Benjamin Wallace-Wells profiles the Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat who has managed to fight and win in one of the most competitive parts of the country.
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.
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.
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.
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-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.
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