Billionaire hedge fund founder Tom Steyer announced Wednesday that he is running for governor of California, arguing that he is not beholden to special interests and can take on corporations that are making life unaffordable in the state.
“The richest people in America think that they earned everything themselves. Bull—, man. That’s so ridiculous,” Steyer said in an online video announcing his campaign. “We have a broken government. It’s been bought by corporations and my question is: Who do you think is going to change that? Sacramento politicians are afraid to change up this system. I’m not. They’re going to hate this. Bring it on.”
Steyer, 68, founded Farallon Capital Management, one of the nation’s largest hedge funds, and left it in 2012 after 26 years. Since his departure, he has become a global environmental activist and a major donor to Democratic candidates and causes.
But the hedge firm’s investments — notably a giant coal mine in Australia that cleared 3,700 acres of koala habitat and a company that runs migrant detention centers on the U.S.-Mexico border for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — will make him susceptible to political attack by his gubernatorial rivals.
Steyer has expressed regret for his involvement in such projects, saying it was why he left Farallon and started focusing his energy on fighting climate change.
Tom Steyer, who ran for president in 2020, addresses a crowd during a primary election night party in Columbia, S.C.
(Sean Rayford / Getty Images)
Steyer previously flirted with running for governor and the U.S. Senate but decided against it, instead opting to run for president in 2020. He dropped out after spending nearly $342 million on his campaign, which gained little traction before he ended his run after the South Carolina primary.
Next year’s gubernatorial race is in flux, after former Vice President Kamala Harris and Sen. Alex Padilla decided not to run, and Proposition 50, the successful Democratic effort to redraw congressional districts, consumed all of the political oxygen during an off-year election.
In recent years, Steyer has been a longtime benefactor of progressive causes, most recently spending $12 million to support the redistricting ballot measure. But when he was the focus of one of the ads, rumors spiraled that he was considering a run for governor.
In prior California ballot initiatives, Steyer successfully supported efforts to close a corporate tax loophole and to raise tobacco taxes, and fought oil-industry-backed efforts to roll back environmental law.
His campaign platform is to build 1 million homes in four years, lower energy costs by ending monopolies, make preschool and community college free and ban corporate contributions to political action committees in California elections.
Steyer’s brother Jim, the leader of Common Sense Media, and former Biden administration U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy are aiming to put an initiative on next year’s ballot to protect children from social media, specifically the chatbots that have been accused of prompting young people to kill themselves. Newsom recently vetoed a bill aimed at addressing this artificial intelligence issue.
Celebrated for decades as Hollywood royalty, Jane Fonda could easily be living a comfortable life of extravagance and leisure.
Instead, the 87-year-old actor and Vietnam War-era provocateur is as likely to be seen knocking on voters’ doors in Phoenix on a balmy summer afternoon as sashaying down a red carpet at a glitzy movie premiere.
Politically active for more than a half-century, Fonda is now focusing her energy, celebrity, connections and resources on fighting climate change and combating the “existential crises” created by President Trump.
Calling fossil fuels a threat to humanity, Fonda created JanePAC, a political action committee that has spent millions on candidates at the forefront of that fight.
“Nature has always been in my bones, in my cells,” Fonda said in a recent interview, describing herself as an environmentalist since her tomboy youth. “And then, about 10 years ago … I started reading more, and I realized what we’re doing to the climate, which means what we’re doing to us, what we’re doing to the future, to our grandchildren and our children.
“Our existence is being challenged all because an industry, the fossil-fuel industry, wants to make more money,” she said. “I mean, I try to understand what, what must they think when they go to sleep at night? These men, they’re destroying everything.”
Rather than hosting fancy political fundraisers or headlining presidential campaign rallies, Fonda devotes her efforts to electing like-minded state legislators, city council members, utility board officials and candidates in other less flashy but critical races.
Fonda said her organization took its cue from successful GOP tactics.
“I hate to say this, but you know, in terms of playing the long game, the Republicans have been better than the Democrats,” she said. “They started to work down ballot, and they took over state legislatures. They took over governorships and mayors and city councils, boards of supervisors, and before we knew what had happened, they had power on the grassroots level.”
Fonda said her PAC selects candidates to back based on their climate-change record and viability. The beneficiaries include candidates running for state legislature and city council. Some of the races are often obscure, such as the Silver River Project board (an Arizona utility), the Port of Bellingham commission in Washington and the Lane Community College board in Oregon.
