When Gretchen Whitmer first emerged as the likely Democratic candidate for governor of Michigan, in late 2017, the mayor of Detroit, Mike Duggan, circulated a memo urging labor unions and Democrats to find a better-known figure to lead the ticket. Duggan wanted Senator Gary Peters to run; the United Auto Workers preferred Representative Dan Kildee. But neither member of Congress wanted anything to do with Lansing. Mark Bernstein, a politically connected Ann Arbor personal-injury lawyer, recalled that, while watching a University of Michigan basketball game at Duggan’s house, the Mayor tried to persuade him to get in the race. By the end of the primary, Whitmer had outlasted the established alternatives, and went to Detroit to meet with the leaders of the U.A.W. (“Big talkers,” a Whitmer insider called them.) The word was that the union and its allies were prepared to spend two million dollars on the election. “Let’s ask them for $3.5 million,” Whitmer told her campaign staff. “They’re the last ones on board—what can they say?” At the meeting, according to an aide, the U.A.W. pledged to give her the whole bundle.
Lansing, like many state capitals, offers a politician real power without much prospect of fame. In small office buildings and well-worn restaurants, lobbyists and legislators shape and reshape the fate of the auto industry and, with it, much of the Midwest. Whitmer, who is fifty-one, has worked in the capital for nearly her entire adult life. She knows just about everyone in town and is married to a local dentist. (“Everyone loves him,” a Republican lobbyist told me. “He’s very funny.”) Mark Burton, who was Whitmer’s principal aide for more than a decade, said, “The Governor gives off a vibe. She’s super relatable, and super likable, but also a little intimidating.”
Burton recalled an episode from December, 2011, when Whitmer was the minority leader in the state senate, and getting just about anything done depended on her relationship with the Republican majority leader, Randy Richardville. Whitmer had spent years working on an anti-bullying law with the family of a fourteen-year-old boy in her district who had killed himself after an eighth-grade-graduation hazing ritual. The measure was set to pass, but, at the last moment, the Republicans, under pressure from the Catholic Church, added a clause exempting bullies who claimed a religious justification. (The Michigan Catholic Conference denies that it initially supported the clause.) Whitmer, as Burton told it, “said, essentially, this is bullshit.” The following week, Whitmer appeared on the floor of the Senate, accompanied by a cartoon of Richardville holding a driver’s license. Above the majority leader’s face, it read “License to Bully.” Stephen Colbert eventually picked up the story. The Republicans backed down.
Stunts like this might not have made it past Grand Rapids, except that Michigan appeared to be swinging radically to the right. In 2016, Donald Trump won the state, promising to bring back auto-industry jobs and denouncing free trade and faraway élites. His victory seemed to place Michigan at the center of a global turn toward populism and racist resentment. Whitmer had a different interpretation. “2016 was just a low voter turnout,” she told me. “People were just, like, ‘Government doesn’t work.’ They were cynical and mad and wanting to tune out.” It wasn’t that the industrial Midwest had fallen in love with Trump, in her view. It was that people didn’t care enough to vote against him. Still, when a policy expert who briefed Whitmer at her home during the 2018 gubernatorial campaign asked why she was running, she replied, “Because I’m the only one who can do it.” That fall, she won handily.
During the pandemic, Trump attacked her for imposing long school and business closures. She endured an armed mob at the state capitol and a plot by a group linked to a right-wing militia to kidnap and kill her. Last November, Whitmer tied her candidacy to a state constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to abortion and won reëlection by ten points, sweeping the suburbs so convincingly that the Democrats gained control of both houses of the Michigan legislature for the first time in forty years.
Since then, Whitmer’s Democratic majority has allocated more than a billion dollars to support the auto industry’s green transition; quintupled a tax credit for poor families; repealed a law that made Michigan a right-to-work state; and enacted new protections for L.G.B.T.Q. people. After a forty-three-year-old local man went on a shooting spree at Michigan State University, in February, killing three students, some modest, if hard-won, gun-control measures were put in place. “I don’t know that we’ve ever watched the legislature go as quickly as they have,” Maggie Pallone, a public-policy analyst in Lansing, said earlier this year, in an article in the Detroit News. Similar breakthroughs have come in Minnesota and Pennsylvania. What’s happening in the Midwest, one of Whitmer’s advisers told me, is a “Tea Party in reverse.”
