The Michigan Board of State Canvassers voted unanimously on Monday to place Socialist Equality Party candidates Joseph Kishore for president and Jerry White for vice president on the ballot for the November 5 U.S. election.
The SEP candidates qualified through a petition drive that collected over 20,000 signatures from Michigan voters. The petition was submitted last month, and the Democratic Party could find no basis to challenge it. The state Board of Elections reviewed it and concluded that the SEP candidates met the requirement of at least 12,000 valid signatures of registered voters, as well as another requirement of at least 100 signatures in the majority of the state’s congressional districts.
According to the campaign, dozens of SEP supporters have been fighting for more than four months to collect the necessary signatures. Many of them were collected in the Detroit metropolitan area, which includes the four counties of Wayne, Macomb, Oakland and Washtenaw. Thousands of signatures were collected by campaign teams in Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Lansing, Flint, Port Huron and other cities across the state. Residents from 75 of the state’s 83 counties submitted their signatures to elect Kishore and White.
The success of the SEP petition campaign in Michigan has enormous national and international significance. The state of Michigan is a focal point of the 2024 elections. It is a swing state and is at the center of the escalating political crisis in the United States.
Michigan was one of three industrialized states where Donald Trump narrowly defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden defeated Trump in 2020. After the 2020 election, Trump met with Republican lawmakers in the state and tried to get them to overturn his election defeat and replace the Biden electors chosen by voters with Trump electors.
During the 2020 election campaign, a violent right-wing conspiracy aimed to assassinate Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Trump had previously publicly called for “liberating” Michigan from the initial coronavirus lockdown, which was the result of autoworker strikes that forced the closure of major factories. The group that sought to kidnap and execute Whitmer was arrested on the eve of carrying out its plans.
In 2024, the two largest capitalist parties are flooding the state with television and social media advertising, paid campaign workers, and, in the case of the Democrats, a mobilization of union officials and staff. The two parties are likely to spend more than $100 million on their rival campaigns in Michigan alone, and they are poised to spend millions more on legal battles after the election.
The candidates themselves visit Michigan almost every week. It is notable that Trump’s speeches in Michigan focus on ultra-right and militarist forces that he would call on to take violent action if he loses the state. Last week he spoke at a rally in Howell, the city where the Ku Klux Klan was re-established in the 1970s and where neo-Nazis publicly marched just days before Trump’s arrival.
On Monday, Trump gave a speech at the National Guard Association convention in Detroit. Over the course of 2020, Trump had repeatedly called for the National Guard to be called up. First, to quell protests against police violence following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Later, after the election, to quell protests against his plans to remain president despite the voters’ votes.
Trump has threatened that after returning to the White House he will deploy the National Guard in the country’s major cities to round up immigrants and suppress protests.
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In a statement posted on X yesterday, Kishore wrote: “The Socialist Equality Party will use this election campaign to fight for a socialist leadership of the working class. (Jerry White) and I will oppose both the Democrats and the Republicans, the parties of the corporate and financial oligarchy.”
The statement continued: “The SEP will fight to mobilize the working class against the bipartisan genocide in Gaza and the escalating US-NATO war against Russia. We will oppose the ruling elites’ turn to fascism and dictatorship.”
Michigan is home to the largest Arab-populated city in the US, Dearborn. There is tremendous opposition to the genocide in Gaza among workers and youth across the state. Protests have been organized at major universities, including the University of Michigan and Wayne State University. As universities reopen, university administrations closely aligned with the Democratic Party are carrying out massive attacks on basic democratic rights and free speech.
In recent weeks, the SEP’s campaign in Michigan has focused primarily on fighting for an autoworker rebellion against the United Auto Workers (UAW) union apparatus, which supports the planned destruction of more than 2,000 jobs at the Stellantis truck assembly plant in Warren, near Detroit.
Kishore issued a statement last week calling for a joint movement of all rank-and-file workers against layoffs.
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Michigan is still the center of the auto industry, and UAW President Shawn Fain is now one of the most active supporters of the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party. Fain and other union officials support the escalating global war that simultaneously requires a war against the working class at home.
“The SEP categorically rejects the notion that one can oppose dictatorship and fascism by supporting a party of imperialism and war,” Kishore said. “Both the Republicans and the Democrats represent two factions of the corporate and financial oligarchy.”
“The broad support for the SEP’s campaign in Michigan reflects the true mood of workers and youth everywhere,” Kishore added. “In our campaign here in Michigan, across the United States and around the world, we will fight to explain the basic political issues facing workers and to make them understand that none of the problems of working people can be solved except by fighting for socialism, and that this great historic task can only be achieved by adopting a global strategy.”
The WSWS will continue to cover the SEP campaign as part of its overall coverage of the 2024 elections.