“Down ballot, if you come in, especially for primaries, you can really make a difference. You know, not all Democrats are the same,” she said. “We want candidates who have shown public courage in standing up to fossil fuels. We want candidates who can win. We’re not a protest PAC. We’re in it to win it.”
Since her birth, Fonda’s life has been infused by political activism.
Her father, the late actor Henry Fonda, witnessed the lynching of a Black man during the 1919 Omaha race riots when he was 14, casting him into becoming a lifelong liberal.
Though such matters were not discussed at the dinner table, Fonda’s father raised money for Democratic candidates and starred in politically imbued films such as “The Grapes of Wrath,” about the exploitation of migrant workers during the Dust Bowl, and “12 Angry Men,” which focused on prejudice, groupthink and the importance of due process during the McCarthy era.
But his daughter Jane did not become politically active until her early 30s.
“Before then, I kind of led a life of ignorance, somewhat hedonistic,” she said. “Maybe deep down, I knew that once I know something, I can’t turn away.”
In “Prime Time,” Fonda’s 2011 memoir, she describes the final chapter of her life as a time of “coming to fruition rather than simply a period of marking time, or the absence of youth.”
“Unlike during childhood, Act III is a quiet ripening. It takes time and experience, and yes, perhaps the inevitable slowing down,” she wrote. “You have to learn to sort out what’s fundamentally important to you from what’s irrelevant.”
In 1972, Fonda appeared in Jean-Luc Godard’s film “Tout Va Bien,” about workers’ rights in the aftermath of widespread street protests in France four years earlier. It was her first role in a political movie and coincided with her off-screen move into activism.
Fonda’s most noteworthy and reviled political moment occurred the same year, when she was photographed by the North Vietnamese sitting atop an antiaircraft gun.
Actor and political activist Jane Fonda at a news conference in New York City on July 28, 1972. Fonda spoke about her trip to North Vietnam and interviews with American prisoners in Hanoi, Vietnam.
(Marty Lederhandler / Associated Press)
The images led to Fonda being tarred as “Hanoi Jane” and a traitor to the United States, which had deployed millions of American soldiers to Southeast Asia, many of whom never returned. Fonda says it is something she “will regret to my dying day.”
“It is possible that it was a setup, that the Vietnamese had it all planned,” Fonda wrote in 2011. “I will never know. But if they did, I can’t blame them. The buck stops here. If I was used, I allowed it to happen. It was my mistake.”
Fonda’s political beliefs have been a through line in her Hollywood career.
In 1979, she played a reporter in “The China Syndrome,” a film about a fictional meltdown at a nuclear power plant near Los Angeles. The movie’s theatrical release occurred less than two weeks before the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania.
The 1980 movie “9 to 5,” starring Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton, was a biting comedy that highlighted the treatment of women in the workplace and income inequality long before such issues were routinely discussed in workplaces.
Dolly Parton, left, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda are harassed office workers in the 1980 movie “9 to 5.”
(20th Century Fox)
Two years later, as home VCRs grew popular, Fonda created exercise videos that shattered sales records.
She urged women to “feel the burn,” and revenue from the videos funded the Campaign for Economic Democracy, a political action committee founded by Fonda and Hayden.
This year, Fonda offered signed copies to donors to JanePAC, which she created in 2022.
“I’m still in shock that those leg warmers and leotards caught on the way they did,” Fonda wrote to supporters in April. “If you’ve ever done one of my leg lifts, or even thought about doing one, now’s your chance to own a piece of that history.”
UCLA lecturer Jim Newton, a veteran Los Angeles Times political journalist and historian of the state’s politics, described Fonda as confrontational, controversial and unapologetic.
“She’s remarkable, utterly admirable, a principled person who has devoted her life to fighting for what she believes in,” said Newton, who quotes Fonda in his new book, “Here Beside the Rising Tide: Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, and an American Awakening.”
Newton added that Fonda’s outspoken nature certainly harmed her career.
“I’m sure that there are directors, producers, whatnot, especially in the ‘70s and ‘80s, who passed on chances to work with her because of her politics,” he said. “And I’m sure she knew that, right? She did it. It’s not been without sacrifice. She’s true to herself, like very few people.”
