne Counties; white suburban kids could be bused into predominantly Black Detroit schools. A major legal setback became a huge political gift, pouring jet fuel on the sense of white suburban grievance. <\/p>\n \u201cAll of a sudden, I wasn\u2019t in a lonely position any more,\u201d Patterson told the Free Press<\/a> years later. \u201cInstead of having [the] backing of, as someone once put it, \u201885,000 rednecks in Pontiac,\u2019 four million people in three counties were upset about busing.\u201d Come November, Patterson trounced Tom Plunkett, the Democratic incumbent who had fired him less than two years earlier, in the race for county prosecutor.<\/p>\n In office, Patterson continued his NAG-style media stunts\u2014waging war against \u201cwelfare fraud\u201d with sting operations,<\/a> cracking down on pornography<\/a> and personally arbitrating obscenity disputes by watching films such as \u201cThe Last Tango In Paris.\u201d<\/a> Most notoriously, Patterson made himself the voice of suburban opposition to Detroit and its first Black mayor, Coleman Young\u2014a man who shared Patterson\u2019s gift for weaponizing words to get attention. Their battle wore on to both men\u2019s political benefit\u2014\u201ccity vs. suburb\u201d and \u201cBlack vs. white\u201d played well on both sides of 8 Mile Road\u2014even as it effectively snuffed out any hope of regionalism for decades. Patterson\u2019s success came from \u201cnoting what makes people sick and then appearing on TV to proclaim that he is sicker about it than they are,\u201d Free Press columnist Jim Fitzgerald wrote in 1977. \u201cIf Brooks took the Pepsi test, he would vomit after sipping the Coke.\u201d<\/p>\n As the years rolled on, Patterson won reelection over and over\u20141976, 1980, 1984. He tried for U.S. Senate in 1978 and lost the GOP primary. He tried for governor in 1982, and again lost the primary. As a consolation, he was handed the nomination for attorney general, but lost in November. Asked about a potential run for lieutenant governor, he declined<\/a>: \u201cI would rather crawl across I-75 on my knees on cut glass at rush hour.\u201d<\/p>\n By the mid-to-late 1980s, it\u2019s not that Patterson\u2019s electoral career was sputtering\u2014he could have stayed prosecutor for life\u2014so much as he kept bumping up against the ceiling often faced by culture-warriors: There was a limit to what outrage could get you. Increasingly, grievance was disconnected from the comfortable realities of life for so many people in Oakland. <\/p>\n In the 1980s, as Detroit struggled amid a wave of crime, substance abuse and population decline, Oakland County was an unadulterated success, and attracted those people and businesses with the means to move out of the city. Large numbers of Black middle-class Detroiters relocated to Southfield, a comfortable city just across 8 Mile. The Detroit Lions moved to the Pontiac Silverdome in the \u201970s; the Pistons followed suit in the \u201980s, moving into the brand-new Palace of Auburn Hills; nearby, construction was underway for Chrysler\u2019s new world headquarters, topped by a glass atrium shaped like the company\u2019s iconic pentastar logo. <\/p>\n Oakland wasn\u2019t just a suburb; it had swagger. Lee Iacocca of Bloomfield Hills was the CEO of Chrysler and author of the best-selling nonfiction book on the planet. Playing at the Palace, the \u201cBad Boys\u201d-era Pistons were back-to-back NBA champions. Madonna, a native of Rochester, was the undisputed queen of pop who shared Patterson\u2019s penchant for stoking outrage.<\/p>\n And Patterson had that swagger, too. No called him Mr. Patterson; he was \u201cBrooks,\u201d a mononym, like Elvis or Cher. <\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s never been another individual, I would say, in Michigan politics like him,\u201d says state Sen. Jim Runestad, an Oakland Republican. \u201cI\u2019d be in a room of 200, 300 people, and we\u2019re talking and having drinks or something, and all of a sudden, there\u2019d be a change in the room. You could see the change. Then somebody\u2019d say, \u2018Brooks just came in.\u2019 I\u2019ve never met another person like that\u2014that kind of charisma, where just entering a room, even though you couldn\u2019t see them, you felt that presence, that excitement.\u201d<\/p>\n To those who loved him, he was a man of Falstaffian appetites in food and whisky who presided over an incredible amount of economic and population growth, kept taxes low, quality of life high and was almost Steve Jobsian in his ability to market the county. To those who hated him\u2014and there were just as many\u2014he was a big city machine boss transplanted to the suburbs who made it big by poking bruises on the body politic, then prescribing himself as the antidote. He somehow managed to get away with saying outlandishly offensive things because, well, when you\u2019re living in one of the wealthiest counties in America, as long as life is more or less OK, you\u2019ll put up with a lot.