Do we like Gretchen Whitmer?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A long, on-the-record run of protecting LGBTQ+ rights, with the Trump photo-op stoush and the Line 5 fight still open.
Whitmer came up through Michigan's state House and Senate, where she became Senate Democratic Leader, before winning the governorship in 2018 and again in 2022. She's term-limited, so she hands over the keys in January. That's the whole arc: a state-politics lifer who ended up on the national stage, including delivering the Democratic response to Trump's 2020 State of the Union.
The messiest chapter is her Trump dance. In April 2025 she gave a speech criticising tariffs, then ended up standing in the Oval Office while Trump signed executive orders and repeated his claim the 2020 election was rigged. Democratic strategists told NBC it was a “disaster”, while her office said she was surprised to be pulled in and that her presence was not an endorsement. Where you land depends on whether you read it as a governor working the system for her state's auto industry or as getting played.
She's also done the work on women's rights and the planet. In late 2023 she signed the Reproductive Health Act, repealing a 1931 abortion ban and a pile of restrictions on providers. On climate, her appointees pushed Consumers Energy toward exiting coal, and she took on the Line 5 oil pipeline under the Great Lakes. Line 5 still runs amid the litigation, so that one's unfinished, and the state's own August 2026 release shows the fight is still on.
Her relationship with the facts is mostly fine. PolitiFact has rated only three of her own claims: one mostly true on pandemic distancing, one half-true on poverty in February 2026, and one mostly false on auto jobs in 2022. That's a thin sample, not a pattern, and it's the whole list.
Her 2028 announcement was the recent news. She said she would “not be one of them in 2028”, and she noted she'll be out of office this year. Fellow Democrats were disappointed, and Slotkin said she wasn't ruling out a run herself. For people who like her, it's a shame; for the rest of us, she leaves with a record that holds up.