A year after Fonda and Hayden divorced in 1990, she married CNN founder and philanthropist Ted Turner, who she once described as “my favorite ex-husband.” Though Fonda largely paused her acting career during their decade-long marriage, she remained politically active.
In 1995, Fonda founded a Georgia effort dedicated to reducing teenage pregnancy. Five years later, she launched the Jane Fonda Center for Reproductive Health at Emory University.
After Fonda and Turner divorced, she worked with Tomlin on raising the minimum wage in Michigan and then launched Fire Drill Fridays — acts of civil disobedience — with Greenpeace in 2019.
Jane Fonda speaks during a rally before a march from the U.S. Capitol to the White House as part of her “Fire Drill Fridays” rally protesting against climate change on Nov. 8, 2019.
(Alex Wong / Getty Images)
Fonda said she decided to create her political action committee after facing headwinds persuading Gov. Gavin Newsom to create setbacks for oil wells in 2020.
“He wasn’t moving on it, and somebody very high up in his campaign said to us, ‘You can have millions of people in your organization all over California, but you don’t have a big enough carrot or stick to move the governor. … You don’t have an electoral strategy,’” Fonda recalled. “Since we’ve started the PAC, it’s interesting how politicians deal with us differently. They know that we’ve got money. They know that we have tens of thousands of volunteers all over the country.”
Initially concentrated on climate change, JanePAC has expanded its focus since Trump was reelected in November.
“We’re facing two existential crises, climate and democracy, and it’s now or never for both,” Fonda said. “We can’t have a stable democracy with an unstable climate, and we can’t have a stable climate unless we have a democracy, And so we have to fight both together.”
Fonda’s PAC has raised more than $9 million since its creation through June 30, according to the Federal Election Commission.
In 2024, JanePAC supported 154 campaigns and won 96 of those races. The committee gave nearly $700,000 directly to campaigns and helped raise more than $1.1 million for their endorsed candidates and ballot measures. In 2025, they have endorsed 63 campaigns and plan to soon launch get-out-the-vote efforts in support of Proposition 50, Newsom’s ballot measure to redraw California’s congressional districts that will appear on the November ballot.
Arizona state Rep. Oscar De Los Santos, the minority leader in the state’s House of Representatives, recalled Fonda’s support during the 2024 election, not only for his reelection bid but also a broader effort to try to win Democratic control of the state Legislature.
In addition to raising $500,000 at a Phoenix event for candidates, De Los Santos recalled the actor spending days knocking on Arizona voters’ doors.
“It is a moral validator to have Jane Fonda support your campaigns, especially at a time when corporate interests have more money and more power than ever, having somebody in your corner who’s been on the right side of history for decades,” said De Los Santos, who represents a south Phoenix district deeply affected by environmental justice issues.
Voters are often stunned when Fonda shows up on their doorstep.
“I’ve had people walking out of their laundry room and dropping all the laundry,” Fonda said with a laugh.
But others don’t know who she is and Fonda doesn’t tell them.
Jane Fonda
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
“It’s amazing. You wouldn’t think that in just a few minutes on someone’s doorstep, you can really find out a lot,” Fonda said, recalling discovering her love of canvassing when she was married to Hayden.”I loved talking to people and finding out what they care about and what they’re scared of and what they’re angry about.”
Fonda does not walk in lockstep with the Democratic party. In 2023, she joined other climate-change activists protesting a big-money Joe Biden fundraiser. They argued that the then-president had strayed from the environmental promises he made when he ran for election, such as by approving a massive oil drilling project on the North Slope of Alaska.
Fonda said she supported Biden’s 2024 reelection despite disagreeing with some of his policies because of the threat she believed Trump poses.
“When you see what the choice was, of course you’re going to vote,” she said. “I get so mad at people who say, you know, ‘I don’t like him, so I’m not going to vote.’ [A] young person said to me, we already have fascism. They don’t know history. You know, we don’t teach civics anymore, so they don’t understand that what’s happening now is leading to fascism. I mean, this is real tyranny.”
But she also faulted Biden and then-Vice President Kamala Harris after she became the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee, as well as 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, for failing to speak to the economic pain being experienced by Americans who backed Trump.
“They’re not all MAGA,” she said.