<\/p>\n But Patterson wanted more than what he had. In 1988, he co-chaired George H.W. Bush\u2019s presidential campaign in Michigan (Bush walloped Michael Dukakis by nearly 8 points) and opted not to run for reelection as prosecutor. Then, heading into the 1992 election cycle, Oakland County Executive Daniel T. Murphy\u2014the only man ever to hold the office since it was created in the 1970s, an inoffensive and low-key presence despite being the other GOP goliath in the county\u2014announced his retirement. The top job was Patterson\u2019s for the taking. <\/p>\n The thing was\u2014and Patterson didn\u2019t yet realize this\u2014being the CEO of a county required a different skillset than he was used to. It centered on oft-quotidien concerns about budgets, pension funds, county parks and economic development. It didn\u2019t lend itself to culture-war fights. Asked about his propensity<\/a> to be a bomb-thrower in the run-up to his 1992 campaign, Patterson declined to endorse nonproliferation: \u201cOne man\u2019s bomb is another\u2019s factual statement.\u201d But you couldn\u2019t really wage a war if the other combatant laid down his arms.<\/p>\n On June 23, 1993<\/a>, six months into Patterson\u2019s first term as executive, Coleman Young announced he would not seek a sixth term that November. For Brooks, it was a turning point. The Detroit-vs.-suburbs stuff just wouldn\u2019t play the same with the new mayor, Dennis Archer, a low-key former state Supreme Court justice and central player in metro Detroit\u2019s legal scene. And so Patterson downshifted his own public persona to fit the time.<\/p>\n \u201cI have opinions on social issues, but I don\u2019t represent us on social issues,\u201d Patterson told Crain\u2019s Detroit Business<\/a> a few years later. \u201cI did that as a prosecutor. My job now is to be an ambassador, a promoter for what\u2019s good about Oakland County.\u201d<\/p>\n Brooks played the role with vim. The pitbull prosecutor turned happy warrior fighting on behalf of business conservatism.<\/p>\n He instituted a two-year rolling budget that made it easier for the government to weather economic downturns. The fiscal stability, in turn, earned the county a coveted AAA bond rating, which made it cheaper to borrow money and, thus, easier to make needed investments.<\/p>\n He leveraged the area\u2019s massive engineering and manufacturing sector to found \u201cAutomation Alley,\u201d a successful effort to attract young college graduates and skilled workers and the businesses that rely on them. The effort came to encompass all of metro Detroit. He created Medical Main Street to focus on growing the health care and life science industries, and an Emerging Sectors Initiative to bring more high-tech businesses to Oakland County, an effort that resulted in more than $5 billion in new investment and tens of thousands of high-skilled jobs, many of them filled by foreign-born workers. <\/p>\n Oakland County was roaring. But it was also starting to change. In 1992, Bush carried the county, but with only a plurality. It would be the last time a Republican presidential candidate won Oakland; in the same years that Oakland reelected Patterson\u20141996, 2000, 2004 and so on\u2014Democrats carried it. It was a trend that would soon be felt downticket. <\/p>\n Patterson had been attracting investment from all over the world, bringing in new immigrants and college graduates. It was all going according to plan. But there was one thing he perhaps hadn\u2019t planned for: How all these new people might vote.<\/p>\n I<\/span>n 1998, when Dave Woodward was elected to the state House at age 22, one of the things that immediately separated him from other young win-it-now political obsessives was his patience. He saw a trend: Bill Clinton had won Oakland County in 1996, the first Democrat to carry it in decades. If they could just convince those people to vote Democratic lower on the ballot, that could change everything. <\/p>\n Having grown up in Oakland during the \u201980s and \u201990s, Dave knew the county\u2019s reputation as a place for the wealthy and well-connected. He also knew that it bore little resemblance to the lives of many people in the county\u2014himself included. \u201cIn Oakland County, particularly, prosperity\u2014in so many ways\u2014is all around you,\u201d he says. \u201cThe opulence is all around you.\u201d<\/p>\n Born and raised in Royal Oak, one of the middle-class, inner-ring suburbs in the south end of the county, his family was neither wealthy nor well-connected. His dad worked retail at Sears for 25 years\u2014a working-class living that put food on the table but wasn\u2019t the kind of money that created feather-bed comfort. Woodward\u2019s interest in politics started in high school, but when it came time for college, he needed to be practical: At Wayne State, he set himself up for a career as an actuary. But being an actuary didn\u2019t excite him\u2014not like politics. In 1998, Woodward ran for the open seat being vacated by his hometown state representative, a Democrat. Woodward didn\u2019t have a whole lot of money or connections and Royal Oak was still a battleground with lots of moderate Republicans\u2014and the year was otherwise miserable for Michigan Democrats\u2014but he won anyway, with nearly 55 percent of the vote.