Opinion: Whitmer 2028 is the Anti-Vance 

We may still be 1,349 days out from the November 2028 election in the United States, but the perpetual and ceaseless nature of American presidential cycles necessitates looking to the next race for the White House four years in the future from the very moment a President-Elect rounds off their inaugural Oath of Office with ‘So help me God’. The clock resets, and the countdown begins.  

As the chaos and carnage of the Trump-Vance administration only intensifies as it erodes democratic norms and processes in the accelerating transition to authoritarian democracy and oligarchy at home and mangles the United States’ closest and most important alliances and partnerships in favour of autocratic illiberal actors abroad, Democrats have been caught somewhat flat-footed by the lightning pace and scale of the damage inflicted in such a short period of time since 20 January. 

Assuming Trump does not find a Machiavellian means of evading the stipulations of the Twenty-Second Amendment prohibiting a third term in office (which is extremely unlikely given the polarised nature of contemporary politics, which makes achieving the sizeable state legislature and congressional majorities required for a constitutional amendment almost impossible) – and despite the President’s musings that he does not see Vance as his natural successor – few seriously dispute that at present at least Vice President JD Vance is the clear frontrunner for the 2028 GOP presidential nomination. 

In turn, the search for the Democratic antidote to Vance has already begun in earnest as a plethora of candidates position themselves for 2028 and have begun jumping through the national profile-enhancing hoops that typically precede presidential campaign launches. From Gavin Newsom’s new political podcast to Kamala Harris’ Fight Fund to Chris Murphy’s viral impassioned Senate floor speeches on key Democratic priorities to Pete Buttigieg’s regular outings on Fox News (not exactly renowned as a welcoming interview environment for such prominent Democrats); the primary campaign wheels are already moving. 

However, despite the substantial and talented bench of plausible Democratic contenders, in my mind there is only one who can lay claim to being the Anti-Vance – the prospective nominee I believe to be the most likely to defeat Vance in a general election matchup whilst also being excellently prepared to be Commander-in-Chief and the most likely to be effective in office at translating campaign priorities and promises into policy reality. 

Electability, but not at the expense of suitability. The Democratic nominee in 2028 must be Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. 

Let’s first look at the electability element to Whitmer’s candidacy. She is a widely admired and respected two-term Democratic Governor in one of the most vital presidential battleground states who boasts extensive wider Rustbelt appeal (pivotal across Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania). Despite the heavily polarised and divided state of politics and her frequent clashes with Trump (and especially in a purple state like Michigan), as of February 2025 only 28% of Michiganders said the Governor was doing a poor job, with the vast majority saying she was doing an excellent, pretty good or fair job.  

A heavily unionised state with long-standing Democratic and secondary sector industrial roots but which was won narrowly by Donald Trump by 1.42% in 2024, Michigan and its neighbours are poised to remain critical swing states in the forthcoming cycles.  

Whitmer won her first gubernatorial election in 2018 by 9.56%, a very healthy margin. To refute the assertion the Governor was merely carried by the conducive national headwinds for Democrats in the 2018 midterms, four years later in 2022 (midterms in which the Republicans were now significantly favoured), the Governor easily won re-election and by a wider margin, by 10.53%, despite the more challenging national environment. Whitmer has also consistently outperformed fellow Democrats on the same statewide ballots as herself.  

With Whitmer leading the Democratic ticket in Michigan in November 2022, the Republican gains seen elsewhere not only never materialised, it was a blue wave that swept the state; Democrats swept every statewide office from the governorship to the Secretary of State’s office by comfortable margins, and the party regained the Michigan House for Representatives for the first time since 2008 and the Michigan State Senate for the first time since 1984. On the gubernatorial ballot, Whitmer racked up historic levels of support amongst demographics critical both for victory in Michigan but also nationally and with whom national Democrats and the Harris-Walz campaign struggled in 2024: such as 62% of women (Harris got just 52%), 94% of African Americans (Harris slipped to 87%), and won young voters aged 18-29 with 64% (Harris actually shockingly lost this group to Trump 50-47%). Moreover, Whitmer only lost white voters, the crux of the Republican coalition, by 1% in 2022 (Harris lost them in Michigan by 10%), and similarly the Governor only lost male voters by 3% (Harris lost them by 12%). The demographic figures convey Whitmer’s electoral strength for themselves. 

On top of merely appealing to and energising the sects of voters Democrats must do to win, Whitmer has repeatedly demonstrated extraordinary strength in suburbs (determinative for any contemporary presidential campaign in the seven swing states). For example, Whitmer outright won Macomb County (northern Detroit suburbs) by some 20,000 votes; the county backed Trump in all three of his presidential runs, including by some 70,000 votes in 2024. There are clear levels of crossover support for her.  

