American Local Elections Study · 2025
Detroit
What city residents think about local government and what they want it to do.
Viewing Results From:
In 2025 the Local Politics Lab conducted a national survey of 2,346 adults, along with post-election surveys of 5,517 adults in 33 cities and counties holding local elections to capture how the public views important issues facing their community. We asked respondents about their perceptions of local services and their elected leaders, along with their views on a variety of topics including housing, policing, immigration, and election timing. Here we report findings from the 235 respondents from Detroit, Michigan.
Key Findings
58percentapprove of Mayor Mike Duggan’s performance
37percentrate local roads in Detroit as below average or poor
47percentsay people like them have a great deal or fair amount of say in local government
47percentsupport moving Detroit’s local elections to even-numbered years
Approval of elected officials
Majorities approve of the performance of Mayor Mike Duggan and Detroit City Council, as well as Governor Gretchen Whitmer. A majority also approves of the performance of Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy. More respondents approve than disapprove of the performance of Wayne County Sheriff Raphael Washington, but 35 percent of respondents say they do not know enough to rate Washington’s performance. This is consistent with research showing that the public has limited knowledge about many local elected officials, particularly prosecutors.1
For some elected leaders, being unknown may be a bigger problem than being unpopular. Across the country, a large share of respondents say they do not know enough to rate the performance of their local officials.
Grades for local services
When asked to grade different aspects of their local community, Detroit respondents give the highest grades to local schools, with 32 percent calling them excellent or above average. Respondents give local roads the lowest grade.
Across the country, local institutions like schools and policing tend to receive the highest grades from the public, while broader economic conditions, especially the cost of housing, receive the worst.
Attribution and accountability
Federal, state, and local government agencies share responsibility for setting policies and delivering services that affect quality of life in Detroit. This division of responsibility can make it difficult for the public to correctly assign credit or blame to local officials for policy decisions they make.2 Across different levels of government, respondents identify Detroit city government as most responsible for traffic, police, and crime, while they perceive the state government as being most responsible for roads, housing costs, zoning, and schools.
Although local governments have considerable discretion over many public services, the public may struggle to attribute policy outcomes to local elected leaders.
Government spending and revenue
To gauge budget priorities, the survey asked whether local governments should spend more, less, or about the same amount in eleven areas. Healthcare draws the strongest support for increased spending, at 64 percent. The largest partisan divides are over education spending: 65 percent of Democrats favor increased spending, compared with 32 percent of Republicans, a difference of 33 percentage points.
Support for increased spending is substantially higher than support for increasing sources of government revenue. Income taxes draw the most support for an increase at 26 percent, and 50 percent of Detroit respondents want property taxes cut.
Most Americans want more spending by local governments on education, housing, and healthcare, but do not support raising taxes.
Crime and policing
Detroit respondents are more likely to perceive that crime has increased nationally than in their own neighborhoods. Thirty-three percent say crime increased in their neighborhood over the past year, while 54 percent say it increased in the country as a whole.
National debates over policing and public safety have changed substantially since 2020. Following the murder of George Floyd and nationwide protests, many state and local governments placed limits on police use-of-force and instituted new requirements concerning body cameras, officer certification, and misconduct reporting. Progressive prosecutors also sought to address concerns over mass incarceration at the local level by declining to prosecute nonviolent misdemeanors.3 In more recent years, concerns about violent crime, shoplifting, and public disorder have helped fuel backlash against some of these reforms. Some police reforms, including requirements that officers wear body cameras, receive broad support in Detroit. Support is lower for reducing the size of the local police force or limiting the types of crimes that are prosecuted.
Questions about the federal role in public safety became especially prominent in 2025 as the Trump administration deployed the National Guard and other military personnel in several American cities, including Los Angeles and Washington D.C. While a majority of Detroit respondents say that responsibility for crime and policing lies primarily with state and local government, they report notable support for these types of federal deployments. Thirty-six percent of Detroit respondents agree that the military should participate in fighting crime in American cities, and 49 percent support bringing federal troops to Detroit to address crime.
Despite declines in the national crime rate, a majority of Americans say that crime across the country has increased. Far fewer say crime has increased in their own community.
Housing and land use
In many American cities roughly three-quarters of residentially zoned land is reserved for detached single-family homes, a restriction that limits where apartments can be built and that is widely linked to housing shortages and higher costs.4 Seventy-one percent of Detroit respondents favor allowing multifamily housing throughout the city rather than limiting it to areas that are already densely developed, which is similar to support among Americans as a whole (66 percent).
Rent regulation has returned to the political agenda in a number of places, with attempts to freeze rents or otherwise limit rent increases in New York City, Massachusetts, and California.5 Seventy-five percent of Detroit respondents favor limiting how much landlords can raise rent each year. This policy is popular among both renters (75 percent in favor) and homeowners (80 percent in favor).
