Michigan has always been a strong battleground state and a bastion of Midwestern culture, but it’s no surprise that voters here will be a key factor in determining the future of democracy across the country this fall. May But what is surprising is where the center of power in Mitten comes from today, and kinds As a result, Michiganders are garnering national attention and power.
For the first time in my life, the real center of political influence in my home state isn’t Detroit, Ann Arbor, Flint, or the quiet woods and lakeside cottages of northern Michigan. Instead, that influence comes from the state capital, Lansing. Lansing is the central city of an oft-overlooked, underfunded, landlocked state, home to the state capitol, Michigan State University, and the Lugnuts baseball team. (It’s also full of pre-Civil War buildings and potholed roads, abandoned factories, an electric-car plant, a scientific research facility, and rows of solar panels.) It also comes from the suburbs, farms, and professors’ homes scattered throughout the uneven district. That’s my hometown, the Greater Lansing area, within the boundaries of Ingham County.
This is interesting!
Michigan has been in the spotlight in some ways since President Barack Obama took office. First, there was a paradigm-shifting moment, when the state cast its electoral votes for Republican Donald Trump for the first time in nearly 30 years. But then came the 2018 midterm elections, which brought a new Democratic gubernatorial administration as well as a flurry of progressive votes on voting rights, cannabis legalization, and independent redistricting. By 2020, Michigan, a target and battleground for Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the election results, rejected the president and elected a Democratic-majority state Supreme Court. Then, in the 2022 midterm elections, Democrats won full control of the state legislature for the first time since 1984, and have used that power heavily ever since.
There’s a lot about Lansing in this larger metanarrative. In the 2018 election, eight of Michigan’s many formerly red congressional seats rode the blue wave.Number In the congressional district that includes metro Lansing, Democrat Elissa Slotkin, a CIA veteran, recaptured the seat then held by Republican incumbent Rep. Mike Bishop. That same year, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Michigan State University graduate and former state legislator who represents the area, recaptured the governor’s mansion from Republican hands, while Slotkin kept her seat. Even after redistricting changed the boundaries of her district after 2020 (currently 70%),Number The district tilted in favor of the Republican Party.
With Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Greater Lansing retiring, Slotkin is seeking to succeed her in the Senate and will likely face off against Trump-endorsed Republican Mike Rogers, who represented Slotkin’s old seat for 14 years until Bishop took over in the 2014 Republican wave. The race is already fierce and expensive, but it will continue to be so as long as Democrats desperately want to hold onto the Senate. Slotkin appears to have a slight advantage in polls and fundraising, and is currently outperforming Biden in the polls.
Slotkin’s departure from the House of Representatives marks her seventhNumber The district is on the brink of what is likely to be one of the biggest races. largely Competitive largely There’s plenty of money in the books across the country. This is a 50-50 fight that will have a major impact on whether Democrats can take back the House this fall.
The race pits Republican Tom Barrett, an Iraq War veteran and election denier, against a Democrat who lost to Slotkin in a costly election and is trying again in 2022. The Democrat running in the race is Curtis Hertel Jr., a former Gov. Whitmer official and son of a former Michigan House speaker.
Residents of Greater Lansing: So much of national politics depends on you!
In the postwar period, Michigan’s center of power was undoubtedly Detroit. With its manufacturing power, musical and sports footprint, and civil rights heritage, the city often produced some of the state’s most powerful elected officials, including Avery Brundage, John Conyers, John Dingell, and Carl Levin. Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan, was a hotbed of student activism, thanks to the extraordinary profile of Tom Hayden and his Students for a Democratic Society movement (and a thriving punk rock scene). In the previous generation, the university groomed Grand Rapids native Gerald Ford for a future in politics, even serving a fortuitous, brief stint in the White House (to this day, he remains the only U.S. president from Michigan). Greater Lansing may have had the actual center of state power, its own world-class university, and a once-thriving industrial base, but it never managed to compete with the influence of its more culturally famous cities.
But things changed. Detroit’s longtime rulers grew older and retired without successors to carry the cause. Manufacturing jobs left the Midwest, and the state’s identity was lost. In the late Reagan administration, the Republican Party seemed a permanent presence in the state legislature, with officeholders more interested in austerity and gerrymandering than public service. It was hardly the Republican Party of former governor and civil rights leader George Romney. Entering the new century, Detroit faced bankruptcy, local corruption scandals, an uncertain future, and a precarious path to recovery. The Michigan Legislature experienced a disastrous Republican trifecta in the 2010s, eviscerating labor unions, gutting the water supplies of Flint and Detroit, and imposing new abortion restrictions.
As Michigan House Minority Leader in 2013, Whitmer gained attention for speaking out in support of abortion rights at the state Capitol and for delivering a moving speech at the 2017 Women’s March in Lansing. This attention helped Whitmer become a prime candidate to succeed ousted Republican Rick Snyder in the Governor’s Mansion in 2018. She quickly became a national Democratic candidate. When President Donald Trump scorned her as “that girl from Michigan” and his most ardent supporters violently threatened her, anti-Trump liberals rallied to her defense. She also courted Joe Biden at a critical moment in the 2020 Democratic primary.
Slotkin, too, became a hero of the #Resistance as the key battleground lawmaker who was the first to call for President Trump’s impeachment, but she also maintained a bipartisan voting record and a reputation as a moderate in Congress that served her well after her district became more conservative. Whitmer, meanwhile, has pushed the state in a more liberal direction, making the most of a Democratic trifecta in 2022 and beyond by passing a string of progressive bills on everything from gun control to clean energy to abortion. She still has several years left in her term and is seen as the future of the national Democratic Party.
That is, just The most important politicians in Michigan are from the area where I grew up, and they are now some of the most important politicians in Michigan. NationwideThere’s nothing mid-Michigan. Right?