Whitmer’s first ambition was to be an ESPN anchor, and she still has a sportscaster’s instinct to inhabit a highly formal setting and then destabilize it with informality. She speaks briskly, avoids jargon, and runs ahead of schedule. David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s senior adviser, who owns a house in Michigan, told me, “She’s plainly smart, she’s very agile. But there is a sense in which ‘I might know a person like this.’ ” One afternoon in May, I watched Whitmer record a series of TikTok videos in her “ceremonial office,” used for bill signings and photo shoots, which was decorated with portraits of past Michigan governors, many of them sporting muttonchops. Whitmer has wavy chestnut hair and a prominent chin that she dropped like a gavel at the start of each take. When she recorded a video wishing happy anniversary to the Ford Motor Company, a man in the room mentioned that his first car was a Ford Focus, which had been impounded for unpaid parking tickets. “I know so many young men who had their car impounded for parking tickets,” Whitmer said. “Sorry if that sounds sexist. I don’t know as many women.”
At the height of the pandemic, the Detroit rapper Gmac Cash recorded an anthem titled “Big Gretch”: “Throw the Buffs on her face ’cause that’s Big Gretch / We ain’t even ’bout to stress ’cause we got Big Gretch.” Whitmer has expressed ambivalence about the nickname (“Certainly, no woman I know likes to be called big”), but it has come to capture what her supporters admire most about her: she is a Democrat who fights and wins in one of the most competitive parts of the country. “People think she’s an intellectual, but she’s not,” Tommy Stallworth III, a veteran Detroit pol who is now a Whitmer senior adviser, said. “She is a wartime consigliere.”
More broadly, Whitmer’s wins suggest a different story of the Midwestern heartland, one dominated not by a political backlash in declining industrial cities but by a moderate liberalism in prosperous suburbs, where the Democrats have, for now, found the majorities and the money to stave off Trumpism. “Even I had my doubts over the last few years,” Whitmer told me. “What is it going to be by the time I’m up for reëlection?” When I asked her what it has taken to be a successful politician during this period, she said, “It’s an interesting combination of cold blood and genuine passion.”
For most of the second half of the twentieth century, Michigan’s politics were governed by a certain equilibrium. Long-tenured pro-union Democratic congressmen dominated in Washington. In Lansing, pro-business Republicans were the norm, personified by Mitt Romney’s father, George, who turned a successful career as an auto executive into a stint as Michigan’s governor, in the sixties. Whitmer came from a bipartisan political family. Her mother, Sherry, was a lawyer who would eventually work under the state’s Democratic attorney general (and future governor) Jennifer Granholm, and her father, Dick, had served in the cabinet of Romney’s Republican successor, William Milliken. In Whitmer’s baby book, there is a press release: “Commerce Director and his wife have a baby, Gretchen Whitmer.”
Whitmer’s parents divorced when she was six years old, and she and her two younger siblings were raised mostly in the suburbs of Grand Rapids by their mother. Dick, based a couple of hours away, in Detroit, became the C.E.O. of Michigan Blue Cross Blue Shield. The family stayed relatively close. “My mom’s mom used to call my dad the world’s finest ex-husband,” Whitmer’s sister, Liz Whitmer Gereghty, told me. A lifelong friend of Whitmer’s compared their upbringing to the teen-age raunch-com “American Pie,” which was set nearby. “Everyone going out to Lake Michigan after the prom—it all felt very familiar,” the friend said, then quickly added, “Far better behaved than that.” (Whitmer offered a similar characterization: “My parents would tell you I was having way too much fun and should have had a lot more focus.”)
