Don't Call Michigan a Blue State (yet)
Straight from the governor's mouth.
“No! Michigan’s not a blue state. It would be a mistake for anyone to look at that and think Michigan is not still a tossup, very competitive, very diverse state that’s going to decide the outcome of the next national election again.” -Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D)
Some Michigan locals have been calling 2022 the year of the ‘blue blowout.’ In the most recent midterm elections, Michigan Democrats defied expectations and took control of every branch of state government for the first time in 40 years. To start, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer won re-election by a surprisingly wide 10-point margin. (For comparison’s sake, Pres. Joe Biden only beat Trump here by 3-points in the 2020 election.) After a tumultuous first term where she faced off against armed COVID-deniers and a foiled kidnapping attempt, her decisive victory exposes how her opposition is powered by fringe militants rather than legitimate grievances. While Whitmer’s win is the feel-good story Democrats wanted, their wins in the state legislature were the more impactful gains that they desperately needed.
Both the Michigan State House and the Michigan State Senate flipped to Democrats following the 2022 elections as the party gained seven legislative seats. The party has wasted no time wielding their new legislative power and have rocketed into the national consciousness for their ability to enact a distinctly liberal agenda. During this legislative session the party has used its new majority to pass a long list of much-needed policy:
This may all seem like a surprising turn from a state that’s had steadfast Republican leadership throughout the last decade. However, it all makes sense when looking at the state’s changes in the last five years. Back in 2011, Republicans held the power of the pen when it came time to draw new districts. The new maps that were enacted for the following decade were widely viewed as a partisan gerrymander.
“Voters in Michigan have never before faced such a shamelessly partisan redrawing of congressional boundaries. Instead of drawing fair lines that follow community and county borders in a logical way, the Republican legislature has drafted a map so skewed that it exploits every trick in the book to gerrymander districts in ways that benefit Republican incumbents.”
-Michigan Democrats Gary Peters and Sander Levin, commenting on the state’s 2011 redistricting process
In response, voters supported the implementation of an independent redistricting commission in hopes that taking the responsibility out of politician’s hands would lead to fairer, more competitive districts.
The newly enacted maps were found not to favor any one specific political party and made several congressional districts more competitive. In addition to fairer political boundaries, voters also supported increased voting rights through a ballot initiative that enshrined several voting rights provisions into the state’s constitution. Among the new provisions enacted include same-day voting registration, no-excuse absentee voting and even automatic voter registration when signing up for a driver’s license.
These changes to voting rights law have demonstrably changed Michigan’s voter participation and the overall makeup of the electorate. When comparing the most recent two presidential elections (as the 2016 election took place before these voting rights changes were enacted) there were 700,000 more presidential votes from Michigan in 2020 than in 2016, an increase of nearly 15%. The results are even more stark when comparing Michigan to a neighboring state with much more restrictive voting laws: Ohio.
Ohio has a larger population than Michigan (about ~1.7 million more residents) and, as expected, had more registered voters when the states had similar voting laws. But after Michigan changed their voting laws to be more permissive, Michigan now has more registered voters on its rolls than Ohio. Really take a moment to think about this: Ohio has over a million more eligible voters than Michigan, yet Michigan has more actual voters. And what happens when more voters actually have a say in the democratic process? Candidates who actually represent their voters win and those who race toward extremist ideology are pushed out.
No wonder Republicans don’t want more people to vote.
Comparing Michigan to its neighbors provides a clear argument as to why supporting voting rights legislation that increases access is so incredibly important. As mentioned above, Ohio has fairly restrictive voting laws (that are unfortunately only getting stricter). The state also has notoriously gerrymandered districts that benefit Republicans on both the federal and state levels. This mix results in Republican politicians who aren’t beholden to voters’ policy preferences and are willing to engage in straight-up corruption due to the safety of their seats. The same patterns are playing out in Wisconsin as well. Wisconsin sits between Michigan and Ohio in its approach to voting rights: allowing for some permissive laws like no-excuse absentee voting but still retaining politically tilted maps that date back to Republicans’ REDMAP initiative. This leads the state to sit between Michigan and Ohio politically as it’s not quite the Republican stronghold of Ohio and yet Democrats still struggle to produce wins against extreme conservative candidates.
And this is what Gov. Whitmer means when she tells you NOT to call Michigan a blue state: Michigan has such a politically diverse electorate that who shows up on Election Day matters a whole lot. Republicans produced a decade of success by implementing restrictive laws that ensured that their voters were the only ones showing up and Democrats have finally reversed that trend by making sure that all eligible voters can participate. But this trend could only be reversed thanks to the complacency of Michigan Republicans.
A faction of the state’s conservatives have gone off the deep end: fully embracing militant extremist tactics to intimidate their opponents. Instead their tactics are working against them: Michigan voters who might otherwise support moderately conservative candidates are turning out explicitly to fight far-right extremism. Meanwhile, the party is currently holding millions of dollars in debt thanks to a disconnect between party leaders and their once-reliable donors. As a result, Republicans are quite literally fighting themselves right now and providing Democrats with a wide opening to capture power. But Whitmer sees the writing on the wall and knows that this is simply a brief break in the clouds for her party rather than the dawn of a new day. Once their opponents get their act together, Democrats will be playing on a much fairer field but they’ll still have to fight.