Whitmer beats back Dixon in Michigan governor’s race

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer defeated Republican Tudor Dixon to win a second term after a campaign that tightened in the waning weeks before the midterms.

Whitmer, a Democrat, led in polls throughout the summer, only to see her lead narrow to single digits in the fall. She also boasted a significant campaign cash advantage in the historic race, which was the first gubernatorial contest between two women in the state.

Dixon, a conservative media personality who has never held public office, won the backing of the DeVos family, a wealthy powerbroker in Michigan Republican politics, during a chaotic primary season where five candidates were knocked off the ballot amid fraud allegations.

Former President Donald Trump endorsed Dixon in July, a few months after she’d falsely asserted that Trump had won Michigan in the 2020 presidential race and days before she dodged the question during a Fox News appearance.

Abortion rights dominated the race. The fall of Roe v. Wade brought attention to a 1931 state ban on the procedure that was still on the books and ready to go into effect before it was blocked in court this summer. And voters were also prompted to weigh in on a ballot measure to enshrine abortion rights into the Michigan Constitution.

In their first debate, both candidates said they would honor the results of the ballot initiative while accusing each other of lying about that promise.

Whitmer sought to tie abortion rights to Michigan’s future economic prosperity, arguing that, if voters codified them into the state constitution, state businesses would be in prime position to poach workers from neighboring states like Indiana and Ohio with strict abortion limits.

“Go to Purdue and talk to every woman engineer, as well as Ohio State, and bring them to Michigan, where you can have full rights to make your own decisions about your health and your body and a great job,” Whitmer said last month.

Dixon focused her campaign on a “responsible reduction” in the state’s 4.25 percent individual income tax and to cut state regulations by 40 percent over four years, though it was unclear what rules she’d target for elimination.

The Republican also embraced conservative rhetoric echoing in several other races across the country about LGBTQ rights in schools, claiming that Michigan students were being taught “sex and gender theory, and not … to read, write and do math.”

Dixon criticized Whitmer’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, namely restrictions on businesses and school closures that the Republican said hurt the state’s economy.

“This governor’s state policies are radical, dangerous and destructive,” Dixon said during the pair’s first gubernatorial debate last month. “Crime is up, jobs are down, schools are worse and” — referencing a viral 2018 campaign promise by Whitmer — “the roads didn’t get fixed.”

Whitmer insisted the state was making progress on improving infrastructure.

“We are fixing the damn roads,” she said during the Oct. 13 debate. “We are moving dirt.”

And Whitmer defended her pandemic-era policies, recalling the level of death and uncertainty in the early days of the disease’s grip on the state and the nation.

A foiled 2020 kidnapping plot — which Dixon mocked on the campaign trail in September — was spurred in part from anger over pandemic-related lockdowns.