Many were just angry and hurting, she said, because they couldn’t afford groceries or pay medical bills. Fonda believes many now have buyer’s remorse.
Fonda reflected on the parallels between the turmoil in the 1960s and today. In the interview, which took place before the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, she argued that today’s political climate is more perilous.
“I’m not sure that what we have right now in the U.S. is a democracy,” she said. “It’s far graver. Far, far graver now than it was.”
Fonda said she remains driven, not by blind optimism, but by immersing herself in work that she believes makes a difference.
“This is what I’m going to be doing for the rest of my life,” she said.
A legal fight over Elon Musk’s $1 million-a-day voter sweepstakes is back in state court in Pennsylvania, a loss for the billionaire, after a federal judge said Friday that he doesn’t have jurisdiction.
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner wants to keep his fight to shut down the giveaways in state court, calling it a violation of state lottery laws. Musk had argued that the case belonged in federal court as it involves claims of federal election interference. A judge scheduled a hearing for 10 a.m. Monday. It wasn’t immediately clear whether Musk would attend though Krasner previously argued that Musk should have to appear in court.
Musk’s political organization, which aims to boost Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, has organized the sweepstakes as a way of encouraging people to be registered voters in key battleground states.
With just days to go until Tuesday’s presidential election, the case now returns to Judge Angelo Foglietta, who held a brief hearing Thursday in a courtroom at Philadelphia City Hall. No further hearings were immediately scheduled.
U.S. District Judge Gerald J. Pappert, a Republican former Pennsylvania attorney general appointed to the federal bench by President Barack Obama, issued Friday’s ruling.
“Defendants argue the complaint’s references to ‘the forthcoming Federal Presidential Election’ show the lawsuit necessarily raises questions of federal law. But federal question jurisdiction does not turn on a plaintiff’s motivations in filing suit; it turns on whether the legal issues arising from the claims originate in federal or state law,” Pappert wrote.
Krasner lawyer John Summers, in a statement, said he will now ask Foglietta “to enter an injunction to stop the defendants’ lottery and the defendants’ unfair and deceptive practices.” Matthew Haverstick, a lawyer for Musk, did not immediately respond to text and phone messages seeking comment.
Musk, who owns Tesla, SpaceX and X, has gone all in on Trump this election, saying he thinks civilization is at stake. He is undertaking much of the get-out-the-vote effort for Trump through his super PAC, which can raise and spend unlimited sums of money. He has committed more than $70 million to the super PAC to help Trump and other Republicans win in November.
Krasner accused Musk and his PAC in his lawsuit filed Monday of running a dubious lottery in the tense run-up to Tuesday’s election. Four of the first dozen winners appeared to be from Pennsylvania, perhaps the key prize in the tight presidential race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Is it just a coincidence that this is the state that has the largest electoral votes? I don’t think so,” lawyer John Summers argued Thursday.
Posts by Musk’s America PAC on his X platform indicate he’s given away 13 checks of $1 million since the first one in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 19. Other winners came from the battleground states of Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Michigan. The sweepstakes is set to run through Election Day, open to registered voters in too-close-to-call states who sign a petition supporting the Constitution.
“They’re doing things in the dark,” Summers told the judge. “We don’t know the rules being followed. We don’t know how they’re supposedly picking people at random … It’s an outrage.”
Election law experts have questioned whether it violates federal law barring payments for votes. Musk has cast the money as both a prize as well as earnings for work as a spokesperson for the group.
Krasner has said he could still consider criminal charges, as he’s tasked with protecting both lotteries and the integrity of elections.
Both Trump and Kamala Harris have made repeated visits to the state as they fight for Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes, and both plan several more stops there before Tuesday.
Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX who’s gone all-in on Republican Donald Trump’s candidacy for the White House, is pledging to give away $1 million a day to voters for signing his political action committee’s petition backing the Constitution. The offer is sparking questions among election experts about the plan’s legality.
Some experts say it is a violation of the law to link a cash handout to signing a petition that also requires a person to be registered to vote. The Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
A source familiar with Musk’s America PAC said, “The PAC is confident in the legality of this initiative and the predictable media meltdown is only helping AmericaPAC’s efforts to support President Trump.”
