Democracy is a lovely concept for high school civics textbooks, but it has absolutely no place in a high-stakes battle for the United States Senate. When Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer officially threw her considerable weight behind Representative Haley Stevens this week, the usual chorus of progressive malcontents immediately began whining about the establishment putting its thumb on the scale. To which I say: thank God someone finally found the scale and had the courage to sit on it.
We are living in unprecedented times, and unprecedented times call for the adults in the room to stop pretending the electorate knows what is best for them. The Michigan primary was shaping up to be a messy, expensive, and frankly exhausting affair where candidates would have been forced to travel the state, speak to actual residents, and pretend to care about the price of groceries. By anointing Stevens now, Whitmer has bravely bypassed this archaic ritual, saving the party millions of dollars and sparing a perfectly good centrist from the indignity of answering unscripted questions in a Saginaw gymnasium.
Over a $400 lunch at Café Milano last Tuesday, a prominent strategist confessed to me what everyone in Washington already knows but is too cowardly to say out loud: voters are simply too volatile to be trusted with something as fragile as a two-seat majority. They get distracted by shiny, impractical objects like universal healthcare or living wages, completely ignoring the structural beauty of a candidate who can confidently promise a two percent tax credit for clean-energy supply chain managers over a ten-year phase-in period.
Let us look objectively at what Stevens brings to the table. She represents Oakland County. She famously worked on the Obama auto rescue task force. She knows exactly how to stand in front of a shuttered stamping plant and speak in complete, soothing paragraphs about public-private synergies without ever once threatening to raise the corporate tax rate. This is a rare talent. The progressive base wants someone who will scream at billionaires on the internet; Stevens understands that you only scream at billionaires in private, and only when they are late on their PAC contributions.
The absolute last thing we need right now is a competitive primary forcing our nominee to make promises they will immediately have to walk back the second they arrive on Capitol Hill.
Treadwell is exactly right. When you allow a primary to happen naturally, you risk the candidate accidentally committing to a popular policy position. Once that happens, the entire K Street ecosystem has to spend months unwinding the damage, organizing closed-door meetings to explain to the newly elected senator why the pharmaceutical industry is actually the victim. Whitmer’s early endorsement acts as a firewall against this kind of reckless populist commitment.
The optics of a backroom coronation may bother the purists, but it is vastly superior to the alternative. Have you ever actually attended a primary debate? I have. It is a terrifying spectacle. You have perfectly respectable consultants forced to sit in the front row of a public high school auditorium while local union leaders demand concrete answers about trade policy. It is degrading. Whitmer, understanding the immense psychological toll this takes on the consultant class, has mercifully pulled the plug.
Furthermore, we must consider the toll that a genuine contest takes on the messaging. The Democratic Party has spent years meticulously crafting a narrative that they are the sole protectors of institutional norms. Nothing threatens an institutional norm quite like a grassroots primary challenger pointing out that the institution currently functionally serves about four hundred people in a single zip code in Northern Virginia. Whitmer’s endorsement ensures that this kind of rude, unhelpful observation never makes it onto a debate stage in Grand Rapids.
The critics, of course, argue that an early endorsement from a wildly popular, two-term governor effectively freezes the field and deprives minority communities of a voice in the process. What they keep missing is how incredibly convenient this freezing is for the people who actually matter: the media buyers. When a primary is competitive, ad rates fluctuate. When the governor simply points at a centrist and declares the race over, we can lock in our broadcast buys in the Detroit media market a full eight months in advance. That is the kind of fiscal responsibility the party should be championing.
I am just asking the questions no one else will: why do we still pretend the primary process is anything other than a liability? If we truly believe that democracy is on the ballot this November, why would we risk exposing it to the voters? The voters have a terrible track record. They are the ones who got us into this mess in the first place by consistently demanding things.
If you give the electorate a choice, there is a non-zero chance they will choose the candidate who makes my clients uncomfortable, and I simply cannot have that kind of uncertainty in the third quarter.
Whitmer’s intervention is a masterclass in modern governance. She looked at the chaotic, messy, unpredictable landscape of a democratic election and said no thank you, I will handle this myself. It is a model I hope to see replicated nationwide. If we are lucky, by 2028, we can do away with the primary system entirely and simply have a panel of ten cable news contributors select the nominees based on who has the best posture during a congressional hearing.
Until then, we owe Gretchen Whitmer a debt of gratitude. She has done the hard work of looking the Michigan voter in the eye and gently whispering that the adults are talking. It is exactly the kind of bold, decisive leadership that proves why we shouldn't have to vote for these people at all.