STERLING HEIGHTS, Mich. _ Michael Taylor grew up Republican with parents who always have voted Republican and still do.
In college, he took pleasure in drawing the wrath of liberal students while writing a conservative column for his campus newspaper. He later became a tea party darling in his Detroit suburb for fighting a local tax increase during the height of the Great Recession. And in 2016, he dutifully cast his ballot for Republican Donald Trump.
But on Tuesday, Taylor will do something he said he's never done before _ vote for a Democrat.
"I think Joe Biden is the candidate who can unify all of the Democrats, and he's the candidate who can appeal to moderates and Republicans like me who don't want to see four more years of President Trump," he said.
Taylor, however, isn't just an average suburban GOP voter turned off by what he called Trump's "deranged" presidency _ he's the mayor of Sterling Heights, Michigan's fourth largest city.
His conservative-leaning, working-class suburb is in Macomb County, the epicenter of where blue-collar voters in the industrial Midwest delivered the presidency to Trump in 2016 after twice voting for Barack Obama.
If Democrats are to win the White House in November, political strategists widely agree a big part of the strategy will be reclaiming areas such as Macomb in the crucial swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania while holding their ground in Minnesota, another state Trump nearly won four years ago.
As Michigan voters head to the polls Tuesday, Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders both have argued they are best positioned to win back these so-called pivot counties that twice voted for Obama before turning to Trump.
Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, has said his political revolution will create "the largest voter turnout in American history," bringing a blue wave to such areas. Biden has contended he is best suited to unite the nation and appeal to disaffected Republicans while bringing Obama voters who supported Trump back into the fold.
While the Democratic primary electorate differs from who will vote in November, how Biden and Sanders perform in these Obama-Trump counties can offer a preview to who might be best primed to reclaim the turf from Trump.
So far, Biden is winning the battle, a Chicago Tribune analysis found.
Nationwide, there are 206 Obama-Trump counties, and voters in 85 of them already have cast ballots. Biden has won 41, to 18 for Sanders. Former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who since has exited the race, won 20, all in Iowa. Sen. Amy Klobuchar won four, two in Iowa and two in her native Minnesota, while two other such counties remain too close to call.
More than half of the pivot counties are in the Midwest, including 12 in Michigan. The counties are spread throughout the state, from suburban Detroit to the westernmost part of Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
Macomb County is the largest of the Obama-Trump counties in Michigan and the second most populous in the country (Pinellas County, Florida, is the first). After Obama won Macomb County by 8 points in 2008 and by 4 points in 2012, Trump won it by nearly 12 points in 2016, thanks in large part to an America-first economic message that railed against bad trade deals abroad and vowed more manufacturing jobs at home.
Taylor, who first shared his decision to back Biden with the Tribune, described voters in his county as thinking "pretty highly of our work ethic here."
"I think what you saw in 2016 was people saying, 'We're sick of these places on the coasts, New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. ... dictating to us what's going to happen. We've got some political power, we've got some political might and we're going to flex it,'" said Taylor, who took office in 2014 at the age of 31, succeeding Buttigieg as the youngest mayor of a city with more than 100,000 people.
"That's what I think Trump's election here was a referendum on," he said. "People thinking their interests weren't being protected by politicians in Washington, D.C."
