How sweet it is (as Jackie Gleason used to say) that Gretchen Whitmer – the Michigan governor targeted for kidnapping and possible assassination by right-wing terrorists – scored big time in the midterms. She slaughtered the MAGA nut who ran against her, successfully championed an abortion rights referendum, and her coattails swept Democrats into power in both state legislative chambers for the first time since 1983.
Madonna debuted her first album in 1983. That’s how long ago it was.
Lest we all become too focused on Republican Ron DeSantis’ gubernatorial sweep in red Florida, we should put our hands together for Whitmer, whose midterm triumph in a crucial midwestern swing state may well have national resonance for a Democratic party that’s in the hunt for next-generation leaders.
“Big Gretch,” as she’s widely nicknamed on her home turf (a Detroit rapper has even praised her in a song called “Big Gretch”), was supposedly locked in a tight race with Tudor Dixon – a conservative media “personality” who courted Trump’s endorsement; a culture war extremist who believes that raped women should be forced to give birth – because the polls said it was a tight race, and the news coverage echoed the polls. I know you’ll be shocked to hear that the polls were dead wrong. Whitmer won by nearly 12 percentage points and nearly half a million votes. Even in Macomb County, the famous working-class swing county that Trump won twice, Whitmer broke on top by five points.
So much for the best laid Republican plans. MAGAts, fueled by lies, had assembled a “legal” team that was jonesing to challenge the Michigan election results. As one conservative lawyer reportedly said last month in a Zoom meeting, “If there is a close election, it’s going to be up to us to fix it. We’re the team that’s going to have to fix an election in Michigan if it’s rigged.”
Well, it wasn’t close. We haven’t heard a peep from those fools since. On Tuesday, the same Democratic female trio that has run Michigan since 2019 – Whitmer, Attorney General Dana Nessel, and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson – was decisively re-elected, despite taking relentless abuse from MAGA-land (plus the kidnapping plot). During the nadir of the pandemic, when Whitmer was busy saving lives by requiring masks and enforcing closures, Trump assailed her as “that woman from Michigan,” and denounced Nessel as a “whacky do-nothing.”
But they refused to knuckle under. Whitmer said that Trump’s feckless response to the pandemic was a “disgrace,” Nessel called Trump “a petulant child,” and when Trump continued to lie that his 2020 loss in Michigan was due to election fraud, Benson had the best line of all: “We cannot let misinformation – whether it comes from the White House, the Kremlin, or anywhere else – sow seeds of doubt in our elections.”
The bottom line, and a blueprint for Democrats seeking to win back working-class voters in the industrial Midwest, is that Whitmer stressed kitchen-table issues – like working with General Motors to invest $7 billion in four new electric-vehicle and battery-production facilities; bringing in new plants that make semiconductor chips; and keeping her 2018 promise to repair tens of thousands of roads and more than 1000 bridges. At the same time, she homed in early on the abortion issue. When word leaked last spring that the Republican theocrats on the U.S. Supreme Court were prepping to overturn Roe v. Wade, she began work to place abortion rights in the state constitution. She pushed for a referendum. It was on the ballot Tuesday, and 57 percent of the voters approved it.
Whitmer was on Joe Biden’s short list for veep in 2020. She’s vowing to serve a full second term, which is what re-elected pols always say, but if Biden decides he’s too old and weary for a second go-round, don’t be shocked if Whitmer steps up. She’s earning it.