Author name: Victor Skinner

A Democratic majority in the Michigan House flipped on Tuesday to an even bigger majority for Republicans, setting the table for the GOP to investigate Democratic malfeasance next year. Michigan Republicans broke a two-year Democratic government trifecta on Election Day by holding on to seats occupied by vulnerable House Republicans and flipping four seats held by Democrats.

In Michigan House District 27, Republican Rylee Linting leads Democratic incumbent Jamie Churches 51.6%-48.4% with 95% of votes counted, while Republican Ron Robinson holds a seven-point lead over Democratic incumbent Nate Shannon in District 58 with 91.83% of the vote in, the Detroit Free Press reports. Republican Steve Frisbie leads Democratic incumbent Jim Haadsma by 19.4% with just 25.81% of the vote counted in District 44. Democratic incumbent Jenn Hill is also poised to fall to Republican Karl Bohnak in District 109, where Bohnak leads 51.3%-48.7% with 99% of the vote in.

The situation is expected to shift Democrats’ 56-54 majority in the lower chamber to a 58-52 majority for Republicans, according to projections by The Detroit News.

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Is U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg angling to replace Gov. Gretchen Whitmer? It’s a question the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., has repeatedly faced since moving to Michigan with his husband in 2020, two years before Democrats secured a government trifecta for the first time in 40 years.

So far, his silence is speaking louder than his words. “Pete Buttigieg refuses to rule out running for Michigan governor in 2026 – AP,” NewsWire recently posted to X. The move to Michigan transpired a year after Buttigieg and his husband Chasten adopted newborn twins, with a Buttigieg spokesperson telling the Detroit Free Press “moving to Chasten’s hometown of Traverse City allowed them to be closer to his parents, which became especially important to them after they adopted their twins, often relying on Chasten’s parents for help with child care.”

But there’s other political benefits in the battleground state of Michigan that simply aren’t available to a liberal Democrat in Indiana. After a failed presidential run in 2020, the Intelligencer noted Buttigieg had few options in The Hoosier State. “Whatever the personal benefits and the spousal connection, moving to Michigan also happens to place Buttigieg in a red-hot battleground state whose current Democratic governor and two U.S. senators may not stay in their current jobs forever,” the Intelligencer’s Ed Kilgore opined in 2022. “In deep-red Indiana, there was no obvious avenue for higher office for a guy like Buttigieg, which is probably a major reason he ran for president in 2020 instead of climbing a ladder that really wasn’t there.”

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Detroit auto shop owner Michael Murphy supports former President Donald Trump, and he thinks someone with the city has a problem with that. In recent weeks, Murphy told WJBK, political signs he put up outside Pointe Auto Tech on Detroit’s east side have been repeatedly removed, while signs promoting Vice President Kamala Harris nearby have been left untouched.

“A white City of Detroit truck pulling up and taking them,” he said. After the first time the signs were swiped on Oct. 21, “I got some more,” Murphy said, only to have those removed, as well.  “They said I was not allowed to put them between the sidewalk and the curb,” he said. “I have put them there, but I’ve put them against the building and they’ve taken those as well.”

Detroit General Services Director Crystal Perkins confirmed Murphy’s signs were taken down because she claimed they violate the Detroit Sign Ordinance that requires them to be at least five feet back from the sidewalk. When confronted with Harris signs a few blocks from Murphy’s shop that appear to violate the ordinance, Perkins agreed the signs were in violation but denied any double standard.

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Lavora Barnes, chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, was confronted by Forbes  about the bitter opposition from voters concerned about Hamas’ war against Israel and the party’s reluctance to meet demands to call for a permanent ceasefire and halt all military aid to the nation’s closest ally.

Barnes made it clear Democrats have no actual solution, and rely instead on painting Trump as a racist in a misleading comparative analysis. “We talk a lot about the truth of who Donald Trump is. We use his own words a lot of the time to remind folks about the things he’s said about immigrants, the things he said specifically about Muslims, the things he said about he would encourage Netanyahu to double and triple down on the work, the hateful work, that he’s already doing in the region,” Barnes said.

The focus, she said, is “just to let them know that while you may not be happy with where the Biden administration is and you may not yet be comfortable with where a Harris administration would be, either of those are much better for this community and for the world than Donald Trump.”

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Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson recently attacked the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, labeling him an online “troll,” for highlighting an issue that’s fueling distrust and questions about transparency in the 2024 election.

“Michigan has more registered voters than eligible citizens!? Is that true @CommunityNotes?” Elon Musk posted to X, the social media site he owns.