Politics was not her main interest. “I played sports,” she said. “But, more than that, I was kind of a rabid fan.” She was working in the football office at M.S.U. when her father, then a prominent power broker, encouraged her to get an internship in the office of the Democratic leader in the Michigan House, whose chief of staff, Daniel J. Loepp, later became C.E.O. of Michigan Blue Cross Blue Shield. “She was like a sponge,” Loepp told me recently. “I always knew she would eventually run for office.” When a House seat opened up in East Lansing ahead of the 2000 election, Loepp urged Whitmer to run and helped her get the endorsement of a popular former state attorney general. She won by two hundred and eighty-one votes; it was her last truly close race. She was twenty-nine years old. “It’s not that Gretchen Whitmer came out of the womb and said she was going to be governor of Michigan,” Whitmer told me. “Every jump in my career, I’ve had that moment where I looked around and thought, Well, look who’s out there. I could probably do a better job.”
Even as a young legislator, Whitmer was no ideologue. East Lansing was affluent by Michigan’s standards—with pretty neighborhoods surrounding the Michigan State campus—and, early on, she was unapologetic about defending the interests of her constituents. “In those years, a lot of Democrats were pushing to equalize education funding around the state,” an aide of Whitmer’s at the time told me. “But East Lansing was always very well funded, and she would generally try to keep it that way.” More often, Whitmer was a force for pragmatism: a former state legislative colleague recalled that, when many Democrats were trying to ban smoking in the state, Whitmer helped work out an exception for casinos, to keep the powerful gambling lobby on the sidelines.
On women’s issues, though, she was uncompromising. In the two-thousands, she was the Democratic co-chair of a ballot initiative to protect stem-cell research in Michigan. “We needed someone who could talk about fetal tissue in a way that was honest and direct and not euphemistic,” Burton said. “She was absolutely unflinching.” One longtime progressive lobbyist in Lansing told me that she’d opposed Whitmer during her first primary: “I’d run into some first-time women candidates who think they’re good on choice, and then you ask them the first question about partial birth and they collapse.” A couple of years later, Whitmer, then pregnant with her first daughter, gave what the lobbyist called a “barnstorming speech on reproductive rights—no equivocating, no fucking around.”
Whitmer’s profile started to grow just as the Democrats’ position in Michigan was eroding. Granholm spent her two terms as governor largely stymied by a Republican legislature; Democrats still refer to this as “the lost decade.” The mayor of Detroit, a rising Democratic star named Kwame Kilpatrick, resigned in 2008 after pleading guilty to obstruction-of-justice charges, and a few years later the city filed for bankruptcy. By the Tea Party election of 2010, the dominant political force in the state was the billionaire DeVos family, of Grand Rapids, whose matriarch, Betsy DeVos, went on to serve as the U.S. Secretary of Education under President Trump. The gubernatorial election that year was a rout, won by an outsider Republican businessman named Rick Snyder, who campaigned with the budget-conscious slogan “One Tough Nerd.” Quickly, Republican power consolidated: the Party was in charge of redistricting, and redrew election maps to cement its advantages in the state legislature and in Congress. It also moved to loosen campaign-finance laws. Robert McCann, who worked in Whitmer’s state-senate office, recalled going through the Republican campaign-finance reports just after a G.O.P.-backed law raised the cap on individual donations, “and it was just a long row of twenty-thousand-dollar donations, all from people with the last name DeVos. And it was just, like, We don’t have anything like that.”
Snyder himself was not especially radical. He eventually spearheaded the state’s passage of Medicaid expansion. When Republicans in the legislature proposed a right-to-work bill, which would allow workers in union shops to opt out of paying dues, Snyder initially opposed it. “Rick just felt there were higher priorities that weren’t as divisive,” Dennis Muchmore, who was Snyder’s chief of staff, told me. “We thought it was an image thing.” But, by 2012, the Republicans had a veto-proof majority in the state senate; when they passed the right-to-work bill, Snyder signed it.
A year earlier, Whitmer had become the Democratic leader in the state senate, where the Party held just twelve of thirty-eight seats. Without any ability to affect legislation, Burton told me, the caucus could do little else than get Whitmer on television and have her attack. “Our entire strategy was to make her a star,” he said. The breakthrough for Whitmer came in December, 2013, when Republicans were threatening to enact legislation that excluded abortion from bundled health plans, so that women would have to buy a separate policy covering the procedure. Whitmer called it “rape insurance.”
