Whitmer Is Showing Biden How It's Done

The New York Times

OPINION

MICHELLE GOLDBERG

The Democrat Showing Biden How It’s Done

March 1, 2024

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

At a Detroit union hall in mid-February, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan gathered representatives from local carpenters and construction unions, along with participants in an apprenticeship program, for a round-table event to draw attention to the ways the Biden administration has helped organized labor. At every seat around the U-shaped table, there was a flier from Whitmer’s Fight Like Hell PAC, but it didn’t address jobs; it was about abortion.

“Donald Trump brags that he was the one who got rid of Roe v. Wade and is marching his party toward enacting a nationwide abortion ban,” it said. When Whitmer spoke, she made sure to hit on reproductive rights, and the economic costs of losing them. “I know in the union hall it’s maybe not the first thing we always talk about,” she said, but when, for over half the population, “the most important economic decision you’ll make in your lifetime is taken away from you, that impacts all of us.”

A month earlier, Whitmer, the co-chair of Joe Biden’s re-election campaign and perhaps his most important Michigan surrogate, told “Face the Nation” that the president should speak more often about abortion, a word he’s been reluctant to use. Now, she was demonstrating how it’s done.

“We’ve got to be comfortable saying abortion is health care, and women deserve health care, and only the woman should be able to make that decision about whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term,” she told me after the union event.

I’d expect Democrats to push Whitmer’s message even harder after Tuesday’s Michigan primary, in which over 13 percent of voters, more than 100,000 people, chose “uncommitted,” largely as a statement of opposition to Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. At a time when the Democratic Party is deeply divided over foreign policy and, to a lesser degree, over immigration, support for abortion rights unites progressives and moderates, if not the culturally conservative Arab and Muslim voters who were trending away from the Democratic Party even before Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7.

Representative Katherine Clark, the House Democratic whip, recently told me she thinks abortion will be “the No. 1 issue” in the election. This new emphasis is quite a turnaround after decades when party leaders treated abortion as a necessary evil and often spoke of it in nervous euphemisms, but it’s the sort of moment a leader like Whitmer seems made for.

There are many reasons that people regularly fantasize about Whitmer replacing Biden on this year’s ticket, and, assuming that doesn’t happen, see her as a likely presidential prospect in 2028. (She insists she’s not interested, but few seem to believe her.) Whitmer is the popular and telegenic leader of a must-win state with a long record of accomplishments, including passing gun safety laws and an ambitious clean energy plan, as well as repealing anti-union “right to work” legislation. When Biden visited Macomb County, Mich., last month to accept the United Auto Workers endorsement, he called her “the best governor in the country.” That might have been a controversial statement — there are, after all, lots of other ambitious Democratic governors — if it didn’t seem so obviously true.

Whitmer manages the neat trick of coming off as both an edgy progressive pugilist and a stolid Midwestern pragmatist. When she was feuding with Trump over pandemic lockdowns, the Detroit rapper Gmac Cash dropped a track dubbing her “Big Gretch,” a nickname that’s stuck. (“All that protestin’ was irrelevant/Big Gretch ain’t tryna hear y’all or the president.”) But as much as the far right abhors Whitmer — nine men are in prison for a plot to kidnap and possibly assassinate her — in her 2022 re-election bid, she won several counties that had gone for Trump two years earlier, including Macomb, historically seen as a bellwether of national political sentiment.

Perhaps the most important thing about her right now, though, is her fierce defense of abortion rights and her comfort talking about the subject at a time when it’s moved to the molten center of American politics. When the Supreme Court decision scrapping Roe, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, came down in June 2022, Michigan still had a 1931 abortion prohibition on the books. Whitmer led the way in making sure it never went back into effect, campaigning hard for a 2022 ballot measure making abortion a state constitutional right. Jessica Mackler, interim president of Emily’s List, said that at a moment when women in Michigan, as well as much of America, didn’t know if they were about to lose their bodily autonomy, and with it the power to shape their own lives, “Gretchen Whitmer was the leader who was standing there saying, ‘I’m going to fight like hell and protect these rights for you.’”

Whitmer first shot to national prominence in 2013, when, as minority leader in the Michigan Senate, she spoke against a bill requiring women to purchase a separate rider if they wanted abortion covered by their health insurance. Democrats called the bill “rape insurance,” and in denouncing it on the Senate floor, Whitmer revealed that she’d been raped in college. “I can’t imagine going through what I went through and then having to consider what to do about an unwanted pregnancy from an attacker,” she said, adding, “I think you need to see the face of the women you are impacting by this vote today.” The bill passed anyway, though 10 years later, as governor, Whitmer would sign its repeal.

