How Not To Lose Michigan, According to Dem Senate Candidate Elissa Slotkin
Welcome to Trail Mix, your 2024 election sanity guide. See something interesting on the trail? Email me at jake.lahut@thedailybeast.com. To get Trail Mix in your inbox, sign-up here for free.
This week, we have a special Michigan edition, featuring an exclusive interview with one of the nation’s top Senate candidates and new numbers on the field organizing disparity between the Trump and Biden campaigns.
THE VIEW FROM TRAVERSE CITY
From the top floor of the Park Place hotel, the stakes of the 2024 election were in plain sight.
Among seven major battleground states, Michigan has one of the best chances of being the “tipping point” in the presidential race—a fancy way of saying its 15 electoral votes could decide the whole shebang—and the mood on the ground is almost pure stress for Democrats.
Yet as hues of blue and green washed over the room on one of the first warm, clear days in late May, a deeper anxiety was lurking.
As she looked across one of the most expansive views available of a chain of lakes emptying into Lake Michigan’s Grand Traverse Bay, Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), the Democratic favorite in this year’s U.S. Senate race, was thinking about whether the view would be here for generations to come.
Clad in green, Slotkin told a friendly crowd of environmentalists that Michganders’ attachment to their “environmental heritage” was “one of the most bipartisan and well-felt issues in the state,” and they were all at the center of it.
“Water, both our waters and our water,” Slotkin said, making a drinking gesture to distinguish between the state’s 11,000 lakes and its drinking water, “I think live inside every single Michigander, and certainly in me.”
Yet the former CIA analyst, a rising star trying to fill the shoes of retiring Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), knows all too well how being a Michigan Democrat requires a level of tact and political acumen not for the faint of heart.
As existential a threat as climate change is to Slotkin, those in the room, and plenty of her constituents, being serious about winning statewide in Michigan doesn’t always comport with mainstream Democratic priorities. Slotkin’s own precinct is a prime example: She’s never been able to win it since she won her first race in 2018.
Asked by The Daily Beast if she would support any federal restrictions on fossil fuel production—with the U.S. currently producing more oil and gas than any nation in history, under a Democratic president, Joe Biden—Slotkin steered clear.
“Coming from a security background, we like redundancy, flexibility,” Slotkin said. “So I like an ‘all of the above’ approach to energy.”
Right there, in front of a few dozen cans of Coca-Cola and other refreshments, lay the central conflict for Slotkin. Beyond her bid to become the youngest woman in the Senate, the struggle of threading the needle between Michigan’s swing voters and the party base is the same one facing the Biden campaign and Democrats in all battleground states.
Slotkin said she is a strong supporter of “weaning us off of an exclusive focus on fossil fuels” and wants more wind, solar, hydrogen and nuclear power in her state—but “for the power needs we’re gonna have going forward, we’re going to need ‘all of the above.’”
Speaking frankly about the challenges facing those who want the nation to do something about climate change and lead the world in green energy, Slotkin acknowledged that Americans always want more, not less.
“Certainly, I think carrots work better than sticks,” she said.
Michigan is chock-full of what political scientists call cross-pressured voters. Its makeup of college- and non-college-educated voters, suburban white voters, Black voters, rural white voters, and a sizeable Muslim-American population around the city of Dearborn make it one of the most distinctive electorates in the country. It’s one where longstanding ties between each major party and its traditional coalitions have been strained, from rank-and-file union voters shifting from Democrats to the Trump-era GOP, all the way to pro-Palestinian voters vowing to sit out this election in protest of U.S. support for Israel in its war with Hamas.
Key voting blocs are spread throughout the state, with families and social circles often exerting pressure over conflicting elements within a voter’s identity, including race, religion, income, and peer group, which can make such voters both persuadable and hard to read.
For a candidate like Slotkin, the result is an occasionally defensive posture, meant to deny Republicans any chances to paint her as a radical progressive.
In Traverse City, Slotkin emphasized the need to bring more independents and Republican voters “into the conversation” on key issues. A big part of that effort lies in trying to avoid alienating them at all costs. She described her approach to the farther flung rural areas of the state as “losing better.”
Cutting the voting deficit for Democrats by just a couple of points in deeper red precincts can, Slotkin believes, make all the difference in a state which went for Donald Trump by some 10,000 votes in 2016 (0.23 percent of the vote) and for Biden by just shy of 155,000 in 2020 (2.78 percent).
Slotkin said inflation and the economy remain the biggest issues she hears about from voters, making them the toughest challenges for Democrats as they seek to hold the state and the White House.
Trump lawn signs, flags, and other MAGA paraphernalia have been sprouting at houses which bore them in 2016 then ditched them in 2020. Democrats are less visible, particularly in this northwest corner of the lower peninsula, where Midwesterners have long flocked in summer to enjoy pristine lakes, hunting, fishing, dune beaches, and rolling views of pencil-thin trees.
