Gretchen Whitmer and the future of the Democratic party

This New Yorker profile of Michigan’s governor explores how Michigan has become critical to the Democratic party’s both short-term and long-term electoral future:

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.”

What Whitmer has done is pull together a coalition of voters that includes big city minorities, rich suburbanites and college town liberals, and traditional union voters, to overcome the fact that rural Michigan might as well be Alabama North. This is the same dynamic, more or less, that you can find in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Wisconsin (Ohio is apparently hopeless at this point).

Whitmer’s uncompromising stance on reproductive rights has been a key here, as is her understanding that culture war issues are critical to getting liberal and liberalish young people to stay in a state, and to move to it from elsewhere.

Few developments in the past several years have been more important to Democratic presidential prospects than Michigan’s move back into the blue column, and Whitmer’s very canny political instincts have played a big part in that.