Debbie Dingell Is Afraid the Trump Polls Are Wrong—Again

Debbie Dingell was one of the few Democrats who saw Donald Trump coming. She’s worried that her party will underestimate him again.

The 66-year-old representative from Michigan first noticed his pull with voters in her district, which stretches from Ann Arbor to Detroit, in August 2015 at a United Auto Workers picnic. The union workers and their families expressed curiosity about the Republican newcomer they recognized from TV, were disillusioned by the national Democratic Party, and were even more unenthusiastic about the party’s nominee. “Debbie, we can’t be with that Hillary Clinton,” they told her again and again.

, Dingell, a three-term representative and the widow of the late congressman John Dingell, relayed her concerns to the Clinton campaign immediately: The former secretary of state wasn’t spending enough time communicating with white, working-class voters, she warned. Even a year later, in Michigan ahead of the general election, Dingell was adamant that her party . In the end, she was right: Michigan, which a Republican presidential candidate hadn’t won since 1988, went to Trump . The polls .