Republican Michigan Senate candidate Terri Lynn Land will end Tuesday night in the city whose struggle makes it a veritable symbol of her working-class campaign: Detroit.
Land, who trails by 15 points after four months diverting national Democratic money up to help her opponent Rep. Gary Peters in Michigan, will spend her campaign’s last day in three disparate but sentimental locations: a church, a city grill and a hotel in the tallest building in the state – a building that still stands tall, immovable, over a city where hope got itself outsourced.
Land’s campaign was boosted Monday by a fleece jacket-clad appearance by Republican Governors Association boss Chris Christie, but it’s unclear whether that will be enough.
Land will begin her day Tuesday voting at Pathway Church in Byron Center, Michigan at 11 a.m. EST, followed by a voter lunch at Grandville’s Rainbow Grill and a nighttime procession with Governor Rick Snyder and the other statewide Republican candidates at the Detroit Marriott Renaissance Center, a commercial complex owned by General Motors. Early voting for Snyder’s re-election race against Democrat Mark Schauer shows a dead heat.
“You did not save Detroit. You saved GM. You saved Chrysler,” filmmaker Michael Moore recently wrote to President Barack Obama. “Detroit, at this point, would stand a better chance if they were an Iraqi or Syrian city, in terms of getting some sort of help.”