Gretchen Whitmer's perplexing problem in race for Michigan governor

LANSING — She's the candidate with the endorsements, the money and the experience in government.

But as Gretchen Whitmer tries to make the big leap to becoming Michigan's next governor, she's encountering a perplexing, and worrisome problem. She may be well-known in politically active Democratic circles, but more than half the electorate at large doesn't know who Whitmer is.

The 46-year-old East Lansing Democrat has taken the traditional route to political success — three terms in the state House of Representatives, two in the Senate, some time in private legal practice and more as a temporary Ingham County prosecutor.

Yet a recent poll by the Lansing-based EPIC/MRA showed 54% of the 600 people surveyed earlier this month didn't recognize her name among the Democratic candidates, compared with 31% for retired businessman Shri Thanedar, who has spent a couple of million dollars on television advertising, and 47% for former Detroit health department director Abdul El-Sayed.

"She hasn’t done any advertising. And Thanedar is spending a couple of million on ads, coming out of nowhere and in some polls, he is ahead," said Bernie Porn, president of EPIC/MRA. "She can’t wait too long. She doesn't want the opposition to define her before she defines herself."

It's not for lack of trying. Since getting into the race 16 months ago, she has visited 78 of Michigan's 83 counties, meeting with any and all groups that are politically engaged. And she has gotten into the habit of starting every speech on the campaign trail with this:

"My name is Gretchen Whitmer. I’m a mom. I’m a lawyer. I'm a lifelong Michigander," she told a roomful of women at the Susan B. Anthony Campus and Community Awards dinner in Dearborn last month.

But that just scratches the surface.

Dreams of becoming a sports reporter

Gretchen Esther Whitmer was born in Lansing to Richard and Sherry Whitmer and moved to Grand Rapids with her mother when she was 10 after her parents split.

Both parents were public servants — Richard, who is now retired, was the director of the state Department of Commerce under former Gov. William Milliken and later the president of Blue Cross/Blue Shield and Sherry was one of the top attorneys working for former attorneys general Frank Kelley and Jennifer Granholm.

The oldest of three children, Whitmer was the protector of her younger sister Liz and brother Richard.

"When we were growing up, I was in kindergarten and only was in school for a half a day and she was two years ahead of me," said her sister Liz Gereghty, who now lives in Katonah, New York. "We would walk to school together in the morning and I don't know how she did it, but she managed to negotiate her way out of school and walk me home from kindergarten every day."

Whitmer attended Forest Hills Central High School in Grand Rapids, where she split her time working odd jobs —babysitting, mowing lawns, and working part-time at a lumber yard, a department store and a restaurant — and playing softball and running track.

Whitmer had a comfortable life, living with her mother, while her father traveled from his home in Detroit to Grand Rapids at least once during the week and every other weekend, making sure never to miss one of his kids' games. The value of work was always instilled in the teenager.

"If I wanted to have some independence, I needed to make some money and they always pushed me to do that. That’s in my DNA and how I was raised," she said. "You can’t expect anyone to hand something to you. And I’m OK with that."

She had dreams of becoming a sports reporter for ESPN and appears in her high school yearbook as "the budding broadcaster" of the school.

"I grew up going to football games with my dad and we were just sports fanatics," she said. "I love sports and I thought there were so few women who were in sports broadcasting."

But while getting a bachelor's degree in communications at Michigan State University, she did an internship with state Rep. Curtis Hertel, D-Detroit, when the House of Representatives was split 55-55 between Democrats and Republicans.

"It changed everything for me," she said. "I saw how important it was that we all have a voice during the debates."

So instead of using her degree to get a job at a local television station and maybe work her way up to ESPN, Whitmer went to MSU's law school and got a law degree.

"I got some really good advice when a friend said there are so few people who actually make it on air. And bringing a legal degree allows you to bring something more to the table," Whitmer said. "But I loved law school and never looked back."

Right out of law school, she got a job with the Dickinson Wright law firm in Lansing, working on cases dealing with the regulation of utilities as well as doing some legal work for the Funeral Director's Association. It wasn't exactly exciting work, but it led her back to what really sparked her interest: public service.

"When I jumped into the 2000 election, my state rep, Laura Baird, was a strong advocate, a fearless woman, and Debbie Stabenow was my state senator," she said. "These were smart, tough women and I understood why that was really important to have their voices there."

