A campaign bus adorned with “BIG GRETCH SAYS GO VOTE” signage pulled into a labor union parking lot on Saturday as dozens of bundled-up Democrats prepared to knock on doors in East Lansing, Mich., a liberal stronghold in a closely divided state.
Then Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan’s second-term Democratic governor, stepped off to give the party faithful a pep talk.
“All right, so we are down to a handful of days,” Ms. Whitmer told the crowd. “This is going to be a close race. The whole world is focusing on Michigan and a couple of other states. You’re wondering what is going to happen. They’re worried. We’re not worried, right?”
There is a parallel political universe in which Ms. Whitmer might not have been one of the Democratic Party’s most-sought surrogates, busing across Michigan from East Lansing to Brighton in the campaign’s final stretch, but rather a candidate for president or vice president, jetting across the battlegrounds from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin with a Secret Service detail.
Four years ago, Ms. Whitmer was a finalist to become President Biden’s running mate, and earlier this year, as party activists grew alarmed about Mr. Biden’s re-election chances, hers was one of the alternate names that kept popping up.
But when Mr. Biden stepped aside and Vice President Kamala Harris became the party’s candidate, Ms. Whitmer quickly offered her support and did not seek the vice-presidential nomination. She has spent recent months traveling the country to promote her new book, rallying supporters in Michigan and making campaign stops in eight other states to speak in support of Ms. Harris.
As Election Day nears, Ms. Whitmer has focused on her home state, where she won re-election two years ago by 11 percentage points, but where polls now show a virtual tie between Ms. Harris and former President Donald J. Trump. Ms. Whitmer has also held at least 20 recent events, an aide said, supporting Democratic candidates for the Michigan Legislature.
Michigan, and perhaps even the presidency, could ride on how many Whitmer 2022 voters turn out this year, and how many of them stick with the Democrats. The Trump campaign has aggressively courted blue-collar white voters, Black voters, Arab Americans and young men, all groups that Democrats have historically relied on in the state.
“We’re working very hard to make sure that the coalition that supported me just two years ago understands that they’ve got a similar candidate in Kamala Harris,” Ms. Whitmer said in an interview before posing for photos with the crew of East Lansing door-knockers.
She added that she had “met a lot of Republican women, in particular, who have said, kind of quietly, ‘Your candidate has my vote.’ They’re not throwing yard signs out in their lawns. They’re not, you know, screaming it from the top of their lungs.”
Ms. Whitmer’s coalition two years ago, built on support for abortion rights and “fix-the-damn-roads” pragmatism, was the stuff of Democratic consultants’ dreams. The governor turned out the party’s urban base, ran up huge margins in suburban Detroit and lost by less in solidly conservative counties. She carried places that had been drifting away from Democrats for years, and she turbocharged the leftward shift of some former Republican strongholds.
Twenty-four months later, polls show a far different landscape in Michigan, a state that Mr. Trump won narrowly in 2016 and Mr. Biden carried in 2020.
And while Ms. Whitmer makes the pitch for Ms. Harris, Trump campaign officials suggested it might not always be helping the vice president. They pointed in particular to a recent video featuring Ms. Whitmer on social media that some Roman Catholics saw as an offensive take on Communion, and for which she apologized.
“Gretchen Whitmer has spent the last year of her administration making cringeworthy TikToks in hopes of going viral,” Victoria LaCivita, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, said in a statement. “These stunts have backfired, disrespecting Catholic Michiganders and showing voters where Kamala Harris and the Democrat Party’s priorities lie. Spoiler alert — it isn’t lowering inflation or securing our southern border.”
It is not just the presidency on the line in Michigan. Ms. Whitmer’s legislative agenda in her final two years as governor rides on partisan control of the State House of Representatives, where Democrats are clinging to a slim majority. Michigan Republicans also see an opportunity to win an open seat in the U.S. Senate and flip two open U.S. House seats now held by Democrats.
Curtis Hertel, the Democratic nominee in one of those swingy congressional districts, joined Ms. Whitmer on a portion of her bus tour this weekend as he made his closing case to voters.
“You can tell how much the governor loves people, and she relates to people, and she understands how to talk to people in a way that inspires them,” Mr. Hertel said.
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