Michigan has more registered voters than eligible citizens!? Is that true @CommunityNotes? https://t.co/f7Q2iCZdQ7

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 19, 2024

The site’s fact checkers responded with a community note that asserts “Michigan plans to remove over 600,000 inactive voters by 2027.”

“The state currently has 8.4 million registered voters, according to the latest records obtained by Bridge Michigan, nearly 500,000 more than the number of people in the state who are old enough to vote,” the note read, linking to the Bridge Michigan analysis. Those facts were immediately countered with election misinformation from Benson, who twisted the data to fit her own narrative.

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When Vice President Kamala Harris was a 24-year-old law student San Francisco, her father, a Marxist economics professor at Stanford University, published a critique of immigration policies hurting black families.

Harris and six of his like-minded colleagues argued in 1988 that “the current immigration policy, which allows relatively large numbers of low-skilled workers to enter the United States” translates into a “burden … on low-skilled native-born workers,” and black families in particular, Restoration News reports. “At the same time that the trends in international trade have moved against U.S. workers, U.S. immigration laws have been modified in ways that increase the influx of low-skilled workers, who compete with native-born youths and low-skilled adult workers for low-skilled jobs,” the pamphlet read. “This shift has been a particularly serious problem for blacks, who constitute a high proportion of the low-skilled adult workers.”

Fast forward 26 years, and Donald Harris’ 1988 pamphlet Black Economic Progress: An Agenda for the 1990s has become even more relevant as his daughter oversees the largest influx of migrants in the nation’s history.

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While Michigan’s finances improved in 2023, it ranked 35th out of 50 states for its “taxpayer burden” in a recent analysis by Truth in Accounting, a nonprofit focused on highlighting government finances. Truth in Accounting’s fifteenth annual Financial State of the States grades states using an A-F grading scale, while providing perspective on finances through each state’s “taxpayer burden,” which is essentially the amount per taxpayer to pay off all of a state’s debt.

With $46.8 billion in available assets to pay bills, and more than $75 billion in bills, “the outcome was a $28.2 billion shortfall, which breaks down to a burden of $7,600 per taxpayer,” according to the report. The bulk of those bills involve more than $39 billion in unfunded pension liabilities.

“Bottom line: Michigan would need $7,600 from each of its taxpayers to pay all of its outstanding bills and received a ‘D’ grade for its finances,” the report reads. “According to Truth in Accounting’s grading scale, any government with a Taxpayer Burden between $5,000 and $20,000 is given a ‘D’ grade.”

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Gov. Gretchen Whitmer contends efforts to keep Stellantis from moving its headquarters out of the Great Lakes State is a “top priority,” though her social media antics raise questions about whether she’s serious.

“We have an open dialogue going on,” Whitmer told Crain’s Detroit Business at the Battery Show at Hunting Place in Detroit this week. “We want to help Stellantis see the wisdom and the opportunities for changing up their headquarters but making sure it stays here in Michigan. That dialogue is robust, continuous, and we’re not going to take our eye off the ball. We want Stellantis to continue to call Michigan home.”

Whitmer is in talks with Carlos Tavares, CEO of the company that produces Jeep, Chrysler, and Dodge, over the possibility of relocating Stellantis’ American headquarters in Auburn Hills. Those conversations follow struggles at Stellantis over the last year, with a UAW strike last September, delays in EV product launches, sputtering sales and significant layoffs this month. The company formed from a merger between Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and Peugeot S.A. in 2020 and its global headquarters is now located in the Netherlands.

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Michigan Republicans scored another legal victory last week when a Michigan Court of Claims judge ordered Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to clarify incomplete election guidance. Last month, the Republican National Committee filed a lawsuit against Benson over improper guidance to local election officials that instructed clerks and election inspectors to process and count bail ballots with missing stub numbers.

On Oct. 3, Judge Brock Swartzle ordered Benson to revise page 7 of her “Election Inspectors’ Procedure Manual” that states “without exposing any votes, the election inspector should verify that the number on the ballot stub agrees with the ballot recorded for the voter in the (Qualified Voter File) Absent Voter List.” The passage, Swartzle ordered, “shall be revised” to read, “Without exposing any votes, the election inspector must verify that the number on the ballot stub agrees with the ballot number on the face of the absent voter return envelope.”

During a hearing in the case, Benson conceded that ballots with mismatched serial numbers could be the result of voter fraud, and the RNC “applauds the finding by the Court requiring … Benson to follow Michigan law requiring ballot number matching,” RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said in a statement.

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