It is a similar story in Kent County (the city of Grand Rapids and surrounding suburban areas), and which has long been a GOP stronghold in Michigan for eight decades. Before it voted for Whitmer in both 2018 and 2022 – a Democratic gubernatorial candidate had won Kent County just once since 1948 (in a huge outlier in 1986, in which the Democrat won all but one county in Michigan in a massive landslide). 

Against such national headwinds, 2022 was undeniably an objectively extraordinarily impressive result for such a volatile purple state at the federal level to award Democrats under Whitmer with a legislative trifecta and every statewide office – and a testament to the Governor’s leadership, her electability and broad appeal to a plethora of demographics and regions that Democrats simply must improve with to win, and her down ballot coattails.  

Gretchen Whitmer is more than aware of the demographic bleeding that plagued Democrats in 2024 and doomed Kamala Harris (even to the extent that it cost them the national popular vote for the first time since 2004, as safe blue state margins from Illinois to New Jersey to New York narrowed considerably). This includes young men that typically voted Democratic, but which abruptly fled in droves to Trump-Vance in 2024. Just yesterday, in her 2025 State of the State annual address, Whitmer singled out the plight of young men and appealed directly to them, framing their struggles as a crisis of opportunity and pledging to help them. She is clear-eyed about clawing back traditional support from a group that Vance seemingly bolstered the GOP ticket’s appeal to – and if her electoral record is anything to go off; she is perfectly positioned to be that nominee. 

Vice President Vance is another Midwesterner, as the former US Senator from neighbouring Ohio with a prominent background in the deprived and hollowed out rural Midwest. To neutralise his likely own regional appeal in Appalachia which spans across key rural areas of several vital states (although I would add Vance underperformed most Republicans in his own US Senate race in Ohio in 2022), including Pennsylvania and North Carolina, it would be sensible for Democrats to nominate a regional overperformer with a proven track record of extensive appeal. Nominating another too easily caricaturable San Francisco liberal in Harris again or Newsom would be extremely risky in the Rustbelt and would only make the uphill battle to reclaim Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania and middle America more cumbersome.  

Similarly, as a former Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee from January 2021 to January 2025, Governor Whitmer has gathered extensive experience in organising and executing campaigns at the national level for the Democrats (allowing her to gain campaigning and logistical experience beyond just her state), which will serve her well if she mounts her own presidential bid in 2028, as she is generally expected to do. She also campaigned fiercely for the Harris-Walz ticket, which bolstered her out-of-state profile substantially. 

Governor Whitmer is respected, admired and authentic, and at the forefront of the evolving electoral coalition for the Democratic Party in a region that is very much the key to the White House in the Electoral College and which Vance will have his own appeal.  

Furthermore, to address the elephant in the room, no – I do not think that the Governor’s gender will by default preclude her from winning the Electoral College, nor do I think the United States is fundamentally unwilling to elect a woman president, even now. Indeed, Whitmer may find herself facing more reservations about her being a woman in the 2028 primary than the general election from unconvinced Democrats whose apprehension is derived not from bigotry but from anxiety about nominating another woman only to see them defeated in November if they perceive that as an Achilles heel. 

Such false blanket assertions that a woman simply cannot win implies that both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris were defeated by virtue of their being women and otherwise would have won, but that is an oversimplification of both of their respective elections and doesn’t at all account for the wild and unique twists and nuances of both the 2016 and 2024 cycles.  

Whilst both unquestionably faced both subconscious and overt misogyny in the form of unwelcome commentary on their appearance or their laugh or their voice and it certainly would not have aided their campaigns, I would contend that it is not because of misogyny alone that they lost. Most unabashed misogynists hellbent on preventing a woman becoming president are unlikely to be high-propensity voters for Democrats anyway – as in: there was plenty of bigotry in both campaigns, but generally not from voters inclined to vote for them or their part regardless, and therefore it is hard to conceive that their gender moved a sufficiently determinative volume of votes against them to doom them.   

Rather, both candidates were victims of other flaws and of the times. For Hillary Clinton, she won the national popular vote by over 2,850,000 votes and came so painfully close to winning the Electoral College across Wisconsin (lost by 0.77%), Michigan (lost by just 0.23%), and Pennsylvania (lost by 0.72%), that many quantitative election analysts like Nate Silver believe that FBI Director James Comey’s unconstitutional eleventh hour public intervention on 28 October (just 11 days before the election) in abruptly reopening the FBI investigation into Clinton’s State Department email server cost her anything from 1 to 4 points across the board and given her miniscule losses in the Rustbelt, ‘the letter was probably enough to change the outcome of the Electoral College’. 

