This came in fast. Friday afternoon, Whitmer endorsed Haley Stevens over Abdul El-Sayed, less than two weeks before the August 4 primary, after hundreds of thousands of Michiganders had already voted. She flew to Detroit to repeat the endorsement in person at a Teamsters hall, telling the crowd Stevens has “what it takes to win.” What it takes, apparently, includes close to $30 million in outside spending from AIPAC, a track record of opposing gig workers’ right to organize, and a refusal to touch anything resembling Medicare for All. El-Sayed’s campaign called it what it was: “The corporate establishment has closed ranks and made their pick.”

Whitmer built a national brand on the appearance of fighting for ordinary people, the Great Lakes, working families, communities of color. Scratch any one of those commitments and you find a governor who reliably chooses the institutional, well-funded, low-conflict path, then wraps the choice in the language of pragmatism. The Stevens endorsement is this week’s data point in a pattern that’s been running for eight years.

The Pattern Repeats down the Ballot: She Keeps Picking the Corporate Money

Zoom out from the Senate race and the same choice shows up in nearly every contested Democratic primary Whitmer has waded into this cycle. In each case, there was a candidate in the race who had pledged not to take corporate PAC money, and in each case, Whitmer endorsed the opponent who does.

In the Senate primary, it’s Stevens over El-Sayed. Stevens has accepted corporate PAC donations during this campaign from Google, Goldman Sachs and Cigna, and over her career corporate PACs have contributed at least $1.6 million to Stevens’ campaign accounts and $139,500 to her leadership PAC across her five runs for office, while El-Sayed has sworn off the category entirely.

In the open MI-11 seat being vacated by Stevens, it’s Jeremy Moss over both Don Ufford and Aisha Farooqi. Ufford’s campaign has been the only major candidate in the race refusing contributions from corporate PACs, while accusing Moss of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from corporate political action committees, utility PACs and AIPAC’s donor network, including $55,000 routed through the Better Blue Fund, a joint fundraising vehicle whose structure allows multiple candidates to raise funds collectively and attract larger contributions from wealthy donors, obscuring the political interests behind the money. Whitmer endorsed Moss in November 2025, months before any of this reporting came out, giving her chosen candidate a fundraising and institutional head start the corporate-money-refusing opponent never had a chance to compete with.

In the open Detroit-area Senate District 3 seat, it’s Korey Hall over Eboni Taylor. Hall is a sitting member of Whitmer’s administration, Detroit office director in the governor’s office, and she endorsed him directly: “I’m Big Gretch and I’m standing tall with Korey Hall.” Taylor, by contrast, shared a stage with El-Sayed, Bernie Sanders, and AOC at a Detroit rally rebuking corporate PAC money, the same rally where Rashida Tlaib campaigned for Donavan McKinney against Shri Thanedar in MI-13, another race built around the exact same corporate-money dividing line.

In the Ann Arbor mayor’s race, it’s Christopher Taylor over Yousef Rabhi. Taylor is a former corporate and commercial attorney running as the establishment incumbent; Rabhi, a DSA member, told a candidate forum he’d always worked against dark-money accounts and has not taken corporate PAC money, while accusing Taylor’s camp of being behind attack mailers funded by a dark-money group called Michigan Deserves Better.

And in Detroit’s House District 8, it’s Helena Scott over Chris Gilmer-Hill. Gilmer-Hill, an environmental justice policy expert endorsed by Rashida Tlaib, has pledged to never take money from AIPAC, DTE, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, or any other corporate or conservative PAC. Scott chairs the House Energy, Communications, and Technology Committee, the committee with direct oversight of DTE and Consumers Energy. She has taken DTE PAC money since the February 2023 outage crisis that put her committee in the spotlight in the first place, one of 13 of 17 energy committee members who kept accepting utility PAC checks even as they held hearings promising accountability.

Line 5: The Reversal She’s Still Trying Not to Call a Reversal

Nine days before the Stevens endorsement, EGLE and the DNR, both under Whitmer, approved the wetlands and submerged-lands permits Enbridge needs to build its Line 5 tunnel under the Straits of Mackinac. This is the pipeline she built her 2018 campaign around shutting down. The National Wildlife Federation’s response was blunt: the decision is a staggering reversal from Whitmer’s own administration’s previous efforts to shut down the pipeline and protect the Great Lakes. Michigan LCV was harsher: Whitmer had the opportunity to put the health and safety of the Great Lakes first, but instead backtracked on a promise and approved a dangerous project that threatens drinking water for millions of people.

The permitting documents themselves concede the project has significant impacts. The agencies concluded the project’s benefits outweigh those impacts and issued the permits anyway, while environmental advocacy organizations argued the governor had softened her stance after pledging in her 2018 campaign to take action against Line 5. Tribal governments, whose treaty rights and sacred sites sit directly in the path of this project, have opposed it consistently. The administration didn’t even bother responding to reporters asking for comment.

Nine Bills, One Signature Away, All Vetoed

Two weeks ago, after unions spent eighteen months in court forcing a Republican-controlled House to transmit nine already-passed bills to her desk, Whitmer vetoed all nine. These weren’t symbolic messaging bills. They included reforms to the 80/20 law restricting public-sector bargaining over health benefits, pension improvements for state and prison workers, and protections against garnishing unemployment and disability benefits. The joint statement from the Michigan AFL-CIO, UAW, and Michigan Education Association didn’t mince words: the veto betrays democratic values and abandons the very people who have supported her in office, calling it an insult to every hard-working Michigander fighting for economic justice.

Her stated reason was a technicality about effective dates. Even labor allies weren’t buying that the “overripe” framing required killing all nine outright rather than working with the legislature on a fix. Jocelyn Benson, running to succeed her, said what a lot of Democrats were thinking privately: teachers, nurses, corrections officers, and so many others spent years fighting for relief, only to have leaders they trusted pull the rug out from underneath them.

The Data Center Pledge: A Press Release in Place of Real Policy

Last week’s data center rollout is the clearest specimen of the genre. Facing pressure from a growing coalition demanding a moratorium until real regulations exist, Whitmer announced the “Michigan Affordability and Responsible Growth Pledge,” ten voluntary commitments asking data center companies to promise, on their own honor, not to pass costs onto ratepayers. Google and Oracle signed immediately and issued grateful statements. Of course they did. It costs them nothing.