<\/p>\n He arrived in Lansing, 22 and impossibly boyish-looking, as the youngest member of the minority party. And though he threw himself into constituent services and bread-and-butter issues like clean water and consumer protection, he quickly found that minority status imposed limits on what you could achieve through hard work alone. Still, he believed the rah-rah attitude of his more experienced fellow legislators who vowed to take back the House in 2000. <\/p>\n \u201cAnd right after that didn\u2019t happen, I and a group of people sat down to say, \u2018All right, we\u2019ve got to map this out,\u2019\u201d remembers Woodward.<\/p>\n On paper, they sketched out a 10-year plan to build the Democratic Party in Oakland County. At the time, the county party was more a loose confederation of local groups and elected officials\u2019 campaigns than anything resembling a coherent organization. <\/p>\n \u201cWe had to build everything from scratch,\u201d says Woodward.<\/p>\n He started by identifying local races where they stood a chance of making gains. Initially, the model for this calculation was crude. \u201cIt was like, \u2018Where was the margin of loss less than 10 percent? Let\u2019s start there,\u201d Woodward laughs. <\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ll be honest, there were some folks who got mad at me because we didn\u2019t help everybody in the same way,\u201d he says. \u201cBut this was about winning! It\u2019s about winning elections and then winning majorities so that we can actually govern. \u2026 The goal, for me, is not just to compete in an election for the sake of an election; it\u2019s what you do with the power once you have it.\u201d<\/p>\n To start, that meant finding voters. Woodward knew Democrats existed in Oakland\u2014Bill Clinton won in there 1996 and Al Gore in 2000, which, in retrospect, were early signs of a national shift in the political preferences of college graduates\u2014but he also knew that those voters either tended not to vote in down-ballot races, or split their tickets.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s all so high-tech now, the modeling and all that type of stuff,\u201d says Woodward. \u201cThis was old-school: I needed to find us 5,000 more Democrats. So we\u2019re going door-to-door and asking, \u2018Are you a Democrat?\u2019 We found them. And we built a database and made certain to put energy and resources into making sure that everyone we identified a year-and-a-half out from the election ended up voting. \u2026 It\u2019s not rocket science. It was like, \u2018This person should be voting with us, but just hasn\u2019t.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n In November 2002, Woodward won his third term in the state House\u2014his final one, thanks to term limits. At 26, talk naturally turned to what he wanted to do next. In Oakland, Democrats made gains, but the hole was deep: Republicans had a 19-6 supermajority on the county board. <\/p>\n Woodward had attended one of those 19-6 county board meetings, and remembers speaking afterwards with Dave Coulter, a Ferndale Democrat elected to the board in 2002.<\/p>\n \u201cThat was my first elected office, so I was a bit crestfallen to see how little you can really get done in a minority that small,\u201d says Coulter. He had worked to build collegial, productive relationships with the Republicans on the commission\u2014and with Patterson himself, for that matter. But it wasn\u2019t enough to actually manifest the change he wanted to see.<\/p>\n Woodward was offering to help. \u201cI\u2019m like, \u2018OK, clearly we need some more Democrats elected,\u2019\u201d Woodward laughs. \u201cHe\u2019s like, \u2018Ya think?!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n In the process of recruiting candidates, the tables turned on Woodward: Dave, you\u2019re term-limited. Why don\u2019t you run?<\/p>\n It was not exactly advisable for a rising star to leave the legislature to pursue lower office, running in a seat where he\u2019d face a Republican incumbent whom Patterson was grooming to be the next chairman of the board. Plus, he would still be in the minority. But that was where his work was: turning Oakland blue. <\/p>\n In November 2004, Woodward upset the Republican incumbent. Several of his recruits won, too. The Republican majority shrunk<\/a> from 19-6 to 15-10. Now it was time to slam on the accelerator. Woodward and Coulter came up with a new plan.<\/p>\n \u201cFor the next six years that I was [on the board], we sort of divided up responsibilities,\u201d Coulter says. \u201cHe oversaw the \u2018political\u2019 side of things [for the Democrats], and I sort of oversaw the \u2018caucus management\u2019 and \u2018negotiating with [Patterson]\u2019 side of things. And that worked for us. \u2026 I would try to raise issues and policies, and then Dave would try to translate those into votes.\u201d<\/p>\n They picked issues designed to contrast with Patterson\u2019s Republicans, like transit, clean water, urban redevelopment and making sure middle-class areas weren\u2019t neglected in favor of wealthier communities.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a combination of raising issues that were emerging \u2026 and then getting candidates who were credible,\u201d says Coulter. <\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not just a winning formula; these are things that the voters want,\u201d says Woodward.<\/p>\n Patterson saw Democrats making gains and it perturbed him. But he understood the cause of it earlier than most in his party. \u201cI\u2019ve said all along that the far-right wing of the [GOP] has done a very effective job of running moderate women out of the party,\u201d he told the Free Press in 2004.