Michigan May be a Nightmare for the GOP

The state party’s transformation didn’t start with Trump. But his weak polling could plunge MIGOP into wrack and ruin.

by Jeff Timmer
June 17, 2020 5:30 am

Simon & Garfunkel sang “Michigan seems like a dream to me now” as they went off to look for America. That lyric could well be running through the noggins of those in the Trump campaign and the Republican apparatus come fall, as they hope to reprise Trump’s shocking victory in the state in 2016.

A state that was on very few people’s radar in 2016 has become the center of the political universe this year, as our governor, Gretchen Whitmer, feuds with the president and as legions of political reporters travel to our state’s diners in an attempt to understand what they missed the last time around.

The problem with this renewed focus on Michigan? There’s not much evidence that the hype is real. As it stands today, Trump’s 2016 victory is looking more and more like a fluke, with every intervening election and the 2020 polls looking like a MAGA nightmare. The result is a situation where political campaigns and journalists are fighting the last war out of fear of being embarrassed again, rather than looking at the battlefield as it exists today.

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Much of these off-year and localized GOP gains were offset following Trump’s victory in 2016. In the 2018 midterms, Democrats captured all the statewide offices for the first time since 1986, flipped two congressional seats, netted five seats in both chambers of the state legislature, and gained scores of county and local offices. Traditional GOP strongholds in suburban Detroit and Grand Rapids shifted to the Democrats. Gretchen Whitmer, a former state legislator, bested then-Attorney General Bill Schuette in a landslide, even winning Kent County (Grand Rapids), which had voted for a Democrat for governor just once since the founding of the Republican party in 1856. Rejection of Trump and Trumpism by Michigan voters in the 2018 midterm election left the Republicans at their lowest ebb in the state since 1986, though the GOP retained slim control of both chambers of the legislature.

https://thebulwark.com/michigan-may-be-a-nightmare-for-the-gop/