Sierra Club Michigan’s Tim Minotas said what should be obvious: pledges and promises are not enough, and Michigan needs strong, enforceable data center regulations now. He put it even more plainly elsewhere: voluntary corporate promises are not a substitute for enforceable law, and Michigan should not have to rely on companies to regulate themselves. A moratorium was never on the table. What Whitmer offered instead was a menu of commitments with no enforcement mechanism and no penalty for noncompliance. Meanwhile a real regulatory package from Senate Democrats and a moratorium bill both sit stalled in Lansing, and she hasn’t pushed either one across the finish line.

The Data Center Subsidy That came Before the Pledge

The voluntary pledge didn’t happen in a vacuum. Before Whitmer ever asked data center companies to sign a promise, she signed them a tax exemption. On December 31, 2024, she approved Senate Bill 237, exempting operators that invest $250 million or more on digital infrastructure from sales and use taxes on equipment until at least 2050, alongside its House companion. House Bill 4906 and Senate Bill 237 exempt qualifying “enterprise” data centers from the state’s 6% sales and use tax on equipment through at least 2050, or 2065 if the facility is built on a brownfield site. That’s the actual policy substrate underneath every subsequent “protecting Michiganders from data center costs” press release. The state had already forgone hundreds of millions in tax revenue from the exact same companies before asking them to pledge, on their honor, not to pass their infrastructure costs onto ratepayers.

The vote itself split her party. Some Senate Democrats warned the timing was tone-deaf: Democrats had just come off a “tough election cycle” and should work to address resident concerns about high prices rather than write tax breaks for California-based tech companies, one legislator argued, saying no voter had ever asked for more corporate tax breaks. Environmental advocates raised the same objection they’d raise again a year later about the pledge: amendments to address water sourcing, ratepayer protection, and renewable energy requirements were included, but advocates argued the provisions were insufficient to fully protect Michigan’s environmental and economic interests while handing millions to some of the wealthiest corporations in the world. Michigan LCV didn’t equivocate in its scorecard: Whitmer prioritized corporate tax breaks over environmental and consumer protections, at a moment when other states are already seeing data center energy demand translate into rate hikes for ordinary customers and new fossil fuel buildout.

MPSC: Swap the Advocate for the Industry-Friendly Staffer

If you want the mechanism by which “pro-environment” governance quietly becomes pro-utility governance, look at who Whitmer puts on the body that actually sets DTE and Consumers’ rates. Last summer she declined to reappoint Alessandra Carreon, a commissioner viewed as too strong a clean energy and consumer advocate, and installed Shaquila Myers, a former senior adviser on her staff, in her place. A Michigan Advance source described it without euphemism: that was the governor’s very deliberate choice.

This landed while DTE Energy’s $574.1 million rate hike proposal aimed to boost infrastructure and clean energy, raising Michigan residents’ bills by $13.50 monthly, with Attorney General Dana Nessel among the critics demanding proof the expenses and rates were fair and justified. And it’s worth knowing the financial backdrop: Michigan Energy First, a nonprofit group tied to DTE, gave $750,000 in 2022 to Road to Michigan’s Future, a nonprofit linked to Whitmer.

Fighting to Keep Detroit “in Attainment,” Against the Actual Air

This is the one that should make people the angriest, because it directly touches public health in the communities Whitmer’s rhetoric claims to prioritize. Southeast Michigan has had an ozone problem for years, concentrated in neighborhoods like the one around the East 7 Mile monitor, which carries one of the highest asthma hospitalization rates in the state. Rather than accept nonattainment status, which would trigger real pollution controls, mandatory vehicle inspections, and tighter permitting for industrial sources, the Whitmer administration has spent years trying to argue the numbers away.

Whitmer’s administration argued wildfires caused the high ozone readings at the East 7 Mile monitor, and after the EPA accepted that argument and discounted the data, it found southeast Michigan in attainment, letting EGLE avoid measures like requiring vehicle emissions testing. A federal appeals court eventually ruled this was unlawful: the Sixth Circuit overturned the EPA’s decision, citing Michigan’s failure to enforce regulations on industrial facilities emitting the pollutants that create ozone. Rather than take the hint, EGLE went back to the EPA seeking another wildfire smoke exemption to argue for ozone compliance, even as monitoring data showed the problem getting worse, not better, with additional monitors creeping above the ozone standard at Oak Park and Port Huron for the first time in 2025.

Unprecedented Levels of Corporate Welfare

None of this is offset by some parallel record of successful public investment. Under Whitmer’s SOAR fund, companies received nearly $1 billion from the state through SOAR and other corporate subsidy agreements that promised to create 65,491 jobs, and so far they have created 13,079. That’s roughly one job created for every five promised, at a cost approaching six figures per job actually delivered. Lawmakers in both parties eventually killed the fund’s ongoing budget authorization. Even the belated 2025 hiring wave only reached 1,846 of the 14,559 new jobs various firms promised, less than 13% of what companies had committed to create in exchange for $1.74 billion in taxpayer subsidies.

The Pockets Lined to “Fix the Damn Roads”

The slogan that made her in 2018 finally became a real deal last October, when Whitmer and House Speaker Matt Hall signed off on a plan to pump as much as $2 billion a year into road repairs, the largest funding increase for roads in state history. Whitmer called it the fulfillment of her signature campaign promise. What she didn’t mention was what happened at a steakhouse in Birmingham seven weeks before the ink dried.

On August 21, 2025, a slew of road construction executives whose companies stood to benefit from the spending gathered at Fleming’s Steakhouse and wrote checks totaling $211,293 to Hall’s leadership PAC in a single day, most of them $4,000 or more. It was more money than any legislator’s leadership PAC had raised in total through the prior nine months. Road-building company donations more than doubled statewide in 2025 compared to the year before, an odd-numbered, non-election year when giving normally drops off, jumping from roughly $204,000 in all of 2024 to more than $400,000 by October, timed almost exactly to the window when Hall and Whitmer were negotiating the deal behind closed doors. The industry’s trade group, the Michigan Infrastructure and Transportation Association, gave another $268,000 directly to legislators and PACs through the same stretch, on top of what individual executives gave.