As the bill was set to pass, she gave what is still the defining speech of her political career. It started with characteristic brutality: “Apparently, the holiday season of good will toward men reads more like your will toward women, as the Republican male majority continues to ignorantly and unnecessarily weigh in on important women’s health issues that they know nothing about.” But after a few minutes she made a turn. “I’m about to tell you something that I’ve not shared with many people in my life,” she said. “Over twenty years ago, I was a victim of rape. And thank God it didn’t result in a pregnancy, because I can’t imagine going through what I went through and then having to consider what to do about an unwanted pregnancy. From an attacker.”
Whitmer had guarded this story so closely that her staff didn’t know it; neither did her father, whom she phoned right after she stepped off the Senate floor. “I was really in turmoil,” Whitmer said of her decision to go public. Video of the speech went viral. Before long, Whitmer was appearing regularly on MSNBC, and became a national voice on reproductive rights. But, in Lansing, her speech didn’t change a single Republican vote.
In the summer of 2017, the Michigan Republican Party conducted a pair of focus groups—one with Republicans from the wealthy suburbs of Oakland County who had not voted for Trump, and the other with voters from working-class Macomb County who had backed Trump after voting twice for Obama. The groups represented the push and pull of partisan politics; a senior Party official at the time told me they were “probably the most interesting focus groups I’ve ever been a part of.”
The results, the Republican official went on, suggested “two really crazy things.” First, many of the Oakland County Republicans were seriously considering voting for a Democrat for governor in 2018. Trump “had completely alienated these voters, because of who he was as a person,” the official told me. “The flip side was that the Macomb County people were not high-propensity voters. They typically voted only in Presidential elections. And they did not consider themselves Republicans.” The Party had effectively traded away some of its most reliable voters for, as the official put it, “people who had lived rough lives.” When the Macomb County group was asked whether they knew anyone who had died from an opioid addiction, half the participants raised their hands. “It was right then that I knew we were going to lose the next election,” the Party official said. “Because we weren’t going to get back our old people. And our new people weren’t drawn to us—they were drawn to a single man, and he wasn’t on the ballot.”
The Republicans struggled to find a way to attack Whitmer, who had outmaneuvered a pair of Bernie Sanders-style progressives in the Democratic primary. The Snyder administration was ending disastrously, with the ongoing horror of the Flint water crisis, and Whitmer seemed relentlessly focussed on those suburban moderates who were sliding away from the G.O.P. (Her campaign slogan was “Fix the Damn Roads.”) Eventually, the Republicans put out an ad repeating an attack that one of Whitmer’s progressive opponents had made: that she was too cozy with Blue Cross Blue Shield, the state’s largest insurer, whose C.E.O. was her old statehouse mentor Daniel J. Loepp and whose employees had donated more than a hundred and twenty thousand dollars to her campaign. Shortly after it ran, according to two state G.O.P. officials, Loepp called the Michigan Republican Party leadership to complain. At the time, Blue Cross Blue Shield sponsored a major policy conference on Mackinac Island, which attracted luminaries from both parties. Loepp denied making the call, but the ad never ran again.
Whitmer eventually won Oakland County by seventeen points, and, with it, the governorship. Her campaign had coincided with news of the Larry Nassar case, in which dozens of gymnasts came forward to say that the East Lansing doctor had abused them. Whitmer often told her aides at the time, “Women are angry.” But the Republicans kept control of the legislature. In the first year of her term, they defeated an expansive education plan and a gas tax that Whitmer had wanted to fund her roads program. “We were struggling,” a Whitmer aide said.
But the pandemic, which hit Detroit early and hard, reset Michigan’s politics. Garlin Gilchrist, the lieutenant governor and a Motor City native, kept a tally of the people he personally knew who had died of COVID-19, which eventually came to twenty-seven. I asked him how the Whitmer administration had balanced suppressing the disease and keeping the economy and the schools afloat. He said that was a false choice: “People who are dead can’t participate in economic activity.”
