Democrats Are About To Find Out If This Candidate Cracked The Code For Beating Trumpism

TRENTON, Mich. ― Control of the White House and Senate could come down to a relatively small number of undecided voters here in Michigan. Among them are voters who still consider themselves Republican, or lean that way.

During a visit to a campaign office south of Detroit last week, Democratic Senate nominee Elissa Slotkin told canvassers she understood how difficult getting to these voters will be.

“They’re sick of the TV ads, they’re sick of the mailers,” Slotkin said. “And here you come to knock on their door.”

But Slotkin has heard from local Republican officials who say they are tired of Trump’s “chaos,” and from Republican women angry over their party’s attack on reproductive rights. “The window is open,” Slotkin said. “These people are deciding, what am I going to do?”

Democrats are banking on those voters being as receptive as Slotkin says, and on Slotkin being the candidate who can secure their support. At 48, the congresswoman is a rising star in her party and has won three U.S. House elections in tough, Republican-leaning districts. She was such an obvious choice to succeed retiring incumbent Sen. Debbie Stabenow that no high-profile Democrats challenged her nomination.

Slotkin’s formula starts with her well-cultivated, and in some ways well-deserved, image as a more conservative Democrat. She lives in a rural part of the state, on a family farm where she spent part of her childhood. She has a background in national security and worked for presidents in both parties. She isn’t shy about criticizing fellow Democrats, and she’s publicly disavowed progressive slogans like “defund the police” and “abolish ICE.”

But Slotkin has been with her party’s leaders on issues like abortion, health care and taxes ― not just as an ally, but as a vocal champion. She promotes Democrats as the party most committed to protecting American companies and American workers in the face of foreign competition. And she has been a relentless critic of Donald Trump, especially when it comes to issues tied to the future of democracy.

This posture should look familiar, because it’s a lot like the one Kamala Harris has taken into the presidential campaign. That’s not a coincidence: The sitting vice president’s surest path to the presidency lies in winning Michigan plus two other Great Lakes states, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, who together form the electoral “Blue Wall.”

These states have similar political profiles and are full of recently elected Democratic officials who, like Slotkin, have won elections by pursuing a pragmatic, problem-solving agenda while fighting fiercely to stop Trump. That new direction is very much a reaction to his rise, and the void in the common-sense center of American politics Trumpism has left.

But few distill this approach to its essence like Slotkin does. And now that approach is facing what may be its toughest test. Polling averages have Slotkin ahead of her Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, but the margin has shrunk to less than three points.

Slotkin’s success hints at a durable strategy for stopping Trumpism, but only if that strategy works in 2024. And at this point, it’s as easy to construct reasons for why it won’t succeed as it is to feel confident that it will.

Slotkin’s path into public service, as she related it to HuffPost in a recent interview, goes back to her first days in a graduate program at Columbia University in Manhattan, when a fellow student stopped her in the hall to say a small plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Slotkin, who had just returned from studying Arabic and politics in Egypt, immediately suspected terrorism. “There’s no accidentally hitting the World Trade Center,” Slotkin remembered thinking.

Slotkin and her classmates donated blood and volunteered at a nearby hospital expecting wounded victims of the attack — what turned out to be a futile gesture, because there were so few survivors to treat. But Slotkin says that day changed her career trajectory, prompting her to shift from studying global development to studying national security.

A year later, a professor invited her to lunch with a Central Intelligence Agency recruiter, and a year after that she was accepted into the agency. She would go on to three overseas tours in Iraq, then would leave the CIA to work in the State and Defense departments, eventually serving in both the Bush and Obama administrations.

Many Michiganders now know about Slotkin’s bipartisan background, thanks to a biographical campaign ad that was all over the airwaves this spring and summer. They also know her entry into electoral politics traces back to 2017, when she returned to her family’s farm in rural Michigan and watched as Republicans tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Slotkin remembered how insurers had once denied her mother coverage because of an earlier battle with cancer, which they considered a pre-existing condition. The Affordable Care Act, which came to be known as Obamacare, had put an end to that practice, though not before her mother’s cancer returned ― and, in 2011, took her life.

Slotkin says she was furious Trump was trying to take away those insurance protections, and even more furious when she spotted her Republican congressman, Mike Bishop, standing at a Rose Garden ceremony Trump held to celebrate passage of repeal legislation through the House.