Slotkin offered a theory on why Democratic messaging on climate change and energy seems to be suffering from “a disconnect”, as President Biden has passed the most comprehensive climate change bill in American history while presiding over record oil production.
“Somehow the messaging does not match the reality,” Slotkin said, recalling her Republican colleagues “crying tears that we can’t keep more pipelines over and we can’t get more leases for natural gas—and it’s like, we are producing at the highest levels ever!”
“A dose of reality in the messaging would be helpful,” she said, while emphasizing the need for Democrats to campaign in more conservative areas.
“It’s like, suck it up, buttercup,” Slotkin said. “You gotta go meet people where they are, and you’d be shocked how many people have never met a Democrat, think we have horns and a tail, and then when you come with a little bit of common sense and a little bit of practicality, they’re open to a conversation. Michiganders are still very practical.”
LAY OF THE LAND IN THE MITTEN STATE
The Michigan Senate race will be one of the top races to watch in November, given how tight presidential polling has been in the state.
Sen. Stabenow has been in elected office since she was 23 years old—starting with the Ingham County Board of Commissioners in 1975, ending up in the Senate in 2001—and her retirement sparked some early jockeying among Democrats for what has turned out to be a relatively sleepy primary between Slotkin and actor Hill Harper.
Stabenow’s retirement was a big deal.
“When Debbie Stabenow surprised the heck out of us and said she wasn’t gonna run again about a year and a half ago… she’s doing an amazing thing: she’s retiring from the Senate at 70,” Slotkin said, as the Traverse City crowd burst out laughing. “There’s nobody doing that. That’s not a thing.”
The congresswoman also said Stabenow—who’s said she won’t endorse a successor—has pointed to climate change as “the No. 1 issue she wants me to carry the torch on.”
Slotkin’s likely Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), is one of the GOP’s prize ponies for this cycle. He used to chair the House Intelligence Committee and even flirted with a 2024 run against Trump.
When he was considering a presidential bid, just over a year ago, Rogers told The Daily Beast he wanted to focus on “the literacy crisis in America and all of the problems that brings with it,” as well as the need for “a leader who is focused on the real issues, not just sugar-high politics and the tweet of the day.”
He pointedly criticized Trump following the Jan. 6 insurrection, saying there’s “never a time in American democracy when violence accomplishes what you want,” and saying it was tantamount to “giving up on our Constitution when you storm the Capitol to try to change an election.”
Despite Rogers’ critiques, he got Trump’s endorsement anyway in March and his standing in the GOP primary skyrocketed—by up to 40 points, according to one poll. While Rogers is the polar opposite of the MAGA Trumpian persona, his GOP opponent, investor Sandy Pensler, could give him a headache given his ability to self-fund and his neater alignment with Trump.
Then there’s former Rep. Justin Amash (I-MI), who left the GOP after becoming the first Republican member of Congress to call for Trump’s impeachment in 2019. He’s the wild card in the GOP primary, with the ability to take moderate and libertarian-leaning voters from Rogers.
Another potentially formidable player would have been former Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI), one of the eight Republicans who voted to impeach Trump second time around in 2021 and the beneficiary of boosted name ID because of the grocery store chain owned by his family. But he dropped out in April, helping clear the way for Rogers.
With plenty of undecided voters up for grabs, Rogers has held a steady lead in the limited polling of the race, usually between 15 and 20 points, with Amash and Pensler trading places in second and third.
Slotkin, meanwhile, has been clobbering Harper, an Iowa native and a former recurring cast member on CSI: NY whose purported ties to the state have been tenuous and, as The Daily Beast first reported, faces a major vulnerability among the union vote in the nation’s auto-manufacturing capital given his past work for Toyota.
Slotkin led Harper by 45 points in the most recent poll and is neck-and-neck with Rogers in general election polling, leading by up to 3 points in recent surveys.
Primary day is Aug. 6.
BOOTS ON THE GROUND
Aside from the tight polling landscape, there’s one other consistent feature of the 2024 election in Michigan thus far. There’s a massive disparity in organizing between Democrats and Republicans.
It’s gone under the radar compared to state Republicans’ financial woes and Democrats fretting about helping Biden maintain the “blue wall” of rust belt states, but it could prove the deciding factor.
The Michigan Democratic Party has 33 field offices, with plans for more than 50, according to a party official who spoke with The Daily Beast.
There are more than 100 staffers for the party in Michigan, and they plan on making more hires, according to the same official.
Biden’s re-election team is operating out of 32 of those field offices as part of the coordinated Democratic campaign, and they’ve tripled the number of Michigan-based staffers since February, according to a Biden campaign official. The campaign has also registered more than 1,000 volunteers and trained hundreds to lead organizing efforts such as phone banking and door knocking.
“My biggest concern was people were just burned out and have been burned out,” said Democratic state Sen. Mallory McMorrow. “It's a lot of pressure to be in a very important swing state, but it feels good.”
