Dems look ready to flip U.S. Rep. Dave Trott's suburban Detroit district

Todd Spangler | Detroit Free Press

WASHINGTON – Most pundits were expecting a knockdown, drag-out battle between Democrat Haley Stevens and Republican Lena Epstein for the open congressional seat being vacated by U.S. Rep. Dave Trott, R-Birmingham.

It didn’t happen.

Since both won their primaries in August, most handicappers have settled on Stevens as having the best chance to win in this Republican-leaning district as she rides a wave of Democratic enthusiasm that appears to be lifting candidates around the country, especially those in open seats.

But whoever wins, the women — both of whom are in their 30s and in many ways represent a surge in first-time women candidates being seen across the country — seem more intent on selling their own messages rather than attacking one another.

“They’re being kind to each other,” said Ed Sarpolus, a pollster with Target-Insyght in Lansing. “They almost seem like they don’t want to talk about each other.”

That could change, of course — and outside groups have already spent millions attacking or supporting the candidates — but for now, the race for the seat to represent southeastern Oakland and western Wayne counties appears to be more about aspiration than agitation.

That’s not to say the two candidates — both of whom are making their first runs for public office — don’t have a lot to say: They do.

In Stevens’ case, it’s touting a record that includes being the de facto chief of staff to the Obama administration team that helped save General Motors and Chrysler from liquidation in 2009, a move that many credit with helping to keep the American auto industry from going under and saving hundreds of thousands of jobs. She’s also making the case for job training, more affordable health care and funding to fix Michigan’s roads.

“Michigan built the auto industry; it’s unbelievable we would have the country’s worst roads,” she says in a recent ad, amid video of cars and trucks rolling along patched and potholed highways. “We build the world’s best cars, we deserve to drive them on the country’s best roads.”

As for Epstein, it has been less about highlighting her most prominent political experience — being cochair of President Donald Trump’s historic Michigan campaign two years ago — than it is talking up the need for bipartisanship, lower taxes and being a woman in a traditionally male industry. That may be a smart move, too, given that some recent polls suggest as many as 59 percent of Michiganders have a negative view of Trump's performance as president.

“I’ve been underestimated, talked down to, and dismissed,” says Epstein, who runs her family’s industrial oil business, in an ad that shows her walking past men rolling their eyes and ignoring her. “But it won’t stop me from working hard because I’m from Michigan. Working hard is what we do.”

Though Stevens has the advantage — with most handicappers moving the race into “lean Democratic” status from toss-up — it’s still far from over, with three weeks to go. Remember: This district was considered all-but-safe for the GOP as little as two years ago, and Trump won it by 5 percentage points.

With that in mind, here’s more about the candidates:

Stevens: 'Proud Democrat" can be wonky, tough

It should be no surprise that Stevens, 35, who grew up in Rochester Hills and Birmingham, is used to long hours: She worked pretty much round-the-clock back in 2009 when Obama’s auto team was busy trying to save the domestic auto industry from potentially going belly-up.

Read more on this story:

It's a crowded, competitive contest for Dave Trott's U.S. House seat

Epstein vs. Stevens? It's more like Trump vs. Obama

What’s maybe more of a surprise, talking to the somewhat wonkish, easygoing Seaholm High graduate who used to fill up her blue book exams with essays on what led to the Civil War and historical pieces about Henry Clay is that she’s tough, too: She finished a half-marathon in Annapolis some years ago on what turned out to be a stress fracture in her ankle, hopping to the finish line before going to get an X-ray.

“I thought it was just stretching, I kept running,” she laughed, saying she only sought medical help after a friend suggested she do so. “I got to (the) hospital and they had me walk into the X-ray (machine) and they came in (after that) with a wheelchair.”

She’s from an industrious family, not overtly political. Her mother and father ran a landscaping business they sold in the ‘90s. Her mom is also part of an advertising business; her father — who still does landscaping on the side — taught elementary school in Detroit for years after he sold the business.

And although Stevens characterizes herself as a “proud Democrat,” she says her parents probably voted Republican from time to time growing up. She left Michigan to attend American University in Washington, D.C., spent a year at Oxford, and along the way caught the politics bug, door-knocking for John Kerry’s campaign in 2004, working as a field organizer in Grand Rapids, interning one summer for former U.S. Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Menominee, and joining Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2008.

When Clinton lost the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama that year, Stevens moved to Obama’s campaign, writing briefings for vice presidential nominee Joe Biden. After they won, she stayed on for the transition — and then, as GM and Chrysler seemed likely to dissolve in the Great Recession, she was recruited by Obama’s auto czar, Steve Rattner, to join the new autos team looking to save them. Stevens was the de facto chief of staff of the task force — an informal title given to her by Rattner.



