Election 2022- Michigan Analysis

The recent finger-pointing by Tudor Dixon and Michigan’s Republican Party as to who is to blame for her loss to incumbent Democrat Gretchen Whitmer is laughable. But let’s get back to that in a bit. By the way, she lost by almost 10 points and 500,000 votes.

Similarly, Democrat Secretary of State Benson beat conspiracy-addled election denier Karamo by an even bigger margin of 14 points and over 600,000 votes. Popular firebrand Democratic attorney general Dana Nessel defeated criminal Deperno by 9 points and a narrower vote of just over 375,000. (It’s a sad state of affairs that the Republican Party voters supported a guy for state AG with documented fraud and criminal activity as an attorney! Mind-boggling)![1]

I now turn to the state legislature, but rather than go district by district, since preliminary results indicate that the Democrats will control both chambers and for the first time give Democrats a “trifecta” — in which one party holds both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s office. (As an aside, you can look at a graphic of control in Michgian from 1991 to 2022 [2] in which Republicans had trifecta control for 14 of 31 years and during that time always controlled the state senate).

State senate control prior to Nov2022 was Republicans 22–16 in the 38 member chamber.
State House control prior to Nov2022 was Republicans 56–53 in the 110 member chamber. (one seat was vacant)

After the 2016 election, I looked at the vote totals for our state’s US House delegation. At the time, we had fourteen representatives in Congress. Republicans sent nine to the Democrats five. Yet,adding up the votes for all Republicans vs. all Democrats, I found that the aggregate total for Democrats was approximately 52% to 48% yet the Republicans won more seats due to gerrymandering.

This election cycle however, is new territory. Not only have voters re-aligned to some extent, the states non-partisan commission drew new, fairer districts designed to be competitive. Let’s see how that played out.

Let’s look at the state house first. Total votes for all 110 Democrats equal 2,160,309 versus Republican’s 2,102,443, (a gap of 57,866 votes at 1.36% difference).
A similar vote total is seen in the state senate races with Democratic to Republican votes at 2,183,727 versus 2,122,018 (a 61,709 vote gap and 1.43% difference).

While some of the districts had wide swings of victory with one candidate defeating the other by wide margins of 60-something percent to 30-something percent, overall, the results of the election reflect the new representative totals in the legislature.

At the federal level, the race for the US House seats (which is now 13 representatives) Democrats aggregate vote totals were 2,184,504 vs. Republican 2,083.361. This is a vote difference of 101,143 and 2.37%. Results of the races show Michigan sending a similarly reflected number with Democrats sending seven to Congress versus six Republicans.

All in all, the redistricting appears to have done just what voters wanted- make the races competitive and reflective of the votes the parties received.

Interestingly, the “districted” races were, in aggregate, much closer than the statewide races as was illustrated above with the numbers for governor, AG, and SOS. Other statewide numbers to consider were our recent US Senator elections. Gary Peters defeated his Republican challenger John James by just under 100,000 votes in 2020, though still a win for the Democrats. James also ran against Michigan’s other senator, Debbie Stabenow in 2018 and lost by 275,000 votes. (Third time was the charm for James winning a congressional district this year).

So back to the Republican circular firing squad. Party leaders claimed Dixon didn’t have an effective campaign organization and she claims they undermined her campaign. Her allegation is ludicrous. The Republican Party was drooling like a hound with a bone thinking they might take Whitmer out of office. While I don’t have the expertise to validate their claim on her campaign, one thing is clear: She ran on typical Republican policies and platform. She light-touched her affiliation with Trump and focused on standard Michigan Republican policies: Undermining public education, destructive tax cuts and cutting regulation. She pandered to tough on crime crowd and election “integrity” pablum. As a typical Republican who advocated tax cuts, she also advocated road repairs and other programs for which she had no documented means to pay for them especially after cutting taxes. She ran as a no-exceptions anti-abortion advocate and a strong pro-gun candidate. And she railed about pandemic lockdowns.

These were all standard, classic Republican Party positions.

Not only did voters rebut her positions versus Whitmer, they rebutted the entire Republican Party policies not only up and down the ballot, but also with specific votes on the two proposals which modified out state constitution.

Proposal 3 enshrined reproductive freedom into the state constitution refuting the Republican’s anti-abortion positions. The obvious catalyst for this was the US Supreme Court overturning the precedent of Roe v Wade and throwing all abortion rights and laws back to the states.

Proposal 2 further protected voting rights from manipulation by vote suppressing Republican initiatives refuting their arguments on “election security.”

Even Proposal 1, which largely dealt with financial disclosures by legislators refuted Republican actions to block the attempt at financial transparency that some Democrats had initiated legislation to cover.

The last time Republicans lost in a big way, they performed an autopsy and came up with some recommendations to correct for the loss- though they promptly ignored these recommendations. This time the MiGOP isn’t even doing that. They are infighting to assign blame and literally ignoring the fact that the voters DO NOT LIKE THEIR POLICIES.

[1]
https://mielections.us/election/results/2022GEN_CENR.html

[2]
https://ballotpedia.org/Party_control_of_Michigan_state_government