The Future of Michigan Politics Depends on a City You Probably Never Think About (2024)

It’s not news that the voters in Michigan, that ever-powerful swing state and bastion of Midwest culture, will be a key determinant of the entire country’s democratic future come fall. What may be surprising, though, is where the Mitten’s locus of power seems to emanate from these days—as well as the types of Michiganders who are gaining national attention and power as a result.

For the first time in my lifetime, the real center of my home state’s political influence lies not in Detroit, Ann Arbor, Flint, or the serene forests and lake houses of Northern Michigan. Instead, it’s coming from the capital city: Lansing, the often overlooked, underfunded, landlocked municipal center of the state, home to the State Capitol and Michigan State University and Lugnuts baseball. (Also, lots of pre–Civil War buildings and potholed streets and abandoned factories and electric vehicle plants and scientific research facilities and arrays of solar panels.) It’s also coming from the suburbs and farms and professorial residences scattered throughout the lopsided district: the Greater Lansing Area, my flyover hometown situated within the borders of Ingham County.

This is exciting stuff!

Michigan has been in something of a spotlight since Barack Obama was in office. First, there was the paradigm-shifting moment that saw the state cast its electoral votes for a Republican, Donald Trump, for the first time in nearly 30 years. But then there were the 2018 midterms, which saw a new Democratic gubernatorial administration as well as a rash of progressive ballot victories on voting rights, weed legalization, and independent redistricting. By 2020, Michigan, a target of—and battleground for—Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the election results, had rejected the president and elected a majority-Democratic state Supreme Court. In the subsequent 2022 midterms, Democrats won total control of the Legislature for the first time since 1984—and have been using that power to great effect ever since.

Within those big metanarratives, there’s a whole lot of Lansing. In the 2018 cycle, one of the many once red seats that fell to the blue wave was Michigan’s 8^th Congressional District, which encompassed Greater Lansing. There, Democrat and CIA veteran Elissa Slotkin flipped a seat that had been held by a Republican, then-incumbent Rep. Mike Bishop. That same year saw the ascension of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Michigan State alum and former state representative for the area who took the governor’s mansion back from Republican hands. Slotkin, meanwhile, kept her seat even after post-2020 redistricting shifted her district’s boundaries (making it the current 7^th District) and tilted it slightly in favor of Republicans.

Now, as Michigan senator and Greater Lansing native Debbie Stabenow retires, Slotkin hopes to succeed her in the Senate—and will likely face off against Trump-endorsed Republican Mike Rogers, who represented her old congressional seat for 14 years, right before Bishop succeeded him in the 2014 red wave. That race is already tight and expensive, and it will only remain so as Democrats desperately hope to hold the Senate; Slotkin seems to have a slight polling and fundraising edge and, for now, is outperforming Biden in polls.

And with Slotkin leaving the House of Representatives behind, her seat in the 7^th District is up for grabs in a race that is set to be one of the most competitive and most cash-flush in the entire country—a full-on toss-up that will help make all the difference as to whether Democrats can take back the House of Representatives this fall.

The race is between Republican Tom Barrett, an Iraq War veteran and election denier who lost an expensive race to Slotkin in 2022 and is trying again. The Democrat in the race is Curtis Hertel Jr., a former Whitmer apparatchik and the son of a former Michigan House speaker.

Greater Lansing populace: A lot of national-level politics are riding on you!

In the postwar years, the center of Michigan’s power was arguably Detroit. With its manufacturing prowess, musical and athletic footprint, and Civil Rights legacy, the city often gave rise to the state’s most potent elected officials: Avery Brundage, John Conyers, John Dingell, and Carl Levin. Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan, was a hotbed for student activism thanks to the outsize prominence of Tom Hayden and his Students for a Democratic Society (plus a thriving punk rock scene). In a previous generation, the university also trained Grand Rapids’ own Gerald Ford for a future in politics, up to his accidental and short-lived White House stint. (To this day, he remains the sole United States president to hail from Michigan.) Greater Lansing may have held the actual seat of state power, a world-class university of its own, and a once thriving industrial base, but it could never compete with the clout of the more culturally renowned cities.

But things changed, as they do. The long-serving Detroiters gradually aged and retired from their seats, without any anointed successors to carry forth their causes. Manufacturing jobs left the Midwest, and with them a sense of the state’s identity. The late Reagan era brought a seemingly permanent Republican presence to the statehouse, with officeholders who cared much more about austerity and gerrymandering than they did public service—hardly the GOP of onetime governor and Civil Rights crusader George Romney. In the new millennium, Detroit faced bankruptcy, local corruption scandals, an uncertain future, and an uneven path to rebuilding. The Michigan statehouse also saw a disastrous Republican trifecta in the 2010s that gutted unions, ruined Flint’s and Detroit’s water supplies, and imposed new abortion restrictions.

In 2013, as Michigan’s House minority leader, Whitmer raised her profile after speaking out on behalf of abortion rights on the statehouse floor; she also gave a rousing speech at the 2017 Women’s March in Lansing. The attention elevated Whitmer to the governor’s mansion in 2018, making her a refreshing successor to disgraced Republican Rick Snyder. She quickly became a national Democratic contender: When President Donald Trump disparaged her (“that woman from Michigan”) and his most fervent acolytes violently threatened her, anti-Trump liberals rallied to her defense. She also got in on Joe Biden’s good side during a key moment in the 2020 Democratic primary.

Slotkin likewise became a #Resistance hero as a critical swing-district member to call for Trump’s first impeachment, yet also maintained a bipartisan voting record and moderate reputation in Congress—one that helped her after her district became more conservative. Whitmer, however, has really pushed the state in a more liberal direction, making full use of her post-2022 Dem trifecta to pass a suite of progressive legislation on everything from gun control to clean energy to abortion. She’s still got a couple years left—and is considered the future of the national Democratic Party.

In other words, it’s not just that the most important politicians in Michigan hail from the area where I grew up; it’s that they’re now some of the most important politicians in the entire country. Nothing mid about Mid-Michigan, amirite?