<\/p>\n But what Patterson might not have expected was that Woodward had his eyes on something that Republicans had taken for granted as theirs to control: redistricting.<\/p>\n \u2022\u2022\u2022<\/p>\n I<\/span>t was a quirk of Michigan law: The state legislature controlled the once-in-a-decade redistricting process for federal and state legislative maps. New county commission lines, however, were decided by a panel made up of five people: the chairs of the county\u2019s Democratic and Republican Parties, the county clerk, treasurer and prosecutor.<\/p>\n After the 2006 election, the Republican majority on the board was just 13-12. Whoever controlled the district lines after the 2010 census would likely determine the majority. All of the countywide posts would be up in 2008\u2014a presidential year, which meant high turnout for Democrats\u2014and one of those offices, Patterson\u2019s old job of county prosecutor, was an open seat. In November, Barack Obama carried Oakland with 56.5 percent of the vote. Patterson won a fifth term as county executive with 58 percent of the vote. Republicans held the clerk\u2019s office, but Democrats picked up the treasurer and prosecutor posts\u2014which meant they would control redistricting in the county for the first time in generations. Woodward would get his majority. It was all going according to plan. <\/p>\n But there was one thing Woodward hadn\u2019t planned for: Patterson\u2019s sway in the state capital. <\/p>\n At Patterson\u2019s behest, the GOP state legislature rewrote the rules of county redistricting to strip control from the five-member bipartisan panel and hand it to the GOP-controlled county board. And lest there be any doubt about why this was happening, the new law was written in such a manner that it applied only to Oakland County\u2014only to counties with a population of more than 1 million (there are two: Wayne and Oakland) that didn\u2019t operate by their own charter (just Oakland). <\/p>\n \u201cBrooks came [to Lansing] and said, \u2018Hey, make this exception for Oakland County,\u2019\u201d one top Michigan Republican strategist who was involved in the episode told me. \u201cHe wanted the board. When he was exec, it was more like they weren\u2019t an independently elected board; even though they were, Brooks ran them. He gave them their agenda. \u2026 They did what Brooks wanted. He ran that county like a king. He wanted a compliant board. That mattered more to him than [them being] Republicans, quite honestly.\u201d <\/p>\n Republican Gov. Rick Snyder signed the bill into law<\/a> in December 2011.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve been involved in Michigan gerryma\u2014 er, redistricting for 30 years,\u201d says the GOP strategist, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. \u201cThey came to me and had me help them draw the maps that they actually passed in Oakland County.\u201d <\/p>\n The new lines were an extraordinary gerrymander, turning a 25-seat commission with a narrow GOP majority into a 21-seat commission with a 14-7 GOP majority. <\/p>\n \u201cThis is how Republicans play. You see it playing out with the voting laws around the country,\u201d says Woodward, still angry about it a decade later. \u201cThey held onto their power an extra decade longer than they probably would have otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n The Democrats had to begin all over. This time, they wouldn\u2019t be starting from scratch. The commission seats hadn\u2019t flipped yet, the voters themselves already were.<\/p>\n Oakland\u2019s population was increasingly diverse and highly educated, with people drawn by the economic opportunities that Patterson himself had championed. Between 1990 and 2010, the portion of Oakland\u2019s population comprised by people of color had more than doubled<\/a>; almost 55 percent of its residents had at least an associate\u2019s degree. By 2014, more than 1 in 10 of Oakland\u2019s 1.2 million residents were foreign-born. For Republicans, it was a demographic time bomb. <\/p>\n And it ticked down just as the Republican Party\u2014nationally and locally\u2014was about to be taken over by someone whose politics were uniquely tailored to turn off people with college degrees, people in diverse and well-to-do suburbs, people who had immigrated to the country; someone who would make it radically easier for Democrats to recruit donors, volunteers and voters from those same groups; someone who would replace Brooks Patterson as the Republican Party\u2019s indispensable man\u2014just as he did with local Republican power-brokers throughout the country: Donald J. Trump.<\/p>\n F<\/span>or a long time, the operating assumption in places like Birmingham, Bloomfield and Troy wasn\u2019t simply that someone like Mallory McMorrow couldn\u2019t win an election, it\u2019s that she shouldn\u2019t waste her time trying. It was too much of a reach\u2014a GOP-friendly electorate in a seat drawn by Republicans and held by an incumbent, Marty Knollenberg, whose dad had been a longtime congressman.