&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/iframe DETROIT—Something weird is happening in the Motor City: Government is working. And the guy in charge is about to get re-elected in a landslide because of it.

Detroit used to look like how America ends. Abandoned skyscrapers downtown. An 18-story abandoned train station looming at the edge of the skyline like a Roman ruin. Collapsing car factories, block after block of grass growing high over lots where the houses had burned or been abandoned. Bankrupt, with the governor putting a city manager in charge, looking at selling off its art museum’s collection to pay the bills—all while the glass towers of General Motors’ of-course-named Renaissance Center stuck up high above neighborhoods that were literally falling apart.


“I was appalled at so many things,” Mayor Mike Duggan told me in an interview for POLITICO’s Off Message podcast, recorded in his office. “That the buses just weren’t running and people stood out on the corners in the winter for hours at a time. That every vacant building in the city was covered with graffiti and nobody cared. The lack of anybody caring was heartbreaking.”

Now, all of four years later, Detroit looks like one answer to how America bounces back.

There’s a lot about Detroit that makes no sense. How what was the richest city in the United States in 1960 ever got to where it did. How officials watched the decay and always found some reason why it was someone else’s fault. But these days, what doesn’t make any sense is how so much construction and renovation is happening so quickly—four projects to a block downtown, a Shake Shack, a hipster comic book store.

It also doesn’t make sense that Duggan is the mayor: He’s pasty, puffy, a little awkward. He looks like he’s forcing a smile even when he’s laughing. Like so many amid the slow-motion collapse of the American car industry, he moved out of the city before he came back to start running, leaving a job running the Detroit Medical Center, which he did after serving as the county prosecutor. He’s not so much a straight talker as a blunt talker: Duggan, 59, talks about racist old policies in the city as racist. He doesn’t make promises he knows he can’t keep, like bringing down the sky-high crime rate.

Oh, and Mike Duggan is white, in a city that at 83 percent African-American is the blackest big city in America.

During Duggan’s first run, in 2013, he was kicked off the ballot and launched an unplanned write-in campaign, which he won by 20 percentage points. Running for reelection this year, he just took 69 percent in the first round of voting against the most famous name in Detroit politics (state Sen. Coleman Young II, the illegitimate son of five-term Mayor Coleman Young, who changed his name as an adult to match his father’s), who made it to the second round in November by placing in the top two … with 27 percent. The six other candidates in the first round took about 3 percent among them.

The low expectations of a beaten-down city and massive room to improve have unquestionably helped. “The great majority of Detroiters understand that we’re not going to be able to have a full recovery in every neighborhood at once, but most seem to feel that the pace of change is going in the right direction,” Duggan said. “And of course, nobody’s offered a solution to, OK, I’ve got 20,000 more Detroiters working than four years ago. What was your plan that would have done more than that? And I think the lack of an alternative is a big part of the support.”

Duggan started by reinstalling miles of missing and broken street lights, a move both rudimentary and revolutionary. Some corporate investment was already happening, but Duggan and the city council started leveraging the companies that had to come to the city council for the usual process on tax breaks, forcing commitments on affordable housing and avoiding forcing tenants out of neighborhoods. He hired experienced professionals to senior levels of city government, recruiting from around the country. His administration helped funnel millions in foundation money into government programs and reclamations. Corporate barons like Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert were engaged and encouraged, despite complaints from some that they were taking advantage of a city too ready to roll over for him. The city slapped fines on owners who had let their buildings get covered with graffiti or hadn’t replaced windows in long-vacant buildings.

But the politics remain complicated. Take Scott Benson, an African-American city councilman who stood proudly with Duggan at a news conference in August announcing the new “SisterFriends” program to pair volunteer women with expecting mothers for help with nutrition, doctor visits and advice—“there has to be a way to take our expertise and apply it to the moms in this town,” Duggan said at the event, pointing out the kind of stat that captures a city still very much in crisis: One in six Detroit children has problems stemming from a preventable premature birth.

Benson stood side by side with the mayor, laughed with him, posed for photos with him after. Then, when I walked up to him to ask what makes Duggan successful, he told me he wouldn’t talk on the record.

Young, Duggan’s African-American opponent, barely has a campaign—his website was shut down in June because the campaign didn’t pay the bills, and repeated efforts to try to get in touch with him went nowhere but a string of half-engaged conversations promising to set something up, and a phone number for his campaign manager that’s not taking messages. The dissatisfaction is high enough that Young still got thousands of votes.

Aspiring white politicians go silent about Duggan too. Too risky, they explain. Duggan may be popular, may have just won big, but it’s tricky. Detroit’s an enormous 143 square miles, and he’s done great for the eight square miles downtown, they say, but they don’t want to risk potential votes in the other 135 by being quoted praising him.

Duggan is sensitive to the criticism that he’s all about downtown. His slogan was “Every Neighborhood Has a Future”; he started a “Department of Neighborhoods” in office; and his campaign printed out signs for his reelection launch with the name of every neighborhood on them, to be waved.

Duggan approaches campaigning like he approaches governing: technocratic management, classic machine politics, get-to-the-point communications and big-dollar investments.

“He is a very workmanlike mayor,” said Brandon Dillon, the Michigan Democratic Party chair and a former state legislator. “I don’t think anyone would say he’s the most gifted orator, but he is extremely intelligent.”

Click here to subscribe subscribe and listen to the full episode to hear Duggan talk about the night he first decided to run for mayor, the difference he’s seen working with the Trump administration versus the Obama administration, and his thoughts on the controversy over the new movie “Detroit.”

