Democrats Focus on Governors Races as Last Line of Defense
With a conservative Supreme Court looming, Dems hope to reverse a decade of losses at the state level.
Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic nominee for governor of Michigan, campaigns in Lansing on Aug. 20.
Photographer: Reuters/Jeff Kowalsky
On the afternoon of June 27, Gretchen Whitmer was walking into a fundraiser when she got the text from a friend: “I cannot believe about Kennedy,” it read. Over the next few hours, the former prosecutor running to be Michigan’s next Democratic governor caught up on the news that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy was retiring. “The enormity of it swept over me during the course of this event,” Whitmer says.
In the weeks that followed she released a plan to protect women’s reproductive rights by, among other proposals, repealing the state's law criminalizing abortion that could be enforced if Roe v. Wade is overturned. “If the Supreme Court takes action, we in Michigan have no protections or ability to choose,” she says. “And so we’ve got to change the law, and that means we’ve got to win this governor’s race.”