<\/p>\n But the election of Donald Trump challenged many operating assumptions about politics and the communities in which we live. Being an outsider could be an advantage. <\/p>\n McMorrow grew up in New Jersey, moved around the country, and came to Michigan to settle down with her husband, who grew up in Birmingham. (Full disclosure: Her husband and I were students at Michigan State together, and blogged together for a year or two circa 2005.) Though McMorrow is an educated, accomplished young professional, running for office in the Detroit suburbs isn\u2019t what you expect of a career that includes a stint at Gawker, the gossipy blogging conglomerate.<\/p>\n In 2016, \u201ca lot of women just sort of admitted, like, \u2018I\u2019ve been comfortable for way too long and I haven\u2019t paid attention to what\u2019s going on. And now I am. And what\u2019s happening is bullshit, frankly, and I\u2019m in a position to make a difference,\u2019\u201d says McMorrow. \u201cI had no idea what I was doing. But I knew, \u2018OK, if this guy can become president, we need to put better people in place.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Not long after Election Day 2016, a video went viral<\/a> showing a group of white students at a middle school in Oakland chanting \u201cbuild that wall\u201d<\/a> in the cafeteria as a few Latino students cried or left the room. It was the same school where McMorrow and her husband had voted for Hillary Clinton just days before. <\/p>\n \u201cThat was heartbreaking. And I distinctly remember, like, Googling \u2018how to run for office.\u2019\u201d says McMorrow. She jumped into the race for state Senate.<\/p>\n \u201cNobody thought I had a chance. I sat down with some local Democratic Party leaders who flat-out told me, \u2018You\u2019re going to get destroyed, but you can build your name recognition and run for city council next time.\u2019\u201d says McMorrow. <\/p>\n McMorrow\u2019s district had a history as a high-profile, expensive disappointment for Democrats. In 2006, now-Congressman Andy Levin ran for a largely-similar state Senate seat in a race that cost $2 million and which he lost narrowly, because even in a Democratic year, Oakland hadn\u2019t changed enough for the national wave to matter.<\/p>\n But the landscape had shifted. Due in large part to the economic growth in high-tech and emerging industries in Oakland County, Troy, a suburban city of just over 80,000, experienced a boom in college-educated Asian American and South Asian residents. In 2000, AAPI people comprised roughly 13 percent of Troy\u2019s population; the Census Bureau now estimates they make up 25 percent. Roughly one in four of the city\u2019s residents is foreign-born. Trumpian white grievance politics did not speak to them. (In the 2020 election, the city accounted for 1 percent of the statewide Democratic voteshare\u2014it is now as vote-rich for Democrats as the blue stronghold of Flint.)<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not simply that diversity brought in new voters, diluting the strength of the Republican electorate. The new diversity actually affected the political preferences of the mostly white residents who already lived there. Republicans became less Republican.<\/p>\n \u201cThe reality is that I still represent an 80-plus percent white district. But there is a not-insignificant representation of AAPI residents, of Muslims, of Jews,\u201d says McMorrow. \u201cThere is enough diversity \u2026 that even if you are a straight, white, Christian person who lives in Oakland County, you don\u2019t want to demonize somebody who\u2019s an immigrant, because they live next door to you and you work with them. \u2026 I think that\u2019s the difference: I don\u2019t think my constituents see diversity as a threat.\u201d<\/p>\n It also blunted the effectiveness of Republican attacks on McMorrow for having only recently moved to the district. McMorrow remembers going door to door in Troy and encountering a woman who\u2019d received a mailer that posed her, via photoshop, next to the \u201cHollywood\u201d sign. \u201cShe was like, \u2018Why did I get this thing about you being from California?\u2019 I told her: I\u2019ve lived in five different states, my husband is from here, here\u2019s why I moved to Michigan\u2014gave her the whole spiel\u2014and she finally said, \u2018You remind me a lot of my daughter who moved to Chicago. Can you bring her back?\u2019\u201d says McMorrow. \u201cThat was a lightbulb moment for us: There are so many people in Oakland County who want their kids to either stay here or to move back.\u201d<\/p>\n For years, Michigan has hemorrhaged college graduates to big coastal cities\u2014New York, Washington, Chicago. In some ways, this \u201cbrain drain\u201d is a byproduct of the lack of regional cooperation that has long plagued metro Detroit, preventing it from investing in things that young professionals value, like mass transit or dense, culturally rich, walkable cities. <\/p>\n Patterson and other suburban politicians had long made hay out of fanning a city-vs.-suburbs narrative, but that approach has lost its effectiveness. Now, says McMorrow, Oakland residents realize \u201cthat our proximity to Detroit is an asset.