The debate that could determine the fate of the Michigan governor’s mansion began with twin appeals to bipartisanship in a deeply divided state.
Roughly three minutes in, those overtures were ancient history.
Over the course of the one-hour debate between Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, and Republican opponent Tudor Dixon, both candidates began and ended nearly every response—on gun control, on schooling, on abortion, on election integrity, on policing—by painting their opponent as too extreme to lead the state.
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“She keeps claiming to be bipartisan,” Dixon, a former conservative commentator and occasional conspiracy theorist, said at one point. “Do not be deceived. this is a woman who shut down the state and had to have her powers—powers,” she added, with implied air quotes, “removed by the Supreme Court.”
“Do not give her four more years to terrorize you,” Dixon said.
Whitmer, meanwhile, repeatedly cited Dixon’s support for the falsehood that the 2020 presidential election was stolen as “too extreme and too dangerous” for the state, and dismissed Dixon’s attacks as “divisive rhetoric to pit us against each other for her own political gain.”
“I don’t have time for that, and I don’t think you do, either,” Whitmer said.
Much of the debate, by stated topic or implied connotation, revolved around Whitmer’s actions during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. The governor was targeted with death threats and an attempted kidnapping by far-right extremists as she enforced lockdown restrictions that shuttered schools and businesses. Dixon attacked the governor for the lockdowns from her opening statement, describing her small business as a victim of the economic consequences of the shutdowns, and expressed frustration as a mother of children who struggled once schools were moved online.
Dixon likened the governor to a tyrant with overly expansive views of her powers, not just on lockdowns but on the legal showdown over abortion in the state, both proof that Whitmer believes that she is “above the constitution of Michigan,” Dixon said, who has held onto her powers “like grim death.”
“She says she closed the gap—what she really did was close the schools,” Dixon said at one point in a discussion about education funding. “Let them play! Let them play! She wouldn’t even listen.”
Whitmer said the shutdowns were necessary to save Michiganders from dying, and pointed to the worst days of the pandemic as a moment of contrast between her own experience managing a crisis and Dixon’s actions at the time.
“Lives were on the line,” Whitmer said of her use of emergency powers during the pandemic, which was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court. “I would have made some different decisions, but we were working in the middle of a crisis.”
Dixon, meanwhile, “said kids couldn't get COVID,” Whitmer scoffed. “Had she been governor during the pandemic, thousands more people would have died.”
Dixon returned frequently to her campaign theme of making Michigan a “family-friendly” state—to be accomplished, she said, by stopping Whitmer from putting “little boys in your daughter’s locker room” and forbidding “adults whispering sex” into the ears of children—by repeatedly bringing up the closure of Michigan’s schools during the pandemic, even if the discussion was about policing, abortion or crime.
But despite the sharpness of the attacks from both candidates, neither seemed particularly interested in a back-and-forth with their opponent. Whitmer and Dixon rarely made eye contact over the course of the debate, much less engaged in sustained back-and-forth, instead largely sticking to sixty-second soundbites in response to the moderator’s questions.
