Howell Republican Mike Detmer has been on the campaign trail for nearly a year.

Both the Republican and Democratic parties in Michigan are training volunteers and hiring more staff.

And campaign ads have already hit the airwaves.

More than a year out, the 2020 election cycle is already in full swing in Michigan, a key state in the upcoming presidential election.

“I can’t remember a time when there was congressional race advertising a whole year out from the election,” said Dennis Darnoi, a Republican political consultant from Farmington Hills.

And while perhaps not as intense as the “hot boil” of energy and activism generated in 2017 after the election of Republican Donald Trump as president of the United States, Brandon Dillon, former chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, said the 2020 election cycle is shaping up as “a pretty strong simmer.”

Democrats want to mirror 2018 successes

On the Democratic front, the party and individual groups are getting fully geared up for the next 13 months before the Nov. 3, 2020, election. The state Democratic Party is hoping to replicate its success in 2018 when it bounced back from the 2016 election, where the reliably blue electorate in presidential races turned red and sent Trump to the White House by a razor-thin, 10,704 vote margin.

By hiring field organizers in regions across the state who were from those districts, the party was able to connect more directly with voters in 2018 than in 2016, when the campaign organization of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton ran the show from its Brooklyn headquarters, hundreds of miles from three crucial states — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — that flipped from blue to red.

That all changed for the 2018 election cycle, when Democrats flipped seats held by Republicans, including three top statewide offices — Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Attorney General Dana Nessel — two congressional seats, five state Senate seats and five state House seats.

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Those field organizers have stayed on the job since 2018, said Michigan Democratic Party chairwoman Lavora Barnes. At this point in the 2016 election cycle, none of that grassroots team was in place, she said.

“We’ve knocked on tens of thousands of doors already and we’re staffing up in other areas,” she said. “We have voter protection teams, a director of rapid response and we’ve got someone doing African American outreach to make sure that we don’t only show up in the two weeks before the election.

“We’re firing on all cylinders early,” Barnes added.

There are other signs that Democrats are gearing up much earlier than usual.

When the newly formed Supermajority Education Fund embarked on a 16-city bus tour of the United States last month to encourage Democratic women to get involved in the 2020 election cycle, Detroit was a logical choice to stop, said Cecile Richards, co-founder of the fund and former president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

“By next fall, our goal is to have 2 million women signed up,” she said. “It was so impressive what women did here in 2018. There's nothing but opportunity. Michigan is a test case for how you can really change politics in a state.”

On a sunny Sunday afternoon, more than 100 women showed up for the Supermajority stop to learn how they can get more involved, whether that means going door-to-door to connect with voters or encouraging more women to run for office.

"I’m committed to using all my spare time I have to going out to get some changes because I can’t leave this world to my two boys unless we fix it,” said Detroit attorney Vicki Myckowiak. “I’ve been somewhat active in politics, but not like this. It’s out of my comfort zone, but I’ve got to be willing to make my comfort zone bigger because it’s just too important.”

With a more conservative U.S. Supreme Court poised to decide abortion cases that could put more restrictions on the procedure, Planned Parenthood announced last week that it plans to spend a record amount of money on the 2020 election cycle — $45 million in nine states, including Michigan. The money will be used to educate and mobilize voters and elect more candidates who support reproductive rights.

And Fems for Dems, an Oakland County-based group that started in 2017 with 500 women, has grown to 5,000 members who are getting trained to expand the group's reach with a software program called We Always Vote Everytime or WAVE, which will provide information such as voting records for friends, neighbors and family. Armed with that data, the members can make contact with those people to make sure they’re going to vote in 2020 and provide an absentee ballot.

“We want to increase the number of people who vote by absentee,” said Lori Goldman, a Bloomfield Township resident and founder of Fems for Dems. “It’s a gentle pressure. When I send you an e-mail and tell you that I’ve checked your voting record and you know I’m going to check back with you. You know the social pressure.”

