In Gov. John Engler’s first re-election campaign in 1994, the Michigan Democrats did not send their best. Instead, they sent a man named Howard Wolpe.
Wolpe was a longtime congressman before running, but his name is largely forgotten in Michigan politics, except as trivia. Remember the guy Engler crushed in 1994?
But Wolpe’s running mate, Debbie Stabenow, would become a legend. At the time, she was a state senator.
In the four-candidate primary—Wolpe, Stabenow, Larry Owen, and Lynn Jondahl—Stabenow was the only one who had potential. Which is why, when she debated the men that July, they ganged up on her.
Owen saw in Stabenow a force that, three decades later, would run Mike Duggan out of the Democrat Party: girlboss power.
Her ads that year focused on her motherhood; Owen called it a pander to women voters. Motherhood was not a terrain where the men could join her, nothing to add from their “lived experience.”
Go far enough down that path, Owen anticipated, and you get what the Michigan Democrats have become in 2025: No party for white men.
“I think it’s unfortunate what’s going on here, sort of a cynical effort to carve out a piece of the electorate,” Owen said, “to try and carve out the majority and appeal to one particular interest group.”
This was a white man calling out the Democrats for identity politics. Owen would never be heard from again. And Michigan would send Stabenow to Washington.
In 1996 and 1998, she won a seat in Congress. Then in 2000, she took on Sen. Spencer Abraham, a Republican, and won.
Just this week, by Whitmer’s directive, Michigan’s Constitution Hall is now named for Stabenow, her mentor.
“Debbie told me there is no better political strategy than to hustle,” Whitmer said during the dedication ceremony, later calling Stabenow a “beacon of inspiration.”
But in 1994, she was riding shotgun in a losing effort. It’s a mistake Stabenow and the women who follow in her footsteps would not repeat.
If there was part of Stabenow who believed she could’ve beaten Engler, she knew she could’ve beaten the other top Republican on the 1994 ballot, Abraham. (Engler disagrees. “I would’ve mopped the floor with her,” Engler told me on the Enjoyer Podcast of Stabenow in the 1994 governor’s race.)
In 2000, Stabenow did beat the incumbent Abraham, then went on to serve 24 years in the Senate.
When it was time to choose a new governor in 2002, Democrats went with the strong female lead in Attorney General Jennifer Granholm. For the first time, Michigan had a woman in the governor’s office and the U.S. Senate. (Republicans ran Elly Peterson and Lenore Romney for the Senate in 1964 and 1970, both losing to Sen. Phil Hart.)
After Granholm’s two terms, the Democrats chose Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero to face Republican businessman Rick Snyder. Bernero lost.
By 2014, Michigan Democrats were angry with Snyder, who signed the right-to-work law after saying it was not on his agenda. But they didn’t have a candidate. Ex-Congressman Mark Schauer volunteered as the sacrificial lamb.
Unlike Stabenow, Gretchen Whitmer, then a state senator, declined to be on the losing ticket. Four years later, in 2018, Whitmer ran for governor, not lieutenant, and won.
But a funny thing happened on the way to her coronation. In January 2018, Duggan, one term into his three as Detroit Mayor, thought the Democrats could do better. So he tried to recruit Sen. Gary Peters to join the governor’s race and snatch the nomination from the presumptive Whitmer.
Since 1990, when the Michigan Democrats run a white man for governor, they lose—a trend that holds to this day. When they run a woman, they win. And here was Duggan, trying to replace the female candidate with a white man.
Peters declined, the story got out, and it was an embarrassment for Duggan. Two months later, Duggan was reduced to endorsing Whitmer.
That November, when Whitmer won, she swept in Jocelyn Benson as secretary of state and Dana Nessel as attorney general. A blue wave and a pink wave, carried out by white women.
Had Duggan gotten his way, the entire girlboss revolution would have been prevented. But Duggan did not get his way. That 2018 failure, and the equal and opposite reaction it created, and the pink wave that followed, is why Duggan left the Democrat Party—and why he claims the Democrats left him.
The Michigan Democrats are no party for white men. You can thank Howard Wolpe for that.
James David Dickson is host of the Enjoyer Podcast. Join him in conversation on X @downi75.
