Campaigns in race for governor go down to the wire

Kathleen Gray , Jennifer Dixon | Detroit Free Press

The final days of the 2018 primary election campaign bring rallies, phone banks, art fairs and plenty of door-knocking for the Democratic and Republican candidates for governor.

Words like "comeback," "damn roads," "jobs and paychecks" and "single-payer health care" marked the campaign trail this weekend.

And crowds varied from more than 1,000 at Cobo Center on Sunday, who came for a speech by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who endorsed Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed, to the 300 people at a community picnic in Detroit featuring Democrat Gretchen Whitmer with Mayor Mike Duggan to a Thursday night pasta party in Macomb County with Republican Bill Schuette and former U.S. Representative and Secretary of State and current county Public Works director Candice Miller.

And Lt. Gov. Brian Calley decided to go old-school Sunday, telling voters he was campaigning "the old-fashioned way" by knocking on doors in cities throughout Oakland County.

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"This is back to my roots when I first ran for the state House in the beginning," Calley said as he talked with voters in Farmington. "It is very much about the retail politics, that connection with people directly one on one."

One woman, who didn't want to give her name, said she was "always Republican, but I want to be part of the Republican silent majority."

In Detroit, Sanders, a Democratic candidate for president in 2016 who won Michigan's presidential primary election, told the Cobo crowd to get out and vote on Tuesday and to ignore the polls that have shown El-Sayed behind the other two Democrats in the race — Whitmer and retired businessman Shri Thanedar.

"I've got some personal perspective as somebody who experienced Michigan polling," Sanders said. "On the day before the presidential primary (in 2016), the polls had me 27 points behind. ... Well we won that election. And by the way, so will Abdul."

And El-Sayed said his candidacy was more about vision than the "broken politics" in the United States.

"I know that in our democracy, we have a choice in 2018. It’s not just about one candidate over another. It’s about a vision of who we are and who we want to be," he said. "We are done waiting while people all over this state are told they don’t belong … they’re less than because of what they look like, who they love, how they pray."

Attorney General Bill Schuette, the Midland Republican who has had a consistent, double-digit lead in all the polls taken in the race, appeared before a Macomb County crowd on Thursday night and repeated a standard stump speech about the endorsement he got from President Donald Trump and his plans for a "jobs and paycheck" agenda.

"There are three things I want you to do today. I need your vote. Vote please on Tuesday and drag people with you," Schuette told the audience. "When you leave here today, cop an attitude about Michigan because the best days are ahead of us. And take no tiny steps and no incrementalism."

He brushed aside accusations in the final days of the campaign that emails showed he did political work, along with many state employees, on state time.

"The Democrats are attacking me because they know I have a path to victory and the Republicans are desperately behind and I'm not going to engage in this political gamesmanship," he said.

Whitmer, the former Senate minority leader, got a campaign bus Friday for the final days of the campaign, which included stops in Southfield, Oak Park, Wyandotte, Allen Park, Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor. At the Allen Park Street Fair, shouts of "Fix the Damn Roads," was a persistent refrain from voters as she strolled through the fair.

And on Sunday, about 300 people turned out in 90-degree heat for a Whitmer rally at a park in Detroit that featured free pony rides, hot dogs and hamburgers, and some undecided voters with just 53 hours to go before the polls close Tuesday.

“I’m listening to see who I want,” said Deborah Hunter-Harvill, a member of the Detroit Board of Education. She said she was “supportive” of Whitmer and that “women in leadership are very important to me.”

Speakers at the rally included Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, and U.S. Rep. Brenda Lawrence, D-Southfield.

“I’m fired up to be here with you,” Whitmer told the crowd. She described Michigan as a place where people once came for opportunity and where children got a great public school education.

“We deserve that Michigan but we’ve got a lot of work to do,” she said.

Duggan, whose political action committee paid for the rally, said Whitmer had run a “great campaign” and promised to “get out every vote we can.”

Thanedar, hosted a sparsely attended rally Saturday in Detroit after holding several town halls across the state last week. He told the crowd that he won't be beholden to anyone except the residents of Michigan if he wins the Democratic nomination on Tuesday.

"What the Republicans are doing is cutting taxes and investments and you’re not going to get to prosperity by cutting," he said. "We can’t afford to have another Republican for another four years or eight years."

Meanwhile, state Sen. Patrick Colbeck, R-Canton, marched in parades, held flash mob-type rallies at busy intersections and Jim Hines, a Republican and physician from Saginaw Township, finished up a 10-day mobile home tour of state, concentrating in southwest Michigan in the past week.

Besides the traditional campaigning, the candidates were also raising money — lots of it — in the final days before the primary election. Thanedar, who is largely self-funding his run for office, donated another $1.5 million to his campaign for a total of $12.9 million.

El-Sayed wracked up another $165,527 in the past week, including $61,900 coming from the leadership PAC for state Rep. Abdullah Hammoud, D-Dearborn, who collected $90,000 from five donors on July 31 and turned around and donated $61,900 to El-Sayed from the PAC the next day. Whitmer received $141,406 in contributions in the past week, plus $84,813 in state matching funding.

On the Republican side, Schuette led the way in last minute fundraising with $117,00 in contributions in the last week in addition to a cumulative total of $312,699 from Chemical Bank in Midland, followed by Calley with $58,826 and Colbeck with $16,500. Hines, who has largely funded his own campaign with $2.7 million, didn't report any late contributions.

The polls are open 7 a.m.-8 p.m. on Tuesday.

Contact Kathleen Gray: 313-223-4430, kgray99@freepress.com or on Twitter @michpoligal.