Sporting a fuchsia blazer, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer told a Detroit crowd she was feeling “damn good.”
As the Democrat celebrated a double-digit reelection victory in 2022, a crowd some 700 miles south on the other end of I-75 in Atlanta cheered another decisive win. This one was for Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. “Reports of my political death have been greatly exaggerated,” he proclaimed.
Georgia and Michigan moved in tandem during the last two presidential elections, elevating Donald Trump in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020. During the midterms, though, voters elected governors who pushed their states in opposite directions.
In 2024, neither politician is on the ballot, but some voters say they wished they were.
On Belle Isle, a storied island park in the Detroit River, Sharde Stanley and her family grill burgers and hot dogs while waiting for nightfall and the first crackle of fireworks above the city skyline.
“Since I’ve been a kid, my mom’s been bringing me,” Stanley says.
Stanley says she has felt torn about the presidential election a few months away. She voted for Biden in 2020, but her high hopes for his presidency have since been dashed. That has left her weighing a vote for Biden or just staying home.
Mention Whitmer, though, and Stanley lights up.
“I love Big Gretch,” she says, referring to a nickname for the second-term Democrat popularized by many Detroiters. Stanley says she would send Whitmer to the White House without hesitation.
“Absolutely. No questions asked, that would be the person I vote for,” she says.
It is a sentiment echoed by voters in Georgia about that state’s governor. At the Wills Park Pool in suburban Alpharetta, Ryan Conner says he has been happy with Kemp.
“He kind of stood up to political pressures to throw the election in Trump’s favor in 2020, so I gained a lot of respect for him at that point,” Conner says. “So overall, I’m a Kemp fan, yeah.”
Relaxing near a yellow water slide, Conner says he is a regular reader of the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. Though he may lean more conservative, he says he cannot vote for former President Donald Trump.
Over six years, Whitmer and Kemp have ushered in diverging policy changes and navigated the tumult of a pandemic, racial justice protests, efforts to undermine election results and the overturning of Roe v. Wade., all while remaining hugely popular in closely divided states.
Voters find their decision ‘a tough place to be’
Cradling a novel in the sun on the other side of the pool, Kerry Webster says she voted for Trump in 2020, but now that he has been convicted on 34 felony counts and charged with more, she is not sure what to do.
“He’s a conniver. He’s not really a good person, he’s really not,” Webster says. “But the economy was better and Biden, I don’t know if he does a lot for us, hate to say.”
Like Webster, Deanna McKay has grappled with whether her vote matters much, even in a state and community that shaped the close contests for governor, U.S. Senate and the White House. McKay cares most about abortion rights and affordable housing.
She says she describes herself as “socially Biden, but financially Trump, and that’s kind of a tough place to be.”
After watching last month’s debate in Atlanta, McKay says she will not vote for president at all.
For Webster, she says she is now leaning toward Trump after the debate, but remains undecided.
If Alpharetta had a sister city in Michigan, it might be Rochester, a well-off Detroit suburb that once voted reliably Republican, but has shifted in the Trump era.
From a shady bench near the farmers market in Rochester’s quaint downtown, Nancy Lockhart praised Gov. Whitmer for helping enshrine abortion rights, passing gun safety laws after a deadly school shooting a few towns over and navigating the pandemic.
“Throughout COVID, no one really knew what the heck we were doing, but she took control and made some good choices for the state of Michigan,” Lockhart says.
But in the presidential race, Lockhart is deciding between voting for Biden or staying home. The debate reinforced her reservations about Biden’s age and she still hopes a different option crops up.
State lawmakers in tight districts focus on local, not national
With swaths of independent voters wanting little to do with Biden or Trump, some down-ballot candidates in competitive state legislative districts have hitched their campaigns more to their popular governor than their party’s candidate for president.
Across Michigan, in suburban Grand Rapids, Democratic State Rep. Carol Glanville has been striving to connect with split-ticket voters open to voting for candidates of either party.
“We have a lot of folks who still refer to themselves as Gerry Ford Republicans,” Glanville says. “They tend to be very pragmatic. West Michigan is proud of their values.”
Gerald Ford’s presidential library is in the district Glanville recently flipped. As she knocks on doors for her campaign this year, Glanville says it feels like Democratic priorities are resonating, such as making college more affordable and protecting the Great Lakes. She says for many voters, especially women, reproductive rights, health care and abortion are weighing heavily on their minds.
“I can’t describe exactly how I feel when a woman I don’t know is on the front porch telling me about her personal health details or lost pregnancy because it feels like people aren’t listening,” Glanville says.
Seats like Glanville’s are crucial for Democrats who, following redistricting reforms, won both the Michigan House and Senate in 2022 for the first time in a generation. In Georgia, it is Republicans who wield total control of state government. The choices voters in Michigan and Georgia have made about who to send to their state capitols have resulted in starkly different policy agendas.
While Michigan Democrats codified abortion rights, Georgia Republicans passed a restrictive law. As Georgia expanded access to firearms, Michigan moved to tighten access. Michigan expanded early and absentee voting, Georgia enacted tighter rules like reducing drop boxes. While Georgia moved to curb unions, Michigan dismantled the so-called “right-to-work” law on its books.
