Inevitable or unlikely? Michigan Dems choose Whitmer to face Schuette

To hear some Michigan voters tell it, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gretchen Whitmer was foreordained, christened by a Democratic establishment bent on forcing a safe choice on an electorate starved for change. 

That's certainly how some supporters of longshot candidate Abdul El-Sayed, a charismatic progressive who ran a tight campaign and fared a lot better than many expected, framed Whitmer's victory in Tuesday's primary.

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Whitmer claimed an early lead in the race, despite a few outlier polls that showed unrealistically promising results for eccentric billionaire Shri Thanedar. (At midnight Tuesday, Thanedar had won just 16% of the statewide vote.) And despite a late-campaign surge in excitement for El-Sayed, who brought U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders to Detroit for a pre-election rally, Whitmer's win was decisive. With 90% of the vote counted statewide, she'd accumulated 51.6% of ballots cast, to El-Sayed's 31.4% and Thanedar's 16.9%, according to the Associated Press. Whitmer even seems to have won in Detroit, where young progressives hoped El-Sayed had gained a foothold.

In Tuesday's race, Whitmer was the establishment candidate. Expected to win, her victory unsurprising. Inevitable, really, which is one step away from "unavoidable," which isn't a good thing to be. 

It's a dichotomy that's dogged Democratic politics since 2016. It presses the party's voters into the same caricatures that have fractured Democrats since the 2016 primary. And it ignores the hard work that goes into winning any race, the uphill fight ahead of Whitmer or any woman who is a candidate for executive office, and most short-sightedly, the reality of how this race has played out.

In 181 years, Michigan has elected exactly one female governor, something Republican nominee Bill Schuette of course raised on election night, and a horse he surely will not fail to beat past death and November.

Schuette casts Whitmer as the second coming of former Gov. Jennifer Granholm, to whom he assigns sole blame for the national economic crash and Michigan's resulting job loss and population exodus. And for some voters, noting that Whitmer, like Granholm, is a female Democrat, will seem like an excellent point, because this is the world we live in. 

Whitmer announced early and worked hard, locking up institutional support and amassing a campaign war chest. But as late as this January, big-name male Democrats were still hoping to recruit another candidate for the ballot, reportedly asking each other behind closed doors what kind of campaign she'd run, and whether she could win, even after she'd chased all the other hopeful male candidates out of the race. That's also the world we live in. 

And it's also a world in which some Democrats questioned whether Whitmer was progressive enough, surely a surprise for a lawmaker whose tenure in the state Legislature included extending Medicaid to 600,000 Michiganders as part of the Affordable Care Act, sharing a deeply personal story about sexual assault during a successful GOP-led push to bar private insurance from including coverage for abortion services, and siding with protesters against Gov. Rick Snyder's revamp of the state's emergency manager law — you know, the progressive causes establishment Democrats aren't supposed to champion. 

"I never thought people would try to get around me on the left," she told the Free Press editorial board during an endorsement interview last month. 

Inevitable? Maybe. She won, so it's easy to point back and say that was the right lens to view this race through all along. But take a step back, and what Whitmer has accomplished begins to look less inevitable, and more remarkable.

Contact Nancy Kaffer: nkaffer@freepress.com.