Whilst the Clinton campaign certainly made innumerable mistakes and faced historic headwinds and misogyny – Clinton would have still been elected president if not for an arbitrary intervention. Subsequently, to assert Clinton lost just because of misogyny alone is not accurate – until the last minute, she was likely going to win irrespective of that.  

Likewise, eight years later, Kamala Harris was a victim of the national environment. With a country that famously votes on little else but its chequebook, after being an integral part of an administration that, however free of blame it directly was, presided over a skyrocketing cost of living  

It was never going to be easy for Harris and Walz to swim against those tides, especially with the Vice President reluctant to distance herself from the historically unpopular Biden and the pejorative perceptions of the administration’s economic failings. Much of the post-election analysis seems to have settled on the assumption that, contrary to the conventional wisdom beforehand that widely anticipated a race down to the wire, Harris could not have won. I find myself agreeing with that more as time progresses. The Democrats were astute to swap out President Biden for the Vice President in July, for the defeat would have not been a narrow one but a resounding thumping had Biden led the party into November, with immeasurable damage to down ballot Democrats in the House and Senate had he done so.  

Kamala Harris undertook a largely thankless but vital campaign that increasingly in hindsight seemed hopeless from the outset (despite public polling hopes and the candidate’s radiant optimism, the Harris-Walz campaign’s internal polling never showed them winning at any point). Nevertheless, by supplanting Biden as the nominee, Harris likely single-handedly prevented a generational Senate map wipeout, seismic House losses and sweeping losses and further bleeding across further key states, giving Democrats a plausible springboard back to congressional power in 2026 and executive power in 2028. That journey would have significantly more complicated and unlikely if Democrats had experienced a totally cataclysmic national shellacking.  

On a very specific point, there have been claims that the Hispanic vote drifting to Trump in 2024 stemmed from misogyny towards Harris; but the easy refute to that claim is that Hillary Clinton was one of the strongest recent Democratic presidential nominees with Latino voters, achieving 65% in 2016 to Harris’ 56% in 2024. As such, the point remains Harris did not lose or suffer the demographic exodus’ simply because she was a woman, even if it didn’t necessarily help her odds. In turn, Gretchen Whitmer is certainly not disqualified from the office or the nomination by default on the same grounds. A woman absolutely could win the White House in 2028, and I hold Whitmer is that candidate. 

Beyond the electability argument, there is the Governor’s impressive record of effective bipartisan policymaking in Michigan. With 4 years as the Minority Leader and 9 years as a sitting member in the Michigan Senate, and 5 years as a member in the Michigan House of Representatives prior to running for the governorship, Whitmer has developed the ability to bring fiercely divided partisans together and find common ground. Her two terms in the Governor’s Mansion have proven that, as for the first four years of her leadership she presided over divided state government and a devoutly obstructionist Republican majority. That did not at all, however, prevent her from translating her campaign prescriptions into policy results. She has signed over 1,380 bipartisan bills to date into law. In the contemporary hyperpolarised environment and in a state legislature that she did not control, that is simply remarkable. Having proven herself capable and effective in a tense and divided legislature full of tribal rancour in Michigan, that is a tremendous asset given a President Whitmer would likely face a similarly polarised and uncooperative Republican congressional caucus in Washington DC. She has already burnished her credentials and ability to get policy moving regardless.  

As mentioned briefly above, as Governor of Michigan Whitmer has signed over 1,380 bipartisan bills into law and has balanced every one of her six annual state budgets. She has coupled fiscal responsibility with making necessary critical investments across education, climate change, healthcare, middle class tax cuts, reinforcing abortion protections in the post-Roe environment and infrastructure restoration – with her infamous pledge to ‘fix the damn roads’.  

To emphasise the scale of extraordinary bipartisan achievements as Governor, I will run through some of her accomplishments that make her an appealing candidate to both a national Democratic primary electorate, the general electorate at large, and demonstrate her capability and competence as a chief executive.  

