For more than five decades, the Almanac of American Politics has set the standard for political reference books. In September, the Almanac will be publishing its 2026 edition, with more than 2,000 pages offering fully updated chapters on all 435 House members and their districts, all 100 senators, all 50 states and governors, and much more.

Below are excerpts from the new chapters in the 2026 Almanac on the state of Michigan and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, written by Louis Jacobson. Jacobson — a senior correspondent for PolitiFact, a senior columnist for Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, and a contributor of political coverage for U.S. News & World Report — has written for eight editions of the Almanac since 2000. For the 2026 edition, he served as chief author.

Readers can receive a 15% discount if they purchase the new Almanac at its website and use the code IMIP2026 at checkout.

HERE TBR BRINGS YOU THE FULL MCHIGAN CHAPTER:

Michigan, along with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, has helped pick the winner of each of the last three presidential elections.

Nearly 200 years ago, when the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville wanted to visit the American frontier, he boarded a boat and steamed across Lake Erie to visit the Michigan Territory. Tocqueville was not the first Frenchman to travel there. In the 17th century, French explorers and missionaries sailed the Great Lakes and slapped their version of Indian names on the landscape, which is why Michigan’s “ch” is pronounced like “sh” and why Mackinac is pronounced with a silent final “c.” (But Michiganders don’t carry it to extremes: Detroit ends with a robust English “oit.”) Michigan was not effectively occupied by the United States until 1796 and was bypassed in the initial westward rush into Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. In 1831, Tocqueville could still travel through virgin woods occupied by Indian tribes. But later in that decade, Michigan was settled in a rush by Yankee migrants from upstate New York and New England, who cut down trees and built farms and orderly towns, complete with schools and colleges. Politically, Michigan was full of Yankee reformers who hated slavery, staffed the Underground Railroad and promoted temperance. Michigan was one of the birthplaces of the Republican Party, which held its first official meeting in 1854 in Jackson, and up through the 1920s, Michigan was one of the nation’s most Republican states.

After the Civil War, Michigan developed an industrial economy. Its Lower Peninsula was covered mostly with trees, and lumber was the first boom industry on which Michigan overrelied. (Even today, half the state’s land area remains forested, supporting a popular hunting culture, though one that’s declining as baby boomers age.) Forests were clear-cut or swept by blazes such as the 1881 fire that burned out half of Michigan’s “thumb.” In the late 1800s, prospectors discovered huge copper deposits on the Keweenaw Peninsula, which juts from the Upper Peninsula into icy Lake Superior. (The state includes 40,000 square miles of the Great Lakes, making almost half of Michigan water.) Immigrants from Italy and Finland, Cornwall and Croatia found work in the mines. Then came the auto industry. A combination of accident and shrewdness—Henry Ford’s prickly genius and local bankers’ willingness to finance auto startups—ensured that America’s fastest-growing industry for the first 30 years of the 20th century was centered in Michigan. Detroit became a boomtown, the nation’s fastest-growing major metropolitan area after Los Angeles, which was then much smaller. The three-county Detroit metro area zoomed from a population of 426,000 in 1900 to 2.2 million in 1930 (today it’s nearly 4 million). The auto industry drew labor from outside Michigan, from southern Ontario, and from the farms of Ohio and Indiana. It attracted Poles and Italians, Hungarians and Belgians, Greeks and Jews. During World War II and the two following decades, it attracted whites from the Kentucky and Tennessee mountains and Blacks from the cotton country of Alabama and Mississippi.

This influx of a polyglot proletariat eventually changed Michigan’s politics. The catalyst was the Great Depression of the 1930s and company managers’ desire to use machines efficiently, treating employees as extensions of machines and with great distrust. Autoworkers became militant, and more militantly Democratic. Michigan politics became a kind of class warfare, conducted with a bitterness that split families and neighbors. The unions mostly won, because autoworkers and post-1900 immigrants were larger in number and produced more children than did outstate Yankees or management. With continuing growth, though, economic issues turned less bitter. Republican George Romney, the former American Motors president, was elected governor in 1962, and his successor, William Milliken, accepted the social welfare policies the UAW leadership and the Democrats had endorsed. Michigan supported one of the nation’s most distinguished and extensive higher-education systems, built state parks and recreation areas and pioneered efforts to end racial discrimination.