\u201d The generation of white people who\u2019d fled to the suburbs in the 1950s and \u201960s is an ever-decreasing share of the population, and their descendants often have affection for Detroit and value diversity. <\/p>\n \u201cThe shift\u2014it wasn\u2019t even that you could see it in the numbers afterward; like, you could feel the energy shifting on the ground beneath your feet,\u201d says Mari Manoogian, who ran for state House alongside McMorrow in the 2018 cycle (McMorrow\u2019s Senate district encompasses a major chunk of Manoogian\u2019s seat).<\/p>\n Manoogian grew up and still lives in Birmingham, a posh town about eight miles up Woodward Avenue from 8 Mile Road. It\u2019s one of the wealthiest communities in the state, which made her an outlier: Her father worked his way up from the bucket-truck brigade with Detroit Edison to become a poobah in the National Utility Workers\u2019 Union. For class projects in school, young Mari chose subjects she knew her well-heeled classmates wouldn\u2019t, profiling labor icons like Samuel Gompers and Cesar Chavez\u2014\u201cpeople I figured nobody else would pick \u2026 because that\u2019s not the type of community we\u2019re from.\u201d She remembers being \u201cchastised for having an Obama sticker on my Jeep in 2008,\u201d when she was a junior at Birmingham\u2019s Seaholm High School. \u201cFast-forward 10 years later, and I\u2019ve got kids from Seaholm knocking doors for me.\u201d<\/p>\n While some of that is about increasing diversity, the change in Birmingham is less about demography than the rise of so-called \u201cBiden Republicans.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe \u2018Oakland Hills Country Club set\u2019 is changing, or at least having some serious reservations about the current version of the Republican Party,\u201d says Manoogian. \u201cKnocking doors in 2018, \u2026 people would say, \u2018I\u2019ve voted Republican my whole life, but I\u2019m not voting Republican anymore. \u2026 They\u2019re not focused on the issues that matter to us. They\u2019re focused on these culture-war issues.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n McMorrow sees it, too. \u201cDemocrats used to get hit on for \u2018social justice\u2019 issues. I think the Republican Party is on the flip side of that now,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s like, \u2018I\u2019m a small business owner \u2026\u2019 or \u2018I\u2019m an executive, and I\u2019ve always had a comfortable tax structure. But I don\u2019t care if a transgender girl wants to play soccer. Let her play soccer!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n In places like Oakland, the Republican Party\u2019s continuing focus on culture-war issues even puzzles former Republican officeholders.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s the opposite of a big-tent party right now,\u201d says Martin Howrylak, a Republican who represented Troy in the state House from 2012-2018. \u201cThat was really the game plan of Trump: to create lines: \u2018You\u2019re either with me or against me. And if you\u2019re not with me, you might as well\u2014politically speaking\u2014die.\u2019 And that \u2018take no prisoners\u2019 approach is the antithesis of what\u2019s needed here. As long as the party continues to embrace the former president, it\u2019s going to have trouble in Oakland County.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s not to say that every Oakland Republican is in trouble. Some have adapted masterfully to the changing demographic and political realities.<\/p>\n When Republican Jim Runestad jumped from state House to Senate in 2018, he suddenly faced a district roughly three times larger\u2014and substantially more diverse\u2014than the one he was used to. The city of Novi, which he represents, has, like Troy, had a massive infusion of South Asian residents. Runestad refused to write-off those voters.<\/p>\n \u201cI immediately went to all the events I could possibly attend. I was at a Bollywood dance-off,\u201d Runestad says. \u201cI was at a Temple event. I was at India Day. I was at so many functions, and all of them that I went to\u2014just about every case\u2014they said, \u2018You\u2019re the only Republican who\u2019s ever been here.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n It mystifies him that his fellow Republicans ignore these voters.<\/p>\n \u201cThe thing that upsets me the most is that that outreach has not been done all along,\u201d says Runestad. \u201cThey love this country. They don\u2019t want lots of regulation. They work very hard on their businesses. They don\u2019t want tremendous taxation. They want police presence. Talk to individuals in the Asian community: Are they for \u2018defund the police\u2019? Absolutely not. \u2026 They go, \u2018You\u2019re right. About 90 percent of everything we believe is Republican, but the Republicans have not shown up.\u2019 You can\u2019t neglect an entire community \u2026 and expect their support.\u201d<\/p>\n If the Republican Party had made the same switch Patterson once did, trading in culture wars for a business-conservative approach, 2018 and 2020 might\u2019ve played out differently. But in Oakland, as in communities throughout the nation, Trump became the alpha and omega; there was no Republican Party separate from him\u2014which was good for him, but very bad for suburban Republicans, as Oakland was about to show.