Michigan has enjoyed (or suffered, depending on how you look at it) seven straight years of female leadership. The girl bosses in Lansing are hoping for at least another four, with either Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson or Attorney General Dana Nessel at the helm.
It’s too bad Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist decided to interrupt the tea party.
Gilchrist, a Democrat and Detroit native, announced his gubernatorial bid this week, setting himself up for a direct battle against Benson, another member of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s administration and one of two other Democrats to join the race thus far.
And with former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s announcement that he won’t be running, the race is looking like it could be Gilchrist vs. the girls for the Democratic nomination.
If elected, Gilchrist would be Michigan’s first black governor—something Benson, with her background in “anti-racism” advocacy, surely must support.
Just kidding. We already know how Benson and the rest of Whitmer’s Girl Squad react to being challenged. (Hint: not well). So it’s safe to assume Gilchrist’s name is already in the Burn Book, his liberal bonafides be damned.
For his part, Gilchrist seems to understand that it’s only a matter of time before the claws come out against him. That could be why he’s trying to put as much distance between himself and the very administration of which he’s a part—better to just go ahead and throw the first punch.
“When you’ve got problems, you get an engineer to come fix them,” Gilchrist said this week, referring to his background as a software engineer for Microsoft. “When systems are broken, you get an engineer to get those systems to work better for people, and this is a moment to do that.”
Gilchrist went on to add that he believes Michiganders turned on Democrats in 2024, “because they haven’t gotten the results.”
We’ll have to read between the lines a bit, but that sounds a whole lot like Gilchrist throwing Whitmer and her posse under the bus.
To be sure, Gilchrist is going to run into the same problem that former Vice President Kamala Harris encountered when she tried to use this strategy on the national stage: Why didn’t he, as Whitmer’s No. 2, help make sure the administration was solving the state’s problems?
And why should Michiganders trust that he’ll take seriously the state’s broken systems when he was a leading member of the administration that broke them in the first place?
“It wasn’t me!” is not exactly a winning campaign message—though it could be the one that lands in the Democratic primary against Benson, who is lapping the field.
Benson, however, is not going to let Gilchrist mansplain how to solve Michigan’s problems. And she’s certainly not going to let him interrupt Lansing’s Karen Era.
It was under Whitmer, after all, that Michigan at the same time elected women to serve as governor, secretary of state, attorney general, and chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court for the first time in the state’s history. Correction—herstory.
Gilchrist has just been there for moral support… and because Whitmer needed to check off more than one identity politics box.
But that’s not the point. The point is that Gilchrist just doesn’t get it like the Queen Bees do. He can’t speak to the issue of abortion in the same way—which is not even at risk in Michigan anymore—because he’s, well, a man.
Sorry, a non-birthing person.
And he just doesn’t understand the threat the Trump administration poses to women’s rights like Benson and Nessel do.
After all, Gilchrist doesn’t have the lived experience of being a birthing person and having to live under a federal government that actually believes women are distinct, unique individuals with rights to their own spaces and sports teams.
The truth is that the feminist aura that has dominated Michigan for the past several years is cheap, fake, and deeply hypocritical.
For all their talk about a women-centered, women-run government, what have the ladies in Lansing actually done for women in Michigan? Left them with an education system that is failing their children? Chased their husbands out of their jobs while making sure those jobs will never come back?
If Gilchrist were smart, that’s the argument he’d use against Benson. The women in Lansing had their shot—and everyone is worse off for it.
Kaylee McGhee White is editor-in-chief of Independent Women Features, a Steamboat Institute media fellow, and a columnist for Michigan Enjoyer. Follow her on X @KayleeDMcGhee.
