It sure looks that way, based on recent history, and now a female has entered the race for the GOP nomination for SoS to be determined next year.
Mary Treder Lang, a certified public accountant from Grosse Pointe Farms, announced Tuesday that she’ll seek the Republican nod on a platform of “Security, Optimization and Stability,” emphasizing her background in cybersecurity and ability to eliminate the threat of cyber-attacks on Michigan’s election system and the theft of personal information.
Before 1974, no woman of either major political party had ever been elected Michigan Secretary of State, but then Macomb Co. Treasurer Candice Miller, a Republican, scored an upset victory over six-term incumbent Democrat Richard Austin. Austin and his predecessor, Democrat James Hare, had held SoS for 40 straight years. But Miller’s triumph launched a skein of six straight electoral victories in which Miller and two other GOP women, Terri Land and the office’s current occupant, Ruth Johnson, will have served 24 straight years in the office by the end of Johnson’s term-limited tenure next year.
In other words, no Republican man has ever been elected Secretary of State since 1952, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was first elected president. And no female Democrat has ever held the office.
That may change next year, because Jocelyn Benson, a Wayne State University law professor who lost to Johnson in 2010, is again seeking the Democratic nomination. Meanwhile, Treder Land must get by three announced male opponents to win the Republican nod at the 2018 GOP Fall Convention — Shelby Township Clerk Stanley Grot; state Senate Majority Floor Leader Mike Kowall (R-White Lake); and MSU professor Joseph Guzman, who was a co-chair of President Donald Trump’s winning Michigan campaign, assuming all three stay in the race.
Treder Lang has run for office only once before — in 2008, she had the misfortune of winning a slam-bang, multi-candidate Republican primary in the 1st district of the state House of Representatives, only to be buried in the Barack Obama presidential landslide by WSU professor Tim Bledsoe (D-Grosse Pointe), after which time the enclave was reapportioned to make it impossible for a Republican to win there again for the forseeable future.
The blonde, effervescent Treder Lang is touting her 30 years of experience in the private sector, where she has led teams in multiple fields including computer security, finance, sales, and government relations. Since 2015, Treder Lang has been employed by Vista Maria, a Dearborn Heights-based non-profit association focussed on at-risk youth, as the vice president of Development and Major Gifts.
Treder Lang is an appointee of Gov. Rick Snyder to the Eastern Michigan University Board of Regents and also has served on the board of the Michigan Assn of Public Accountants and Michigan State Parks. Perhaps her most colorful achievement is to be the only female ever to serve as Commodore of the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club.
Treder Land says she’s prepared to raise and spend half a million dollars just to win her party’s nomination for SoS a year from now, and as much as it takes after that to win the general election.
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