Five members of the family that founded lane-painting firm PK Contracting gave a combined $20,000 at the fundraiser. The parent company of Michigan Paving and Materials contributed $8,000 days after that firm’s operations manager attended in person. Former Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, running for governor as an independent, pulled in more than $80,000 from road-industry donors during the same window.

None of this is illegal, and Michigan’s own campaign finance watchdog was careful to say the deal’s structure can’t be traced cleanly back to any single donor’s wish list, since the real negotiations happened behind closed doors where no public record shows who asked for what. But the watchdog also didn’t pretend the optics were nothing. Neil Thanedar, executive director of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, put it plainly: when political leaders raise hundreds of thousands of dollars from industry executives a month before delivering billions in new funding for that same industry, it leads the public to assume tax money is being lost to corruption, whether or not any single transaction is ever proven to be one.

The deal itself did nothing to close the door on that assumption going forward. The nonpartisan Citizens Research Council reviewed the final package and called the funding changes “haphazard and not well thought-out,” noting lawmakers made no structural reforms to how road money gets awarded. The biggest structural shift, routing roughly 60% of new funds to county and municipal road agencies instead of the state, sounds like decentralization until you notice that local road contracts are handed out with far less competitive bidding and far less oversight than state-level ones. Only 23 of Michigan’s 83 counties even participate in the state’s open bidding network. A researcher who studies the program for the Council didn’t mince words: if you want to find waste, fraud, and abuse in Michigan government, don’t ignore road construction. Whitmer signed the bill anyway, took the ceremonial photo in the hard hat and vest, and called it a promise kept. It probably was, for the people who own the companies that were writing checks at Fleming’s the same fall it passed.

Slipping $250,000 Donations Through a Loophole

Long before any of this cycle’s endorsements, Whitmer ran a version of the corporate-money playbook herself, and it’s worth remembering because it shows the instinct isn’t new. Michigan caps individual donations to a gubernatorial campaign at $7,150. In 2021, facing a wave of pandemic-era recall petitions, Whitmer’s campaign invoked a 1984 state ruling that lifts contribution limits entirely for officeholders defending against an active recall. Only one of the roughly 30 recall efforts filed against her ever actually produced a recall committee. She used the exception anyway, and kept using it for the better part of a year.

The money that flowed in dwarfed anything her limit-abiding opponents could touch. Mark Bernstein, a personal injury attorney and University of Michigan regent, gave $257,150. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker gave $250,000. Ronda Stryker, Patricia Stryker, and Samson Energy executive Stacy Schusterman each gave the same quarter-million. By the Michigan Freedom Fund’s count, at least $3.8 million of the $14.2 million Whitmer raised in 2021 came from more than 200 donors who exceeded the normal limit. A Michigan Campaign Finance Network analysis found that donations only possible because of the recall carveout accounted for nearly 44% of her fundraising that year, even though those donors made up under 1% of her total contributor list. That’s not marginal. That’s the mechanism doing almost half the work.

When the recall threat evaporated and the money couldn’t be spent on an election that was never coming, Whitmer’s campaign didn’t refund most of it. $3.5 million went to the Michigan Democratic Party, and only $250,000 was refunded, to Bernstein.

Handing the Morouns Exactly What They Asked For

In September 2024, Whitmer’s MDOT decided to grant the Detroit International Bridge Company, the Moroun family’s holding vehicle for the Ambassador Bridge, the hazardous materials routing redesignation it had been seeking since filing its petition in 2020. MDOT decided to permit Class 8 hazardous materials, corrosive material like battery ingredients, and Class 3 material, flammable and combustible liquids, on the bridge starting in October, ending a restriction that had been in place since 2014 specifically because the span runs directly over the drinking water source for both Detroit and Windsor. The company itself framed the decision as a win, saying it “dramatically improves safety in the State of Michigan and enhances the smooth flow of international commerce in the Detroit-Windsor corridor.”

I filed formal comments opposing this. Based on federal routing-designation law, a study MDOT itself had commissioned, and decades of the company’s submissions and court filings, the record did not support granting it. The regulation MDOT was applying, 49 CFR Part 397, requires states to make an affirmative safety finding before granting this kind of redesignation. The record instead showed a private bridge company with a documented history of safety and maintenance problems asking to be trusted with corrosive and flammable freight over an international drinking water source. The timing wasn’t incidental either. The publicly owned Gordie Howe Bridge was already designed from the ground up to carry hazmat safely and was set to open within roughly a year, so MDOT’s approval let the Morouns beat the built-for-purpose alternative to market. Fire officials in Windsor raised the same concern about who absorbs the liability and emergency-response cost if something goes wrong mid-span. MDOT granted the redesignation anyway, on a six-month review, months before that alternative came online.

This wasn’t a headline decision Whitmer personally announced from a podium. It was a technical-sounding administrative action, made by an agency she appoints and controls, that quietly handed a politically connected private family exactly the outcome they’d been lobbying for since 2020, over the opposition of public health advocates, Canadian officials, and public comments in the docket, while the governor’s public-facing rhetoric stayed entirely about fixing roads and protecting communities.

FOIA: The Promise That Costs Nothing to Make and Nothing to Break

If you want the single cleanest measurement of the gap between Whitmer’s stated values and her actual conduct, it’s this: in 2018 she wrote, in plain terms, that “if the legislature won’t act, I will use the governor’s authority under the Michigan State Constitution to extend FOIA to the Lieutenant Governor and Governor’s Offices.” Michigan and Massachusetts are the only two states in the country that fully exempt the governor and the legislature from public records law. Whitmer promised to fix her half of that unilaterally, without waiting on anyone.

She has been in office since January 2019. As of the most recent tracking, that promise has gone unfulfilled for roughly 2,500 days, longer than the United States’ involvement in World War I and World War II combined. It gets worse than simple inaction. An internal memo from Whitmer’s chief legal counsel directs department and agency directors to notify the governor’s office when certain sensitive FOIA requests are coming in, so the executive office can be “fully informed” before disclosure, even though her office remains legally exempt from ever having to produce records itself. A leading open-government advocate called that memo “problematic” specifically because it adds a layer of review that can slow down requests to agencies she does have power over, while the governor’s office stays completely dark.