Workmanlike covers it. Duggan really does drive himself around, solo, in his Ford SUV, to weekly community meetings where he gathers ideas and tends to bring them back to his staff, asking for reports on how to make them reality—or why they can’t. In an hour on a Friday morning at a career center in the North End, he recruited three people for an adult masonry and plumbing training course he’s set up at a public school, said he’d think about bringing back the Bookmobile, and encouraged people to bid for reclaimed houses they could pick up for $1,000 online at the city’s daily auctions.

Which leads to I-told-you-so territory.

Around this time last year, in one of the few internal Hillary Clinton campaign showdowns that hasn’t been previously reported, Duggan was part of a group of mayors who were brought to Brooklyn for a session that included chairman John Podesta running through a dozen bullet points of the candidate’s economic message. Duggan stopped him—Can you explain it in 60 seconds, make it make sense to someone he’d meet walking down the block in Detroit? he asked, according to people who were told the story by mayors in the room. Mitch Landrieu from New Orleans jumped in, echoing the concern. Then Bill de Blasio from New York joined too.

This isn’t going to work in blue-collar places you need, Duggan told Podesta. (“The campaign was open to hearing what was working for them. I was for sticking to basics,” Podesta recalled, but he added that he felt that their real frustration was that nothing Clinton was saying was breaking through all the coverage of emails.) Duggan said he saw deep skepticism about Clinton’s message among black and white voters alike in Michigan, and that’s why he doesn’t like Democrats talking about chasing the white working class over invigorating the minority voters who didn’t turn out for her.

“‘If Barack Obama in eight years didn’t create opportunity for me, why is Hillary Clinton going to do more?’” Duggan said, recalling his conversations with black Detroiters during the campaign. “It’s just that when you had Donald Trump embracing the David Dukes of the world, it overrode the economic message.”

“I think there was a far greater alignment between people of color and Caucasians who want to work hard, want to get new skills, want to benefit from a stronger economy than there is a difference,” he said. “At some point, somebody in this country is going to figure out that no matter what color you are, what people want is opportunity to work hard, get more skills and raise the standard of living for their family.”

Duggan also fought with Clinton’s campaign brass over having full control over her GOTV operation in Detroit. The Clinton campaign suspected he was trying to road-test a reelection machine and decided to go with the same national paid-canvassing company it was using everywhere. She won 95 percent in the city, but turnout plunged.

In Wayne County, which includes Detroit, Clinton got 77,411 fewer votes than Barack Obama in 2012, in a state she went on to lose to Trump by just 10,704 votes.

“Had Michigan decided this election, I probably would have been haunted by that for a long time,” Duggan said.

Anyway, Duggan is clearly a Joe Biden man. The two hit it off early in Duggan’s term, with the mayor leaning on the then-vice president for federal help and Biden seeing in him exactly the kind of working-class, pragmatic Democrat (and Irishman) that he loves. Duggan called up Biden on his cellphone over the summer to ask him to record a robo-call for his reelection campaign, which the vice president agreed to immediately, and delivered as soon as his staff had been patched in to figure out the logistics.

“He’s loved here,” Duggan said, then on his own, turned wistful about the death of Beau Biden, and the effect on his father. “If it had been at a different point, he would be president now.”

Sounds like he’d be ready to chair Biden 2020, I noted.

“Well, you know, I’d do it if Joe Biden wanted,” he said.

As for himself, Duggan ended the speculation that he might be lured into next year’s governor’s race.

“There’s no circumstance under which I’m running for governor,” he said. “There’s nothing about Lansing that remotely appeals to me, so no.”

Duggan is far from running a functional city. Detroit is still segregated, still struggling in ways most mayors can’t begin to comprehend. Some crime is down, investment is soaring, but he still hasn’t hit his goal of getting the overall population to start increasing again, despite the occasional claims to the contrary. There’s no shortage of funky coffee shops, but there aren’t a lot of options for grocery stores, or other basics.

To say the city has a ways to go in public opinion is an understatement. In a new POLITICO-Morning Consult poll, only 27 percent of people said they had a very or somewhat favorable view of the city, compared with 25 percent who said they had an unfavorable view. Just 5 percent of people said they considered the city very safe, and 41 percent said they considered it very unsafe.

Duggan doesn’t have control of the school system, but he knows that Detroit’s abysmal educational options are sucking young couples who come in as urban pioneers right back out of the city, and he doesn’t know what to do about that.

Of no help, he said, is fellow Michigander Betsy DeVos, a familiar force in the local school debate long before she became Trump’s education secretary. They fought then, over the schools plan she pushed through the state legislature. They haven’t spoken since she joined the Cabinet.

“There was far more interest in her political agenda than in educating kids,” Duggan said. “She’s doing the same thing in Washington that she did here.”

Duggan sees himself as the opposite of a political climber, though people who’ve seen him operate say he has a healthy ego. As he tells it, his office is agenda-free, dealing with daily disasters, frantic in his mission to turn around the city’s still-declining population, trying to be creative with taking corporate and philanthropic money without indenturing Detroit’s future, all while dealing with a combination of survivors resisting gentrification and property owners squatting rather than developing because they’re banking on a bigger payday down the line.

There’s no mystique to what he’s doing, or why people seem to want four more years of him, he and his aides say. A big part of whatever success he’s had is just showing up, after decades when his predecessors didn’t.

“In Detroit,” said Duggan’s campaign manager Rico Razo, “people just want a response.”