DETROIT – If you had to guess who Michigan’s most nationally famous member of Congress now is, odds are it would be freshman U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Detroit) who made headlines her very first day in office last year by publicly announcing that she’d told her young son “we’re going to go in there and impeach the motherfucker.”
Soon, she became one of the politicians who President Donald Trump and his supporters most love to hate. She was often attacked as one of a “squad” of four radical Democratic congresswomen.
President Trump said at one point that she and the others should “go back” to her home countries, although Tlaib (pronounced Ta-leeb) is an American citizen born in Detroit.
When Israel briefly denied her an entrance visa to see her grandmother last summer, Trump tweeted that the real winner “was Tlaib’s grandmother, because she doesn’t have to see her now!”
That didn’t go over well.
For her part, Tlaib, a 43-year-old lawyer and former state representative, said she was proud to be a member of the “squad,” along with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts.
“I ran to be on the impeachment jury!” she told me.
But can she be re-elected?
On paper, the odds should be heavily against it – and not because she has tangled with President Trump.
Demographically, her first election was something of a fluke. Tlaib represents Michigan’s 13th district – the poorest in the city, and one of the poorest in the nation. It consists of the west side of Detroit, and a handful of most gritty blue-collar suburbs, like River Rouge and Melvindale. Even before the pandemic, many of its residents were unemployed. A third lived below the poverty line.
Two-thirds of her constituents are black or Hispanic. The vast majority are Christian. Rashida Tlaib is a Muslim, the first of 14 children born to parents from Palestine.
This is the district represented by John Conyers for more than half a century, before he resigned at the end of 2017 and later died. The odds were strong the voters would elect another black to succeed him – and two years ago, Brenda Jones, the Detroit City Council President, was the odds-on favorite. She had the support of the United Auto Workers union and Mayor Mike Duggan.
That was in the Democratic primary, which is the real election here, for all practical purposes; Republicans are so weak here that two years ago, they didn’t even bother to field a candidate in November.
There’s little doubt Jones would have won a two-person race that August. But she didn’t get one. Other prominent black candidates jumped in: Coleman Young II, the son of Detroit’s legendary mayor. State Sen. Ian Conyers, the famous congressman’s nephew.
Rashida Tlaib had a solid constituent base from her days representing part of the district in the legislature. Additionally, thanks to her ties to liberal and Arab-American groups, she raised as much money as all her opponents combined. In the end, she beat Jones in a squeaker, 27,841 to 26,941 – a 900 vote margin.
But her winning total was only 31 percent of the vote. There was also a second election that day — one to fill the last two months of John Conyers’ term. Brenda Jones won that race fairly easily, because some of the other black candidates did not contest the short-term race.
That would seem to indicate that if Jones ran again this year, and other African-American candidates stayed out, she would have an excellent chance of beating Rashida Tlaib.
Indeed, this year Brenda Jones is running again – and this time it looks like it may be just her against the freshman congresswoman in the Democratic primary. But what a difference two years makes.
Rashida Tlaib may have angered Republicans nationwide with her feud with Donald Trump, but if anything, that has helped make her a folk hero in her district. She also has, despite her rhetoric on the national stage, regularly returned to Detroit to address constituent concerns, and gotten assignments to committees where she could address them, including Financial Services and Oversight and Reform.
“These are my people; they are who I care about; this is where I belong,” she told me when she was first running, and she doesn’t seem to have forgotten that. Meanwhile, Jones has run into trouble.
Stories last month in a number of media outlets indicated she took campaign contributions from a number of sources doing business with the city, contributions which appear to violate state “pay to play” laws, and which were also larger than the law allows.
Meanwhile, the city council president has had next to no success raising money for another bid for Congress. According to required campaign finance filings, Jones’ campaign committee has only $16,600 on hand for the race, and has debts of $28,381.
On the other hand, Rashida Tlaib has raised more than $2 million, has more than $1.4 million on hand, and no debt.
Two years from now, after Michigan undergoes a difficult redistricting process that includes losing one congressional seat, it is possible that the congresswoman could face a much tougher race.
But based on what’s happened so far, the odds seem good that Michigan’s first Muslim woman in Congress will be going back again.
Editor’s Note: A version of this column appeared in the Toledo Blade.