The bipartisan fix has passed one chamber or the other of the legislature in 2017, 2019, 2021, 2024, and 2025, and stalled every single time. Each time, Whitmer’s office has had the constitutional authority to simply extend the policy to herself by directive, at zero legislative cost, and each time she hasn’t.

Israel: The Unbroken Thread Since Day One

Whitmer’s first international trip as governor, in November 2019, was to Israel, hosted by the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit in coordination with the state’s economic development arm. It generated immediate backlash from the state’s Arab American community, whose leaders called it, per an Arab American News release at the time, an “insensitive and offensive trip to the apartheid state,” with a slap in the face feeling among many who had backed her a year earlier. Four years later, after October 7, she moved fast to declare herself “unequivocally supportive of Israel” after backlash to an initial statement critics found too vague. Now, in 2026, she’s endorsing the AIPAC-backed candidate in the Senate primary over the candidate AIPAC spent tens of millions trying to defeat.

Benton Harbor: Relief, but Only After Being Forced

Benton Harbor’s water started testing high for lead in October 2018. For three years, the response from Whitmer’s EGLE was to direct the financially struggling, majority-Black city to raise water rates to pay for fixes, while the underlying lead problem went unaddressed. My colleague Nick Leonard’s account of trying to work the system quietly is damning on its own: “A number of petitioners met with folks at EGLE in late 2019 to talk about things we thought were problematic with their response, and their answer at the time was, things are under control, lead levels are going down, we’ve got this.” They didn’t have it.

Nothing moved until September 2021, when GLELC joined nineteen other organizations, including the Benton Harbor Community Water Council, NRDC, Flint Rising, and the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition, in filing a formal emergency petition with the EPA under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The petition asked EPA to find that Benton Harbor’s water posed “an imminent and substantial endangerment to the health of persons,” the same legal standard used in Flint. Leonard didn’t mince words about why it had come to that: “The EPA must exercise its authority to order delivery of water bottles and filters to Benton Harbor residents, schools, and day care centers; it is time for the federal government to step in to protect this low-income community of color from toxic water.” The petition also pointed out something uncomfortable: EPA had issued an emergency order for a mostly white West Virginia town with a smaller lead problem within months, while Benton Harbor waited three years.

Whitmer’s executive order came about a month after that petition landed. Credit where it’s due: once she acted, the follow-through was good. Nearly all 4,500 lead lines in Benton Harbor were replaced within a year, six months ahead of the accelerated schedule, and Leonard himself later called it “an incredible win.” Meaningful action from this administration tends to arrive only after the people harmed by inaction do the work of making delay politically unsurvivable while moneyed interests have little at stake.

If This Was the Audition, She Should Never Get the Lead Role

Whitmer says she isn’t running in 2028. She said it flatly at the Mackinac Policy Conference in May: “I will not be one of them.” Then, hours later, she corrected herself: “Never say never.” She’s since taken the vice chair job at the Democratic Governors Association, a post that exists to build exactly the kind of national donor and organizer network a future campaign would run on, and launched a Substack where her first post talked about offering the country “a path forward.” Whether or not she runs, this record is what “electable, moderate, gets things done” governance actually produces when you stop reading the press releases and start reading the permits.

A folksy Michigan accent and a “fix the damn roads” bumper sticker were never evidence of who actually gets protected when the money and the microphone show up in the same room. If the national audition is real, she should never play a leading role.

If you’re like most people, a state legislator’s seat probably isn’t the first place you’d look for anything connected to Israel and Palestine. That’s a reasonable instinct. The State Department negotiates with foreign governments. Foreign policy reads as federal business by default, and a state representative or state senator can lean on that default without ever having to argue for it.

Michigan’s record over the last three decades shows gaping holes in that instinct when under even slight scrutiny. State lawmakers have signed off on trade missions, barred contractors from boycotts, appropriated money to build ties with Israel’s tech and defense sector, and once, forty years ago, tried to use the state’s pension fund as leverage against a different country’s apartheid system.

None of that required setting foreign policy. It required a vote, sponsorship, or signature from someone holding exactly the kind of seat that’s on the ballot this cycle.

A Decades-Long Tradition

The tradition goes back further than any one legislator’s trip. Gov. John Engler flew to Israel on a trade mission in 1997 (Detroit Free Press, May 19, 1997), arriving on a private jet loaned by Detroit Pistons owner William Davidson, to meet Jerusalem’s mayor and push Michigan-Israel trade ties. In 2008, Gov. Jennifer Granholm went further than a courtesy visit, signing a formal Joint Declaration of Strategic Cooperation with Israel’s deputy prime minister, making Michigan the first US state to sign a water-technology partnership agreement with the country, on the same trip that took her delegation to meet with a Michigan defense contractor’s Israeli venture partners. Gov. Rick Snyder took his own trade mission in 2013, meeting Netanyahu one-on-one and signing a letter of intent with Israel’s economy minister. When Gov. Whitmer went in 2019, she called it “the decades-long tradition of Michigan governors traveling to Israel to deepen our relationship.”

Rank-and-file legislators have a parallel version. In 2005, eight members of the Michigan Legislature spent six days touring Israel on a trip organized by the Jewish Community Council of Metropolitan Detroit, built around “forging stronger economic ties between Michigan and Israel” and studying the country’s “homeland security” and “anti-terror” programs. Sylvia Santana took what she called “an annual trip offered to state lawmakers to learn more about Michigan’s relationship with Israel” in 2023 and had to publicly apologize to her Dearborn-area constituents once word got out. In September 2025, two more Michigan legislators went on the biggest version of this trip yet: Rep. Jaime Greene and Rep. Noah Arbit both joined roughly 250 state legislators from all 50 states flown to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv for a conference called “50 States One Israel,” with the Israeli government covering airfare, lodging, and meals in full. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar didn’t treat the gathering as a courtesy visit either, telling the delegation directly to go home and get to work: “Instead of boycotting Israel, promote engagement with Israel. Instead of divesting from Israel, promote investments in Israel.”

Cybersecurity cooperation has followed the same track as trade and tourism. In December 2019, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson joined ten other secretaries of state on a trip sponsored by Project Interchange, an American Jewish Committee institute, framed around examining Israeli cybersecurity practices for election administration (The Arab American News, Dec. 21, 2019). Local Arab American leaders read the visit differently at the time. Attorney Huwaida Arraf said flatly that “Michiganders do not want their officials bringing home mass surveillance and militarized policing,” and Arab American Civil Rights Chairman Nasser Beydoun and activist Amer Zahr both raised the same concern: that a state importing Israeli security expertise was importing a surveillance and policing model along with it.