Musk, the wealthiest person in the world with a fortune of $242 billion, has already committed at least $70 million to reelect the former president and is now ramping up his efforts to get voters in swing states to support Trump. The X owner had previously offered supporters $47 for each registered voter in seven battleground states that they could get to sign his petition, a nod to the fact that the winner of the November 5 election will be the nation’s 47th president.
“Though maybe some of the other things Musk was doing were of murky legality, this one is clearly illegal,” wrote Rick Hasen, a UCLA Law School political science professor, at the Election Law Blog, about the $1 million per-day giveaway.
He pointed to a law that prohibits paying people for registering to vote or for voting.
“The problem is that the only people eligible to participate in this giveaway are the people who are registered to vote. And that makes it illegal,” Hasen said in a telephone interview.
Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, the state’s former attorney general, expressed concern about Musk’s $1 million give-away plan on Sunday.
“I think there are real questions with how he is spending money in this race, how the dark money is flowing, not just into Pennsylvania, but apparently now into the pockets of Pennsylvanians. That is deeply concerning,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Elon Musk’s PAC petition
Musk promised on Saturday that he would give away $1 million a day, until the Nov. 5 election, for people signing his PAC’s petition supporting the First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech, and the Second Amendment, with its right “to keep and bear arms.”
He awarded a check during an event Saturday in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to a man identified as John Dreher. A message left with a number listed for Dreher was not returned Sunday. Musk gave out another check Sunday.
Musk’s America PAC has launched a tour of Pennsylvania, a critical election battleground. He’s aiming to register voters in support of Trump, whom Musk has endorsed. The PAC is also pushing to persuade voters in other key states.
Trump, who was campaigning Sunday in Pennsylvania, was asked about Musk’s giveaway, and said, “I haven’t followed that.” Trump said he “speaks to Elon a lot. He’s a friend of mine” and called him great for the country.
Legal issues with Musk’s $1 million giveaway
Among the election law experts who are raising red flags about the giveaway is Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance lawyer, who noted the latest iteration of Musk’s giveaway approaches a legal boundary.
That’s because the PAC is requiring registration as a prerequisite to become eligible for the $1 million check. “There would be few doubts about the legality if every Pennsylvania-based petition signer were eligible, but conditioning the payments on registration arguably violates the law,” Fischer said in an email.
Michael Kang, an election law professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, said the context of the giveaway so close to Election Day makes it harder to make the case that the effort is anything but a incentivizing people to register to vote.
“It’s not quite the same as paying someone to vote, but you’re getting close enough that we worry about its legality,” Kang said.
Typically coordination between campaigns and so-called super PACs had been forbidden. But a recent opinion by the Federal Election Commissioner, which regulates federal campaigns, permitted candidates and these groups to work together in certain cases, including getting out the vote efforts.
The Republican Voters Against Trump campaign is dedicated to opposing the former president.
Tom Moore is a self-described “Reagan Republican” who loves his country but is worried about the future of democracy.
After voting for Donald Trump in 2016, the soft-spoken probate court clerk from a small town near Grand Rapids no longer supports the former Republican president.
Now he’s speaking out in hopes of convincing other conservatives to abandon Trump.
Moore, 53, added his voice to Republican Voters Against Trump, a coalition dedicated to opposing Trump. The group is in the midst of a $50 million ad campaign featuring homemade testimonial videos of disaffected Trump voters.
Moore says Trump acts more like an aspiring dictator than a public servant.
“When he talks about retribution and going after his enemies, he’s coming across as a mafia boss,” Moore tells Metro Times. “This is the United States of America. I really love my country. I can’t have somebody using the power of the government to go after their enemies. That’s what Vladimir Putin does.”
“Michigan is a huge state for us — 100%,” Gunner Ramer, political director for the group, tells Metro Times.
Ramer estimates that 15% of Republicans “are up for grabs” and can still be persuaded to abandon Trump. Many of them have college degrees, earn higher incomes, and live in the suburbs.
While most Democratic groups focus on promoting President Joe Biden’s record in office, Republican Voters Against Trump criticizes the former president through the voices of his previous supporters. The group has collected more than 200 video testimonials and is urging others to add their voices.
“The message is important, but the messenger is even more important,” Ramer says. “That’s why we have the testimonials. These are people who used to be Republicans, and they say, ‘I didn’t leave the Republican Party. The party left me.’ They don’t recognize the party of today. They are the difference makers.”