When Roe v. Wade was overturned, as The Washington Post’s Ruby Cramer reported, Whitmer immediately rushed to tell her daughters, Sherry and Sydney, treating the ruling as a family crisis as well as a political one. “The Whitmer family has been in Michigan for five generations,” wrote Cramer. But, Cramer continued, without the right to control their reproductive destinies — and, in the case of Whitmer’s eldest, who is gay, to marry — “they will probably settle their lives elsewhere.”

That year, running for re-election in tandem with the campaign for a constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights, Whitmer held round tables on the subject all over the state. The issue, she said, helped her build a coalition that included moderate Republican women. In our interview, she described the sort of things they told her: “I’ve never voted for a Democrat. I never thought I’d vote for you. But I’m out knocking doors for you. Because you have to win because you’re the only one fighting for this, for this freedom for me and my girls.” Now Whitmer must convince those women, as well as disaffected progressives, that Biden has to win for the same reason.

At first glance, this shouldn’t be hard. Abortion, as we’ve seen in the two years since the Supreme Court scrapped Roe v. Wade, is a powerful electoral motivator. This is especially true when it comes to state ballot measures, which let voters separate their support for reproductive autonomy from their party affiliation; abortion rights have proven popular even in very Republican states. But Democrats have also repeatedly outperformed expectations in congressional elections since Dobbs. Just last month, in the race to fill George Santos’s old seat on Long Island, the Democrat Tom Suozzi won by almost eight points, more than polling had predicted. There were several issues at play in that contest, but abortion was a significant one.

The problem for the general election is that, as the left-leaning polling group Data for Progress recently concluded, “Voters do not currently perceive Trump as a threat to abortion rights.” In a February poll, only 24 percent of voters held Trump responsible for state abortion bans. (14 percent blamed Biden for them.) The group’s earlier research found that only 48 percent of voters, and 63 percent of Democrats, believe Trump would attempt a national abortion ban.

For those who follow politics closely, this might seem bizarre, particularly since Trump has boasted about appointing the Supreme Court judges who killed Roe. But voters evidently have a hard time connecting the louche, impious ex-president with the harsh prohibitions his term in office made possible.

Trump obviously wants to keep it that way. As The New York Times has reported, he has privately voiced support for a 16-week federal abortion ban with exceptions for rape, incest and life-threatening emergencies, but publicly, he tries to avoid talking about abortion restrictions, recognizing them as a liability.

A 16-week federal ban, it should be emphasized, is not a moderate position. Even with the exceptions Trump supports, it would impose on the entire country the sort of laws that have forced women in Texas and elsewhere to carry doomed pregnancies to term, and made doctors fearful of treating women having late miscarriages until they’re on the verge of death. (All the even more draconian state bans would almost certainly remain in place.) But Republicans would much rather be talking about second-trimester abortions than, say, fetal personhood laws and whether they can be reconciled with in vitro fertilization.

Democrats, however, believe they still have time to link Trump to the barrage of tragic and maddening stories that have emerged since Dobbs. “For 54 years they were trying to get Roe v. Wade terminated, and I did it, and I’m proud to have done it,” Trump said at an Iowa town hall in January. “Nobody else was going to get that done but me, and we did it, and we did something that was a miracle.” His words, said Mackler of Emily’s List, are “going to be all over the messaging between now and November.”

And since the battle to restore bodily self-determination will stretch beyond that, it’s going to keep reshaping our politics for a long time to come. After the labor round table, Whitmer went down the hall to a conference where a dozen or so volunteers, most of them Black women, were making calls to get out the vote for Biden by talking to Michiganders about abortion rights. “We’re going to fight like hell for our reproductive rights,” Whitmer said to applause. “They’re at risk right now.”

Even women who care deeply about abortion rights sometimes don’t realize this, she said, precisely because Michigan has done so much to protect them. “‘We just secured our rights! They’re at risk again?’” she said, explaining what she sometimes hears from women in the state. “Yes. You get the wrong people in the White House who want to sign a national ban, everything we did last year doesn’t matter.”

Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment. 

A version of this article appears in print on March 2, 2024, Section A, Page 23 of the New York edition with the headline: Whitmer Is Showing Biden How It’s Done.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/01/opinion/gretchen-whitmer-abortion.html