Sitting in that Lansing chair evidently comes with more of a role in this question than the chair’s occupants like to admit.

Boycotting Apartheid

In 1987, state Reps. Perry Bullard and Virgil Smith introduced bills, with matching legislation from Sens. Jackie Vaughn and Dan DeGrow, to pull roughly $2 billion in state pension money out of companies doing business in apartheid South Africa. The bills failed that session, the way similar divestment bills had failed every year since 1977. But the idea behind them, using the state’s pension money as leverage against a foreign government’s human rights record, isn’t something imported into this fight from outside. Michigan’s legislature built that tool and tried repeatedly to use it, for a cause the state now treats as obviously righteous in hindsight.

Israel and the apartheid regime in South Africa were allies, and not quietly. Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres met South African Defence Minister P.W. Botha in 1975 and, according to documents a researcher later pulled from South African archives, offered to sell Pretoria nuclear warheads “in three sizes”. A formal defense cooperation agreement followed, with a clause stating that the agreement’s existence had to stay secret. Two years later, in 1977, Israel traded 30 grams of tritium for 50 tons of South African uranium, material both countries needed for weapons work neither would admit to pursuing. When a US satellite detected a mysterious double flash over the South Atlantic in 1979, the Vela Incident, the leading explanation among nuclear researchers has long been a joint Israeli-South African test.

The military relationship went well past nuclear cooperation. Israel helped South Africa dodge the UN’s 1977 mandatory arms embargo by sending Lavi project technicians to upgrade South Africa’s aging Mirage fighters, and by licensing the South African navy to build patrol boats and missile corvettes based on Israeli designs. South Africa’s Scorpion missile was a licensed copy of Israel’s Gabriel. When South African Prime Minister John Vorster, a man interned during World War II for pro-Nazi sympathies, visited Israel in 1976, it was only the third trip outside South Africa he’d taken as prime minister, and it produced a wide-ranging pact covering coal, steel, military hardware, and further nuclear collaboration. The two countries had already upgraded their diplomatic missions to full embassy status in 1974. The ANC, watching all of this from exile, called the Vorster visit the high point of a cooperation that had been building for years.

None of that history is what the 1987 Michigan bills were about directly. But it’s the backdrop that made pension divestment from South Africa the obvious model for BDS advocates to reach for decades later. The two governments weren’t separate case studies in how states can commit human rights abuses. For a stretch of the Cold War, they were each other’s most reliable weapons supplier and diplomatic partner, bound together by, among other things, a shared experience of international isolation and arms embargoes. When BDS organizers point to the 1987 Michigan bills as precedent, they’re pointing at a state legislature that once tried to use financial pressure against one half of an alliance the other half was still benefiting from.

The comparison isn’t only a matter of who armed whom, either. It comes from people who lived through apartheid firsthand and later saw the West Bank and Gaza for themselves. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who spent his life fighting apartheid from inside it, wrote after his own visits that what he saw in the occupied territories, the checkpoints, the house demolitions, the confiscation of land for Jewish-only settlements, the confinement of Palestinians to fragmented pockets of territory, reminded him directly of the Bantustans his own government had carved out for Black South Africans. He went further than analogy, writing in 2012 that in some respects the situation was worse than what apartheid ideologues in South Africa had built.

Denis Goldberg, who was tried alongside Nelson Mandela as a member of the ANC’s armed wing and spent 22 years in prison for it, made the same comparison in his own words before his death. Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s foreign minister, put the government’s position plainly in 2022: “The Palestinian narrative evokes experiences of South Africa’s own history of racial segregation and oppression.” That conviction is why South Africa’s government, not just its activists, brought the genocide case against Israel to the International Court of Justice in 2024, a move South African commentators described as a cathartic moment for ordinary South Africans who’d lived through apartheid’s afterlife and heard their own history described back to them in the testimony.

Same Tool, Opposite Direction

“Pension divestment and Israel” can mean two opposite things depending on who’s using the phrase. The 1987 bills would have divested Michigan’s money away from companies profiting off apartheid, which is the same mechanism BDS supporters want applied today to companies doing business in the occupied Palestinian territories. What most state laws on the books right now actually do runs the other way: they divest from, and blacklist, companies that boycott Israel. The target is the boycotter, not the boycotted. They control is where a state’s investment dollars go, and they steer those dollars away from companies seen as insufficiently supportive of Israel, not away from Israel itself.

Michigan is one of at least 27 states that passed a law like this within a four-year stretch, according to a Center for Public Integrity investigation into where the bills came from. They didn’t come from 27 legislatures independently landing on the same idea. They came from model legislation, drafted by pro-Israel advocacy groups and copied, sometimes almost word for word, from one statehouse to the next. Drop Site News has reported on a newer Israel-backed nonprofit built specifically to keep state lawmakers supplied with pre-written bills like this, on issues well beyond boycotts.

Public Acts 525 and 527, passed in 2016 and signed into law by Gov. Snyder in January 2017, require any business contracting with the state, for supplies, IT work, or construction on state property, to certify in writing that it isn’t boycotting Israel and won’t for the life of the contract. Michigan was the fifteenth state to pass a law like it. The Jewish Community Relations Council’s executive director called it proof that “the State of Michigan stands with Israel,” and the pro-Israel group StandWithUs said at the time that it protected tens of millions of dollars a year in state trade with Israeli entities.

There’s also a live appropriations question every budget cycle. The Michigan Israel Business Accelerator has pulled in millions of public dollars through the Michigan Economic Development Corporation since 2018, and this past February it asked the legislature for another $1 million through a Legislatively Directed Spending Item, the earmark process where one lawmaker attaches their name to a specific request. A single 2023 mobility-sector trip to Israel’s EcoMotion conference cost Michigan taxpayers nearly $65,000 in lodging, flights, sponsorship, and booth costs, according to records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Questions Worth Putting to Any Michigan House or Senate Candidate This Year

A state legislator doesn’t set foreign policy. But Michigan’s statute books, budget lines, and travel schedules tell a different story than the one candidates keep repeating. A Michigan legislator’s vote decides whether a contractor has to sign away its position on a foreign boycott before it can fix a state building. A legislator’s sponsorship decides whether a nonprofit gets another million dollars in state money to deepen ties with a foreign country’s tech and defense sector. A legislator’s silence decides whether an untested speech restriction stays on the books for another decade unchallenged. None of it runs through the State Department. It just takes someone willing to admit they’re choosing not to pull levers already sitting in front of them, instead of pretending the levers don’t exist.