Whitmer had made a similar calculation. The medical historians, she told me, had emphasized that in the last pandemic, the 1918-20 flu, children had died at disproportionately high rates. “I gotta tell you,” she said, “all I could think about was: what if all the second to eighth graders were all of a sudden dying? Could I live with myself not having pulled the kids out of schools to keep them alive?” Whitmer issued nearly two hundred COVID-related emergency orders in 2020, and instituted one of the longest and most comprehensive lockdowns in the Midwest. Once the crisis receded, she admitted in a radio interview that, in many cases, her rules did not “make a lot of sense.” But she defended the approach: “I think that deaths were the right north star.”
Politically, Whitmer had developed an instinct for the tête-à-tête, which tended to both raise her profile and come at a cost. During a March, 2020, appearance on MSNBC, she’d pointedly criticized the Trump Administration’s response to the pandemic, and soon the President was sneering at “that woman from Michigan.” (He also instructed Mike Pence, then the chair of the White House coronavirus task force, not to take her calls.) As resistance to her executive orders grew, especially in rural Michigan, gym owners and barbers who defied the law and stayed open became folk heroes; by April, 2020, it was common for lawmakers to find armed men surrounding the state capitol. “Every day, when I came to do my job,” Gilchrist told me, “I had people standing along the sidewalks leading to the state capitol with guns raised, like I was going through a starting lineup at a basketball game.”
On April 30, 2020—eight months before the January 6th riot—armed protesters moved into the capitol in Lansing and gathered outside the doors of the House chamber, confronting the police who guarded the doors. Legislators could hear military boots in the hallways, and people chanting, “Let us in!” One representative recalled taking cover behind a colleague, who was a former cop and carried a gun. No one was injured, but, that October, the F.B.I. arrested thirteen militiamen affiliated with a group called the Wolverine Watchmen, who had conducted arms training and surveilled the Governor’s vacation home, in northern Michigan, with plans to kidnap her and abandon her in a boat in the middle of Lake Michigan. Nine days after the arrests, Trump held a rally in Muskegon, where he denounced Whitmer and his crowd chanted, “Lock her up!”
In person, Whitmer is highly rehearsed but she also jokes often, sometimes to lighten the darker moments of her political career. During a recent lunch in her offices, on the third floor of the capitol, she maintained steady eye contact over a kale salad that she hardly touched. At her public events these days, the audience has to be vetted beforehand. Her husband recently retired from his dental practice because of threats against the Governor and her family. “I’m not as carefree as I used to be, in terms of walking into a big room of people,” Whitmer told me. “I’m changed by it.”
Reporters eventually discovered that at least one of the lead conspirators in the kidnapping plot had appeared that summer at a political event with the Republican majority leader of the state senate, Mike Shirkey, who, in a speech at Hillsdale College, the conservative Christian liberal-arts school, had said that Whitmer was on “the batshit-crazy spectrum.” (Shirkey later suggested a willingness to fight the Governor on the capitol lawn and called the January 6th insurrection a “hoax.”) Whitmer told me that on Shirkey’s next birthday she sent him a cake decorated with a flying bat, to make light of the situation and to try to repair a relationship she needed. “Sometimes I want to be the mean cop,” she said, “but I gotta be the good cop.”
Conservative politics in Michigan is thick with temporary exiles and early retirees. Caught out by the turn toward MAGA-ism, they spend most of the year in Florida, work with corporate clients on political messaging, and pass around news articles about loopy things people do in Macomb County. (“Man charged with assault after hitting Warren store clerk with frozen fish,” ran the headline on one I was forwarded.) In 2020, Snyder, who remains a Republican, said publicly that he would vote for Joe Biden. Few have faith that the Party as they knew it will return. One former state Party official told me that he held out hope that Peter Meijer, a moderate, wealthy former G.O.P. congressman from Grand Rapids, would run for the U.S. Senate next year, but, if he didn’t, “it could be ten years or more until we’re competitive in Michigan again. It just might need the passage of time.”
