They lined up in the dark and rain before polls even opened in Saginaw, the key county in the crucial state of Michigan.

Some just wanted to be able to vote and get to work on time. But many people were also determined that, whatever issues they cared about, this American election was more important than most others.

And Saginaw voters matter more than most, too. The complex US electoral system has created a battleground of seven US states that will decide the election – including Michigan. Saginaw is one of the most hotly contested stretches of grass in Michigan.

From polling places at Bethel AME Church on the solidly Democratic east side of the city of Saginaw, one of the poorest parts of the county, to the wealthy, Donald Trump-backed town of Frankenmuth, many voters saw themselves as changing their way of life wanted to protect. living in a time of deep national division in the US.

Among those who said they voted for Kamala Harris, the issue of women’s rights after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion two years ago came up repeatedly and most often. Cheyanne Laux, who voted at the church, said it decided her vote.

“Trump has clearly proven in the past that he clearly does not think about women’s rights. The abortion issue, that’s the most important thing to me, so voting Democratic is tantamount to preserving that right,” she said.

Others who voted for the US vice president spoke of fears about the damage Trump would do to democracy if he returns to the White House.

Trump supporters, in turn, saw an existential threat to the US in what they see as uncontrolled immigration and spoke of the former president as the man who would bring jobs back to an area hit hard by the closure of auto factories in recent years .

Tom Harris voted for Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden in the last two elections. This year he cast his vote for Trump.

Harris works at one of the few remaining auto plants in Saginaw and is a longtime member of the United Auto Workers union.

“I was totally a diehard Democrat because that’s what the union told me. My brother-in-law had to say why he liked Trump. He says, “I hate the man as a person, but he can run the country.” So I started looking at Trump a little differently,” he said.

Harris said Trump did better on the economy as president and avoided involvement in foreign conflicts. Comparing the global situation then to now, he said Russia was too afraid of Trump to invade Ukraine while he was in power.

For voters like Shelley Coon in Frankenmuth, Trump was the man to protect their children from what they described as the Democratic party pushing an ungodly agenda in schools.

“The final decision for me was that I don’t want our children to learn what the Democratic party teaches in the schools, all these 52 genders, non-binary things. No, that just goes too far. For me, that was my final decision. I know there were a whole range of topics, but that was really the make or break thing,” she said.

“I don’t vote as a leader. You have to stick to the policy and we are getting too far away from religion, Christianity.”

Michigan saw a huge increase in turnout in the last presidential election, as Democrats flocked to the polls to get Trump out of the White House. Seventy-two percent of the state’s registered voters cast a ballot, the largest percentage for any election in Michigan since John F Kennedy became president sixty years earlier.

Both recognize that attendance will again be crucial this year and are looking to take it to new heights. Trump told his supporters at a rally in Saginaw to vote to make his victory “too big to manipulate” as he continued to push his false claim that the presidency was stolen from him in 2020.

Meanwhile, Harris ended her campaign with a flurry of ads in Michigan attacking Trump as a continued threat to women’s rights, hoping to get ambivalent female voters to the polls or get women who previously voted Republican to switch sides.

Saginaw County will be a litmus test for how successful that strategy has been. Trump won the county in 2016 with 1.1% of the vote, on his way to winning Michigan by just 10,704 votes and thus the election. Four years later, Trump’s vote tally rose in Saginaw, but he still lost to Biden by 303 votes as stay-at-home Democrats turned out in large numbers in 2016.

Chelsea la Coppola, who moved to Saginaw Township two years ago from another swing state, Arizona, said her vote was largely determined by “women’s rights, right to choose.” La Coppola said she thought the issue would encourage many people she knows to vote.

“It is a big factor for them, together with the democracy aspect. “Everyone is worried about what will happen if Trump returns to power,” she said.

Tracy Goetgeluck, a voter in the city of Saginaw, said she had two daughters in their early 20s and abortion rights were “huge for them.”

“For my daughters and many of their friends, the main purpose of their votes is the feeling that their own rights will be taken away if Trump becomes president again, and that’s really scary for them. Even my son, because he is so close to his sisters, votes because he doesn’t want his sisters to take that away from them,” she said.

Katherine Harris also said that “the abortion issue is huge for me,” but as a supporter of further restrictions and as a Trump voter. She acknowledged that the issue could work against the former president, especially among female voters angry that the Supreme Court is stripping their rights.

“I do think it could harm him, as well as many younger women, because in our society we don’t hold ourselves accountable for our actions, so it’s a lot easier to have an abortion rather than live by what we have done. she said.

Erica Rapini was a strong supporter of Trump, but her daughter, 21-year-old first-time voter Mikayla, kept her opinions to herself, saying only that deciding who to vote for “felt like I was taking a test” .

“It’s hard to decipher what’s true and what’s not true in the media and things like that. So I really had to do some research,” she said.

Her mother was more certain in her views.

“My biggest issue is the crime crossing the southern border and the lack of response from the current administration,” she said.

Even though Saginaw is about 1,500 miles from the Mexican border, Trump’s repeated and false accusations that immigrants are causing a crime wave have resonated with many conservative voters, along with the swirl of rumors and fabricated claims on social media.

Katherine Harris swears that undocumented migrants were bussed to Bay City, about half an hour away, where her sister lives. That claim was so widespread that the mayor of Bay City issued a statement last week denying it and saying they were legal migrant workers.

Like many Trump voters, Harris said she was not bothered by the tone of his vitriolic attacks and threats against his opponents.

“I tell everyone, I’m not here to be his friend, I’m here for him to take care of our family the way it should be. I don’t agree with his Twitter, I don’t agree with some of the comments he makes. But he can run the country,” she said.

But what some Trump supporters brush aside as largely irrelevant, voters like Goetgeluck see as disqualifying and troubling.

“I didn’t want another round of Trump. He scares me a lot. He doesn’t seem to think about our people. He’s about himself. Before him, our country respected each other. Since he started campaigning against Hillary Clinton things got really nasty, our elections are just nasty. That is not what our country stands for. That wasn’t the case in the past, she said.

Not many voters spoke enthusiastically about Kamala Harris, saying the most important thing was keeping Trump out, and more than a few voters simply wanted to let the election pass.

La Coppola said the atmosphere had been so restless that she avoided public expressions of support for the Democrat.

‘You’re afraid of crazy people coming to your house, so you don’t even want to put up a sign. You don’t want to put a bumper sticker on your car. You don’t want to do anything that might confuse the other side,” she said.

That concern extends to the aftermath of the election, given Trump’s continued efforts to undermine confidence in the legitimacy of the election if it goes against him.

Goetgeluck worries about what will happen if Trump loses and again refuses to accept the outcome, as he did when he encouraged his supporters to storm the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

“I was standing in line and two people behind me, who I knew were going to vote for Trump, were talking about how counterfeit votes have already been found in Michigan, double voting and all these things, and I don’t believe that’s Where. Rumors start going around and it just snowballs from there,” she said.

Joe Pratt, who voted for Trump but said he would have preferred the former president’s running mate, J.D. Vance, at the top, is among those who believe the last election was rigged against Trump and that this one will be too.

‘People are already being arrested and investigations are underway. I don’t remember where it was, but there was already a huge wave of voter fraud. Pennsylvania maybe. It was pretty bad. So that’s where it already started. There are people’s names that do not match the addresses. Addresses are fake. People’s names are fake,” he said.

There is no evidence for this claim. But Pratt is optimistic about what will happen if Trump loses.

“We all just move on with our lives. We have to ride out the wave. I mean, what else can we do at that point? he said.

Read more about the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage