When Gretchen Whitmer was the opposition leader in the Michigan Senate she would spend her days in pitched battle with her political foes. But when they were done, the Democrat and her Republican counterpart would shut up shop, head to the bar and thrash it all out over a beer.
American politics has become incomparably more polarised in the decade since then, yet Whitmer, now the state governor, still paints herself as a champion of bipartisan understanding and no-nonsense, pragmatic politics.
“The governor is tough,” said Curtis Hertel Jr, her former legislative director and friend for nearly three decades. “I think she is someone who is willing to work across the aisle and get things done.”
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Now, four months before a presidential election, with the ageing Democratic candidate faltering before the eyes of the nation, the 52-year-old mother of five, who Donald Trump derided as “that woman from Michigan”, has been put forward as the fantasy head of a shining new Democratic ticket, one that would push Joe Biden and Kamala Harris away in favour of a new generation and reinvigorate the presidential race.
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“Pass the generational torch, crush Trump, save Democracy, historic 1st female President.
Surge in polls, +6 over Trump. Party delirious with joy,” Mike Murphy, an influential Republican strategist, wrote online, describing his “pitch” for the Democrats to choose Whitmer as the Democratic nominee. “Kamala joins parade. No other choice … Trump crushed. Win House.”
Many others, including Whitmer herself, have forcefully dismissed the idea.
She reportedly called a senior official in the administration to reaffirm her support for Biden when the speculation grew fevered after the president’s disastrous debate against Trump. Yet she also reportedly said that winning Michigan, a swing state that backed Trump in 2016, then Biden in 2020, would be tough this time around. A source close to one of her rivals told Politico that she had said Michigan was no longer winnable — a claim she denied.
“I am proud to support Joe Biden as our nominee and I am behind him 100 per cent in the fight to defeat Donald Trump. Not only do I believe Joe can win Michigan, I know he can because he’s got the receipts,” Whitmer wrote online.
According to the smattering of polls released in the aftermath of the debate, Whitmer does not do much better than Biden against Trump, and many voters have not heard of her. Yet at this stage, the search for a miracle among the Democratic party has grown so intense that she is being touted as a saviour.
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“Her name has been raised a lot more than other governors,” said Matt Grossmann, professor of political science at Michigan State University. “It’s still a very long way from anything happening in that regard, and so it’s mostly just chatter at this point. But it’s consistent with her rising national image and her long-term ambitions.”
In Whitmer’s favour: she is from an important swing state, which Democrats have to retain to defeat Trump. She has a track record of success in winning power for the Democrats in Michigan, including flipping control of the state legislature, and she focuses on issues that voters actually care about, encapsulated by her catchphrase “fix the damn roads”. She’s telegenic, with the fine features and polished mahogany hair of a screen siren from Hollywood’s golden age (“She’s beautiful. It’s important. It shouldn’t be, but it is,” one Michigan voter told me last week).
At a time when maintaining access to abortion is a vital electoral issue for the Democrats, she has defended reproductive freedoms and spoken movingly about her experience of being sexually assaulted at university. She is well-known and popular with a wide section of the state electorate, to the extent that a Detroit rapper gave her the nickname Big Gretch (which she appears less than impressed by). And she speaks in a down-home Midwestern accent.
Against her: she is relatively untested on the national stage. Unleashing a new candidate at this point in the election cycle would be chaotic, and choosing Whitmer over Harris even more so. In Michigan, some voters find Whitmer smug, and many are still furious over the tight controls she imposed during the pandemic, including closing schools.
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She has also said she is not running, and will serve out her term as governor, which ends in 2026. Speaking last week, family friends said that Whitmer had told them that it was a “hard no” to running for president for now, since Trump and his allies would unleash a campaign to bring her down that could hurt those close to her.
Despite the denials, Whitmer does act like someone primed for a presidential run. Last year, she launched Fight Like Hell, a political action committee to raise money for Democratic federal candidates (she is co-chair of Biden’s campaign), and next week her memoir, True Gretch: What I’ve Learned about Life, Leadership and Everything in Between will be published.
Whitmer grew up in East Lansing and Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she and her younger sister Liz (now also a Democratic politician in New York) moved back and forth between their lawyer parents after they divorced. Whitmer’s mother, Sherry, was an assistant attorney-general under Democratic leadership, and her father, Richard, worked for a moderate Republican governor.
“She grew up around politics,” said Richard McLellan, a retired constitutional lawyer who has been active in Michigan politics for over 60 years, and worked with Whitmer’s father, later adding: “So she learned how the government works.”
In the suburbs of Grand Rapids, the young Whitmer is remembered as a mischievous whirlwind who was friends with everyone, and often to be found in the thick of things at parties down by the river near her house.
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“My husband and I had a boat, and we’d go out on the boat and the kids would party,” said Vicki, a Republican and mother of one of Whitmer’s closest schoolfriends, who asked for her surname not be used.
“I thought she was very likeable,” she said. “Just because you’re wild as a teenager doesn’t mean you’re not a good adult.”
According to her forthcoming memoir, Whitmer, when she was 15 or 16, got so drunk at a high school football game that she passed out between two parked cars, where she was found by the principal, Bert Bleke.
“And while I’d like to say that I gathered myself enough to walk away with dignity, I actually threw up on him,” she writes. “Sorry, Mr. Bleke!”
Yet that is not how he remembers it. Reached by phone last week, Bleke said Whitmer never threw up on him, though he added that from what he remembered of her, she would have been “capable of that”.
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“If that did happen, I would remember,” he said. “I don’t think it did happen. It may have been a slight exaggeration.”
Despite her antics at school, Whitmer, he said, was a “great kid” who had a “wide variety of people she got along with”.
“She was always full of mischief, and spent a fair amount of time in my office, but it was always kind of fun stuff and nothing malicious. She just had a lot of energy,” he said. “She was just one of those kids who was bright, was probably bored by a lot of the work she was supposed to be doing in high school, and her outlet was, you know, raising a little Cain.”
Whitmer’s press representative did not provide a comment in response. If she does run for president, every claim about her life, however small, will be stress-tested on the national stage.
After graduating from high school, Whitmer went to Michigan State University and studied communications, with dreams of becoming a television sports commentator. Instead she went on to qualify as a lawyer, then moved into politics in 2000 when she was elected into the Michigan house of representatives.
Her rise through the party and state legislature was, those who know her say, characterised by her toughness, honed by years as the minority leader in the Republican-dominated state senate, and willingness to reach across the aisle.
“She was always in the minority,” said Susy Avery, former chair of the Michigan Republican Party. “I think because of that, she picked up a lot of ways to be aggressive in terms of passing legislation.”
Whitmer has already faced serious consequences from her work. In 2020, the FBI arrested 13 far-right plotters who were suspected of plotting to kidnap and potentially assassinate Whitmer at her holiday home and violently overthrow the state government. Five were later convicted.
In her book, she claims that she wanted to meet the would-be assassins, who talked about knocking on her door and murdering her when she opened it. Threats drove her husband, a dentist, to close his clinic. Her daughters, who are both at university in Michigan, were terrified by the episode.
In politics, Whitmer told an interviewer from The New York Times last month, you need “thick skin and a short memory”. After the plot was foiled by the FBI, she had to keep working with a Republican politician who had shared a stage with some of the would-be kidnappers. But she kept going — negotiating with him to get a state budget through. And she looked forward to the day, she said, where moderate Republicans would fight their way back to the party leadership.
“I miss being able to have thoughtful debates and then ultimately find common ground. I think the average person in this country expects that of us,” she said. “And so I’m hopeful that this is a chapter but not a trajectory.”