One afternoon this spring, I drove to a biker bar in Cement City, in rural Hillsdale County, to meet with Susy Avery, a renowned fund-raiser who is close to the DeVoses and had been the state Republican Party chair under Snyder. (“We’ll have some adult beverages,” Avery had told me cheerily, over the phone.) When I arrived, she was in a corner booth, upbeat and effusive, nursing a Crown Royal and ginger ale. “This is not my first rodeo—I’ve lived through a lot,” Avery said. “This time in Michigan politics is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It’s very challenging.”
The challenge had to do with cash. As the rich suburbs had turned toward Whitmer, Avery went on, they had taken with them much of the state G.O.P.’s donor base, leaving the Party ever more dependent on a few billionaires and the business community, which Democrats were busy wooing with a sanity-and-stability pitch. Younger Republican candidates, Avery said, “are very good at social media, but you just cannot raise money on social media.” In the 2022 cycle, this had led to an unusual situation in which the G.O.P. chairmanship in Michigan was shared by a wealthy real-estate developer from Ann Arbor named Ron Weiser, who had been George W. Bush’s Ambassador to Slovakia, and a MAGA activist named Meshawn Maddock.
That was an obviously unstable pairing. The Republicans failed to gather enough signatures to get their top two choices on the gubernatorial ballot, and wound up nominating a conservative media personality named Tudor Dixon. After the Dobbs decision, Dixon was asked about a hypothetical case in which a fourteen-year-old victim of incest would not be able to get an abortion. She called this the “perfect example” of why it had been correct to overturn Roe; the statement soon became the centerpiece of an avalanche of pro-Whitmer ads. Some fact checkers in Michigan concluded that the Democrats had taken Dixon’s quote out of context, but Whitmer saw an opportunity.
“I remember thinking, I can’t believe this,” Whitmer said. “For the first month after she won the primary, that’s all we communicated on.” Whitmer had been preparing for a post-Roe campaign since the night that Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, in September, 2020. Her administration had already sued to force the state Supreme Court to clarify whether a 1931 Michigan law banning abortion would go into effect if Roe were overturned. The court ruled that it would not, but the decision was open to appeal. In response, the Governor’s liberal allies launched a campaign to include on the November ballot a question about establishing a state constitutional right to abortion. Whitmer held roundtables across the state. “It was one of those things where we always said that the overwhelming majority of people support reproductive rights, but who’s really polled it, right?” she said. Now, she went on, women were seated next to her, saying, “ ‘I’ve never voted for a Democrat, but I’m out knocking on doors for you.’ ” In the fall, the amendment passed by thirteen points, three more than Whitmer’s own double-digit victory. Whitmer said, “I do think we built a different kind of coalition than Democrats have relied on before.”
After the Republicans lost badly in the midterms, the two chairs resigned and were replaced by a right-wing grassroots activist, Kristina Karamo, who just months earlier had been rejected for a paid position as a canvasser over concerns about her podcast appearances, in which she argued that Beyoncé and yoga were satanic. (“And you should see her divorce filings,” Whitmer said to me over a conference table in the capitol, raising her eyebrows; in 2014, during a car ride with her ex-husband, Karamo, in the passenger seat, allegedly reached for the wheel and yelled, “Fuck it, I’ll kill us all!” Karamo has denied that this happened.) As the new head of the state Party, Karamo announced plans to shutter the longtime G.O.P. headquarters in Lansing and operate instead with only a post-office box in Grand Rapids. Avery and two other former chairs, as trustees, had to help close down the old headquarters, taking a long look around an emptied-out building that they no longer had anything to do with.
Some of the new talent on the Democratic side might, not long ago, have simply been Republicans. Angela Witwer, a sixty-year-old former marketing-firm owner, who now chairs the House Appropriations Committee, told me that when she first ran for office, in 2018, she interviewed with representatives of both parties. She picked the Democrats, she said, because they seemed more organized. “Also,” she added, “they aren’t crazy.” Her district, in exurban Eaton County, is usually a tossup. “There is labor, but even labor is split, because they think we’re all taking their guns away,” she said. The suburban part of her district, she went on, “is educated, heavily female. And then I have a ton of farms and little tiny villages that are hanging out Confederate flags everywhere. ‘Fuck Biden’ flags are everywhere.”