When talking about these memories, Slotkin likes to say, “Something in me broke.” She might just as well be speaking about the mood of the country, which turned sharply against Trump during the first year of his presidency. His attempts to repeal Obamacare, his attacks on immigrants, his assault on reproductive health care access ― all of it fueled a political backlash, especially among younger women, some of whom were so angry they decided to run for state or federal office in the next election.

With a few exceptions, these women weren’t looking to push politics to the left so much as they were looking to pull it back from the right. And in Michigan especially, they ran the table in the 2018 midterms, producing a new class of Democratic leaders, including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Rep. Haley Stevens.

Slotkin’s challenge against Bishop was arguably the toughest, given that in 2016 Bishop had won the relatively conservative, heavily rural district by 16 points. But Slotkin proved a skilled messenger and prodigious fundraiser ― talents that came together in a brutal ad, widely aired, that juxtaposed clips of Bishop at the Obamacare repeal rally with home movies of Slotkin’s late mother.

On Election Day, Slotkin beat Bishop by three points.

In office, Slotkin has made plenty of headlines by openly breaking with prominent Democrats. In 2021, she refused to vote for Nancy Pelosi as speaker, saying it was time for a new generation of leadership. Last year, after the Oct. 7 attack on a music festival that killed more then 1,200 Israelis, she criticized fellow Michigan House Democrat Rashida Tlaib for not explicitly condemning Hamas, the group behind the killings, as a terrorist group.

But Slotkin later voted against a broader, GOP-backed censure motion in the House. And among the causes that Slotkin has championed is one many progressives also hold dear: She wants the federal government to negotiate drug prices directly with drugmakers, as other countries do, to make medications more affordable.

She has campaigned on that idea and introduced bills to put it in practice. In 2022, she supported drug negotiation provisions that went into the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed and became law — and which are on their way to making it easier for seniors to pay for some of their prescriptions.

Supporting drug price negotiation is not that politically difficult, to be clear. The idea is enormously popular, even with Republican voters. But that’s a key ingredient in the success of Slotkin and other Democrats like her. Republicans have staked out so many extreme or unpopular positions, like opposition to a policy widely thought to make drugs cheaper, that she can speak up for mainstream Democratic positions without alienating moderate and even some conservative voters.

Nowhere is this dynamic more obvious than on the issue of Trump’s conduct, from the crass to the criminal — a subject that Slotkin brings up all the time, and one that led to what may have been the most iconic moment of her career in the House.

It was in December 2019, when the House was considering whether to impeach then-President Trump over his relationship and interactions with Vladimir Putin. Slotkin announced she would vote yes at a town hall meeting that drew plenty of Trump supporters, including a handful who heckled her from the back throughout.

Slotkin told them she wanted to hear everyone’s views, but only in the context of a civil conversation with her constituents. She then proceeded to make her case for impeachment methodically, leaning heavily on her credentials as a former intelligence officer who knows a threat to national security when she sees one. Slotkin drew frequent, loud applause from the rest of the audience.

“I believe in the voters,” she told HuffPost after that event. “I believe in their decency.”

A year later, she won reelection – increasing her margin from the first race and outperforming Joe Biden, who narrowly lost the district to Trump.

In 2022, when Slotkin faced another tough race, she got the endorsement of Republican Liz Cheney, who at the time was still in Congress and finishing her tenure as co-chair of the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection. Cheney announced she was backing Slotkin in a joint appearance that attracted hundreds.

On Monday, Cheney came back to Michigan to show support for Slotkin’s Senate bid. Less than two weeks earlier, Cheney had been in the state to campaign for another Democrat: Harris.

On paper, Mike Rogers would seem like the kind of Republican who would have crossover appeal of his own.

He is an Army veteran and former FBI agent who served seven terms in the House, the last three as chairman of the intelligence committee, before retiring from Congress in 2015. As representative for Michigan’s 8th, the same district that Bishop would inherit and Slotkin would then win, Rogers “branded himself a center-right institutionalist who put country over party, results over ideology,” Michigan-based political journalist Tim Alberta observed in Politico.

After leaving office, Rogers was openly critical of Trump while he worked as a CNN commentator and (briefly) contemplated a primary challenge to Trump in 2024.

“People are tired of the chaos,” Rogers told CBS News in 2023. “I think they’re ready for a calm, steady helm, where we actually make progress on issues that we have admired for 10 or 15 or 20 years and never quite can get to a conclusion.”