In Moore’s nearly two-minute video, he talks about the importance of democracy and respecting the U.S. Constitution. He also points to Trump’s pro-Russia rhetoric and his failure to support Ukraine, a position that Moore believes will empower former Cold War foes.
“What he did was repugnant, it was disgusting, and I want a president who’s going to ensure that freedom thrives throughout the world,” Moore says in his homemade video.
Republican Voters Against Trump is funded by the Republican Accountability PAC. Some of its main contributors are billionaires such as Reid Hoffman, Seth Klarman, and John Pritzker.
“Our campaign is about maintaining and expanding on the anti-Trump campaign that propelled Biden to victory in 2020,” Ramer says. “There is a crucial segment that needs to be reminded why they and other like-minded people have rejected Trump in the past. This is the heart of the persuasive universe.”
Other conservatives who want to add their voices to the testimonials can do so at rvat.org/add-your-voice.
In 2016, Trump won Michigan by 0.3%, or fewer than 11,000 votes. In 2020, Biden beat Trump by 154,00 votes.
Why doesn’t Gretchen Whitmer just run for president? Or at least humor the suggestion?
Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, sat cross-legged on the couch of a darkened TV studio in East Lansing, where a local PBS program called Off the Record is taped—a weird name for an interview show watched by 100,000 people.
“I know!” agreed Whitmer, who wore a camouflage sweatshirt with Michigangster scripted across the front. We met here on a recent evening for an interview in which I would ask her—on the record—several variants of the above “running for president” question.
No, of course she is not running for president, Whitmer told me. She 100 percent supports Joe Biden, who is great and vigorous and all of that—and not too old, definitely not too old. She just wants to help him win. Kamala Harris too. Love her!
Clearly, though, Whitmer was happy to go through the Kabuki of being interrogated over whether she might change her mind. She didn’t bother with the annoyance that many ambitious pols feel compelled to feign—it’s such a hassle—when asked whether they might give the ol’ presidency a look. She giggled at many of my questions. Whitmer seems to genuinely enjoy being a politician, even the ridiculous and absurd parts of it, such as this.
“So, you’re not running for president,” I said.
“Correct,” she affirmed.
“Why not?”
“Because I just got reelected governor,” she replied, half-smirking. “And I made a commitment to the people of Michigan that I’m gonna fulfill it.” This has been Whitmer’s stock answer since she trounced the Republican Tudor Dixon by 11 points to win reelection last November.
Okay, sure. But a few days earlier, Whitmer had announced plans for a new political-action committee, the Fight Like Hell PAC, named for her oft-stated vow to preserve abortion rights after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year. The PAC will allow the governor to raise money for Democrats across the country ahead of 2024—just the kind of thing restless and term-limited statewide leaders do when they are trying to take themselves national.
And surely Whitmer noticed that, in early June, Biden had taken an unfortunate plunge while onstage during the U.S. Air Force Academy graduation. He was fine, but the viral episode underscored how nerve-racking it can be to watch an octogenarian run for reelection. Presumably Whitmer had also seen that 67 percent of respondents to a recent CBS News poll said they don’t think Biden should seek another term, a figure that includes 75 percent of independents and 42 percent of Democrats.
No shortage of Democratic colleagues, operatives, and donors has encouraged Whitmer to seek the presidency—and not necessarily to wait until her second term ends. She is one of the top Democrats on the “If Biden backs out” index, and has even been offered up—including by me—as someone who might consider primarying him. Polls show a bipartisan yearning to avoid a Biden-Trump rematch that is not exactly shaping up to be a rolling pageant of joy.
I followed Whitmer on a series of high-energy events across Michigan last week. She visited a dance studio in Detroit and a sporting-goods store in Lansing, where she signed a bill—the Crown Act—that will make it illegal to discriminate against citizens based on their hair style. “For far too long, we’ve known that hair-based discrimination has been used to deny equal opportunity for Black men and women,” Whitmer said to applause from a heavily Black audience.
She is deft at pivoting from specific issues to the broader theme of personal freedom, particularly relating to her signature cause, abortion access. “Michigan is a state where we stand up for fundamental rights,” she continued. “Whether it’s the right to make your own decisions about your health and your body, the freedom to feel safe in your community.” Her list also included the freedom to move around. “Fix the damn roads” was Whitmer’s slogan when she first ran for governor, in 2018. After considerable gridlock over how to fund the work, the state’s roads are now plugged with orange construction barrels. “Our new state flower,” she calls them.