Michigan grew faster than the nation as a whole from 1910 to 1970, and successive censuses and reapportionments increased its U.S. House delegation from 12 to 19. But by 2022, its House delegation had fallen back to 13, and since 2010, the state’s population has grown by 2.6 percent, trailing the national rate. A key turning point may have been changes in the domestic auto industry. After the UAW’s strike against General Motors in 1970, the union won its central demand: “30 and out,” retirement after 30 years on the assembly line. That, in turn, led to demands for costlier retiree health benefits on top of the ones negotiated for active workers. The assumption was that the Big Three—General Motors, Ford and Chrysler—would continue to dominate the U.S. auto market as they had for decades and would be able to afford top-shelf benefits. But foreign competitors began producing better, cheaper cars that responded better to consumer preferences, first in Europe and Japan and then in nonunion plants in the United States. In Detroit, the population fell from 1.8 million in 1950 to 713,000 in 2010 and 633,000 in 2023, though the period from 2022 to 2023 marked the city’s first annual increase since 1957. Starting with riots in 1967, crime rates in Detroit remained high for 25 years, and much of the city simply vanished—houses were abandoned or burned down, commercial frontage had nearly full vacancy rates, and the downtown was a beleaguered fortress surrounded by vacant square miles. Detroit’s crumbling architecture helped spawn a photography subgenre called “ruin porn.”

But Detroit began rebounding in the 1990s. Crime was down and welfare rolls had shrunk. New sports stadiums and even some new housing were built downtown, and old theaters were refurbished. The decade that began in 2000 paused this comeback, as the Big Three, desperate to generate cash to pay huge costs for workers’ and retirees’ benefits, squeezed their subcontractors into bankruptcy, and GM and Chrysler followed in 2009; the federal government provided a bailout. Ford managed to stay afloat only by mortgaging almost all its assets in 2007. But Michigan recovered along with the rest of the nation: After the Great Recession, the Big Three resumed making profits, and GM and Chrysler began buying back government-owned stock. After spending several years in the biggest municipal bankruptcy in North American history, Detroit struck a “grand bargain” with the state’s GOP leadership in 2018—the final financial restrictions were lifted, leaving the city free of such oversight for the first time since the 1970s. In 2023, the city recorded fewer homicides than at any time since 1966. In 2024, a proposal was under consideration to partly demolish and redevelop Detroit’s signature, but aging, Renaissance Center, GM’s longtime headquarters.

Over time, the auto industry has become more high-tech, with fewer unionized workers, higher skill requirements and widespread robotics; employment in Michigan’s auto industry has declined by more than a third since 1990, and the industry’s share of Michigan employment halved to 3.7 percent. In 2020, workers at GM went on strike— the longest since 1970—but it ended with an agreement after 40 days. (In 2023, another six-week United Auto Workers strike at GM, Ford and Stellantis, Chrysler’s successor, resulted in pay increases through 2028.) By the time the coronavirus pandemic hit, Michigan had replaced all the manufacturing jobs it had lost during the Great Recession. Then, in 2021, GM made the blockbuster announcement that it would stop manufacturing passenger vehicles fueled by gasoline by 2035, shifting entirely to electric. It spent $2.2 billion to retool its Detroit-Hamtramck complex, newly dubbed Factory Zero, to build the electric GMC Hummer. The following year, GM said it would invest $7 billion on four manufacturing plants focusing on the electric market, including a new, $2.6 billion battery factory near Lansing, in collaboration with the South Korea-based LG Energy Solution, and a $4 billion conversion for a factory in Oakland County near Detroit that would let it build electric versions of the Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra. These projects received state incentives and federal loans. Rural voters were less enamored of zero-emission technologies than automakers were; in 2022, voters in Montcalm County, northeast of Grand Rapids, passed several local ordinances to block a 375 megawatt wind energy project. Meanwhile, the policy changes during President Donald Trump’s second term called into question whether federal support for EVs would continue. The state, and especially the car industry, stood to experience economic pain if Trump followed through on stiff tariffs against Canada and Mexico.