Republicans keeping eye on presidential prize

Republicans are mobilizing, too. Detmer, a 43-year-old Howell resident who works for an automotive supplier, was the first GOP candidate to file for a state House seat two weeks after the 2018 election. He came to the decision after seeing the partisan flips that happened last November and coming to the conclusion that more businessmen were needed in elective office.

“I’ve never held public office, but a long time ago I ran some campaigns and I know that what you need to be successful is to have good name identification,” he said. "And that takes time."

He was one of 56 people — 37 Democrats and 19 Republicans — who have filed for seats in the state House of Representatives. A few weeks ago, though, Detmer decided to drop out of the state race and file for the 8th Congressional District seat, one of two seats that flipped from red to blue in 2018 when Democrat Elissa Slotkin beat U.S. Rep. Mike Bishop, R-Rochester.

“It came about after some soul-searching and conversations with voters in the area,” he said. “I have a strong feeling that our country is at stake, so I decided to get into the congressional race.”

The decision came before Slotkin announced she would support an impeachment inquiry into Trump.

“But that just reaffirmed my decision,” Detmer said.

The Michigan Republican Party is gearing up, too. Organizing by the party is six to eight months ahead of where it was at this point in the 2017 cycle, 30 employees have been hired and 2,107 volunteers have been trained.

GOP chairwoman Laura Cox acknowledged that Republicans had a difficult year in 2018 and will have to redouble their efforts for 2020. “We have an unbelievable number of field staff in the state already,” she said. “This has never happened in an off year."

The goal for the GOP is expanding the majority in the state House and electing a Republican U.S. senator to replace Democrat Gary Peters.

And “we want the president to do very well,” Cox said. "We believe he will do well.”

National Republicans also are fired up, especially with calls for impeachment increasing as a result of a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in which Trump asked for Ukraine's help in investigating political rival and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Biden.

The Republican National Committee already has invested at least $470,000 in television ads targeting Michigan's two Democratic freshman Congresswomen — Slotkin of Holly and Haley Stevens of Rochester Hills — for more recently supporting the impeachment inquiry. The pair were always going to be a GOP target because of their narrow victories in 2018, but the early advertising is unusual.

The House Majority Forward, a Democratic political action committee, has responded and purchased nearly $250,000 in air time to talk about the issues that Slotkin and Stevens have been involved in in Congress, such as the bid to lower prescription drug prices.

A couple other organizations also have been hitting the airwaves to influence voters and candidates ahead of the 2020 election. Doctor Patient Unity, a dark money super PAC that doesn't disclose its donors and is targeting potentially vulnerable senators, has aired more than $2 million in ads in metro Detroit targeting Peters, who is facing a challenge from Republican businessman John James.

James lost the U.S. Senate race last year to U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow.

The ads urge TV watchers to contact their senator to fight insurance companies that spring surprise medical bills on patients.

Another organization — the Trade Workers of American — has spent more than $12,000 on ads urging members of Michigan's congressional delegation to support the U.S. Mexico Canada Trade Agreement.

Michigan will be a key battleground

And this is just the beginning. Michigan's presidential primary is March 10 and the candidates, most of whom have visited Michigan at least once, are sure to repeatedly return to the place that provided the closest margin of victory in the nation in 2016.

National money is expected to continue to pour in for the U.S. Senate race and several congressional races and the focus on state politics will be on state House races, where Democrats hope to flip enough seats so Whitmer will have one chamber where Democrats hold a majority.

"The one thing that I think is very, very different already this year is there is not this huge divide between Democratic primary voters, like the Bernie versus Hillary fight in 2016," Dillon said "There are obviously some voters who prefer a more left-leaning candidate than Joe Biden, but I’m not sensing the same kind of animosity between those factions because Trump is not an abstract concept anymore like he was in 2016."

Darnoi admitted that the energy and the enthusiasm on the Democratic side is high, especially after the success of 2018.

"There’s a lot of work that needs to be done in Michigan, especially on the Republican side," he said. "A lot of people are saying we don’t like (Trump's) tweeting or how he addresses people, but they don’t mind his policy."

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