Transportation
Local transportation policy often involves tradeoffs among drivers, transit riders, pedestrians, and cyclists. Fifty-eight percent of Detroit respondents support the installation of new bus-only lanes to improve bus reliability, even if they reduce the space dedicated to driving and parking. Seventy-seven percent favor subsidizing transit for low-income riders. While some jurisdictions have reduced or eliminated minimum parking requirements,6 71 percent of respondents favor increasing parking requirements for new housing. Such requirements can increase construction costs, particularly when they require structured or underground parking, and may reinforce automobile-oriented development.
Most respondents say the city should prioritize pedestrian safety over increasing speed limits.
Immigration enforcement
Immigration policy received considerable attention in 2025 as federal agents carried out far-reaching immigration raids at workplaces, courthouses, and homes across the United States. As part of this effort, the Trump administration has attempted to place substantial pressure on local governments to abandon existing policies that limit when local police may assist immigration authorities.
Large majorities in Detroit express support for federal policies that would allow immigrants already living in the United States to remain and obtain legal status. Seventy-one percent favor letting people brought to the United States illegally as children stay and work here, 75 percent favor a path to citizenship for immigrants already in the country, and 52 percent favor building a wall on the border with Mexico.
At the local level, 49 percent of Detroit respondents favor letting local law enforcement cooperate with federal immigration authorities to deport people who are in the country illegally, while 51 percent either oppose the policy or did not express an opinion.7
Majorities support pro-immigrant policies at the federal level, while views on local cooperation with immigration enforcement are more divided.
Elections and representation
Perceived influence over local decision-making is a core indicator of civic efficacy and institutional responsiveness. In Detroit, 47 percent of respondents say people like them have a great deal or a fair amount of say in what their local government does.
Election timing can affect who participates in local elections, and consequently whose preferences are reflected in the electorate. Research finds that local elections like those in Detroit, which are held separately from federal elections, generally attract lower turnout and produce less representative electorates.8 Forty-seven percent favor moving Detroit’s local elections from odd-numbered to even-numbered years, which would place them on the same general-election calendar as federal elections.
Seventy-three percent agree that what happens in Washington shapes how they think about local issues in Detroit. This perception is consistent with research documenting the increasing influence of national politics on local and subnational political behavior.9
Methodology
This report presents results from the 2025 wave of the American Local Elections Study, a project of the Local Politics Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School directed by Justin de Benedictis-Kessner. Data were collected by PureSpectrum, an online opt-in panel provider, with quota sampling within each surveyed jurisdiction. Interviews were conducted online between November 6 and December 15, 2025, following the November 4, 2025 local elections. The target population for this report is adults living in Detroit; 235 respondents completed the survey. Data are weighted to population estimates for the jurisdiction from the 2023 5-year American Community Survey based on age, race and ethnicity, educational attainment, and sex. The margin of error for the Detroit sample is +/- 7.1 percentage points at 95 percent confidence.
Footnotes
Boston, Joshua, Anna Gunderson, David Miller, and Kirsten Widner. 2026. “The Prosecutor Paradox: Understanding the Public’s Low Knowledge About Chief Local Prosecutors.” Journal of Law and Courts, FirstView, 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1017/jlc.2026.10017↩︎
Sances, Michael W. 2017. “Attribution Errors in Federalist Systems.” The Journal of Politics 79 (4): 1286-1301. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26551087↩︎
Mitchell, Ojmarrh, and Nick Petersen. 2025. “The Rise of Progressive Prosecutors in the United States: Politics, Prospects, and Perils.” Annual Review of Criminology 8. https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-criminol-111523-122427↩︎
Bipartisan Policy Center. “What Are Zoning and Land-Use Regulations and How Do They Affect Housing Supply?” https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/what-are-zoning-and-land-use-regulations-and-how-do-they-affect-housing-supply/↩︎
On the New York rent freeze see https://www.nbcnewyork.com/new-york-city/nyc-rent-freeze-stabilized-apartments/6518338/; on the Boston petition see https://www.wbur.org/news/2023/03/08/boston-city-council-approves-rent-control-proposal and https://www.wbur.org/news/2025/07/29/mass-rent-control-housing-advocacy; on California Proposition 33 see https://calmatters.org/politics/2024/11/california-election-results-prop-33-rent-control/.↩︎
Grabar, Henry. 2024. “How Parking Reform Is Helping Transform American Cities.” Yale Environment 360, January 31. https://e360.yale.edu/features/free-parking-reform↩︎
These results should be interpreted with caution because views on sanctuary city policies are sensitive to question wording; see https://www.politifact.com/article/2017/feb/24/anatomy-statistic-do-80-percent-americans-oppose-s/.↩︎
Hajnal, Zoltan L., Vladimir Kogan, and G. Agustin Markarian. 2022. “Who Votes: City Election Timing and Voter Composition.” American Political Science Review 116 (1): 374-383.↩︎
de Benedictis-Kessner, Justin, Daniel Naftel, John Sides, and Christopher Warshaw. “Nationalization in Local Elections.” HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series RWP26-006, July 2026. https://jdbk.scholars.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum4201/files/2026-07/Nationalization_Paper_260716.pdf↩︎