In Georgia, just a few seats are toss ups. Republican State Rep. Matt Reeves represents one of them. It’s a suburban Atlanta district that narrowly went for Biden in 2020 and then Kemp in 2022.
“In my race, I’m focusing on the issues here in Georgia,” Reeves says. “And I want to make sure that people know that regardless of what they think of the presidential race, that I’m a reliable, consistent person who’s on call to take care of those issues here in Georgia.”
When Reeves knocks on doors, he talks more about tax relief and public safety than the state law banning most abortions after roughly six weeks. He declines to share who he voted for in the GOP presidential primary. Still, Reeves says it can be hard to avoid national politics.
“I’ll be 47 this year,” Reeves says. “The first half of my life, national politics was focused on pursuing common ground. You had Reagan and Bush and Clinton. And in the last 20 years, during my adult life, there’s been a lot of partisanship.”
Kemp and Whitmer navigate a fraught moment
This election cycle, the governors themselves are in an even trickier spot, caught between the harsh spotlight of the national conversation and delicate state and local politics.
Kemp is slated to attend the Republican convention next week, but not for a speaking slot. He broke with Trump after refusing to help overturn Georgia’s 2020 election result.
At the presidential debate last month in Atlanta, Kemp told reporters he cast his primary ballot blank.
“I’m not looking in the rear-view mirror,” Kemp said in the red-carpeted spin room. “I’ve said all along I’m going to support our nominee. I’m doing that. We had a lot of great candidates that ran, but he’s at the top of our ticket. He wants to win Georgia and I want to win Georgia, too.”
While both governors enjoy stellar approval ratings in their states, they do have vocal critics.
Some of the most fervent Trump supporters soured on Kemp for spurning the president’s pressure to intervene after Biden’s upset victory in Georgia. Kemp is despised by many Democrats for enacting a strict abortion law and declining to expand Medicaid. In Michigan, Whitmer was the target of armed protests at the state capitol and later a kidnapping plot after she enacted strict stay-at-home orders during the early months of the pandemic.
Whitmer did swing some Michigan counties that Biden could not. Kemp closed the gap in prized suburban communities where Trump bled support, but polls suggest that a Republican presidential primary would be difficult. A recent NPR poll suggests Trump would lead Whitmer in a match up and Vice President Kamala Harris would perform better against him than Whitmer.
And despite all the talk of alternatives, many Democrats are enthusiastic about a Biden second term and there are plenty of Republicans eager to send Trump back to the White House. Successful governors are not always successful presidential candidates, as Michigan pollster Rich Czuba points out: “We’ve seen popular governors run for national office and go down like the Hindenburg.”
When some Democrats began calling on Biden to step aside after the debate in Atlanta, chatter about Whitmer as a possible replacement only ratcheted up. She has said she will not run this year.
“Our choices on the ballot right now are President Biden and former President Trump. That is the binary choice in front of us,” Whitmer said in an NPR interview when asked if Biden is the best candidate to defeat Trump. “I am an enthusiastic supporter of President Biden’s, and I’m going to work my tail off to make sure he gets a second term.”
Whitmer was not in town for a Biden rally in Detroit on Friday.
Whitmer insists Biden can still win Michigan, though other Michigan Democrats have expressed alarm about the race. At “Grillin’ with Gretchen” barbecues this summer with branded koozies and paper fans, she has been trying to make the choice for voters clear.
“This election will be decided by a slim number of people in a handful of states and we are one of them,” Whitmer told supporters in Lansing in June. “We cannot let Michigan fall on the wrong side of this election.”
Apples and peaches
2024 will test the condition of the Democrats’ so-called Blue Wall in Rust Belt States like Michigan. Georgia may provide clues about Republicans’ future in the dynamic Sun Belt.
Still, Emory University professor Andra Gillespie is cautious about making comparisons.
“So I have to admit, I think Georgia and Michigan are apples and pears,” she says.
Or maybe more like Georgia peaches and Michigan apples.
Gillespie says Black voters make up a large share of Georgia’s Democratic electorate. Michigan has a larger white Democratic base. Michigan has more high school graduates, making a Democratic-leaning state more competitive for Republicans. Georgia has more college graduates, who have helped shift Republican-leaning suburbs blue. While Gillespie says truly independent voters are a small slice of the electorate, they hold significant power in states like Michigan and Georgia.
“That could be the difference between winning and losing elections, especially in a state where the election could be decided by a relatively small margin where we’re talking maybe tens of thousands of votes,” she says.
Czuba, the pollster, thinks positive attitudes about these governors could translate into votes for the top of the ticket — if candidates draw a throughline between what is happening in Lansing and Atlanta to the policy coming out of Washington, D.C.
“If Joe Biden is to win Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer is going to have to carry him on her back across the finish line,” Czuba said, noting that Kemp and Whitmer have at least one superpower going for them.
“She’s the neighbor who waves you over for a beer and a bonfire,” he says. “And I think when we talk about these governors, one of the reasons they’re effective is they act normally. Oh, it’s a normal Michigander, it’s a normal Georgian.”
Czuba says that may go a long way in an election cycle that has been anything but normal.
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