She wasn't supposed to win that first race for the state House of Representatives. The front-runner was Mary Lindemann, the wife of a well-known county drain commissioner. But Whitmer, who was 29 at the time, was tireless, knocking on doors throughout the East Lansing district and winning that first primary race by a mere 281 votes.

Robert McCann, who was one of four Democratic candidates in the race, remembers meeting Whitmer.

"I was fresh out of college and just really wanted to see what it was like to run for office," McCann said. "One of the first people to reach out to me was Gretchen. And we had a good conversation and talked about why she was running and her background. She wasn’t worried or trying to pressure me out of the race. She just wanted to see where I was at."

McCann, who eventually ended up working for Whitmer when she was a senator, said another canidiate tried to pressure him into attacking Whitmer.

"I was happy to see she ultimately won," he said.

In her next five elections — three for the state House and two for the state Senate — she won with anywhere from 56% of the vote up to 70% in her first run for the state Senate.

But that first term in the House of Representatives proved to be her biggest challenge.

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'I just want to get things done'

After she won her primary race in 2000, she noticed that her mother kind of faded from the campaign trail after tirelessly helping her work the district. But in the strongly Democratic-leaning district, Whitmer didn't need as much help for the general election and didn't pause to wonder about the absence.

"She thought she had an inner ear infection, but we found out during that first campaign that she had a brain tumor," Whitmer said, noting that the fast-growing glioblastoma was the same type of insidious cancer that struck Ted Kennedy, Beau Biden and now John McCain.

"That first term in office, I got married, had a baby and lost my mother."

Whitmer went from daughter to caregiver and advocate, working as her mother's medical guardian and fighting the insurance company when it refused to pay for chemotherapy for her mother.

"When my mom got sick and Gretchen was taking care of her and was pregnant, it was a really difficult time," Whitmer's sister Liz said. "But being in New York, I knew things were going to be OK and taken care of. It was really kind of luxury, because my mom had a fighter in her corner."

Her mother's death, two and a half months after her first daughter Sherry was born, wasn't her only battle as a freshman lawmaker.

"I had to figure out how to keep nursing my infant and keep working in the Legislature. And while all the men liked to tell how important it was to nurse, none of them wanted to make sure I had a room where I could pump," she said.

"What I learned from all of this is that I have no patience for people who just want to politicize problems and don’t want to fix things. I just want to get things done. I don’t have time for the rest of it."

A quiet force in the Legislature

But Whitmer did encounter the Republican buzz saw in Lansing the entire 14 years she was in the Legislature, meaning there's not much concrete to show for her time serving as part of the minority party in Lansing.

She only has three bills to her name: eliminating the prohibition to getting prescriptions through the mail; revising the licensing fees for campgrounds and public swimming pools, and increasing the calculations for the earned income tax credit.

But that's not unusual for a Democrat serving in the minority. In the Senate, for example, Democrats typically sponsor fewer than 20% of the bills that are passed each session and several Democrats also had zero or only one or two bills to their name.

"She was the mouthpiece, the spokesperson for the left, for the Democrats and when you've got somebody saying every day what a bad job you're doing, you don't reward that," said former Sen. Majority Leader Randy Richardville, R-Monroe, who served with Whitmer for 14 years.

But that doesn't mean that Whitmer, who rose to become the Senate minority leader for her last four years in the Legislature, didn't have accomplishments.

She helped shepherd the Democratic votes necessary for the state's Medicaid expansion, which has ended up providing health care coverage to 680,000 low-income Michiganders. She also corralled her members to push a plan to restore street lighting in Detroit and fought for insurance coverage for kids with autism. Bills that she sponsored to help curb bullying of students ended up passing under the name of a Republican senator after she fought to strip language that would have allowed people accused of bullying to claim their taunts were based on religious and moral beliefs.

"You can get a lot done when you don’t care about credit. My name was not on Medicaid expansion, but it never would have happened without the work that I did," Whitmer said. "The best leaders are the ones that want results, not credit."

Despite disagreeing on many policy issues, Richardville said he had a good working relationship with Whitmer. And while he won't support her for governor if she wins the primary, he also won't take personal shots at his former colleague.

"I respect her a lot. She’s got a good mind and a good heart. She’s a very strong mother, family-oriented person," he said. "It's all part of the job. It's kind of like the Foghorn, Leghorn cartoon. You beat the crap out of each other all day and then punch the clock and go out and have a beer."

There were some stinging losses for Whitmer during her time in the Senate. During the right-to-work battle, unions camped out in her offices to lead the opposition to the measure that now makes it illegal to require financial support of a union as a condition of employment, or when she shared the difficult story of being raped while she was a student at MSU during a 2013 debate on requiring women to get a rider on their insurance policies if they wanted to have an abortion covered under their health care plan.

