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Letter from the Editor Dear Reader, Football season is wrapping up, and now it’s time for the biggest competitive sport of all to take center stage: Politics and elections.
MLive’s political team has been covering the preliminaries already: Stories about redistricting based on the 2020 Census, and the subsequent fallout for big-name congressional incumbents all over the state; fund-raising for incumbent Gov. Gretchen Whitmer; the jockeying of Republican candidates who want to face her.
It will continue to heat up until the candidate filing deadline on April 19, and then it will turn into a sprint to Election Day, on Nov. 8.
“So many of our readers across the state will potentially be seeing competitive races where they may not have – at least in the general election – in a long time,” said Lauren Gibbons, statewide political reporter for MLive. “I'm really excited about that.”
It’s not only game time for candidates. Voters need to be informed, and that’s where Gibbons and our team of statewide reporters already have been hard at work, covering issues, policies and the inside baseball that make elections complex and impactful.
For instance, the work of a commission to redraw voting district lines was simultaneously dry and highly consequential. Gibbons covered the drawn-out work of the body over months, and then our state and local reporters covered the flurry of candidate reactions when the new districts for state House, state Senate and U.S. House were released.
Household political names across Michigan – Dingell, Kildee, Meijer, Slotkin, Levin – all quickly made pronouncements about if they’d run and where they’d run. Those decisions and all of that fallout means that MLive reporters all across the state already are working on Election 2022.
Bigger names, like Whitmer at the top of the Democratic ticket in Michigan, have not been sitting still. She’s been raising money nonstop, banking on the national spotlight she grabbed during the initial stage of COVID restrictions. On the Republican side, more than a dozen candidates want the opportunity to face her in November.
“Whitmer has a lot of vulnerability, and Republicans have a lot of advantages,” said Malachi Barrett, an MLive political writer. “We’re coming into a midterm year where historically the minority party fares better. But I still think she's going to be tough to beat and, she's got a lot of money coming in.”
And like everything else in life the past two years, COVID looms large over the election cycle. Not just related to the controversies over social restrictions, but in policy decisions related to workforce development, the allocation of COVID relief funds, and, strikingly, the rifts that have developed in every community.
“COVID has really had an impact on schools. And if there's anything that activates voters, it is schools,” Gibbons said. “Everyone involved in the education system is looking for some stability. They're looking for some guidance. And they haven't really seen that from the state.”
One thing we’ve learned during the COVID era is to be careful with optimism. But that doesn’t stop Barrett and Gibbons and the rest of MLive’s reporters from hoping for a return to election coverage that has all of the exciting features of the past: Campaign rallies, interviews with potential voters in the field and staking out candidate headquarters on election night.
“I'm curious to get around the state and talk to people,” Barrett said. “If anybody sees me out there, feel free to come up and say ‘Hello’ and tell me what you want us to be focusing on because this is a very influential election – up and down the ticket.”
Gibbons notes that elections have shown how people are learning to work around COVID – the last election set a record for absentee ballots cast. It CAN work, it’s just not in the same spirit of everyone coming together in a grand democratic exercise.
“Covering elections from home is really sad,” she said. “We usually we have an election spread, the office camaraderie, or we're going to all these glitzy campaign events and we're seeing all these really interesting things and talking to people.
“So, I'm really hoping that we're getting to the point where we can see these elections as more of a communal experience again.”
I think we’d all vote straight ticket for that.
Editor's note: I value your feedback to my columns, story tips and your suggestions on how to improve our coverage. Let me know how MLive helps you, and how we can do better. Please feel free to reach out by emailing me at editor@mlive.com.
John Hiner Executive Editor Vice President of Content Mlive Media Group
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