1. Would you support repealing or amending Michigan’s anti-boycott certification law?

Public Acts 525 and 527 require any business contracting with the state, for supplies, IT, or construction on state property, to certify in writing that it won’t boycott Israel for the life of the contract. This got voted into law once already, and it can get voted out. Ask whether the candidate would keep it, repeal it, or force the same legal test Arkansas has been fighting over since 2019.

2. Would you sponsor or block state economic development money going to Israeli-linked companies?

The Michigan Israel Business Accelerator has taken in millions through the MEDC since 2018 and asked for another $1 million earmark this February. A legislator can sponsor that request, refuse to sponsor it, or vote the underlying budget line up or down.

3. Should Michigan’s pension system reward or penalize companies over their conduct in Israel and the occupied territories?

Get the direction straight before asking this one, since it’s easy to garble. In 1987 Michigan legislators tried to divest state pension money out of companies doing business with apartheid South Africa. What most state laws elsewhere do now runs the opposite way, divesting from companies that boycott Israel rather than from companies operating in the occupied territories. Michigan doesn’t have a settled law doing either. Ask which direction, if any, a candidate would take the state’s pension leverage, and whether they think what Michigan already did to South Africa is a fair comparison to what BDS is asking for now.

4. Have you taken, or would you take, a state-sponsored or advocacy-sponsored trip to Israel?

This goes back three governors and at least two decades of rank-and-file travel. A legislator who takes a trip like this is accepting something specific from a foreign government. Ask whether the candidate has gone, would go, and what they think comes attached to the invitation.

5. Would you have sponsored House Resolution 223?

State Reps. Wegela, Farhat, and Byrnes introduced this resolution in November, calling on Michigan’s congressional delegation to halt arms sales to Israel and rush aid into Gaza. It carries no legal weight and had no realistic path through a Republican-controlled chamber. It’s still a vote with sponsors attached to it. Ask whether the candidate would have signed on, and if not, what specifically about it they’d have objected to.

6. Would you refuse money from Israel-aligned PACs and organizations, and would you say so publicly if an outside group spent against your opponent on your behalf?

This is a personal commitment a candidate can make regardless of whether anyone’s currently offering that money down-ballot.

The thing to listen for across all these questions isn’t whether a candidate supports or opposes any particular Israeli policy. It’s whether they answer the specific mechanism you asked about or reach for something broader and safer instead, a value everyone already shares about surveillance or antisemitism or Islamophobia, rather than a yes or no on the actual lever sitting in front of them. The office comes with real levers attached whether a candidate names them or not.

AIPAC and its allied groups, including Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), poured more than $100 million into the 2024 cycle alone, making the network the single largest outside spender in Democratic primaries. Michigan is a decade-long case study in how that money moves, who it rewards, and what it teaches candidates about which positions are survivable.

The Senate Race: Haley Stevens and the Untraceable Millions

In the Senate primary, Haley Stevens is running against progressive Abdul El-Sayed. A third candidate, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, ended her campaign in mid-July, turning the race into a direct two-way contest between the party’s establishment wing and its progressive insurgency, with AIPAC’s money planted squarely on one side of that divide. UDP announced a $2 million ad buy in June boosting Stevens, built around her record on the auto industry and prescription costs, not Israel.

That’s the visible spending.

A Detroit News analysis of campaign finance filings found that a large share of Stevens’ donor base traces back to AIPAC, even though the group’s name shows up nowhere in her disclosures. AIPAC has historically bundled donations and spent openly for Stevens, including more than $5 million combined in 2022. This cycle, its contributions are being routed through a payment processor called Democracy Engine, which doesn’t list AIPAC among its disclosed partners. Money with a clear political origin becomes functionally untraceable to an ordinary voter reading an FEC report.

AIPAC has engineered a Stevens victory over a more progressive Michigan Democrat before. In the 2022 redistricting cycle, AIPAC poured millions into defeating then-Rep. Andy Levin, a progressive former synagogue president and self-described Zionist who was nonetheless a vocal defender of Palestinian rights. Levin lost his primary to Stevens, who has consistently backed continued U.S. military support for Israel’s operations in Gaza. Supporting Israel’s existence, or even calling yourself a Zionist, was never the bar. Silence on Palestinian rights was. AIPAC will spend against any Democrat, however pro-Israel, who won’t offer it.

The spending has only grown as the primary narrowed to two candidates. By July 1, ad reservations tracked by AdImpact Politics showed $34.4 million backing Stevens against just $2.8 million for El-Sayed. By mid-July, outside groups backing Stevens had plowed more than $50 million total into the race, while El-Sayed, who has refused corporate PAC money entirely, had seen less than $1 million in outside advertising support of his own. UDP alone has spent more than $10 million boosting Stevens, a candidate the group has backed since it helped elect her in 2018 and reelect her in 2022.

A statewide poll released in mid-July found that roughly half of likely Michigan Democratic primary voters view AIPAC unfavorably, a striking number for a group most voters can’t itemize in a campaign finance report, precisely because it’s designed not to show up in one.

The Cost of Refusing AIPAC

Stevens’ side of the ledger shows AIPAC’s money hiding in plain sight. El-Sayed’s shows what happens to a candidate who refuses to play along. He is the only candidate in the race who has never met with AIPAC or sought its support, and the group has called him “a direct threat to the US-Israel relationship” over his opposition to unconditional U.S. aid. In late June, after eight consecutive polls showed El-Sayed leading the race, UDP launched a $2 million ad buy attacking his “long history of disrespecting women,” built around a discrimination lawsuit he wasn’t even named as a defendant in and misrepresentations of old comments about the efficacy of Michelle Obama’s health initiatives and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. The ad never mentions Israel, aid policy, or the actual reason the group is spending against him.

