Opinion | How Gretchen Whitmer Met the Moment

At a Detroit union hall in mid-February, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan gathered representatives from local carpenters and construction unions, along with participants in an apprenticeship program, for a round-table event to draw attention to the ways the Biden’ administration has helped organized labor. At every seat around the U-shaped table, there was a flier from Whitmer’s “Fight Like Hell” PAC, but it didn’t address jobs; it was about abortion.

“Donald Trump brags that he was the one who got rid of Roe v. Wade and is marching his party toward enacting a nationwide abortion ban,” it said. When Whitmer spoke, she made sure to hit on reproductive rights, and the economic costs of losing them. “I know in the union hall it’s maybe not the first thing we always talk about,” she said, but when, for over half the population, “the most important economic decision you’ll make in your lifetime is taken away from you, that impacts all of us.”

A month earlier, Whitmer, the co-chair of Joe Biden’s re-election campaign and perhaps his most important Michigan surrogate, told “Face the Nation” that the president should speak more often about abortion, a word he’s been reluctant to use. Now, she was demonstrating how it’s done.

“We’ve got to be comfortable saying abortion is health care, and women deserve health care, and only the woman should be able to make that decision about whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term,” she told me after the union event.

I’d expect Democrats to push Whitmer’s message even harder after Tuesday’s Michigan primary, in which over 13 percent of voters, more than 100,000 people, chose “uncommitted,” largely as a statement of opposition to Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. At a time when the Democratic Party is deeply divided over foreign policy and, to a lesser degree, over immigration, support for abortion rights unites progressives and moderates, if not the culturally conservative Arab and Muslim voters who were trending away from the Democratic Party even before Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7.

Representative Katherine Clark, the House Democratic whip, recently told me she thinks abortion will be “the No. 1 issue” in the election. This new emphasis is quite a turnaround after decades when party leaders treated abortion as a necessary evil and often spoke of it in nervous euphemisms, but it’s the sort of moment a leader like Whitmer seems made for.