Interesting New Yorker piece by Benjamin Wallace-Wells on Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer:
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.”
The results, the Republican official went on, suggested “two really crazy things.” First, many of the Oakland County Republicans were seriously considering voting for a Democrat for governor in 2018. Trump “had completely alienated these voters, because of who he was as a person,” the official told me. “The flip side was that the Macomb County people were not high-propensity voters. They typically voted only in Presidential elections. And they did not consider themselves Republicans.” The Party had effectively traded away some of its most reliable voters for, as the official put it, “people who had lived rough lives.” When the Macomb County group was asked whether they knew anyone who had died from an opioid addiction, half the participants raised their hands. “It was right then that I knew we were going to lose the next election,” the Party official said. “Because we weren’t going to get back our old people. And our new people weren’t drawn to us—they were drawn to a single man, and he wasn’t on the ballot.”
Whitmer won easily in 2018. She was reelected in 2022 by even bigger margins, partly because she tied her campaign very closely to a constitutional amendment to legalize abortion. In that election Democrats won control of both houses of the legislature for the first time in 20 years.
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