<\/p>\n In November 2018, McMorrow ousted the GOP incumbent in a seat drawn as safely Republican a decade earlier. Manoogian won her state House race by about 16 points. Oakland County\u2019s two Republican-held congressional districts flipped with the elections of Elissa Slotkin and Haley Stevens. Gretchen Whitmer, the granddaughter of the Pontiac schools superintendent during the busing crisis, carried Oakland with 347,080 votes\u2014more than any Republican presidential or gubernatorial candidate had ever won, and more than Hillary Clinton had received there in 2016. <\/p>\n But more alarming for many Oakland Republicans was what happened at the county level. Ever since Patterson took control of redistricting and engineered a 14-7 Republican board, Woodward\u2019s Democrats had picked up seats, cycle by cycle. In 2018, he finally won his majority: 11 Democrats, 10 Republicans.<\/p>\n But the twist of the knife\u2014Woodward\u2019s poetic coup de grace\u2014came in how he flipped the seat that gave them control. Novi, which had never elected a Democrat before, voted in a new commissioner\u2014someone who had known Brooks Patterson most of her life, whose father occasionally campaigned with him; someone who was a high-school senior in Pontiac all those years ago when Patterson led NAG, and graduated two months before the schoolbuses were firebombed; someone Woodward encouraged to run; someone who had considered herself a Republican until, she says, the party left her: Gwen Markham, daughter of Daniel T. Murphy, Patterson\u2019s Republican predecessor as county executive.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is an irony to it for sure, because my sensibilities, I don\u2019t think, are all that different from what they were when I was 20 and a moderate Republican,\u201d says Markham. \u201cI still believe in good fiscal policy: give the taxpayers good [programs] and don\u2019t waste their money. But I also believe that climate change is real and we have a responsibility to fix the planet\u2014and I\u2019ve \u2026 always believed that women should have control of our own bodies.\u201d<\/p>\n She doesn\u2019t see space for people like her in today\u2019s Republican Party, which is dominated by Trump and disconnected from the issues that resonate in the lives of many suburbanite ex-Republicans.<\/p>\n \u201cThat \u2018Biden Republican\u2019 exists, and they call themselves that\u2014out here, they do,\u201d Markham says. \u201cThey were pretty comfortable \u2026 but they kind of woke up and went, \u2018Holy crap, this is not the future that I want for my kids.\u2019 A lot of these new folks\u2014doctors, lawyers, young people\u2014[are] coming to us and saying, \u2018The Republican Party doesn\u2019t represent us.\u2019 That’s how I ended up being a Democrat.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2022\u2022\u2022<\/p>\n I<\/span>n March 2019, Patterson got the diagnosis<\/a>: stage-4 pancreatic cancer. It moved fast, and five months later, on August 3, 2019, he died at home at age 80, surrounded by his family.<\/p>\n The commission would decide who filled out the rest of Patterson\u2019s term\u2014effectively, who would enter the 2020 cycle as the incumbent. Woodward briefly put himself forward as a candidate, but after a whirlwind of vote-counting, realized he didn\u2019t have the support: He\u2019d need to vacate his seat for the appointment, which would deadlock the board, 10-10. He needed a consensus candidate Democrats could agree on.<\/p>\n He knew just the man: Dave Coulter, Woodward\u2019s onetime partner on the commission, the man who had helped him build the county board\u2019s Democratic majority one voter at a time. <\/p>\n Since stepping away from the board years ago to run for mayor of Ferndale, Coulter had gained a reputation as a capable executive and progressive able to work with business interests. Patterson thought highly of him. On August 16<\/a>, Coulter was elected to fill out the remainder of Patterson\u2019s term. The bulldog prosecutor-turned-executive known to inflame city-suburb tensions was replaced by a pro-regionalism, pro-transit Democrat who became the first openly gay man in Michigan to serve as a county executive.<\/p>\n Without Patterson to temper its tone, the Republican Party in Oakland, like local Republican parties in communities throughout the country, became more Trumpy.<\/p>\n Nowhere is this more apparent than in the rise of Meshawn Maddock, an Oakland woman who co-founded Michigan Trump Republicans, sat on the executive board of the Oakland County GOP, and chaired the party organization in the Oakland-based 11th congressional district<\/a>. <\/p>\n In August 2020, Maddock and Manoogian appeared on Fox 2 Detroit\u2019s \u201cLet It Rip,\u201d<\/a> a \u201cCrossfire\u201d-style news segment. Amid a wave of protests after the killing of George Floyd throughout the country, Maddock used the TV hit to make the case for Trump.<\/p>\n \u201cI can tell you, as a woman: Women want law and order. We want law and order in our businesses, in our homes, in our families,\u201d said Maddock. \u201cThat\u2019s not something the Democrats can offer right now. It\u2019s chaos, destruction, looting and burning.\u201d<\/p>\n Fox 2 host Charlie Langton gave Manoogian a chance to respond. \u201cI was just in downtown Birmingham last night, and I didn\u2019t see any chaos, destruction, looting and burning,\u201d Manoogian said. \u201cWe\u2019re represented by Democrats here just fine.