"I (bared) my soul to the world and it didn’t make a difference. That was my lowest point," she said. "But the next morning, on my 8-mile commute from East Lansing to Lansing, I kept getting phone messages and e-mails from women telling me how much my speech meant to them and it made it all worthwhile."

Flint water crisis a catalyst

After leaving the Legislature because of term limits in 2014, Whitmer thought she would never run for public office again. But she contemplated other offices over the years. She bowed out of the race for attorney general in 2010 because her daughters — Sherry and Sydney — were in grade school and she instead opted for a second term in the Senate.

She briefly flirted with the idea of running for governor in 2014, but running against an incumbent — Gov. Rick Snyder — is always a long shot and she decided against it.

So she started teaching at the University of Michigan and went back into private law practice until 2016 when she was briefly appointed to take over for disgraced Ingham County Prosecutor Stuart Dunnings, who was convicted of soliciting prostitutes. Shortly after that appointment was up, Whitmer announced she was getting into the race for governor.

She points to the Flint water crisis for her change of heart. The city, which was under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager, switched Flint's water source in order to save money. The improperly treated water cause lead to leach into thousands of homes and businesses in the city.

"The Flint water crisis was my last straw," she said. "The horrifying failure of government and what it means to people were the things that push me to a place where I made this decision."

But her campaign has had hiccups. She's on her third campaign manager and third spokesman for the race.

For several months, influential members of the Democratic Party, including Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan and the leadership of the UAW, searched for a different Democrat with better name recognition to run for the office — such as U.S. Sen. Gary Peters of Bloomfield Township or U.S. Rep. Dan Kildee of Flint Township or even a candidate with more finances to bring to the table, such as Ann Arbor attorney Mark Bernstein.

But eventually, Whitmer won most of them over. She got Duggan's endorsement, the UAW, the AFL-CIO, the Democratic delegation in Congress, the Michigan Education Association.

"She has empowered working men and women all her life. Gretchen is a proven candidate. She knows how to rebuild the economy in the state of Michigan," UAW president Dennis Williams said in March. "And more importantly, Gretchen will fix the damn potholes."

Whitmer dismisses the doubters and talks of the size of the crowds she's attracting at events across the state, the money she has raised — 84% of it from Michigan residents — and the 30,000 petition signatures she got to get on the Aug. 7 primary ballot, all gathered by volunteers.

"That's what a grass-roots campaign looks like," she said.

As for the elusive name recognition? That will come too, she predicts, as soon as she gets ads on television in the next few weeks.

And she'll have her family by her side — her two daughters; husband Marc Mallory, a Lansing dentist; three stepsons — identical twins Alex and Mason, as well as Winston, and her sister, who's coming to Michigan for the month of July to help elect her sister as the next governor of Michigan and only the second woman to rise to the state's top job.

"It's hard to distill to one thing that will make her a great governor," Gereghty said. "But she cares. We were raised to believe that if you can ease someone else’s burden, that’s what you should do. As a core principle, that’s what is going to make her great."

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

Gretchen Whitmer on the issues

Roads: Her catchphrase on the campaign trail is “just fix the damn roads” by creating a “Rebuild Michigan Bank,” which could only be used for infrastructure improvements. It would be fueled by either user fees approved by the Legislature or a statewide bond issue approved by voters that would raise $3 billion a year for roads, bridges and water infrastructure improvements.

Auto insurance: Wants to make sure that auto insurance rates are based on a person’s driving record and not criteria such as credit scores, ZIP code or gender. And she wants to increase transparency in the Michigan Catastrophic Claims Association fund, which pays lifetime benefits for people critically injured in car accidents.

School safety: Wants tougher gun laws, including universal background checks on gun purchases and a ban on assault-style weapons. Supports allowing only trained, uniformed officers to carry guns in schools and passing “red flag” legislation that would allow law enforcement to take guns away from people who have been deemed by a judge to be a danger to themselves or others.

Pension tax: Voted against the tax as a state senator and would act to repeal it if she becomes governor.

Legalized marijuana: Supports legalization for adult recreational use.

Medicaid: Voted for the Medicaid expansion in the state Senate and ultimately would like to ensure that all people get health care coverage. She’s looking at plans being used in other states that allow people to buy into a state health care plan. Opposes work requirements for Medicaid recipients.