“You know, I was from Michigan. I had done work in Michigan politically … and that was that,” she said.

With auto rescue in the balance, she pushed to save Chrysler

In the months that followed, she was part of an operation that not only secured about $80 billion in financing to run the auto companies through a complex, structured bankruptcy but one that worked to keep auto suppliers solvent in the meantime, calm jittery mayors and businesspeople, work out financing and make tough decisions, including whether Chrysler — now part of Italian-owned Fiat — would even survive or be broken up and sold off.

She remembers being in Rattner’s office with several other officials when that possibility was being talked about. As they discussed it, she sat at a conference table, working, but, privately, her temperature was starting to go up. This was a Michigan company, with thousands of workers and a long history in the state after all. And suddenly, she blurted out, “This is not a rescue. We can’t do this!” Stevens worked as a close aide to Rattner throughout the process, meeting with local officials, helping to organize the program to protect suppliers and being part of the decision-making team.

In the end, Obama decided to keep Chrysler as part of the rescue.

It’s far from her only experience — she has created online and real-time training programs for jobs in advanced manufacturing through the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute, a joint partnership between the government and private industry; she worked with a Wixom-based company, Ops Solutions, whose technology allows instructions for parts assembly to be projected onto the work itself rather than relying on text-based manuals, and through that, she ran a STEM education initiative with Novi Public Schools. She moved back to Rochester Hills a couple of years ago.

In August’s primary, she was something of a surprise winner in a five-person field, with much of the Democratic establishment supporting state Rep. Tim Greimel of Auburn Hills and entrepreneur Suneel Gupta, a newcomer who astounded local political pundits by raising $1.4 million to her $1 million and Greimel's $881,000. But she won the nomination with 27 percent of the vote.

Stevens' fundraising has taken off since then: As of Sept. 30, she had raised nearly $3 million, and had $1.1 million left to spend; that's compared with Epstein's $2.1 million — all but about $455,000 of which was raised before the August primary — and who had only about $363,000 cash on hand as of Sept. 30.

What propelled Stevens to the top of the crowded Democratic field may never be known for certain — it probably didn't hurt that, across the country, female candidates have been winning at record rates.

Now, she’s pushing a platform that argues prescription drug costs must come down and steps must be taken to support Michigan as a center for manufacturing and for research and development for decades to come. “I speak the economic language of this district,” she says.

As for Trump, she’s not going out of her way to bad-mouth him, and says she believes he has “identified problems,” adding, “When he was campaigning two years ago, I think he was speaking to jobs and speaking to fears that people have around the value of work.” But, she says, “I don’t know if he has necessarily brought forward a lot of solutions.”

“I do think Donald Trump has let some people down. He’s let those people down when he failed to speak out against Charlottesville (Va.). I think he let some people down in some of the (negative) comments about our government … We all love this country — if you run for office, it’s an act of love. … I’ve got a lot of respect for what Secretary Clinton said when she conceded her campaign (in 2016), which was, ‘We should all wish Donald Trump well. Because his success is our success.’ ”

Epstein: Granddad gave her a sense of civic responsibility

Lena Epstein, 37, of Bloomfield Township may have been largely unknown in political circles just prior to taking a key role with Trump’s 2016 campaign that won Michigan, but the same could not be said of her late grandfather: Stanley J. Winkelman, for years, ran a chain of women’s stores across the Midwest named after his family and was a renowned leader in Detroit civic affairs, pushing the city to hire more black teachers, for instance.

After the 1967 civil unrest in Detroit, he insisted on keeping his city stores open and in place, and, as leader of a local subcommittee on community services, called for an investigation into the police. “A giant,” is how he was described in a front-page obituary in the Free Press in August 1999.

Epstein remembers him as “Papa,” and recalls visiting him as a girl at his office in the Fisher Building, and him telling her, as they looked over the city, “You live in the best place in the country.” And even though he was a Democrat — she embraced conservatism while studying at Harvard University — she still credits him with instilling in her a sense of civic responsibility.

“He was willing to ask the tough questions of the time,” said Epstein, who remembers family stories about how her grandfather drove her mother through Detroit after the disturbances, wanting her to see firsthand what had happened. “Papa was a visionary.” Her paternal grandfather, meanwhile, founded the family business, Vesco Oil, which was later taken over by her father, Donald Epstein.

Epstein decided early on, after graduating from Detroit Country Day School, that she wanted to take over Vesco Oil, based in Southfield. And she spent summers and holidays working pretty much every job it had: janitor, sales, accounts payable. She even would have driven one of the delivery trucks, but she wasn’t big enough to handle the large, heavy hoses used to deliver the product to customers.