In Lansing this spring, political power inverted. In the capitol’s rotunda, bow-tied lobbyists still leaned on bannisters beseechingly, but it was Republicans who complained about backroom deals and the Democrats who kept delivering legislation. Conservative trackers—young operatives hoping to capture rival candidates in a gaffe—were already trailing Democratic legislators whose elections might be close. “My first guy looked like a murderer,” Witwer said. It was a reminder that the current Democratic dominance might not last. The Party’s majority hinges on keeping working-class seats in Macomb and Wayne Counties, which could easily flip in 2024, if Trump is on the ballot. This occasionally created tensions between Party stalwarts and newly elected progressive Democrats, who arrived in the statehouse with big plans, only to discover that they had to compromise to protect the Party’s tentative hold on power. Witwer said, “They don’t know what it’s like to lose.”
So far, though, the spectre of a Republican comeback has largely kept everyone in line. “It’s such a huge part of what’s happening right now,” Christy McGillivray, a lobbyist in Lansing for the Sierra Club, told me. “Even when we talk about what’s happening legislatively, no one wants to say bad things about the people who are holding off the fascist Christian takeover.”
Avery had been serving as an elected Republican precinct delegate in Hillsdale County when the MAGA revolution came for her. A local pro-Trump faction moved against all the Party representatives who had opposed the former President’s calls to overturn the results of the 2020 election. “They don’t even really make a case,” Avery said. “It’s just RINO, RINO, RINO.” Avery and other Republicans were declared ineligible for their posts, and replaced with an alternate slate of MAGA delegates to the state Party. To Avery, the implications were clear: the Party had decided to set itself on fire. But another lesson you could draw from her story was that the MAGA faction, like most effective insurgencies in American politics, was well organized at the local level and, therefore, not likely to simply go away. “I’ve been disavowed, censured,” Avery told me at the biker bar, a little gleefully, thrusting her wrists out across the table. “Next step, stockades!”
Whitmer’s official residence in the capital is a short drive from General Motors’ Lansing Grand River assembly plant. Operations at the facility have been shrinking: the third shift was eliminated in 2017, and the Detroit Free-Press speculated in 2018 that the whole plant might shut down. During the pandemic, Whitmer started to notice something new: rows and rows of cars produced in the plants—Cadillac CT5s and Chevy Camaros—were piling up outside. The vehicles, it turned out, were mostly complete but missing some components that were stuck overseas. Whitmer’s vision, she told me, was of “a Michigan that is robust, that is innovative, that has population growth, that is solving the world’s problems.” That was not the situation unfolding in front of her.
The Harvard economist Ed Glaeser has observed that the modern economy has “been kind to idea-producing places, like New York and Boston, and devastating to goods-producing cities, like Cleveland and Detroit.” Michigan is forty-ninth among the states in population growth during the past three decades. Whitmer’s strategy for reversing the trend, which was the subject of her most recent annual policy speech on Mackinac Island (“an island without cars where people go to talk about the future,” as one of her aides put it to me), has two parts: to grow, Michigan needs young people; to draw young people, it needs to have the social policies they want. Whitmer, whose elder daughter came out publicly as gay in the Washington Post last year, described this relationship to me in the context of how she pitched an expansion of L.G.B.T.Q. rights: “For a businessperson who may not have a family member who’s part of the community, who maybe these protections are not personal for, it’s pragmatic to say, ‘This younger generation expects us to have these protections.’ ”
The goal seems to be to make Michigan an ideas-producing place again—one of Whitmer’s initiatives is to use tuition grants to get sixty per cent of the state’s adults post-secondary degrees by 2030—which, not incidentally, would also make it less like the states that supported Donald Trump. But Democrats are also trying to spark a second, goods-producing transformation in the Midwest, using the spending authorized in President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act to seed a new era of green manufacturing. In Michigan, the auto industry’s conversion to electric vehicles is so ubiquitous as a political topic that it is commonly called, simply, the Transition. Whitmer’s administration has helped underwrite a $3.5-billion Ford battery plant in Marshall and a two-billion-dollar battery plant in Big Rapids, both in conservative counties that Whitmer lost; together, the projects are expected to create nearly five thousand jobs. “We either win this decade or we are going to be catching up for a generation,” Whitmer told me. “We have to be on the cutting edge.”