The Michigan Center for Data and Analytics projected that Michigan’s population will grow slowly for another decade, then start declining by 2050. Michigan’s population today would be even smaller without a steady influx of immigrants; the foreign-born now constitute 7 percent of the population. Michigan leads the nation in residents with Arab ancestry, because of a nearly continuous influx since the late 1800s. Arabs now account for an estimated 2 percent of Michigan’s population, centered on Dearborn (where Arab Americans recently became a majority) and other metro Detroit neighborhoods. The Lebanese, Iraqi, Palestinian and Yemeni communities are well established, as are Chaldeans, or Iraqi Christians, in such Detroit-area localities as West Bloomfield, Warren and Sterling Heights. In 2018, Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian, was elected to a House seat representing Detroit; later, her seat shifted to mostly suburban Wayne County. Michigan has historically ranked high nationally in refugee resettlements. The state is 14 percent Black and almost 6 percent Hispanic. In 2022, officials announced a project to restructure Interstate 375 in a way that seeks to restore Detroit’s Paradise Valley, which was a thriving, predominantly Black district until the highway was built in 1964.

Politically, Michigan was heavily Republican from the 1850s through the 1920s, then developed a partisan equipoise during the 1930s that it has largely maintained since. Historically, Detroit has been strongly Democratic; Flint, Saginaw and the Bay City corridor, with their blue-collar heritage, also leaned to the Democrats, though they are more competitive today. With their educated, government-employee workforces, Lansing, the state capital, and Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan, have become Democratic strongholds. Much of the rest of the state has been Republican and is getting more so; the Upper Peninsula, historically Democratic, followed the rest of rural America, turning strongly red. One of the most notable shifts, however, has been in Grand Rapids. The region has a large Dutch-American population and many Christian conservatives, and it’s home to the DeVos family, which founded the multilevel marketing behemoth Amway and became major Republican donors and promoters of conservative policies. But in the Trump era, metro Grand Rapids became bluer, as did many urban and suburban areas across the country.

In 2016, Trump won the state by about a fifth of a percentage point, bolstered by blue-collar voters fleeing the Democrats. But in 2018, the Democrats snapped back, as Gretchen Whitmer won the gubernatorial race by nine points and two other Democratic women flipped statewide offices, Dana Nessel as attorney general and Jocelyn Benson as secretary of state. Democrats also seized two formerly Republican congressional seats. Then, in 2020, Joe Biden won Michigan by a margin large enough that it didn’t even rank among the seven closest states in the nation, leveraging upturns in the Oakland County suburbs of Detroit and in Grand Rapids’ Kent County and narrowing his deficit in blue-collar Macomb County. 

An obsession with overturning the election within the GOP’s Trump wing helped sow the seeds for GOP troubles in Michigan in 2022. In the seemingly competitive races against Whitmer, Nessel and Benson, Republicans nominated pro-MAGA candidates who proved unpopular in a lower-turnout election. Republicans were further hobbled by the unpopularity of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, which resurrected a 1931 abortion ban in the state. Voters countered by placing a measure on the ballot to enshrine abortion rights. Democrats also benefited from a successful 2018 ballot initiative that initiated a redrawing of the GOP-leaning congressional and legislative maps. In the 2022 midterms, Democrats won enough seats to seize both legislative chambers, win the most competitive congressional races, reelect Whitmer, Nessel and Benson, and pass the abortion rights measure, 57%-43%. In April 2023, Whitmer formally rescinded the 1931 abortion ban.

But the 2024 election, in which both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris heavily contested the state, became a mirror image of 2020. Trump made inroads with Black and Hispanic voters and benefited from Arab American opposition to the Biden administration’s support for Israel in its war against Hamas in Gaza; Trump won the state, 50%-48%; Republicans also flipped an open U.S. House seat and won back the state House, ending Whitmer’s Democratic trifecta. The sole consolation for Democrats was Rep. Elissa Slotkin’s victory in the race for an open U.S. Senate seat, keeping both Senate seats in Democratic hands since 2000, unlike in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Democrat Gretchen Whitmer, riding a blue wave of dissatisfaction with President Donald Trump and with outgoing GOP Gov. Rick Snyder, won Michigan’s governorship in 2018. After four years of battling a Republican legislative majority—and becoming a target of rhetorical attacks from Trump and a foiled kidnapping plot—Whitmer won a double-digit reelection victory in 2022, aided by a backlash among abortion-rights backers and a GOP ballot stacked with nominees who argued for overturning the 2020 election. In 2024, Whitmer was considered a possible presidential successor to Joe Biden or a running mate for Kamala Harris, but neither happened. Whitmer, who is term limited in 2026, has been coy about whether she’d mount a White House bid in 2028.

