The Myth of Gretchen Whitmer

L eft-wing media really, really want you to like Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. “Why Not Whitmer?” asks the Atlantic’s Mark Leibovich on the proposition of a Whitmer presidential run (Betteridge’s law offers a sufficient answer to this question, I think). Not to be outdone, Politico’s Jonathan Martin followed that up with “Bypassing Biden: Democrats Think of What Could Have Been.” The latest contribution to this corpus comes from Benjamin Wallace-Wells, who has taken to the pages of the New Yorker to explain “How Gretchen Whitmer Made Michigan a Democratic Stronghold.”

The case for Whitmer relies on her image as a relatable, business-friendly yet socially progressive executive who is effectively defending the heart of the Rust Belt from the dangers of Trumpist populism. A review of Wallace-Wells’s piece, however, shows a governor whose program has been unsuccessfully tried before and whose state is just as purple as ever.

Whitmer hopes her economic agenda will attract new residents to the state and shore up the Democratic Party’s electoral prospects. One major component of this plan involves subsidies for projects such as new electric-vehicle-battery plants that are supposed to create thousands of jobs. (Disclosure: One of the plants mentioned in the article is being built in my hometown.) This pivot to green-energy projects is known as “the Transition” and is lauded by such luminaries as Brian Deese, former director of the National Economic Council under President Biden.

Michiganders have heard this pitch before. Former governor Jennifer Granholm (who has been rewarded for her mismanagement with a spot as Biden’s energy secretary) also pushed economic-stimulus packages with a focus on building up the green-energy industry. The results? Boondoggle projects that paid people to sit in inactive factories without arresting the state’s economic decline. Perhaps this is why Wallace-Wells mischaracterizes Granholm’s tenure. The “lost decade” wasn’t lost because Granholm was “largely stymied by a Republican legislature,” as he tells it, but because the state experienced sustained population losses and severe economic decline under Granholm’s leadership.

Whitmer knows that “we either win this decade or we are going to be catching up for a generation.” But catching up from Granholm’s ineffective cronyism required the fiscal discipline of accountant-turned-governor Rick Snyder; her playbook won’t magically work this time around. Nor did Whitmer’s business-killing pandemic regulations, which she now admits did not “make a lot of sense” even as she stands by them, lay the groundwork for economic revival.

The piece also lauds Whitmer’s efforts to promote abortion rights, including her advocacy for last year’s successful pro-choice constitutional amendment, on the grounds that “to draw young people, [Michigan] needs to have the social policies they want.” As I’ve written before, it’s darkly ironic that Whitmer concerns herself with growing the state’s population after fighting so hard for the supposed right to abortion.

But then Whitmer has always been a demagogue on this issue. She responded to a 2013 policy “that excluded abortion from bundled health plans,” thereby requiring women who wanted abortion coverage to purchase a separate plan, by calling those plans “rape insurance.”

A quote from former Whitmer aide Mark Burton is particularly revealing. When Whitmer was the state senate minority leader, her team’s “entire strategy was to make her a star”; this was the rationale for the “rape insurance” remark. Wallace-Wells is merely a foot soldier in this effort, as are Leibovich and Martin. If Democrats have become “less adept at evoking a transformative sense of the future,” no matter, these writers will simply recast Whitmer’s ineffective policies as inventive. Their job is to launder Whitmer’s reputation for a credulous national audience in preparation for a possible future presidential bid, and this they are doing well enough. Pity they haven’t picked a better cause.

In fairness to Wallace-Wells, like any good dealer, he knows better than to get high on his own supply. He ends the piece with a reflection on “how brief the moment might be in which” Whitmer’s agenda drives Michigan politics. That’s because, even though these hagiographies give the impression that Whitmer is an electoral juggernaut, that simply isn’t true. The best case for that argument goes something like this: Whitmer was first elected governor by a ten-point margin just two years after the state went for Trump, and she won reelection by about eleven points, outperforming Biden’s margin of victory in 2020. Riding on the coattails of her reelection, Democrats were able to recapture both chambers of the state legislature, leading to the state’s first Democratic trifecta in 40 years.

The problem with this argument is that a similar case can be made for Rick Snyder, who in 2010 won election by an 18-point margin just two years after Obama won the state by 16 points, outperformed Obama’s 2012 margin by 13 points in 2014, and helped maintain a Republican trifecta in Michigan for the entirety of his tenure.

So, too, was the case with Jennifer Granholm. When she ran for attorney general in 1998, she was the only Democrat elected on a statewide ballot, outperforming Democratic gubernatorial candidate Geoffrey Fieger by more than 400,000 votes. She also won her gubernatorial reelection campaign by 14 points despite significant job losses during her first term.

None of this is to ignore Whitmer’s political savvy, but Michigan has only once in the last 60 years denied an incumbent governor reelection, and it has usually reelected governors by a larger margin than Whitmer’s. Michigan is a swing state, and it often swings hard. That doesn’t mean Whitmer has suddenly transformed its political culture.

Term limits will prevent Whitmer from returning to the governor’s mansion in 2026. Unless she attempts to unseat Senator Gary Peters, a fellow Democrat, that gives her two years to build upon this groundwork for a presidential campaign. But Americans shouldn’t accept the narrative that she has successfully rebuilt Michigan into a progressive utopia — nor should they allow her to take her agenda to Washington.