DETROIT –Michigan’s primary election for state and local offices isn’t till August 6, and both parties have multiple candidates trying to win nomination for an open U.S. Senate seat.
But it looks very much like voters will end up having a rare choice between two candidates who have considerable experience and are both highly qualified for the job.
That, sadly, is unusual these days — and it shouldn’t be.
Mike Rogers, who has been endorsed by most of the Republican establishment, served in the U.S. House of Representatives from a mid-Michigan district from 2001 to 2015 before leaving voluntarily to try a career in radio. While in Congress, he served a term as chair of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Prior to that, he served in the U.S. Army and was a special agent for the FBI.
Elissa Slotkin, the likely Democratic nominee, is now in Congress and has a national security background, including years spent with the CIA and stints with the state and defense departments.
Both face primary challenges; Rogers from Justin Amash, another former Republican congressman who later became a Libertarian and supported Trump’s impeachment, Sandy Pensler, a Grosse Pointe businessman, and Sherry O’Donnell, a politically unknown osteopath. Slotkin faces a challenge from Hill Harper, the well-known television actor who has a Harvard Law degree and bought a house in Michigan a few years ago.
No election is ever a sure thing, but both parties are solidly behind their front-runners. Should the primary turn out as expected, whoever wins in November will be experienced at government and have proven ability to get things done.
You might think that’s how it should be in any election for statewide or national office. Too often, however, we get candidates who have little idea what they are supposed to do in the job they are seeking. Nobody (at least nobody sane) thinks they could become a surgeon without any medical training or experience.
Nobody thinks they can graduate from law school and immediately become head of a major law firm. So why do people think they can enter the political arena at a high level without any experience in politics and government and be successful?
This is a delusion shared by both Republicans and Democrats. Take Hill Harper, for example, who is challenging Slotkin for the Democratic nomination to Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat. He is an accomplished and charismatic man.
Harper probably believed he could capitalize on his stardom, and resentment by African-American voters. Michigan Blacks have understandably grumbled for years that even though they vote overwhelmingly Democrat, their party, unlike the GOP, has never nominated an African-American for governor or senator.
That argument plays well in Detroit. But, as Bill Ballenger, dean of Michigan political pundits told me, “the Black vote is only 28 to 30 percent of the Democratic primary (total.)
While Harper has taken positions to the left of Slotkin, he hasn’t done much to expand his base, and she has racked up primary endorsements from nearly all the state’s Democratic members of Congress … as well as from former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, a conservative but anti-Trump Republican.
Donald Trump did get elected President without prior political experience, but even with a Republican-controlled Congress during his first two years, failed to get much legislation passed. “I elected him to drain the swamp. He can’t even drain a bathtub,” one disillusioned supporter posted on X (the former Twitter.)
President Biden, whatever you think of his politics and priorities, has been far better at getting his agenda though, even with wafer-thin majorities in Congress his first two years and Republicans controlling the House since January 2023. That’s not my assessment, but that of former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.
Gingrich, who is a Trump supporter, has been saying for months that Republicans have consistently underestimated Mr. Biden and his abilities. “Overall, he has been able to calmly and methodically achieve goals which I don’t agree with … you have to be realistic that these people have been effective,” he told an interviewer for National Public Radio after the 2022 midterm elections.
Focusing on President Biden’s age and running “essentially negative campaigns” failed and will fail again, he said.
Why has Biden done so well? Gingrich didn’t say, but prior to the White House, he spent 36 years in the U.S. Senate and eight as vice-president. He’s won campaigns and lost campaigns. There’s almost no one in politics and no legislative trick he doesn’t know.
New blood is essential too, of course, and it might have made sense for Hill Harper to run instead for a seat in the house. But voters who want someone new and “untainted” by political experience might ask themselves this: If you needed a heart operation, would you want a surgeon in her first week on the job?
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(A version of this column appeared in the Toledo Blade)
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