El-Sayed has called AIPAC’s spending against him a form of legalized bribery, arguing that Stevens is more committed to a foreign country’s future than to funding schools and healthcare at home. In a televised debate, he said AIPAC has spent tens of millions of dollars on attack ads against him, or ads lying about his opponent’s record, because he represents, in the group’s own framing, the most dangerous candidate to the US-Israel relationship in the race. His campaign has accused AIPAC-backed groups of flooding the airwaves with misleading ads as spending against him has climbed past $50 million, and pushed back with a homegrown ad featuring his grandparents rather than the outside money his opponent enjoys.

The pro-Stevens messaging has strayed into misleading territory too. One AIPAC-funded ad runs footage of Barack Obama to imply a level of association or endorsement the former president has never actually given Stevens in this race. Same tactic as the ads that skip past Israel entirely: borrow credibility, or manufacture a scandal, from anywhere except the actual policy question the money exists to protect.

MI-13: The Reward for Reversal

Detroit’s 13th District tells a similar story from a different angle. Rep. Shri Thanedar is being challenged by state Rep. Donavan McKinney, who has been endorsed by Justice Democrats, Rashida Tlaib, and Bernie Sanders, in a primary widely understood, including by national reporters covering it, as a proxy fight over the US-Israeli relationship in the midst of a genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank.

Thanedar wasn’t always the lobby’s candidate. As a state legislator, he co-sponsored a resolution describing Israel as an apartheid state and was critical of the Israeli government. After entering Congress, he reversed course and became one of the House’s most reliable pro-Israel votes. AIPAC’s money followed.

Reporting this month found that roughly two-thirds of Thanedar’s campaign cash has come through AIPAC-linked channels, even as he lost more than $600,000 on campaign funds he’d diverted into cryptocurrency investments. A Justice Democrats spokesperson described MI-13 as one of the poorest districts in the country and argued that deep-pocketed donors get a return when a member votes with the funders on Israel and crypto policy while remaining unreachable to constituents.

MI-13 runs through Highland Park and swaths of Detroit. It remains one of the poorest congressional districts in the country. AIPAC exists to advance a foreign government’s interests in U.S. policy, and its electoral spending has tracked the Israeli right rather than any consistent partisan line in American politics. The group has backed and defended Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 election, a fact Hollier himself waved off in 2022 by noting AIPAC “supports people based on one issue.” In Michigan, that single-issue loyalty has meant channeling money toward whichever candidate, centrist or extreme right, is most reliable on Israel policy, and away from progressives in districts like MI-13 who campaign on redistributing resources toward housing, jobs, and public services in some of the poorest communities in the country. The lobby doesn’t have to oppose those priorities directly. It just has to make sure the candidates who champion them can’t afford to compete.

Michigan is one front in a strategy AIPAC has run against progressive Democrats nationwide. In 2022, UDP and its allied PACs spent more than $7 million combined to defeat Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner, a Squad-aligned progressive, in her primary. Two years later, the group spent $15 million unseating Rep. Jamaal Bowman in New York and $8.5 million defeating Rep. Cori Bush in Missouri, both replaced by self-described “pro-Israel” centrists. Rep. Donna Edwards lost a Maryland primary the same cycle after UDP spent more than $4 million against her. In every case, the candidate on the receiving end of AIPAC’s money stood to the left of the candidate it opposed on labor, on housing, on Medicare for All, not just on Israel. AIPAC entered the 2024 cycle with a stated goal of spending $100 million specifically to defeat progressives it viewed as insufficiently supportive of Israel.

AIPAC has also endorsed more than 200 Republicans for office, including 109 members of Congress who voted to overturn the 2020 election results. A former Justice Democrats spokesperson put it directly: AIPAC has exposed itself as the right-wing organization it is. AIPAC doesn’t just avoid mentioning Israel in its ads or route its money through opaque payment processors. It uses that money to push the Democratic Party’s primaries rightward, defeating its most progressive candidates while funding and defending extremist Republicans.

Ads About Everything But Israel

UDP’s Stevens ad buy runs on auto jobs and prescription costs instead of foreign policy because that’s the group’s standard playbook. When UDP spent nearly $2 million attacking Rep. Tom Malinowski, a Democrat who supports Israel but wouldn’t rule out conditioning U.S. aid to it, the ads never mentioned Israel, hammering him instead on unrelated votes. The same pattern shows up in Illinois, where UDP’s advertising has focused on domestic issues voters are already paying attention to, like immigration, while staying silent on the actual reason for the spending. The Nation’s reporting on AIPAC’s electoral operation found that not a single AIPAC or DMFI ad mentions Israel, because the groups know voters don’t rank the U.S.-Israel relationship as a top issue and would rather attack candidates on other grounds, sometimes stretching the truth to do it.

UDP’s own name was built to obscure its purpose. When AIPAC launched the super PAC in 2022, its mission statement didn’t mention Israel or AIPAC, talking instead about strengthening democracy. Asked directly why the group wouldn’t say what it actually supports, an AIPAC spokesman declined to give a straight answer. UDP’s own CEO told Jewish Insider that the issues the group runs ads on are simply “the issues that are foremost on the minds of voters.” The group has found it more effective to persuade voters on grounds it never has to defend.

A voter watching a UDP-funded ad about the auto industry or ICE, or one implying a Barack Obama endorsement that was never given, has no way of knowing the money behind it exists to protect one policy position, and only that position.

What's Actually at Stake

Leading human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, B’Tselem, and Human Rights Watch, have documented Israel’s system of control over Palestinians as apartheid. The International Court of Justice found in a provisional ruling that South Africa’s genocide claim against Israel was plausible, ordering Israel to take measures to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza. AIPAC exists to insulate the American politicians who fund and arm that conduct from any electoral consequence for it.

A foreign government’s interests, advanced through a nominally domestic lobby, are spending tens of millions of dollars to decide which Americans get to represent other Americans in Congress. A fossil fuel super PAC or a pharmaceutical trade group narrowing a primary’s acceptable positions is its own problem. AIPAC’s Michigan operation is worse on three counts: the single issue is a foreign government’s standing, the stakes are apartheid and mass civilian death, and the effect, coordinated with Jerusalem or not, is to subordinate the independence of American elections to the preferences of a foreign state.

