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Our verdict

nobody gets our endorsement

Election Day is November 3. Absentee ballots went out September 24, and in-person early voting runs statewide October 24 through November 1. This is the whole race — the platforms, the record of the administration both candidates are really running on, the worst claims against each of them, and what the sources actually show. LiberalMind endorses nobody in this race — and the research shows why. Read it, and weigh which flaw Michigan can live with.

How Michigan got here

This seat is open because Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is term-limited after two terms. Michigan is the most contested ground in America: Donald Trump carried the state in 2024 by 1.42 points, yet Democrats have held every statewide office since 2018, and Republicans have not won a governor's race here since 2014.

The Democratic nominee is Jocelyn Benson, Michigan's secretary of state since 2019 and the former dean of Wayne State University Law School. She won the August 4 primary with 83.2% of the vote over Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson. Her running mate is Winnie Brinks, majority leader of the Michigan Senate.

The Republican nominee is John James, the U.S. representative from Michigan's 10th Congressional District — an Army aviator who flew Apache helicopters in Iraq, then led his family's Detroit-based auto logistics companies. James lost two close U.S. Senate races, in 2018 and 2020, before winning his House seat. Endorsed by President Trump, he won the Republican primary with just over half the vote in a crowded field, over businessman Perry Johnson; two rivals who had suspended their campaigns, former Attorney General Mike Cox and state Sen. Aric Nesbitt, still appeared on the ballot. His running mate is state Rep. Jay DeBoyer. If James wins, he would be Michigan's first Black governor.

Three minor-party tickets are also on the ballot: Libertarian Anthony Hudson — whom the Libertarian Party of Michigan formally disavowed in September, too late to remove his name — Donna Brandenburg of the U.S. Taxpayers Party, and Green Party nominee Douglas Campbell.

The raters give Benson the edge but call it a real race: the Cook Political Report says Lean D, Inside Elections says Tilt D, Sabato's Crystal Ball says Likely D. Polling averages in mid-October put Benson ahead by roughly seven points. Whitmer herself leaves office popular — Morning Consult measured her net approval at +26 in September — which is the wind at Benson's back, and the thing James has to beat: not just a candidate, but a record.

The Whitmer record both candidates are running on

Benson is not pretending to be something new. She is the sitting secretary of state of the administration's party, endorsed by Whitmer, running to continue the project. So the record matters, and it is genuinely mixed.

Roads. Whitmer ran in 2018 on "fix the damn roads." When the Legislature rejected her gas-tax increase, she borrowed $3.5 billion in bonds in 2020 to rebuild state highways. In October 2025 she signed a bipartisan budget with a long-term road deal projected to generate more than $1.8 billion a year, weighted toward local roads — paid for partly by applying the wholesale tax to marijuana and raising fees on electric vehicles. Her office counts 24,500 lane miles and 1,900 bridges fixed over her tenure. Even her own telling concedes the funding cliff was real until that 2025 deal; the cannabis tax is already being fought in court.

Corporate subsidies. The Strategic Outreach and Attraction Reserve (SOAR) fund, created in 2021, spent more than $2 billion trying to lure factories. The Mackinac Center's review of the eight flagship deals is brutal: $2.7 billion offered, $1.8 billion spent, 20,595 jobs promised — and 602 delivered so far, about 3 percent. The 2025 budget Whitmer signed pointedly included no new SOAR money, and lawmakers of both parties have pronounced the fund dead. James did not have to invent this attack. Lansing's own budget did it for him.

Guns. After the Oxford High School shooting in 2021 and the Michigan State shooting in February 2023, Whitmer signed universal background checks for all firearm purchases, a safe-storage law, and a red flag law allowing courts to order firearms temporarily removed from people deemed a danger. State court data show 514 red flag complaints filed in 2025, with 407 granted. An August 2026 poll by Public Policy Polling for gun-safety groups found 70 percent of Michigan voters want the laws kept. Whatever else it is, this is settled policy in Michigan — and it was enacted over the objection of the Second Amendment voters this publication serves.

Energy and abortion. Whitmer signed a clean-energy package requiring 100 percent clean energy by 2040 — a mandate James pledges to repeal. On abortion, voters themselves settled the question in 2022: Proposal 3 wrote abortion rights into the state constitution with 56 percent of the vote, and Whitmer then repealed the 1931 ban. Any governor now governs inside that amendment.

