How Democrats could pick Brooks Patterson’s Oakland County successor

Brian Dickerson | Detroit Free Press

Show Caption Hide Caption The winners of Michigan's biggest races, proposals A recap of the winners of Michigan's biggest races and proposals in the November midterm election.

Long before Donald Trump starting alienating suburban voters, Brooks Patterson saw a blue tide creeping northward across Michigan's richest county and demanded that the Republican-controlled state Legislature do something about it.

In 2011, at County Executive Patterson's behest, legislators voted along party lines to adopt a law they hoped would reinforce the GOP's loosening grip on Oakland County and assure that a Republican county commission majority would pick Patterson's interim successor in the event he resigned from office before completing his term.

But Democrats stunned Patterson and his allies by winning 11 of the Oakland County Commission's 21 seats in last week's election — and now it's their party that stands to exercise the increased authority state legislators gave the commission seven years ago.

Unless he resigns before Jan. 1, Patterson, 79 and ailing, will either have to tough out the second half of his four-year term or watch Democratic commissioners pick his successor.

Patterson responds to this column: Reports of my political demise are premature

More: Republican and Patterson's hold on Oakland County may be at an end

And unless Republicans recapture their majority in 2020, Democratic commissioners will be poised to reconfigure Oakland's political boundaries along lines more advantageous to their party's growing base.

It's an ironic turn of events, especially when you remember how much trouble Republicans went to to make sure their hammerlock on Oakland would endure long into the next decade.

Best-laid plans

Patterson was first elected county executive in 1992. For the next 16 years, no Democrat was elected to any countywide office.

But Oakland's demographics were already changing. In 2008, Democrats Jessica Cooper and Andrew Meisner beat Republicans opponents for county prosecutor and treasurer. Their victories gave Democrats a 3-2 majority on a five-member commission in charge of reapportioning Oakland's county commission districts after the 2010 census. (Besides the prosecutor and treasurer, the quintet in charge of redistricting included the county clerk and the chairs of the Republican and Democratic parties.)

In 2011, Patterson sprang into action, prevailing on Republican state legislators in Lansing to reduce the Oakland County Commission from 25 seats to 21 and reassign the authority to redraw Oakland's political boundaries to the commissioners themselves. Both changes enhanced the GOP's odds of retaining control in the face of a growing population of Democratic voters.

Democrats challenged the measure's constitutionality, citing a provision in Michigan's state constitution that prohibits the state Legislature from adopting laws that apply to only one county or city, and a Court of Appeals panel ruled in the challengers' favor.

But Republican county commissioners appealed to the state Supreme Court, where justices voted — once again, along party lines — to reverse the Court of Appeals and uphold the new law.

By 2018, Republicans controlled two-thirds of the downsized county commission's 21 seats, and looked forward to maintaining their supermajority well into the 2020s.

Enter Trump

No one can say for sure why Oakland voters chose to flip half of its Republican seats from red to blue in last Tuesday's election. (A comparable shift in the U.S. Congress would have meant the loss of more than 100 GOP seats.)

But since most of us couldn't name our own incumbent county commissioner if someone put a gun to our heads, it's safe to surmise that more than a few Oakland County voters rejected any unfamiliar candidate who shared a party affiliation with Donald Trump.

And because the changes state legislators adopted in 2011 expanded the authority of whichever party controls the county commission, Democrats are now poised to exploit the very advantages Patterson hoped would prolong his party's control of the county.

The most immediate casualties of this sea change are popular Republicans like Oakland County Sheriff Mike Bouchard, long seen as his party's best bet to succeed Patterson. People in both parties have speculated that the incumbent county executive would step down sometime before his current term ends, giving Bouchard (or some other promising Republican) a year or two of incumbency before the next county election in 2020.

But if Patterson wants Republican commissioners to choose an interim successor, he'd have to relinquish the helm before the county commission's new Democratic majority is sworn in January.

The alternative is to finish his seventh term — and hope that someone less repellent to Oakland's well-educated electorate heads the Republican presidential ticket two years from now.

Brian Dickerson is the editorial page editor of the Free Press. Contact him at bdickerson@freepress.com.