Opinion | What Democrats Can Learn From Gretchen Whitmer

We are deep in the pivotal week of Vice President Kamala Harris’s veepstakes. It is reported that she will make her decision by Aug. 7. And as somebody who wanted to see a sort of mini-primary for Democrats — who made the argument that at the very least, there should be a sort of contest of the vice-presidential candidates and town halls and forums in an organized way — what has emerged in a disorganized way is much more like what I had hoped to see than I’d ever expected.

We’ve been watching Pete Buttigieg and Govs. Tim Walz of Minnesota and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania and Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Andy Beshear of Kentucky fanning out across MSNBC and CNN and social media, demonstrating how they would try to take JD Vance apart in a debate.

One person we have not heard as much from is Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. Whitmer said she is not interested in the vice presidency. At the same time, there was reporting that she was being vetted. She denied that reporting. But Whitmer is an interesting figure for Democrats. She was considered by Joe Biden for vice president in 2020. She has won the governorship of Michigan twice, by significant margins each time. And she made her name nationally when she was the State Senate minority leader fighting against a very anti-abortion bill and she gave a speech on the floor of the Senate revealing — which is something even her own father had not known — that she was raped in college.

After that speech, Whitmer became a national voice on abortion, not just a Michigan voice on it. She became somebody you would see on cable news, somebody the party turned to think about how to talk about this issue.

She won the governorship on a “Fix the damn roads” platform in 2018, and then in 2022 the Dobbs decision came down. She ran for re-election, putting abortion at the center of her campaign. So there’s a lot, I think, to learn from Whitmer’s campaigns here, both in terms of how to run and win in Michigan, which is something Democrats very much need to do this year, and in terms of how to make elections about the thing you want them to be about. She’s also the author of a new book, “True Gretch,” which is a New York Times best seller.