John James (Republican)

His platform: James calls it a "Freedom Agenda." Phase out Michigan's 4.25 percent state income tax with the goal of eliminating it altogether. Repeal the clean energy mandate. Cap regulated utility bill growth at inflation, tie utility profits to performance, raise outage compensation, and expand electric choice by lifting the competition cap from 10 to 30 percent. Opt Michigan into the federal Education Freedom Tax Credit on day one — his signature education pledge — plus expanded charters, phonics-based reading instruction, and limits on classroom cellphones. Refund COVID-era fines. Ban transgender girls from girls' school sports. A "Parents' Bill of Rights" requiring schools to share lesson plans on sensitive topics with opt-outs. A ten-year review of state spending, a fully funded auditor general, expanded public-records access, and legislative approval required to extend emergency orders beyond 14 days. He is endorsed by the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, the Michigan Farm Bureau, the state Fraternal Order of Police, and the Police Officers Association of Michigan.

The worst claims — and the record:

Claim: His tax plan is a $13 billion hole with no map out. This one is arithmetic, not spin. Eliminating the income tax knocks roughly $13 billion out of state revenue, as the Detroit Free Press editorial board put it — money that funds schools, Medicaid, and prisons. James says waste, fraud, and abuse plus growth will carry it; ahead of the final debate, his campaign said it had identified $3 billion in "waste, fraud and abuse" to cut — and the Free Press's debate coverage noted that the $3 billion figure includes outdated numbers and money that cannot legally be redirected to income-tax cuts. Even taken at face value, $3 billion is not $13 billion. James has run for statewide office three times on the argument that government wastes your money. He may be right. He has still not published the math for his biggest promise.

Claim: He is a businessman who took the government's money. James built his profile running James Group International, a real Detroit logistics firm serving the auto industry. But the Free Press's debate reporting noted that the state's economic development corporation revoked a tax agreement connected to the company, overlapping with James's time leading it. The man campaigning against corporate welfare has a revoked state tax deal in his own company's past. He deserves the same question he asks Benson: what happened, and why?

Claim: He says whatever the room wants to hear on abortion. The record here is a zigzag, and every stop is documented. In 2018 James called abortion "genocide" and opposed it even in cases of rape or incest. In 2024 he said the issue was "decided" in Michigan — Proposal 3 had passed, end of story. Then, at a July 29, 2026 campaign event, audio reported by the Daily Beast captured him denying he had ever called it settled and pledging to "do everything" to get "the most conservative, most pro-life bill passed." A voter's honest problem: Proposal 3 constrains what any governor can do, but a governor signs and vetoes bills, appoints judges' nominating commissions' members, and sets the party's direction — and James has now told two different Michigans two different things, each with total confidence.

Claim: He is Trump's man, not his own. James insists he is "his own man," and there is some evidence: in Congress he backed funding for Selfridge Air National Guard Base and introduced legislation to blunt the impact of tariffs on the Canada trade Michigan's auto industry runs on. But when the Free Press editorial board asked this summer whether he disagreed with President Trump on anything, his answer was: "He likes Big Macs. I like Reubens." Voters can decide whether that is loyalty or evasion. What is not in doubt: Trump endorsed him, the endorsement cleared his primary field within a day, and Benson's entire closing argument is that James "will keep working for Trump."

The flaw, plainly: James's platform is the conservative platform — lower taxes, cheaper energy, school choice, parents' rights, law enforcement, an auto industry unshackled from mandates. His flaw is follow-through. The signature promise has no published math, the business record has a revoked tax deal in it, and the abortion position has been three positions. The question with James is not what he says. It's whether this campaign's version is the one that shows up in Lansing.

Jocelyn Benson (Democratic)

Her platform: Benson runs on affordability and competent administration. Faster housing construction approvals and starter-home support; expanded homebuyer and property-tax credits; barring private equity firms and institutional investors from buying homes in their first 100 days on the market. A $5,000 caregiver tax credit, an independent Prescription Drug Affordability Board, upfront hospital pricing. Starting teacher salaries of at least $60,000 and preschool for all 3- and 4-year-olds. A power-grid audit, bigger outage credits, weatherization help, and a ban on political contributions from regulated utilities. A pause on new data centers until rules on community input, energy costs, and natural resources are set. Tariff-relief deals with Canada. She pledges to expand FOIA to cover the governor's office, and she is endorsed by Whitmer, Barack Obama, the UAW, the Michigan Education Association — and, on the gun question, by Brady PAC and Everytown for Gun Safety.