No plan is as central to the ambitions of the Biden Democrats, in terms of both policy and politics, as the creation of a clean-energy economy. “Governor Whitmer uniquely understands that we can build an industrial commons here,” Brian Deese, who was the director of Biden’s National Economic Council, told me. “If we don’t invest in the manufacturing processes to produce these technologies, then we wind up hollowing out that capability and having supply chains that are unacceptably reliant on China.” But the Transition is also an effort to rebuild the “blue wall,” the Democrats’ stronghold on Midwestern states, which frustrated Republicans’ Presidential hopes for two decades. Damon Silvers, the former policy director and special counsel of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said, “It is hard to overstate what is happening in Michigan, because, if electric-vehicle manufacturing is done union and is able to sustain middle-class families again, those families will vote for Biden, and then the U.S. stays in the Paris Agreement. And, if they don’t, then you get some version of Trump again and it all falls apart.”
Of course, such a program is susceptible to the same populist backlash that elevated Trump in the first place. Progressives have questioned the scale of the corporate handouts and also the quality of the jobs they’re creating—the U.A.W. recently withheld its endorsement of President Biden because of concerns that wages in the new battery plants, typically between fifteen and twenty dollars an hour, would be too low. On the right, the line has been that the Democrats are trying to impose a future that many Americans don’t want. “Who is the ‘they’ demanding E.V.s?” Andrew Beeler, the Republicans’ assistant floor leader in the Michigan House, told me. “Because, if it’s the free market, why do they need a subsidy from the federal government?” He called Whitmer “a poll-tested politician who knows where her bread is buttered, and that’s unions and green energy, and she will not stray from that.”
Whitmer, for her part, embraces the fact that her administration has close working relationships with corporations. A little slyly, she brought up Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor and Republican Presidential candidate, who has become embroiled in a yearlong standoff with Disney over his self-branded anti-woke policies. “I can’t imagine General Motors taking a stance on just about anything where I would go to war with General Motors,” Whitmer said. “It’s just wild to me to see that Democrats are now viewed as a little more pragmatic and business-friendly than maybe some Republicans. But I think that’s good. I think that’s important. And I would consider myself in that vein.”
The Democratic Party has had to adapt in Trump’s wake. In subtle ways, its most prominent figures seem steelier than their counterparts a decade ago, with a clearer sense of the political center and a sharper eye for an advantageous political fight. They are also less adept at evoking a transformative sense of the future, and more politically dependent on conservatives alienating swing voters, a pattern that isn’t sure to last. “The way I’ve always looked at it, man, is—it’s all about power,” Mark Burton told me. “How do you get more of it, how do you save it, how do you use it in the best way possible?” Whitmer, Burton went on, had developed a deep appreciation of this: “She understands power.”
When I last spoke to Whitmer, just after the Fourth of July, she was, in a sense, at the height of her political influence: reporters had been coming to Michigan all spring to ask whether she’d run for President. (“I am not sitting in any room thinking about running for President,” she told me, “and anytime that comes up it’s a distraction.”) But she also seemed attuned to the political uncertainties of the Biden era, and to how much the Party still needed to accomplish and how brief the moment might be in which to do it. “You know, what happens in these next few years is going to determine not just what the Michigan economy looks like but what American democracy looks like, what the average person in this country’s rights are, what our confidence is in our institutions,” she said. “Things are moving so fast right now. And, when you’re moving fast, you can make a lot of progress or you can do a lot of damage.” ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated the location of the residence surveilled by the Wolverine Watchmen, the number of seats in the Michigan state senate, and Damon Silvers’s role with the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and failed to include comment from the Michigan Catholic Conference.
