Trump's 2016 Win Turned Jocelyn Benson Hyperpartisan
Despite claiming she would not be a partisan, Benson has turned her role as Secretary of State into a weapon
If the 2000 presidential election is what sparked Jocelyn Benson’s interest in the elections, the 2016 election turned Benson into a hard-left partisan.
Put another way: Donald Trump broke Jocelyn Benson’s brain.
In her memoir, “The Purposeful Warrior,” Benson describes going to bed on Election Day in 2000 thinking that Al Gore had won. Instead, Gore came up 537 votes short in Florida, and George W. Bush won.
Benson found her culprit in Katherine Harris, then the Florida Secretary of State. Because Harris did not “count every vote,” Benson believes, Bush was elected president.
At the time, Benson was studying abroad at Oxford. Afterward, she went to Harvard Law School. She joined efforts to pass the “Help America Vote Act,” which Bush signed.
By 2010, Benson had written a book called “State Secretaries of State” and was running for that post in Michigan.
During that campaign against Republican contender Ruth Johnson, Benson swore that, if she won, she would take an “oath of nonpartisanship.”
“To fulfill that oath,” Benson wrote, “if elected I will not co-chair any campaigns or endorse any candidates running in elections where I will serve as the final certifier of results.”
Benson’s explanation dipped back into her grievances over the 2000 election. Again she invoked Katherine Harris’s name.
“Harris' decision to certify the controversial election results while also serving as the co-chair of the Florida Bush-Cheney presidential campaign shattered voters' faith in the integrity of the democratic process,” Benson wrote. “It also invited the broader suspicion that Secretaries of State, the chief elections official in most states, nefariously work behind the scenes to ensure that their political party gains power and wins elections.”
That was Jocelyn Benson in 2010. She lost to Ruth Johnson that fall. Benson ran again in 2018 and won. She never did take that oath of nonpartisanship.
By 2024, Benson was endorsing Kamala Harris in the presidential election, and a federal judge said she had “manipulated the presidential ballot in Michigan.”
How does someone go from pledging nonpartisanship in 2010 to manipulating the ballot to help Democrats in 2024?
Trump was elected president in 2016, beating Hillary Clinton, a Benson mentor. The next year, women in pink hats marauded the streets of America. In 2018, Benson swept into office on a “pink wave” led by Gretchen Whitmer.
For Benson, fighting the cause of Orange Man Bad outweighed the appearance of impropriety. By 2024 Jocelyn Benson had become a type of Katherine Harris, a hard-partisan, thumb-on-the-scale election official whose decisions were made to benefit her team, not the people of Michigan.
When RFK Jr. withdrew from the 2024 race and endorsed Trump, Benson kept him on the Michigan ballot anyway. This was meant to benefit Harris, the Democrat Benson had endorsed, in an election where Benson would be the “final certifier.”
“In defiance of the U.S. Constitution and state election law, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson manipulated the presidential ballot in Michigan,” wrote a federal appeals judge, David McKeague, in a legal opinion.
Trump’s 2016 victory was like Bush’s 2000 victory in that both men lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College. Between the pink hats and the pink wave, Benson decided it would take fire to fight fire. By her actions, Benson took an oath of partisanship, turning what was always considered an administrative position into a weapon to benefit the Democrat Party.
Benson is not alone in abandoning her oath; the media followed suit, too. For years it’s been conventional wisdom in mainstream journalism that Trump is a president unlike any other, and must be covered unlike any other.
In the years since Trump won, the Michigan media has abandoned any pretense of objectivity and become an Amen Corner for Democrats.
With Trump—a politician immune to the dirty tricks that would sink others—the Democrat-Media Alliance had its excuse to stop pretending at fairness and be their true selves, regardless of what oaths they had to violate.
