Detroit Free Press Editorial Board

Since 2000, when Republican Mike Rogers beat Democrat Dianne Byrum to win Michigan's 8th Congressional District by just 111 votes, GOP state legislators have twice recast the boundaries of the 8th and the adjacent 11th Congressional District to give their party's candidates a prohibitive electoral advantage.

In the seven elections since, GOP candidates have easily defeated a succession of weak, poorly financed Democratic opponents to maintain a hammerlock on both congressional seats.

But this year, a confluence of factors — changing demographics, growing skepticism about the Republican president, and the recruitment of two exceptionally able Democratic challengers — has made both districts competitive for the first time in a generation.

Indeed, Michigan voters alarmed about the trajectory of their country can make a critical course correction by electing ELISSA SLOTKIN and HALEY STEVENS to represent Michigan's 8th and 11th congressional districts in the U.S. House of Representatives, and we urge them to do so.

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The 8th District was historically divided between Republican-leaning Livingston County and Democratic-leaning Ingham County. After Rogers' narrow victory in 2000, Republicans buttressed their electoral advantage in the 8th by annexing GOP strongholds in northern Oakland County.

The 11th District, which stretched from Canton Township in Wayne County to White Lake and Waterford townships in Oakland, was similarly reconfigured to encompass the affluent GOP enclaves of Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills and Troy.

Those boundary manipulations have given incumbent congressmen Mike Bishop (R-Rochester) and David Trott (R-Birmingham) a leg up on their Democratic opponents in the last two election cycles. But in 2017, Bishop and Trott became lightning rods for constituents disenchanted with Donald Trump's presidency when both voted for legislation that would have scuttled the Affordable Care Act, along with its guarantee of coverage for policyholders with previously diagnosed health conditions.

The effort to repeal Obamacare failed when the late Sen. John McCain cast a deciding no vote after calling out his Republican colleagues' hypocrisy. But the furor unleashed by that episode energized many previously apolitical female voters in the 8th and 11th. It also propelled two promising Democratic newcomers into the congressional scrum.

The talent Michigan needs

Oakland County native Elissa Slotkin, 42, enlisted in the CIA after the 9/11 attacks. She served three tours of duty as an intelligence offer in Iraq, where she met her husband, a U.S. Army colonel. After returning to Washington, she served on then-President George W. Bush's national security staff and became acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for National Security Affairs under Bush's successor, Barack Obama.

In one of her last Pentagon assignments, Slotkin was responsible for coordinating military flights over Syria with her Russian counterpart to avoid accidental engagements between the two superpowers. She dryly likens that experience to the challenge of finding common ground with lawmakers whose long-term strategic interests diverge from her own.

Haley Stevens, 35, is a manufacturing expert who served as chief of staff to the presidential task force Obama established to oversee the federal auto bailout. Besides giving her operational experience in one of the most important federal initiatives ever undertaken in Michigan, Stevens' work for the auto task force gave her a sophisticated understanding of the complex web of manufacturing and engineering resources that undergirds her district's economy. No congressional candidate in either party (with the possible exception of 12th District incumbent Debbie Dingell) has as encyclopedic an understanding of the issues confronting Michigan manufacturers and the workers they depend on.

Slotkin and Stevens promise to be formidable advocates for the residents of southeast Michigan. Both oppose efforts to rescind coverage for hundreds of thousands of Michiganders who obtained health insurance under the ACA. Both understand climate change as a national security threat requiring a response as urgent as the congressional response to terrorism. And both are poised to be part of a pragmatic, bipartisan solution to the immigration policy impasse that has bedeviled Washington for decades.

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Undistinguished and ill-prepared

In his 19-year political career, Bishop, 51, has prospered by being in the right place when his party needed him. But he accomplished little during his four years as majority leader of the state Senate except to obstruct most of Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm's second-term initiatives.

His two terms as the congressman from Michigan's 8th District have been even less distinguished. Although he almost never breaks ranks with the Trump administration policy line (support for funding to protect the Great Lakes is the single notable exception), he has been reluctant either to defend or to criticize the president's actions in public. His responses to the questionnaire the Free Press e-mailed to every congressional candidate reveal an almost comical reluctance to address the issues facing his district.

Then again, Bishop at least answered the bell. Fellow incumbent David Trott, sensing the same disenchantment with Republican government that has Bishop scrambling to save his once-secure seat, bailed on his own re-election bid, forfeiting his party's nomination to Lena Epstein, a 37-year-old industrial heiress from Bloomfield Hills.

Few major party candidates we have ever interviewed have been as ill-prepared for elective office as Epstein. In an hour-long interview with the Free Press, she repeatedly responded to basic policy questions by reading prepared answers verbatim. When asked to clarify or expand on her canned responses, she repeated the same text.

To the limited extent that she is able to articulate them, her positions appear far to the right of the constituency she aspires to represent. She opposes regulations or incentives to mitigate global warming, rejects any new restrictions on firearms, and champions unlimited political spending by corporations. She supports federal funding for construction of a wall on the Mexican border but opposes any path to citizenship for immigrants brought to the United States as children, a position that puts her at odds with three-quarters of the American electorate. Asked about President Trump's expressions of contempt for Muslims, Mexicans, women and others, she responds that Trump was "not elected to be a Sunday school teacher."

Even if the major party candidates were more evenly matched, the imperative of increasing Michigan's Democratic representation in Congress would tip the balance in the 8th and 11th districts in favor of Slotkin and Stevens. The superior qualifications both women bring to this year's election makes the voters' choice in this election even more obvious.