McMorrow said she sees the most upside in outreach to first-time young voters, some of whom were in middle school when Trump was president.
The Trump campaign and a Republican National Committee spokesperson for Michigan did not answer questions from The Daily Beast about their presence on the ground with any specific numbers.
Instead, Trump Michigan Communications Director Victoria LaCivita said Trump’s momentum was “strong in Michigan”, with a “rapidly expanding team and ground game.”
If the LaCivita name sounds familiar, that’s because Victoria is the daughter of Chris LaCivita, Trump’s co-campaign manager and RNC co-chair.
James Blair, political director for the Trump campaign and the RNC, added that the goal is to have volunteers “doing a few high-impact tasks each instead of old models which devolved to few volunteers trying to do many low-impact tasks each.”
Republicans have yet to formally announce state directors in other battleground states for the 2024 cycle. According to a GOP official, Thomas Midanek is the new state director in Michigan.
Michigan Democrats can barely contain their excitement over the organizing gap. They made an April Fools post about the Trump campaign launching more than 30 offices in the state. The Biden campaign is also hitting Trump for being too preoccupied with his legal woes to build an effective presence in the key state.
“Donald Trump is a convicted felon consumed by his own quest for revenge and retribution, which might explain why he has made no effort to build a real campaign presence in this core battleground state,” Mike Frosolone, Biden’s Michigan campaign manager, told The Daily Beast.
POLLING STATION: HOUSING EDITION
It might be time to retire the term “sleeper issue” when it comes to housing.
A new poll found a high level of voter interest in the issue and came up with some eye-opening stats about renters in five top swing states: Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.
Eighty-seven percent of those surveyed said they consider the cost of rent or housing to be a “major or big problem in their state,” according to the poll conducted by Right to the City Action, Center for Popular Democracy, and HIT Strategies. The poll also found 75 percent said the cost of housing causes “the most stress in their families” compared to other economic issues.
The survey also found that major portions of the renter coalition overlap with some of the most targeted voter demographics. Among the 500 people polled across the five battleground states—weighted to reflect representative portions of homeowners and renters—85 percent of renters make under $75,000 per year, 77 percent are non-college educated, 59 percent are age 18 to 35, and 47% are white without a college degree.
“A generation of renters have been saddled by rapidly rising housing costs and ignored by elected officials across the political spectrum,” Dawn Phillips, executive director of Right to the City Action, told The Daily Beast.
“Our poll tells us what we have known for a long time: Solutions like rent stabilization, just cause eviction protections and government-funded permanently affordable housing … are common sense to renters and homeowners alike. Any politician looking to achieve office in 2024 needs to show up for this critical voting bloc and meaningfully address the housing crisis now.”
OFF THE BEATEN PATH
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), one of the most vulnerable House Republicans in 2024, came out forcefully after Trump was found guilty of all 34 counts of falsification of business records. Lawler had a clear message: it’s absolutely not cool to lock up your political opponents.
Lawler decried the “willingness of hyperpartisan New York Democrats” to abuse power and “wage political war on their enemies,” calling on Americans of all political stripes to see the decision as undermining the system and as “destructive to our country.”
However, a Daily Beast review of Lawler’s past tweets found several instances where he’s been more than comfortable calling for jail time when it comes to Democrats like Hillary Clinton and the late New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.
Lawler tweeted in January 2021 that Silver, then 76 and also a convicted felon, “deserves to spend his remaining days in jail, period.” Of Clinton, he tweeted in 2016 that despite “the media’s hyperventilating” over Trump’s notorious calls to “lock her up”, people should remember “she broke the law.” He also praised Trump for saying during the debates Hillary should “be in jail”.
Gabby Seay, a spokesperson for the super PAC Battleground NY, looking to spend against Lawler, told The Daily Beast the congressman “acts like a bully when he calls his opponents criminals and says they should be in jail. But when it comes to Boss Trump’s conviction for illegally covering up his porn-star affair, he makes excuses, attacks the jury’s decision, and tries to change the subject.”
Lawler’s campaign did not return a request for comment.
CAMPAIGN LIT
Unhappy meals. Jose Pagliery came across one of the stranger stories from the trial of the century—Trump lawyer Todd Blanche claims he lost “seven or eight pounds” over the two months by skipping Trumpworld’s outlandish fast food lunches.
Gone to pot. Rep. James Comer (R-KY) has rarely missed a chance to hit the Biden family over Hunter’s business deal with a Chinese energy company, but Roger Sollenberger uncovered Comer’s involvement in his own failed Chinese deal – involving, of all things, the importation of hemp that ended up testing as marijuana.
Do not pass go. Steve Bannon is heading to jail over refusing to comply with a congressional subpoena from the January 6 committee. Mini Racker was at the courthouse as it all went down.
Unsolicited advice. A former top aide to Jill Biden who’s been a thorn in the side of the presidential campaign dished to Jake Lahut about what the president’s team is getting wrong following a Wall Street Journal about his age and mental acuity.
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