If Elon Musk has his way, 2026 will be the year of the third party. Angered by President Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, Musk swears he will create a third party, the America Party, in response.
The biggest winner of the third-party revolution could be Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, currently running for Michigan governor as an independent.
Duggan is the first IINO in Michigan history: Independent in Name Only.
For him, independence is just another campaign tactic, a way to crack through the blue ceiling in a party of girlbosses.
This is a man who hoisted the Pride flag in 2025.
Who marched with Black Lives Matter in 2020, then pulled down a bust of Christopher Columbus weeks later. What is Mike Duggan independent of, exactly? It’s not the ideologies driving the Democrat Party. He’s all-in on those.
History warns of the third-party campaign. In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt broke a promise to America. He ran for a “third term” (not really; his first term was the remainder of the assassinated William McKinley’s second term) as a third-party candidate, and took on his own hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft.
TR was still popular. So popular that he actually won Michigan, the first and only time Michigan voted for a third party candidate in a presidential race. But it wasn’t enough. Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, won the election, and gave America the income tax, the Federal Reserve, and a wartime censorship not seen since the days of Abraham Lincoln.
Elections have consequences. More than 100 years later we are still living the consequences of TR’s ego.
Yet any time I speak to a group of Republicans, as I did this week to the Washtenaw County GOP, there’s always a person or two in the room who is Duggan-curious.
A room full of Republicans, and there’s a few who think the mayor of the bluest city in Michigan is a moderate. Their entire case for Duggan is built around what they don’t know. “He turned around Detroit!,” they say, as if Detroit has been turned around.
Which, if you exclude almost 300 homicide victims from the totals, as Duggan’s Detroit Police Department did, might seem true. But it isn’t.
If the crime stats are cooked, the school stats are perennially bad, and have been for many decades. Duggan treated Detroit’s public school system as a hot potato. As mayor, he never wanted to touch it.
This was smart politics as mayor but undercuts the case for Duggan as governor, where schools would be in his purview.
Detroiters put enough faith in Duggan to carry him through his first primary, when he ran as a write-in candidate. Yet Duggan didn’t have faith in himself to fix the state’s biggest school system. And now he wants to lead a state of 10 million, and a school system of 1.5 million?
Duggan never led the Democratic Party to a better place or warned of the dangers of their extreme path. He fled his party days after they lost an election. Then he claimed to offer a better brand of politics, solely focused on the issues.
There is no Detroit success story. There is no Duggan turnaround. And so, a longtime chief executive is not running as that in his 2026 campaign. He’s running a cult of personality, hosting “Mike Drop” events across the state, offering voters the chance to touch the hem of his garment.
Friends don’t let friends vote Duggan. Send this to a Duggan-curious friend. The state you save may be your own.
James David Dickson is host of the Enjoyer Podcast. Join him in conversation on X @downi75.