Voters in the 13th District and across Michigan will decide these primaries in two weeks. Whatever they decide, the amount of money required to be a viable Democratic candidate in these races, and where a meaningful share of it can be traced if you look hard enough, is itself a story about how much say ordinary voters actually have left.

Over a period of around three weeks, I’ve pulled three mailers out of my mailbox from my state representative, Helena Scott. With Michigan’s Aug. 4 primary just nine weeks away, that is hardly surprising.

The mailer in my hand could have come from almost anyone currently holding a seat in Lansing. It happens every election cycle, in nearly every competitive district, to voters across the state.

Each mailing is an exercise in self-aggrandizement dressed as public service — her name in headline type, her face occupying half the card, every legislative outcome recast as a personal triumph delivered to a grateful district.

One mailer lists her platform priorities under four subheadings that read like a stump speech: “Making Life More Affordable,” “Healthcare Without Barriers,” “Quality Education & Workforce Development,” “Building Better Communities & Local Economies.” Another piece is a signed letter in which Scott writes that she has “been focused on doing everything I can to deliver financial relief to our community, lower utility costs and hold the government and corporations accountable to you.”

Another highlights a quote from Scott stating ”I’m working to make life more affordable for you.”

None of these mailers were paid for by her campaign. Each piece of mail carries the same small-print disclosure: “Prepared by the Michigan Legislature.”

You paid for these. So did I. And so did every taxpayer in Michigan, including those who don’t live in Helena Scott’s district and those who might prefer someone else to represent it.

Michigan House rules allow legislators to use taxpayer-funded office budgets for informational constituent mailings, subject to a blackout period that kicks in 30 days before a primary.

In this case, the cut-off date is July 5. Until then, incumbents can send as much mail as their budget allows, and the rules governing content draw a line that, in practice, is easy to straddle. Official mail cannot be explicitly electoral. But you absolutely can use your official portrait, your official seal, your campaign platform, and your claimed legislative accomplishments while having it paid for by the public.

Ask yourself a simple question: if these mailers are simply informational, why do I need three of them in three weeks? The same reason why legislators running for re-election in competitive districts spend nearly three times as much on taxpayer-funded mail as those in safe seats. The mailing behavior is driven by electoral anxiety, not civic duty.

Full disclosure: I am supporting one of Rep. Scott’s opponents in the August primary. But that is not the point. There is a difference between keeping constituents informed and using their money to run a shadow campaign, and it is hard to imagine taxpayers of any political persuasion sanctioning public funds being spent this way, regardless of which party holds the seat or which candidate benefits.

A challenger running against any incumbent legislator must raise every dollar they spend on outreach from donors, comply with contribution limits, disclose every expenditure, and explain to voters from scratch who they are. They get no budget for direct mail consisting of our tax dollars. Meanwhile, the incumbent can spend weeks blanketing the district with name ID-building, platform-advancing, brand-reinforcing mail that their campaign committee never has to report, because it doesn’t come from their campaign committee. It comes from us.

At the federal level, the mandatory disclosure language on such communications for House members was quietly watered down in 2020 from “prepared, published, and mailed at taxpayer expense” to the softer “paid for with official funds.” Michigan’s disclosure language of “Prepared by the Michigan Legislature” is softer still. Most recipients likely don’t register that the Michigan Legislature prepared a mailer touting one legislator’s personal brand.

The House Business Office, which administers these communications, has demonstrated it knows how to draw lines when it wants to, albeit in a revealing direction. Last year, state Rep. Dylan Wegela was blocked from sending a constituent newsletter that noted the influence of corporations like DTE Energy on the Legislature. The House Business Office told his staff the language was impermissibly critical of the government and needed to be rewritten.

Michigan’s official mailing system has decided that a lawmaker cannot use taxpayer funds to tell constituents that a utility company has political influence over the Legislature. But a lawmaker can use those same funds to blanket her district with mailers advancing her political brand. Then, when the blackout period arrives and the public money stops, the same utility sector Wegela attempted to criticize for their corporate capture of Legislature funds the closing sprint. Taxpayers prime the pump. DTE and Consumers finish the job.

The House Business Office that blocked a lawmaker from criticizing DTE in a constituent newsletter has been printing mailers for a legislator whose campaign DTE helped build. The financial relationships that benefit from this arrangement are not unique to one district. But the numbers in Michigan’s 8th illustrate the pattern clearly.

My own review of Helena Scott’s campaign finance filings spanning her legislative tenure shows $617,188 in total contributions over a decade of state legislative races. The single largest industry bloc is the regulated utility sector: Through four overlapping PAC name variants and more than 20 individual employee contributions DTE Energy alone accounts for roughly $27,000. Add Consumers Energy, Comcast, AT&T, ITC Holdings, NRG Energy, Constellation Energy, and a cluster of telecommunications and rural electric association PACs, and the regulated utility sector and its supply chain represent close to $92,000, or nearly 15 cents of every dollar she’s raised.

If legislators are proud of their constituent outreach, they should be comfortable telling the people paying for it exactly what it cost them. At minimum, every piece of mail produced with public funds should be required to say so in plain language: not “Prepared by the Michigan Legislature” in small print at the bottom of the address block, but a bold black box across the bottom of every piece reading “PRINTED AND MAILED AT MICHIGAN TAXPAYER EXPENSE” followed by the exact cost of the design, print, and mailing.

Michigan could impose a complete ban on taxpayer-funded mass mailings during any calendar year in which the legislator appears on a ballot. Short of that, it could impose a hard cap on the number of mailings an incumbent can send in an election year, rather than leaving the only constraint as a budget line that can be spent all at once.

It could require that any taxpayer-funded mailing trigger a matching public communication credit available to every declared candidate in that district. It could require the House Business Office to publish a real-time public ledger of every mailing produced with public funds, searchable by legislator and date, so voters can see what their money is buying. It could strip the House Business Office of sole authority to police its own content rules and vest that power in an independent body with referral authority to the Secretary of State.

Any one of these reforms would help. Taken together, they would transform a system currently designed to serve incumbents into one that at least pretends to serve the public.

Until then, every mailer carrying a state seal and a politician’s portrait is a reminder that in Michigan, one of the most valuable campaign finance advantages is an incumbent’s access to a taxpayer funded budget.