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What’s going on in the Wolverine State? Establishment politicians and political pundits long ago decided that Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon had virtually no chance of defeating incumbent Democrat Gov.
Gretchen Whitmer.
Now betting markets are still projecting Ms. Whitmer as the winner but a rapid tightening of the polls shows that Ms. Dixon has a lot of company in opposing the draconian Covid lockdowns that comprise Ms. Whitmer’s signature policy.
Ms. Dixon, a cancer survivor and mother with a varied career before seeking office, was seen by many political pros as too inexperienced, too unknown and too Trumpy to beat a well-funded incumbent in a state that
Joe Biden
won in 2020.
Many donors seeking to avoid a loser or ingratiate themselves with a winner made similar judgments. “Democrats run the airwaves in Michigan’s race for governor,” announced an Axios headline just two weeks ago.
Samuel Robinson reported:
Michigan has the widest margin between Republican and Democratic ad spending of any state’s gubernatorial race, according to data from the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.
Incumbent Democrat Gretchen Whitmer is dominating the airwaves, as pro-Democrat ads aired 4,646 times from Sept. 5-18.
Groups supporting challenger Tudor Dixon aired just 19 ads in that same time frame…
Democratic groups supporting Whitmer have reserved $24 million in ads for the governor’s race, while Republicans have reserved just close to $4 million, NBC News reports…
Whitmer is also ahead of Dixon in campaign funding. Dixon’s latest finance report shows her with $523,000 on hand to Whitmer’s more than $14 million.
Yet all of that money hasn’t buried Ms. Dixon. In fact she seems to be surging. Behind by nearly 18 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics polling average in August, she’s now down by just 5.
On Thursday Ms. Dixon focused on the failures at the heart of the Whitmer administration. Beth LeBlanc, Riley Beggin and Craig Mauger of the Detroit News report:
Thursday’s debate… got testy when the candidates sparred over Whitmer’s decision to shutter thousands of businesses during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020 and keep restrictions in place through mid-2021.
Whitmer defended her actions during the pandemic, arguing they saved thousands of lives. The lives that were lost mattered, Whitmer said, and urgent action was needed to limit the toll from the virus.
“If I could go back in time with the knowledge we have now, sure, I would have made some different decisions,” Whitmer said. “But we were working in the middle of a crisis and lives were on the line.”
Dixon argued Whitmer’s response was devastating to the state especially when it came to policies affecting nursing homes, unemployment payments, school policy and business closures.
Tragically for the state and its citizens, Ms. Whitmer neglected to focus on protection of the elderly and instead locked down people who were never at great risk. While the governor may claim that she was making the best decisions that she could at the time, there was ample evidence right from the start that Covid didn’t pose much of a threat to young people. And in any case, while the governor applied some of the country’s most draconian lockdown rules, she didn’t follow them.
Simon Schuster reported for MLive on Ms. Dixon’s takedown of Whitmer governance:
She framed many of her critiques with the COVID-19 pandemic, using the public health crisis as the origin of a cascade of policy failures, from the economy to education.
“Not only did she make bad choices when she closed us down and refused to open our schools, but she hasn’t figured out how to recover,” Dixon said.
The challenger is making the broader point that parents should have a greater say in decisions affecting their kids. Mr. Schuster adds:
“We’ve made it very clear,” Dixon said. “We want parents involved in the child’s education and we want to go back to the basics: making sure our kids know how to read, write and do math. From kindergarten to third grade, they’re learning to read. From third grade on, they’re reading to learn. If they’re missing that crucial step, we’re robbing them.”
As for the incumbent, Thursday’s debate doesn’t seem to have sparked much reflection on whether her assertions of emergency authority were too expansive or whether her emergency orders went too far. The next day Ms. Whitmer made Covid news again.
Ms. LeBlanc of the Detroit News and her colleague Melissa Burke report:
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer vetoed eight bills Friday that would have amended, repealed or limited emergency provisions in several state laws, arguing they would “limit the state’s ability to protect the people we represent.”
… Rep. Julie Alexander, R-Hanover, blasted Whitmer’s veto as blocking “the most basic openness and accountability that Michigan citizens expect from their state government.”
The Detroit News account continues:
Roughly seven months into the pandemic, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled the law underpinning Whitmer’s emergency orders was unconstitutional because it delegated powers exclusive to the Legislature to the executive branch, and allowed the executive branch to exercise those powers indefinitely.
But some emergency restrictions remained in place even after the Oct. 2, 2020 ruling, as Whitmer switched to issuing epidemic orders under the public health code and through her Department of Health and Human Services.
The bills vetoed Friday would have set time frames around the use of emergency powers, would have required state officials to send notice to the Legislature within 24 hours of using some emergency powers and repealed a duplicative statute, Alexander said.
A release from Michigan House Republicans adds:
The governor vetoed House Bills 6184, 6194, and 6195, which would have set reasonable timeframes for specific emergency powers with the possibility of extension by the Legislature — echoing a 28-day period found in the Emergency Management Act, the state’s most prominent emergency powers law.
What could be a more reasonable response to misguided and destructive Covid lockdowns than to ensure that the people’s representatives serve as a check on executive overreach and bureaucratic diktat?
Michigan is already sending a powerful signal by making Gov. Whitmer spend a fortune to hold off an unheralded underdog. Improbable as it may be, if Michiganders elect Ms. Dixon they’ll send a message nationwide that voters want liberty—not lockdowns.
***
James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival.”
***
Follow James Freeman on Twitter.
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