When Roe v. Wade was struck down by the United States Supreme Court in the June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson decision, Michigan policy defaulted to an extreme 1931 abortion law which banned all abortions without exceptions for rape or incest, and which made it a four-year felony to assist with an abortion. Whitmer signed legislation repealing the 1931 law and in November 2022, ballot measure Proposal 3 was put to the electorate, who enshrined abortion rights into the state constitution by a comfortable 13.3-point margin. Over 2023 and 2024, Whitmer also signed legislation prohibiting employers from discriminating against anyone who had an abortion, increased funding for foster parents, signed the Reproductive Health Act (streamlined and removed complex and medically unnecessary statutes that criminalised clinical staff, forced health providers to close, restricted access to abortion and raised costs for patients), and the Michigan Family Protection Act (which legalised surrogacy protected access to IVF amidst federal Republican musings taking aim at it).  

Whitmer also expanded Healthy Michigan to cover another 1 million people (the program that offers low-cost healthcare plans to protect low-income individuals, from ambulance and emergency services to maternity care, hospitalisation to prescription medication, laboratory services to mental health and chronic disease management services). Opposing the extreme rulings of the ultraconservative US Supreme Court stacked by Trump in his first term aimed at curbing the freedom to make healthcare decisions, Whitmer made critical investments in Michigan healthcare and protected reproductive freedom and civil liberties and enhanced the safety of her citizens. On a related note, Whitmer is also unsurprisingly a staunch advocate for protecting and expanding LGBT+ rights in the face of Republican attacks at all levels.  

Whilst championing fiscal prudence and responsibility, Whitmer has also cut taxes for middle class families and pensioners throughout her time in office, which is catnip for a national American audience. She rolled back the Retirement Tax, saving some 500,000 households an average of $1,000 a year, and quintupled the Working Families Tax Credit (delivering a $3,150 tax refund to 700,000 working people, which is expected to lift 20,000 children out of poverty in Michigan).  

Education has also been a prime focus of her terms. Under her leadership, Michigan has expanded access to low-cost and free childcare to an additional 150,000 children, closed funding gaps in schools, increased teacher recruitment, invested in mental health support, provided free breakfast and lunch for all 1.4 million public school students and expanded access to free pre-K and community college to everyone in Michigan (saving students up to $35,000 in their lifetime and expanding opportunity). Whitmer also set up the Michigan Achievement Scholarship, lowering the annual cost of community college by some $2,750 a year, private college by $4,000 a year and public university by $5,500 for eligible students. Michigan Reconnect also now offers a path to tuition-free higher education or skills training for Michigan residents aged 21 and above.  

Whitmer has set tens of thousands more Michigan students and children on the path to success, revolutionised the state into a meritocracy and greatly expanded opportunity. All whilst not raising taxes whatsoever.  

Alongside the Biden administration’s concurrent infrastructure focus at the federal level with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Governor Whitmer similarly invested heavily in Michigan, including $4.6 billion to upgrade water infrastructure, expanded high-speed Internet to tens of thousands of homes and businesses and made the largest investment in state parks and green spaces in history, as well as $1.6 billion for public safety. Under her leadership, over 40,000 automobile industry jobs returned to Michigan with investments from the likes of General Motors, Ford and Stellantis. In delivering on her keynote campaign pledge to ‘fix the damn roads’, she has fixed over 20,000 miles of road and over 1,400 bridges across the state – investments which have supported over 118,000 jobs.  

It is worth reiterating again, that the Governor achieved all these incredible policy successes and spearheaded all this progress with initially divided state government before gaining miniscule majorities that necessitated a tightrope to navigate legislation through (especially on controversial topics), and made all these crucial investments whilst balancing every annual state budget she has signed in office and paying down Michigan debt by $18 billion and increasing the state’s rainy day fund to an all-time high. It is a stunning policy record in office, and Whitmer deserves the objective respect of everyone across the political spectrum for having been so effective as an executive in this political environment.  

In a tense, hyperpartisan and extremely divided political environment both nationally and at the state level in Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer has effectively navigated those challenges to unilaterally transform Michigan into a bastion of political, economic, educational, social, climate and business progress and prosperity. She has developed an uncanny ability to work through the most challenging political settings to repeatedly deliver significant policy results for her constituents, an ability that would serve her immeasurably well in the White House dealing with a combative Congress. The Governor has fiercely stood up to national and Republican assaults on the personal freedoms and livelihoods of Michigan residents and rapidly altered legislation to protect them in face of arbitrary extreme Supreme Court rulings.  

As a popular and very accomplished Governor from a critical battleground state in the Rustbelt whose appeal is expansive and deep across regions and demographics that Democrats must improve with in order to win back the White House in 2028 – and who is known and widely appreciated for her authenticity, hard-working demeanour, effectiveness in office and Midwestern charm – Gretchen Whitmer is the perfect antidote to presumptive Republican nominee JD Vance.  

Image: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan National Guard, Scott Thompson, 2021//PDM 1.0