Whitmer’s governing course has been bumpy at times, especially in her first term, when she confronted Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature. To pay for the road repairs, she proposed a 45-cent-per-gallon gas-tax increase—a deeply unpopular idea that quickly crashed. Whitmer would eventually bypass the legislature and pay for the road repairs through several billion dollars in bonds approved by the State Transportation Commission.
A hyperlocal message like “Fix the damn roads” is good for a cheerleader governor but not always a vehicle that travels well. Whitmer is, for better or worse, extremely Michigan—possessed of one of the thickest native accents I’ve heard, a pronounced northern twang that evokes the Upper Peninsula more than Detroit. She’s lived in the state for all of her 51 years: childhood in Lansing and Grand Rapids, college and law school at Michigan State, stints in the state House and Senate, a vacation cottage up north. Her foul-mouthed irreverence, goofy humor, and ability to pound beers and disarm adversaries make her a formidable operator in Lansing.
“You could drop Gretchen Whitmer anywhere, and she can connect immediately,” Mike Duggan, the longtime mayor of Detroit, told me. “You could be sitting here in Detroit, up in Marquette talking about mining. She listens intently. People feel, like, a bond with her.”
Across the state, Whitmer is known affectionately as “Big Gretch.” It’s not clear where the moniker started, and Whitmer didn’t love it at first. “There aren’t many women who want ‘Big’ on the front of her nickname,” she told me. But she went with it, in keeping with the ethos of her favorite movie, The Big Lebowski. The governor has embraced the film’s walk-off line—“The Dude abides”—as a personal credo of acceptance and willingness to roll with imperfect circumstances.
Whitmer achieved national prominence during the pandemic, and it was not all pleasant—including a kidnapping plot against her for which the FBI arrested a motley but heavily armed band of self-styled militia men. Her lockdown policies faced fierce and at times unruly opposition. She was also a target of President Donald Trump, who dismissed her as “that woman from Michigan.” Whitmer took pride in the brush-off, put the quote on a T-shirt, and wore it on TV. Biden’s campaign team vetted her as a possible running mate in 2020. Whitmer said at the time that she was happy in her “dream job,” which is what politicians tend to say while they’re contemplating another one.
Whitmer has two daughters in college and lives in the governor’s mansion with her second husband, Marc Mallory, a dentist, and their two dogs, a labradoodle (Kevin) and Aussiedoodle (Doug). As a matter of personal bias, I told Whitmer I am supportive of people giving human names to their pets. Or maybe I was just trying to flatter her into answering the question about running for president—crack the door open just a little and spare us this recurrent parade of elderlies.
Whitmer, obviously, took none of my bait. She kept laughing, though—abided, even. “You know, it’s funny; ‘The Dude abides’—it’s a really wise philosophy,” she observed during our brief detour into film study. “There are just things you can’t control.”
I took this to mean that Whitmer is ruling nothing out and is willing to adapt to the unforeseen. I pointed out that Americans were starved for new national leaders. Whitmer did not dispute this. Nor have Democrats nominated a fresh face since Barack Obama—and he had to jump the line for that to happen, in 2008, when it was supposed to be Hillary Clinton’s turn. Is Whitmer willing to “fight like hell” to upset the entrenched political order, or is that just a slogan?
I also mentioned that if the anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. can poll as high as 20 percent in the Democratic primary field, then many Democratic voters are clearly open to—even desperate for—someone not named Biden on the ballot. Why not give them a serious alternative?
“You know, there are a lot of really talented Democratic leaders all across the country,” Whitmer told me. She would be proud to be considered among them.
What if Biden changes his mind?
“He’s running!”
“Okay, but you saw him fall the other day,” I said. “Did your thinking, in that split second before Biden got up, change at all?”
“No!”
Whitmer was still laughing at this point, but I might have been pushing things—approaching dark and disrespectful. I had a flight to catch in Detroit, and a long drive from Lansing, with construction to contend with. “We’ll keep talkin’. How’s that?” Whitmer said. “And one of these days, we’ll have a beer. Or three.”
We left things there, and the Michigangster governor returned to her lane, for now.