But Rogers opted instead to run for Senate. And to get Trump’s all-important backing, Rogers has made the ritual capitulations, like downplaying the former president’s role in Jan. 6 — which, the day afterwards, Rogers had said Trump provoked.

“You’re damn right you had responsibility for this,” Rogers said at the time.

Nowadays Rogers has a different view: “Well, I didn’t say he was clearly responsible,” he told CNN last week.

Rogers’ low-key style seems out of place in MAGA-land, and it’s hard to tell if his heart is really in it. Jeff Timmer, a former state Republican Party executive director, told HuffPost he thinks signs of Rogers ambivalence just makes him seem less trustworthy.

“He kind of makes these pained faces when he does it,” said Timmer, who now works with The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump activist group . “But it’s just as detrimental to his chances.”

Rogers’ tenure in Congress means he has additional political baggage, including a record of support for national abortion bans. Rogers has tried to defuse the issue by saying he’d respect the will of Michigan’s voters, who in 2022 approved a constitutional amendment enshrining abortion rights.

Slotkin, a longtime defender of abortion rights, has warned voters that Rogers’ record is the true guide to his intentions.

“I am so sick of people who don’t understand women’s health, who don’t understand reproductive rights … saying one thing and doing another,” Slotkin said during a televised debate with Rogers. “Michiganders, do not believe him. He will not protect you.”

Slotkin has also focused on Rogers’ opposition to giving the federal government the power to negotiate pharmaceutical prices — not just to highlight his record on a key pocketbook issue, but to make a broader point about his priorities.

She regularly invokes the fact that after leaving the House in 2015, Rogers accepted lucrative positions on corporate boards and moved to Florida, where he lived until he returned to Michigan for the Senate race.

But the race is still close. Rogers has hammered Slotkin over immigration, arguing that voters can trust him on border control because of his background in law enforcement. And he has blamed high consumer prices on inflation unleashed by Slotkin-approved federal spending.

These are the same arguments Republicans elsewhere are making. A tell-tale sign they are working in Michigan is that Slotkin always acknowledges them — “the No. 1 issue I hear about is inflation,” she said during another televised debate — before defending her record and ideas.

Rogers has also put questions about transgender people front and center in his campaign. On the day before the Republican primary in August, Rogers appeared alongside Trump’s former education secretary, Betsy DeVos, and Riley Gaines, the swimmer and anti-transgender activist. At the event, he signed a pledge to support bills that would exclude trans people from “female opportunities and private spaces.”

This too echoes Republican attacks on trans people and their inclusion in public life, both in the presidential race and down-ballot races across the country. And while Democratic campaign officials say their polling suggests only the most conservative voters are motivated by trans-related issues, the GOP’s goal in focusing on trans people may be something harder to measure: painting the Democrats as out of touch with mainstream America.

During the HuffPost interview, Slotkin acknowledged that the Republican arguments about transgender athletes in particular resonate with plenty of Americans who don’t identify as conservative — including, she said, constituents who have pulled her aside to say, “I’m a lifelong Democrat, but I’m just not down with these issues.”

But Slotkin, who said she played three sports in high school, is quick to condemn the GOP’s anti-trans crusade.

She agrees transgender and cisgender athletes’ biological differences could affect competition. But, she said, it depends on the sport (“badminton is different than football”) and she thinks decisions about guidelines are best left to leagues and sponsoring organizations themselves, as they were before conservative agitators seized on the issue.

Republicans are just “playing on people’s fears,” Slotkin said. “It’s purposely trying to make you afraid, when in reality, this is something that individual schools and individual sports are managing.”

Slotkin added that the Republican attacks on transgender athletes feel to her a lot like “bullying children.” It’s something that hits home, she says, because her mother was gay and her brother was bullied in school when word got out.

Slotkin can’t take Democratic base voters’ support for granted, That’s especially true when it comes to U.S. policy towards Israel amid its war in Gaza, an issue already alienating members of Michigan’s large Arab American community and progressive students on the state’s big college campuses.

Slotkin calls the humanitarian situation in Gaza “abysmal” and said it was “sick” to suggest, as Israel’s far-right finance minister did this summer, that it would be OK to withhold food aid as leverage for the return of Israeli hostages. Slotkin has also warned about Israel repeating the mistakes she saw the U.S. make while serving in Iraq, when the military’s post-9/11 victories created more enemies.

“The way you prosecute the war often has a bigger impact on your long-term security than any one strike,” Slotkin told HuffPost, reiterating her public calls for a negotiated ceasefire.