Whitmer was raised as one of three children in Grand Rapids and East Lansing. Her father served as chief of the state Commerce Department in a Republican administration and later as CEO of insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield; her mother, a Democrat, was a senior lawyer in the state attorney general’s office. They divorced when she was young. 

Whitmer earned a bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University and has spoken of her early desire to become a television sports correspondent. But after taking a political internship in Lansing, she changed her career focus and enrolled in law school at Michigan State. Less than three years after earning her law degree, Whitmer won a state House seat, prevailing in an expensive primary by 281 votes. She served six years in the House, then won a state Senate seat, rising to become the chamber’s minority leader for her final four years—the first woman to lead a Senate party caucus in Michigan.

As a legislator, Whitmer leveraged her oratorical skills and procedural knowledge to become an effective critic of Snyder and the GOP Legislature, battling right-to-work legislation and other Republican priorities. In 2013, Whitmer announced in an emotional floor speech that she had been raped in college. She told her story during debate over Republican-backed legislation to require abortion insurance to be purchased separately from private health plans. Only four of 48 senators were women then, and Whitmer decided someone had to argue forcefully against the measure. Her speech attracted national attention, but the bill passed on a near-party-line vote. “It didn’t change a damn thing,” Whitmer told Michigan-based journalist Tim Alberta. “The next morning, I was about as depressed as I’ve ever been, because I’ve just laid my soul bare.”

Whitmer considered running for attorney general in 2010, but decided against it. Four years later, facing Senate term limits, she considered a gubernatorial bid, but didn’t run. In 2018, Whitmer saw her opening, with Snyder term-limited and unpopular after his handling of the Flint water crisis. It also proved to be a much friendlier year for a Democrat to run in than 2010 or 2014. Whitmer became the first Democrat to announce a candidacy, a tactic observers later credited with keeping a number of major Michigan Democrats out of the primary, including Sen. Gary Peters and Rep. Dan Kildee.

In the Democratic primary, Whitmer was the establishment candidate, and the race’s only woman. Whitmer had vastly more political experience than either of her challengers—Abdul El-Sayed, a 33-year-old former city of Detroit health director, and Shri Thanedar, a deep-pocketed entrepreneur from Ann Arbor. Both attacked from her left. Late in the primary campaign, Sen. Bernie Sanders and future Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, two of the party’s biggest names on the left, came to the state to campaign for El-Sayed. But primary voters concluded that Whitmer was plenty progressive. She supported a $15 minimum wage, legalized marijuana and universal preschool, and they liked her focus on nuts-and-bolts issues such as highway funding, which was encapsulated in her campaign slogan, “Fix the damn roads.” Whitmer took 52 percent, as her opponents split the more progressive vote: El-Sayed took 30 percent and Thanedar won 18 percent. To ease any residual friction with progressives and Detroit Democrats, Whitmer tapped as her running mate Garlin Gilchrist, who had served as Detroit’s innovation and emerging technology director and who is Black.

In the general election, Whitmer faced Bill Schuette, who had served two attorney general terms and who had emerged from a competitive primary against outgoing Lt. Gov. Brian Calley. Past tensions between Snyder and Schuette permeated the general election, and Snyder mostly ignored the GOP nominee. Whitmer ran on kitchen table issues and the overall political environment helped Whitmer win, 53%-44%. She took roughly twice as many counties as Hillary Clinton had in the presidential race two years earlier, including working-class Macomb County outside Detroit. Following Schuette’s loss, Republican legislators sought to handcuff Whitmer and other incoming Democrats by curbing the executive branch’s powers. But after a national backlash, Snyder vetoed the measures.

In her first year in office, Whitmer notched some victories, including a bipartisan compromise on the no-fault auto insurance system, which had vexed the state for years and left Michigan with some of the nation’s highest insurance rates. But Whitmer and the Legislature fought endlessly over the state budget, and the issue that had been her campaign’s centerpiece, fixing the roads, crumbled as voters, including some Democrats, rejected her proposal to hike the gasoline tax by 45 cents per gallon. 

For Whitmer, 2020 was dominated by a cascade of coronavirus pandemic-related challenges. She became a fixture on television; she also imposed limits under what many saw as dubious interpretations of executive powers that became targets of legal attack by the GOP-controlled Legislature. The moves sparked armed protests outside—and even inside—the state capitol, and Trump and his allies elevated Whitmer as a pandemic villain. Tensions reached a crescendo in October, when federal and state officials announced charges against 13 men for allegedly planning to kidnap Whitmer. (Some were convicted while others were acquitted in separate trials.) Whitmer also dealt with the collapse of two dams that resulted in the flooding of Midland and resulted in a spate of lawsuits against the state. Despite national conservatives’ demonization of Whitmer, Joe Biden made her a finalist in his vice presidential search in 2020. Biden didn’t pick Whitmer, but she helped him reverse his 2016 loss in the state, and she became a prominent voice countering claims of election irregularities by Trump and his allies.

