Former Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and Florida U.S. Rep. Kat Cammack address a crowd of about 200 on Nov. 3, 2024 in Holland at Baker Events. | Sarah Leach
”I’m here tonight in Michigan because leadership has consequences. It matters who’s in charge.”
That was the message of GOP South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem on Sunday as she stumped for former Republican President Donald Trump, along with former Republican gubernatorial nominee Tudor Dixon and U.S. Rep. Katt Commack (R-Fla.) in the days leading up to Tuesday’s election.
Michigan has been ground zero in the battle over swing state Electoral College votes — the Mitten State has 15 of the 270 needed to win the White House — and that has drawn numerous visits from Trump and Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and their various surrogates.
Noem, South Dakota’s first female governor, is an ally of Trump who rose to national prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic over her refusal to issue a statewide mandate to wear face masks.
As the de facto moderator of the event, Noem quickly set the tone with familiar conservative talking points such as illegal immigration and border control policies, putting the blame squarely on Harris.
“Kamala Harris has allowed 13,000 murderers into this country, 16,000 rapists into this country just by facilitating that open border,” Noem said. “Just think about your county and how small that is in your community of people that you have four more murderers living right there in your community, that’s the average across this country.”
Despite numerous studies published widely in national media outlets debunking a correlation between undocumented workers and violent crime, Noem said the issue has reached fever pitch in the U.S.
“[Harris] has allowed them to come into this country and sign up for free programs and food stamps and all kinds of dollars to take care of them and housing when American citizens and our veterans and people that are struggling here in America get no respect from this White House,” Noem said.
Dixon, who also campaigned Sunday for Trump with Hamtramck Mayor Amer Tlaib on the southeast side of the state, said the border control issue was one of the biggest threats to women and children in Michigan.
“We have watched the Laken Rileys and the Jocelyn Nungarays and the Ruby Garcias of the country be hunted down and raped and murdered — it’s the women, I keep telling people, that are the victims of this open border. I think we’re all the victims of this open border, but it’s disproportionately women that end up with the most heinous crimes,” said Dixon, who lost to Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2022 by about 11 points, or nearly 470,000 votes.
“When I hear 1 in 6 women will be raped, every part of my body and soul says, we have got to stop this,” she said.
Despite Trump’s firebrand persona during interviews and public appearances, both Noem and Dixon described him as a reasonable person who is open to dialogue with critics.
“There is a man who is a former president and looking to be the president of the United States again, who says: ‘I hear what you’re saying.’ That, to me, is what this is all about,” Dixon said. “Sometimes we have disagreements; it doesn’t mean us loving each other is off the table, and that’s where we’ve gotten in this country. That’s what I love about this campaign. It has been a campaign of sitting and talking and having conversation.”
Noem said despite Trump’s billionaire status, he’s an everyman in many ways because he’s authentic.
“I remember in 2016 watching President Trump on TV coming down a golden escalator, and I was thinking, ‘Who does that?’ But you know what? He’s being who he is, and he’s not going to pretend to be something that he isn’t, and he’s honest,” Noem said. “He does that because he doesn’t think he’s any better than us. He’s just going to be who he is and tell the truth and fight for us and be exactly what we need in this country, somebody who’s in a leadership position that we do trust.”
Despite being two years after the pandemic phase of COVID-19, the pandemic was a frequent talking point, with Noem one of a handful of U.S. Republican governors who refused to issue mitigation mandates such as masking and social distancing like Whitmer did in Michigan.
“I never saw families that were suffering so much as I saw in Michigan the way that she shut down their state and the businesses that were closed and the restaurants that weren’t allowed to serve people,” Noem said of Whitmer’s statewide orders in 2020. “It was shocking to see. It was pretty devastating.”
Dixon, who said she could run again for governor “if God says to do it,” said she also has deep concerns about the rise of gun violence in schools and college campuses nationwide.
“It is truly a concern of mine that my daughters are not safe in this country on a college campus … in a state where we had someone walk into a college campus with a gun and start shooting, and the same thing in a high school,” she said, referring to the 2023 mass shooting at Michigan State University that left three dead and five injured, as well as the 2021 mass shooting at Oxford High School in Oakland County that killed four and injured seven.
There have been 445 mass shootings around the country so far in 2024, per the Gun Violence Archive.
Despite the Democratic-led Michigan House and Senate passing a slew of gun control laws in 2023 and 2024 in response to the incidents that made national headlines, Dixon said officials haven’t come up with good solutions.
“We are still not focused on school safety and how we keep people safe,” Dixon said. “This is something that bothers me every day. When are we going to start coming up with a solution? Because talking about a problem doesn’t make a solution just come out of thin air.”
According to the most recent polls, Harris and Trump are tied at 47% in the New York Times/Siena survey, although Harris is up 49% to 48% in a Morning Consult poll and 51% to 48% in the Marist poll along with three other surveys that found Harris in the lead. Trump has a rare lead in a Washington Post poll released Thursday that shows him up 47% to 45% among registered voters and he’s ahead 49% to 48% in an Emerson survey released Tuesday (margin of error 3 points). Harris is up by .7 points in Michigan in FiveThirtyEight’s polling average.
Early voting in Michigan ended Sunday, with in-person voting taking place on Tuesday. The state’s overall absentee return rate was around 74% as of Thursday, with counties across the state averaging return rates between 71% and 85% less than a week out from Election Day. Statewide, an average of 100,000 voters a day were voting at early, in-person voting sites.
Almost 3.2 million votes have already been cast, per the secretary of state.
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