PETOSKEY, Mich. — The sun is out, the lake is glistening, the strawberries are bright red and summer-sweet. Golfers and anglers are busy, cyclists are on the move, brats are on the barbecue. This is Michigan at its best. Much of the state is on a summer holiday, and while Michigan’s economy is not exactly at its best — there remain persistent pockets of poverty and hopelessness — the state overall is perking along, there are slightly more ups than downs in the forecasts, and everywhere, encouraging signs are visible. All this is good news for the governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who has a can-do attitude to go along with presidential aspirations never expressed but never far from the political conversation here. These are not sunny days for Democratic governors and their states. Donald Trump has aimed his roundup raids at them, arguing that they harbor a large portion of migrants illegally in the United States. (Perhaps he has overlooked Texas and Florida.) Those states tend to have high rents, high prices — and high taxes, which is why lawmakers from New York and New Jersey spent the last two months working to increase the level of state and local taxes that, when next April 15 rolls around, can be deducted from Americans’ taxable income. There also has been a running battle between the president and Democratic governors. “We don’t want to benefit Democrat governors, although I would do that if it made it better,” Trump said last month. “But they don’t know what they’re doing.” He singled out Govs. Kathy Hochul of New York, JD Pritzker of Illinois and Gavin Newsom of California, whom he called “Gavin Newscum.” The states these Democrats govern comprise more than a fifth of the country’s population. Overall, Democratic governors rule more than half the country. Newsom has been in a range war with Trump for years, and it flared anew last month when the president sent federal troops to Los Angeles against the wishes of pretty much the entire California political establishment. Then he described Newsom as “grossly incompetent.” Trump called Pritzker “probably the worst in the country.” That prompted the Illinois governor last week to use his announcement that he’s running for reelection to assail the president for using government as “a weapon of revenge.” Michigan’s Whitmer largely has escaped Trump’s vitriol. But the president said this spring he was open to pardoning two men serving prison sentences for their involvement in a 2020 plot to kidnap her, saying he’d “take a look at it. It’s been brought to my attention.” He suggested they “were drinking and I think they said stupid things” and that they were the victims of “somewhat of a railroad job.” A day later, the governor said Trump had earlier promised not to pardon them. Whitmer’s apparent immunity from Trump attacks perhaps reflects how her state isn’t quite blue — Trump carried it in the 2024 election — and instead has been, with budget problems in Detroit and water problems in Flint, black-and-blue. Now there are signs it’s on the upswing. Michigan reached its highest ranking (10th nationally) in the Area Development magazine annual Top States for Doing Business rankings, a jump from 13th place the year before. The 25,357 clean-energy jobs that the Michigan Infrastructure Office claims have been created since 2022 place a state known for the combustion engine as the surprise nationwide leader in winning federal investment in clean-energy enterprises. Trump energy policies, however, could endanger that industry. A University of Michigan economic outlook speaks of “relative optimism,” primarily because of the robust health services, leisure and tourism sectors. “Historically,” Jacob T. Burton, Gabriel M. Ehrlich and Michael R. McWilliams wrote, “these industries have been relatively insensitive to the state of the macroeconomy, and we believe they have room to grow even as more cyclically sensitive industries take a breather.” The study’s forecast projected increases in the sale of light vehicles, which, the authors argue, “should help to cushion Michigan’s manufacturing sector from the uncertainty surrounding tariffs.” To be sure, the state’s 5.3% unemployment rate is higher than the national rate (4.2%), though that is not the catastrophe that tariffs once seemed to portend. And by any measure, its largest city, Detroit, has, along with Pittsburgh, emerged as a model of Rust Belt recovery. One of the reasons: the turnaround success of a Democratic mayor the president never mentions, Mike Duggan — though during his 2024 campaign, Trump warned that if Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, prevailed in the November election, “Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president,” adding, “You’re going to have a mess on your hands.” Trump was working off out-of-date stereotypes. Detroit was the largest American city to declare bankruptcy, but Duggan pulled the city out of that status and stigma. He harangued, romanced and lured corporate leaders into supporting a citywide rebirth; fought blight; and took simple but symbolic steps like repairing streetlights to promote citizen safety — small beer, you might say, but not in a city where about 2 in 5 streetlights weren’t operating. The city’s population has dropped 70% since the 1950s, when Detroit was churning out cars with V-8 engines and selling Chevrolet Bel Airs like mad. So don’t snicker over the celebration of the population growth of almost 2,000 in 2023. It’s the first time Detroit’s population has grown since 1957. That’s the last time the much-beloved but often-beleaguered Lions were NFL champions; old-timers still talk of how Tobin Rote threw four touchdown passes and ran for a fifth to defeat the Cleveland Browns, 59-14, at old Briggs Stadium. So while Whitmer quietly examines a run for the Democratic presidential nomination — likely against two blue-state governors, Pritzker and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania — Duggan is running away from the Democratic Party. He’s now running to replace Whitmer in Lansing as the state’s governor — as an independent. “I realized that, as a Democratic governor, anything I proposed would be met with immediate resistance [from Republicans],” he told reporters. “I’m not a person who wants to be governor and not get something done. I do think it’s possible that an independent governor can work with the reasonable members of both parties.” The gamble: A Duggan win would wipe away the blues.
(David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)
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