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m sorry, Charlie,\u201d Maddock shot back. \u201cThat we would use Birmingham, Michigan\u2014which is the bastion of elitists\u2014I mean, that\u2019s a bunch of rich white women, and that\u2019s what she\u2019s using as an example?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re voters,\u201d said Langton, looking confused. <\/p>\n \u201cLook at Portland, Chicago\u2014those are the Democrats\u2019 strongholds. Those cities have been brought to their knees by leftist ideology, by Democrats. That\u2019s being ignored. Nobody really is interested on Election Day by how safe Birmingham, Michigan is.\u201d<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t just that Maddock was arguing this point, it was the way she argued it: By alienating the women of Birmingham, a community that had been a GOP stronghold until recently, and by alienating women elsewhere in Oakland who identified with Birmingham\u2019s \u201crich white women.\u201d Maddock was proud enough of the exchange to post it on her own Facebook page<\/a>. <\/p>\n A few months later, Maddock and her husband, State Rep. Matt Maddock, helped organize buses<\/a> to take Trump supporters from Oakland County to the Jan. 6 Trump rally-turned-insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. One month later<\/a>, she was elected co-chair of the Michigan GOP. This week, she attended a rally in Lansing, calling for an audit of the 2020 election results.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople like Matt and Meshawn Maddock are the powers in the Republican Party\u2014not just in Oakland County, but in Michigan,\u201d says Timmer, the former executive director of the state GOP. \u201cThey are the most powerful Republicans in the state.\u201d<\/p>\n The dynamic puzzles Democrats because it seems clear what Republicans could do to compete in places like Birmingham, Bloomfield, Novi and Troy. <\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t want to tell my potential opponents how to beat me, but I think that if [Republicans] did stay more Romney-esque, it would still be a Republican stronghold,\u201d says McMorrow, who is up for reelection in 2022. \u201cBut it just feels like Ronna [Romney McDaniel] and company have dictated that this is the culture of this party, all the way down to the local level. And I just don\u2019t think that works.\u201d<\/p>\n In November, Manoogian won reelection with 58 percent of the vote. Coulter won a full four-year term as county executive. Gwen Markham was reelected to the county commission, and so was Dave Woodward, who now chairs an 11-10 Democratic majority. Joe Biden carried the county with 434,148 votes\u2014defeating Trump by a margin of victory of nearly 110,000.<\/p>\n Once the 2020 Census numbers are released, statewide redistricting of congressional and legislative maps will be done by a nonpartisan board for the first time after several cycles of GOP control. And in Oakland, the law Patterson hastily passed to take power from the five-person districting panel and give it to the board means that Woodward will be drawing the lines this time around. \u201cTalk about payback,\u201d he says, laughing.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the Republican Party hasn\u2019t done an autopsy of an election in which it lost the White House and Senate, two years after an election in which it lost the House. Of course, it\u2019s hard to do an autopsy of an election you lost without first admitting that the election was lost, not stolen. Such a post-mortem would likely reveal that the party\u2019s disinterest in holding onto the suburbs prevents the rise of new Pattersonian Republicans with their own identities separate from Trumpism and that this will have long-term historical consequences.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are dozens, if not hundreds of these local or regional-level political power brokers who shape the outcomes of how our cities and regions function in ways that just aren\u2019t visible to most people,\u201d says Delmont, the Dartmouth historian. \u201cWe spend so much time talking about who\u2019s in the White House or even who\u2019s in Congress. But it might be the L. Brooks Pattersons of the world who actually determine, like: Do we have affordable housing? Do we have segregated cities? Do we have police forces that are militarized? The people who actually operate the levers of power are probably much more positioned like a Brooks Patterson than a President Trump or President Biden.\u201d<\/p>\n It also accrues to the benefit of people like Dave Woodward.<\/p>\n \u201cIn 2018, we saw record turnout. In 2020, there was even more record turnout,\u201d Woodward says. \u201cIf we can sustain that for, I mean, one more cycle, you\u2019ve got a lifetime voter in the making. And it\u2019s going to make it harder and harder for the Republican Party to win elections.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s the future of politics in places like Oakland County?\u201d I asked Mari Manoogian earlier this year. She paused for a moment to think about it, looking around her apartment in what was once RomneyLand. \u201cI think we\u2019re living in it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n