The worst claims — and the record:

Claim: Noncitizens voted on her watch while she called the elections the safest ever. Both halves of this are partly true, and the numbers are the whole argument. Benson's own Department of State review of 2024 found 15 people who appear to be noncitizens cast ballots out of more than 5.7 million votes — 0.00028 percent — and referred 13 to the attorney general. Attorney General Dana Nessel's office reviewed 16 referred cases: six produced criminal charges, ten were closed without charges, and 22 more cases forwarded in 2026 remain under review. In August 2026 Nessel charged five noncitizens with illegal voting or registration offenses, and federal prosecutors separately charged a Chinese national and a Russian national. James's line — "the system didn't work" — is an overstatement of a real failure: noncitizens did get registered, a handful did vote, and the system caught them after the fact rather than at the door. Benson's line — address it "with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer" — is reasonable policy and terrible politics when a Macomb County clerk, Anthony Forlini, flagged 14 noncitizens on the rolls in January, Benson publicly called his announcement "reckless," and her own office's review then confirmed four of the 14 were in fact noncitizens and three were citizens. She was the state's chief elections officer, and on the most sensitive call of her tenure she attacked the man who found a real problem before she'd finished checking whether he was right. That is a competence story, and it's hers.

Claim: She is running Michigan's election while administering it. This is structural, and James presses it constantly: the secretary of state oversees the election in which she is herself the Democratic nominee. It is legal, it has precedent, and she has not recused from election administration. Voters who care about the appearance of fairness are not imagining the problem.

Claim: She doesn't know her own tax code. In a May 2025 podcast interview, asked Michigan's income tax rate, Benson answered: "I'm not sure off the top of my head." In the final debate, James baited her with it — and she fired back the correct 4.25 percent. One forgotten number in one podcast is not a governing record. But a candidate whose entire pitch is mastery of state government's details handed her opponent the clip, and the clip is fair game.

Claim: She is Whitmer with a law degree. This is James's frame, and Benson mostly pleads guilty with pride: same party, same donors' class — James attacks her California fundraising trips, and campaign filings do show far more out-of-state fundraisers for Benson than for James — and a platform that extends the Whitmer program: more mandates defended, more credits and boards, the clean-energy law kept, the 2023 gun laws protected by a nominee endorsed by the groups that lobbied for them. For voters who like the Whitmer record, that is the pitch. For voters who hold the Constitution, the free market, and the right to keep and bear arms as the ground they stand on, continuity is not a defense. It's the charge.

The flaw, plainly: Benson is a capable administrator running to extend a governing philosophy this publication opposes at its root — energy by mandate, industry by subsidy (however chastened), firearms by permission, and an elections office that reached for the word "reckless" before it reached for the facts. Her flaw is not corruption and it is not chaos. It is values: she would govern Michigan the way it has been governed for eight years, only more so, and call it competence.

The verdict: nobody gets our endorsement

Two candidates. Two different flaws — and they are not symmetrical, because one of them is a defect of direction and the other is a defect of proof.

James's flaw is follow-through: the right platform — taxes, energy, school choice, law enforcement, an auto state allowed to be an auto state — carried by a candidate whose biggest promise is $13 billion wide and so far $3 billion explained, whose company took a state tax deal the state later revoked, and whose position on the most morally serious issue in the race has changed with the audience in the room. We state the direction plainly: on the values this publication holds — the Constitution, capitalism, the free market, freedom — James is the direction. But an endorsement from this publication is earned with math and consistency, and he has produced neither. The other side's proven record does not certify this side's unproven promise.

Benson's flaw is values: not a defect in how she would run the machine, but in what she believes the machine is for. She is the continuity candidate for an administration that mandated its energy future, subsidized its way to 602 jobs on $1.8 billion, and restricted a constitutional right after two tragedies — and her own tenure's signature episode is an elections chief who dismissed a real problem as recklessness until her own review confirmed it. A vote for Benson is not a gamble. It is a renewal of governance this publication opposes at its root.

So nobody gets our endorsement. That is not a shrug: the two flaws are different in kind, and voters should weigh them as such — a man whose direction is right and whose proof is missing, against a woman whose proof is complete and whose direction is wrong. Here are the facts, here are the claims, and here is what the sources show — the rest is yours. Vote early. Research your candidates. Choose the best moderates, whatever their party — no extremism from either side. And encourage your friends and family to do the same.

Michigan's governor runs the state that builds America's cars. Choose like it matters for four years — because it does.

Sources

AI-assisted article — but the sources are human, and the facts are very real.

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