But Slotkin is also unequivocal that Israel had a right to respond against Hamas militarily, telling HuffPost, “The idea that a country wouldn’t go after terrorists and killers who massacred and raped people is insane.” She went on to say that some civilian casualties were inevitable, and that “it really pisses me off that the media and lots of other folks don’t give any responsibility for [the war and its effects] to Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran.”

On Capitol Hill, Slotkin has voted to support continuing aid to Israel, though she has said she would consider making future aid conditional on Israel increasing humanitarian relief for Gazans.

Slotkin’s posture towards Israel is the reason the Arab American Political Action Committee announced earlier this month it was forgoing an endorsement in the Senate race, just as it was in the presidential. “We ask our community to not vote for either Democrat Elissa Slotkin or Republican Mike Rogers,” the group said. “Frankly, they are both warmongers and do not deserve your vote.”

Slotkin has also popped up in digital ads that portray Slotkin, who is Jewish, as an unflinching ally of Israel. The ads look like they are promoting Slotkin. In reality, the ads come from a Republican-aligned political organization and are running in areas with large numbers of Arab American and progressive voters — in other words, the would-be Democratic voters most likely to turn on Slotkin because of Israel.

The prospect of losing even some of these voters is meaningful in such a closely divided state. But Gaza was also an issue in the 2024 Democratic Senate primary — or, at least, it could have been.

Her one serious opponent, actor Harper Hill, was more critical of Israel than she has been. And as a youngish Black actor and Detroit native with a history of activism, he had potential to run up big numbers with progressives and Black voters. At one point, Politico reported, a wealthy donor offered Hill $20 million to drop his Senate bid.

But the race never became competitive. Slotkin had an enormous fundraising advantage and used it to blanket the state with ads. She also secured early endorsements from Black leaders in Michigan’s big cities, undercutting Hill’s appeal there. Slotkin ended up winning with 75% of the vote.

It’s possible the Senate race could come down to another issue of particular importance to Michiganders: electric vehicles and the future of the auto industry.

Rogers has hammered what he calls the Democratic “EV mandate” ― the combination of tighter emission standards and subsidies to support the production and purchase of EVs that became law under Biden. As Rogers tells it, these efforts will force Michigan-based automakers to make unprofitable vehicles that too few people will want, while subsidizing Chinese companies who already produce compliant vehicles and their parts.

“I think this may be the worst-designed, worst-implemented idea that I’ve ever seen,” Rogers said at a recent lunch event in one of the northern Detroit suburbs.

This has also been Trump’s argument, going back to when he was running against Biden. It’s not hard to see why it might resonate, given memories of American carmakers moving operations to other countries following free trade agreements that so many corporate and political leaders — including some former Democratic presidents — said at the time were good for American workers.

Biden’s primary response was to talk about all the new EV factories automakers and suppliers are building, to meet the demand they expect all of that federal support will generate. Slotkin made that argument too — though sometime around the late spring and summer, she took it further.

She started stating more forcefully that she doesn’t want to “mandate” anything, and doesn’t care what anybody drives. But, she said, subsidizing EV production is necessary to make sure American companies can catch up and compete with Chinese competitors, because demand for the vehicles is going to rise no matter what U.S. carmakers do.

“Whether Michiganders want to drive an EV or not is not the question,” Slotkin told HuffPost. “It’s who do we want making the next generation of cars? And I’m on Team USA, not Team China, on that one.”

That appeal to patriotism is not accidental or limited to the way Slotkin talks about the auto industry.

The meeting last week, where Slotkin assured those canvassers Republican-leaning voters were open to voting for a Democrat, took place in Trenton, a small, politically divided city that Trump won by four points in 2020. Many lawns have Trump signs and American flags side by side.

“Wear your patriotism on your sleeve,” Slotkin told the organizers. “Proudly wear that flag, show that flag. The other side, many of them wrap themselves in the flag and then spit on the very thing it represents. They have no ownership, no special possession of the flag. All of you are here because you love your country.”

Lately Harris has been talking the same way in her campaign, wrapping both her promotion of American industry and defense of American democracy in the language of patriotism. It’s all part of the same effort to flip the script on Republicans, so that even more conservative voters come to see Trump and his party as the ones contemptuous of mainstream values.

If the strategy works, Democrats could keep the White House and maybe the Senate, too. And if not? Then Democrats may be out of power completely, and in need of new ideas.