These were largely white, male, auto-workers in Macomb County Michigan whose very lives and communities had been created , in part, by unions. Their neighborhoods, schools, two cars, snowmobiles, fishing boats, kids' hockey ice-time, "cottages up north," and semi-annual trips to Florida were made possible by union pay and benefits.
Most of the kids I knew used to dress and look a lot like Kid Rock before Kid Rock was born (in northern Macomb County -- as opposed to Marshall Mathers, who grew up famously north of 8 Mile in southern Macomb County, the border to Wayne County and the city of Detroit).
You get the picture.
Traditionally, because of the unions Macomb County residents voted Democrat.
In and about 1980, however, they turned their allegiances to Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party.
And they have never really looked back. The primary reason for the split at the time seemed to be an understanding of social values. For many, the Democrat party had become too left leaning.
Race mattered, too, as it always does in Detroit and metro-Detroit. Detroit was the center of Democratic politics in the state. The shift to Reagan was, in many respects, just another way for a certain demographic (mine) to say we aren't going to have anything to do with Detroit anymore.
These Macomb County voters had analogues across the country, of course; but the change was just particularly stark and visible here.
The shift of the Reagan Democrats marked a turning point in the country's politics, the advent of what we now know of as the "right wing."
It was, perhaps, the most significant shift in a voting block since southern Democrats turned against the party over civil rights some 20 years earlier.
Today, I find myself staring at another potential national voting shift that can be illustrated through Michigan politics.
Mark Schauer and Lisa Brown are running in Michigan as the candidates for public education. They are Democrats, of course, challenging Republican incumbent Rick Snyder.
Snyder's educational reforms set off a firestorm in Michigan 2012 and big parts of his plans -- erasing geographically defined Districts, creating cheap on-line learning, quasi-voucher programs, etc. -- collapsed, some in scandal.
Two "reforms" survived and look to become part of the landscape: the EAA, the state's reform District, and the state's embrace of Common Core and its VAM models of teacher effectiveness.
Curiously, these are the two reforms that are actually more distinctly Democratic than Republican reforms. The EAA was spawned by the Race to the Top initiatives of 2009 and the CC originates from The White House. These two reforms threaten more than any other effort to undermine a long tradition of local control for schools in favor of a corporate, Washington DC directive.
So: Schauer and Brown literally find themselves running against their own party and President. Indeed, Schauer's own kids' schools in affluent Oakland County would have been transformed if Republicans there had not stood against their own Governor. But they really can't say as much.
The (political) head spins.
For example, the Tea-Party is massing a critical response to the Common Core, resisting as federal overreach. While they characteristically overplay their hand, Tea-Partiers are finding very new allies amongst public school teachers and parents. They may, in fact, be the country's best chance to retain something of its neighborhood public school system.
Who knew?
Schauer and Brown, absent any particularly innovative ideas, and rather than address these complexities, have framed their campaign in 1980s terms: Dems want to spend more this year on education than Republicans. That gained some ground for them in the winter, but as the Governor has passed more money in to K12 -- or enough to satisfy general populace -- they are losing ground fast on this key issue, falling from 7 points back to 11. As everyone heads for "summertime in northern Michigan" rocking to that southern band sound, and schools seem set to open as normal in September, those numbers will drop even more.
Schauer and Brown are rather stuck. To tell a true story about public education they would have to criticize Barack Obama and Arne Duncan. But they have no local money to support them if they abandon national friends.
If, however, they side with the National Democratic Party against public education Michigan again will mark an odd and paradoxical political shift: "Public School Teachers and Parents for Republicans."
I have seen stranger things in my lifetime.
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