After college, she learned plenty, too, about being a woman running an industry dominated by men far older than her — a fact that presented hurdles, she said, but at the same time helped her develop negotiating skills. And soon, she found a reason, amid the Great Recession — as a third of her company’s customers closed and the others scaled back — to start thinking about politics. As far as she could tell, few of the elected officials who were making regulations and laws affecting her business had any relevant experience themselves.

“I was,” she says, simply, “very disturbed.”

She helped orchestrate a win for Trump

Epstein — who is married and has a daughter who is about to turn 1 — says that is when she started to become politically active, volunteering on campaigns and joining political clubs in and around Oakland County. In 2012, it was enough to get her hooked up with the Trump campaign — she was its cochair — and she became, and remains, an “unapologetic supporter of Donald J. Trump” despite growing up in a family of Democrats and independents.

“At the end of the day, it (political relationships in our family) was less about partisanship than it was about answers,” she said. “I’ve lived in a world where people can identify differently.”

As for Trump, she said, she never had a doubt about the outcome, believing his outsider status and his business acumen would sway voters. “He offered a tremendous contrast to the career politicians we have seen on both sides of the aisle,” she says, her voice swelling with passion as it often does when speaking about politics. “I knew he was going to win.”

In conversation, Epstein can come across as earnest and proud — especially when talking about her family, or her upbringing in Michigan. At other times, she can be insistent, repeating an answer to a question she thinks should satisfy an interviewer. And when she talks about her daughter, or her husband — a manager in the wine and spirits industry — and his support of her campaign, she gushes.

Like Stevens, she won in a five-person field, beating out state Sen. Mike Kowall and former state Rep. A. Rocky Raczkowski, each of whom had more establishment support, and winning with 31 percent of the vote. As of shortly after the primary, she had raised $1.6 million — about $1 million of which came in the form of a loan to herself.

But unlike the primary, when her links to Trump were probably more of a benefit to her campaign, Epstein now is talking up the prospect of bipartisanship and the need to elect more people to Congress “who will reach across the aisle to get things accomplished.”

That’s not to say she has abandoned Trump. She argues that the U.S. has enjoyed “historic economic growth” during his presidency and that tax reform has worked and should continue. As for increasing deficits, she believes growth from the tax cuts will erase them completely.

As for health care, she says there are parts of the Affordable Care Act — also known as Obamacare — that should be saved: coverage for pre-existing conditions, for instance, and allowing people to remain on their parents’ plans up to age 26. But she expressed regret via Twitter when the Senate failed to pass a repeal and replacement in 2017 that experts said would have driven the cost of coverage, especially for pre-existing conditions, far higher.

The voters, she said, “have one critical decision: Am I enjoying the economic experience we’re having today or do I want to take a step back?”

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Nye, Schwartz: Voters have other choices, too

Voters in the 11th District won’t be limited to Stevens and Epstein as their candidates: Cooper Nye, a 26-year-old independent who lives in Commerce, and 73-year-old Leonard Schwartz, of Oak Park, the Libertarian Party candidate, also are running.

Both have a similar message: that the two major parties are too engaged in partisan battles to stop and take into consideration the real needs of people in the district and address them.

“I think we’re at a point where people see neither party is serious about solving the problems that are facing us today,” says Nye, a Michigan State grad who after graduation spent some years working in Washington, D.C. — including interning for the conservative Heritage Foundation — before returning home. Previously much more conservative, he says he’s running on a “middle ground,” now, and wants to get big money out of politics and close what he considers a revolving door of influence peddling.

“The two parties wield (the issues of) abortion, immigration and guns to get people to side up with them,” he said. “(But) neither party is really going to do anything about any of those issues — they belong in the courts. … I got in the race to try to change the conversation.”

Unlike Nye, who is running for the first time, Schwartz has been something of a perennial candidate over the last couple of decades, though he said he has typically filed in whatever race the Libertarians have needed a candidate. He doesn’t live in the 11th District — that is not a bar to candidacy if you’re a Michigan resident (Epstein, too, lives outside the district, but only by a couple of blocks.) — but says he personally decided to run in this race because of the open seat created by Trott’s departure.

A retired economist and lawyer, Schwartz, who calls himself “a commonsense moderate” said he recognizes he’s a long shot and hopes just to get 10 percent or so of the returns — enough to show that people listened to his message of reducing government intrusion into people’s lives, avoiding foreign “quagmires” and embracing a choice other than the two major parties.

“Democrats and Republicans think they can spend our money and manage our lives better than we can,” Schwartz said. “I’m not a busybody. I don’t want to spend your money or manage your life.”

Contact Todd Spangler: 703-854-8947 or tspangler@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter at @tsspangler.

