Democrats hold a two-seat majority in the Michigan Senate after a runaway win by Democrat Chedrick Greene in a special election to fill a vacant seat last week. Greene's victory has implications for the current legislative session, and it could potentially offer insights about what to expect in November's midterm elections.
Zach Gorchow is the president of Gongwer News Service Michigan. He spoke with Michigan Public's Morning Edition host Doug Tribou about what we can learn from the special election, what the Legislature will work on in the coming months, and how the state budget process looks different this year.
Doug Tribou: In the special election last week, Chedrick Greene easily beat his Republican opponent, Jason Tunney. Greene had about 59% of the vote. Tunney had about 39%, and Libertarian Ali Sledz finished under 2%. In a social media post the night of the election, you referred to that margin of victory as "earthquake-level stuff." How so?
Zach Gorchow: So this is a district that Kamala Harris won by one point over Donald Trump in 2024. It's a district that the prior holder of the seat, Kristen McDonald Rivet, who's now the area's member of Congress, won by six points. And it's generally known as a competitive seat, albeit with a slight Democratic lean, on paper. So for Chedrick Greene to have won the race by 19 points — as someone who, let's face it, was a total unknown politically — for him to win by 13 more points than she did, it's pretty extraordinary.
DT: Comparing a single special election in a state Senate district to numbers from a presidential election in an effort to preview a midterm election is, of course, tricky business. But having said that, now that you've had a bit of time to look over the numbers, what else stands out to you from last week's voting?
ZG: Well, I always look at it as predictive or at least indicative of current motivation and voter enthusiasm. There is a long track record of evidence in Michigan and around the country that when you have one party dramatically overperforming in special elections or off-year elections, that it does signal they have a lot of momentum going into the main election in the fall. And if you look back at a couple other recent special elections in Michigan...
In 2022, a seat in the Grand Rapids suburbs had never been held by a Democrat, was a longtime Republican district — was starting to trend more Democratic — but still drawn to be a Republican district. A Democrat won the special election to fill a vacancy in that seat by a lot. And you know what happened in 2022? The Democrats basically won everything in Michigan.
In 2009, there was a special state Senate election in the Battle Creek and Jackson areas. It had been a seat held by a Democrat and was even thought to be a slightly Democratic-leaning seat, while the Republican candidate won that seat by a huge margin in the special election.
And what happened a year later in 2010? Republicans won everything in Michigan and basically around the country. So, you know, there's no question that you'd much rather be the Democrats coming out of this election and seeing their voters kind of swamping the Republican turnout.
"There is a long track record of evidence in Michigan and around the country that when you have one party dramatically overperforming in special elections or off-year elections, that it does signal they have a lot of momentum."Zach Gorchow of Gongwer News Service on what Democrat Chedrick Greene's victory in the Michigan Senate 35th district special election could signal for midterm races this fall
DT: Last year, you and I spoke as the Legislature was heading toward a potential government shutdown, because the two chambers didn't have a state budget agreement in place for the governor to sign. They had blown past the statutory deadline and were headed toward the actual deadline of the end of the previous budget.
Now, the Republican-controlled House and the Democratic-led Senate have passed their proposals. Once again, there are some major gaps between the two. Does the fact that we're in an election year make it any more likely that they will get a budget done on time?
ZG: Oh, I think it does. And we're already seeing that. I mean, think about it, last year, the Republicans in the House did not pass their own budget bills, did not complete that process, until sometime in August, which is over a month past the deadline under the law to get it done. And it was getting perilously close to the start of the next fiscal year.
Well, guess what? As of about a week ago, both the House Republicans and the Senate Democrats had passed their versions of their budgets. So that's much more on a normal schedule and really tees everything up for the negotiations that traditionally take place starting in mid-May with the goal of having a budget done by the end of June.
Reality is, yes, there is an election. There's a lot of members running that have primaries on the August 4 primary ballot who want to get home and be going door to door. They don't want to be stuck in Lansing. They don't want to be getting beat over the head by their opponents about why they haven't gotten the budget done. So yeah, I think it is a lot more likely.
DT: There are still a lot of negotiations to go, as you've mentioned, but is there anything in either of the proposals from the Senate or the House that particularly stands out to you as different or unusual, or just has your attention, in general, this time around for the budget?
ZG: Well, the House Republicans, they want to shrink the size of the budget, and they are trying to do that in a way that doesn't actually obviously cut programs. So they've cut funding for information technology for every department by 50%. In the Department of State by 100%. They're getting rid of all the money for that. That's not going to happen. There's no way the governor is going to greenlight cutting half the IT budget to all of her departments.
But sort of interesting that that's the route the House Republicans have gone. It's not like they've said, we're getting rid of programs A through F, or we're cutting them in half. You're not going to get voters fired up about cutting IT or the House Republicans saying, well, we're actually going to reduce the spending levels to what the departments have spent, on average over the last three years.
And so there's just a line in each budget bill that says, well, here's a general cut. But again, that's not targeting a specific program. So I think that's pretty interesting.
I also think it's interesting neither the House nor the Senate supported, or have supported so far, the governor's call for new revenues to support Medicaid. And yet both basically passed budgets that keep Medicaid programming intact. So that'll be something to watch, too.
Editor's note: Some quotes in this article have been lightly edited for length and clarity. You can play the audio of the full interview near the top of this page.