In the second half of Whitmer’s first term, she sparred with the Republicans, who still controlled the Legislature, over the contours of a tax cut proposal. But the two sides worked together on a plan for spending federal funds on infrastructure, including drinking water systems, internet access, roads, bridges and dams. She also hammered out and signed a 2022 budget bill. 

But abortion defined her 2022 reelection bid, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The decision meant Michigan was poised to fall back to a 1931 abortion ban that did not include exceptions for rape and incest. Whitmer promised to “fight like hell to protect every Michigander’s right to make decisions about their own body with the advice of a medical professional they trust.” She worked with Attorney General Dana Nessel to fight the 1931 law in court, and she signed an executive order telling state agencies not to cooperate with out-of-state authorities seeking to investigate or prosecute abortions.

In the GOP primary, conservative commentator Tudor Dixon defeated several challengers who to varying degrees cast doubt on Biden’s victory in the state in 2020, setting up Michigan’s first ever woman-versus-woman gubernatorial election. Dixon said she was “pro-life with exceptions for the life of the mother,” while Whitmer said “the only reason Michigan continues to be a pro-choice state is because of my veto and my lawsuit.” Enthusiasm behind an abortion-rights measure boosted Whitmer, as did the GOP’s selection of election deniers as nominees for attorney general and secretary of state. Whitmer won, 54%-44%, flipping two counties she had lost in 2018, including Grand Traverse (Traverse City). Her coattails delivered a Democratic majority in the Legislature for the first time in decades.

After her reelection, Whitmer moved with Democrats to pass laws that expanded affordable housing, decreased taxes on retirement income and expanded Michigan’s civil rights law to sexual orientation and gender identity. She also signed a repeal of the state’s right-to-work law, making Michigan the first state in more than a half-century to repeal such a law; a formal repeal of the old abortion ban; several gun control measures, including universal background checks, safe storage requirements around children and a red flag law allowing the seizure of weapons from people believed to endanger themselves or others; a restoration of collective bargaining rights for teachers; a bill raising the marriage age to 18; and an aggressive clean energy package that required 100 percent clean energy by 2040. In 2024, Whitmer signed a budget bill that expanded preschool access and offered two years of free community college.

After Biden’s disastrous debate performance in June 2024, Whitmer’s name emerged as a possible successor as the Democratic nominee. But within days, she took herself out of the running. When Biden left the race to Vice President Kamala Harris, Whitmer was one of at least seven Democrats who were vetted as possible Harris running mates before Harris chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Whitmer attracted controversy in October when she shared a pro-Harris-Walz video she’d made in which she placed a Dorito chip on influencer Liz Plank’s tongue; some Catholics saw it as mocking the rite of Communion. Whitmer, who described it as merely a riff on a social media trend, apologized. In the 2024 election, Republicans flipped the state House, portending a challenging final two years for Whitmer.

In April 2025, Whitmer joined Trump at the White House and expressed openness to some tariffs at a time when they had become unpopular among many Americans. Trump praised her as a “good person.” For some Democrats, this struck a discordant note.

A long list of possible successors has emerged for 2026, when Whitmer is term-limited, including Democrats Gilchrist, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, and Genesee Co. Sheriff Chris Swanson. Republicans in the mix include U.S. Rep. John James, state Senate Minority Leader Aric Nesbitt, ex-Attorney General Mike Cox, and former state House Speaker Tom Leonard. Then there is independent Mike Duggan, Detroit’s mayor, who many believe has a real shot at upsetting the apple cart.

Meanwhile, incumbent U.S. Senator Gary Peters, a Democrat, has announced he won’t seek re-election in 2026.  That has paved the way for former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, who lost the closest U.S. Senate race in Michigan history last year, to take another shot in 2026. He seems likely to be the GOP nominee, but there is a three-way race underway among Democrats for their party’s nomination — U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, state Senator Mallory McMorrow, and former Wayne Co. Health Director Dr. Abdul El-Asid.

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