Winners and losers from the 2024 election season 

With all these winners and losers in this week’s edition of City Pulse, here is my personal list of winners and losers from the 2024 election cycle. 

WINNERS

1. The Polls — It feels like after every election cycle, we all take turns taking a stick to the pollsters who blew the election results. Not this one.  

The polls said it would be close. It was close. Donald Trump won Michigan by 1.38 percentage points. That falls within the margin of error of nearly every poll in the Real Clear Politics average since September.  

Nearly every poll had Elissa Slotkin winning the U.S. Senate by a razor-thin margin. That’s what happened. Good work, pollsters. 

2. Michigan’s TV stations, paid media outlets — So much money was spent in Michigan. So much. Nearly $300 million on the presidential race, according to AdImpact, which tracks such things. About $219 million in the U.S. Senate race. Nearly $40 million on our U.S. House seat. Another $27 million was spent in the congressional district next door to us.  

That’s pretty much half of a billion dollars on trying to influence your vote. HALF OF A BILLION DOLLARS! Just in Michigan! 

I’ll let you figure out a better use for a half of a billion dollars. 

3. The Voters — The plus side to having insane money spent in our election? Everyone knew about it. 

We haven’t had a higher percentage of our voting population participate in an election since the state started keeping track of such things in 1948. 

Around 78% of all Michiganders who could have voted did. That crashed four years ago, when 70% showed up and the previous record of 72.7% from the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon race. 

4. State House Republicans — Most Republicans are peacocking around after last Tuesday’s results. They have a right to be. However, the biggest winners were the GOP House candidates, former Gov. Rick Snyder, Dick DeVos and the people behind the scenes who won back the state House in convincing fashion despite being significantly outspent. 

The Democrats went on network TV in Detroit. It didn’t work. Republicans’ micro-targeting strategy connected with voters much better.  

They used the state House Democrats’ record against them. The House Democrats ignored their record and painfully campaigned on abortion. (More on that later.) Michigan House Republicans picked up four seats, making it the country’s only legislative chamber to change partisan hands. 

5. Justice Kyra Bolden, Kimberly Thomas — Republicans threw all their eggs in the House and basically left their Supreme Court nominees to fend for themselves. They were eaten alive.  

Bolden and Thomas were well funded and ran a quality campaign that got their names in front of voters, Republican, Democrat and independent. This race was over before the 10 p.m. news. 

Losers 

1. Whoever ran the Hertel campaign — I’m cutting Curtis Hertel some slack here because I’m quite sure he was not the admiral in that deflatingly bad congressional campaign. The D.C. geniuses who pulled this campaign plan off the shelf will not want this effort on their resume. 

Despite having PLENTY of money, they let Hertel get defined before he could define himself. They rarely let him speak plainly. They screwed up the debate. They didn’t let him on local radio interviews. Instead of playing to his strengths of getting shit done when he worked in government, they tried to pass him off as just some “regular” guy. I couldn’t watch a hockey game without seeing that “liberal lobbyist” ad (literally) five times. 

Barrett’s bag of bad votes as a strident conservative legislator were rarely opened … unless it had to do with abortion, and then they literally made up policy he never supported!  

2. Whoever thought abortion was on the ballot — I understand this whole “abortion-is-on-the-ballot” thing came from the Democratic Party mothership, but come on.  Abortion was not on the ballot. It was in 2022. It was not in 2024. You only needed to read a few polls to figure that out. 

You had a convicted criminal who passively inspired a violent riot at the U.S. Capitol at the head of the Republican ticket. Instead, you’re running ads on reproductive health care? Which we made a constitutional right in our state two years ago? What about video of cops getting their heads beat in with a flagpole flying a MAGA banner? 

3. Project 2025 canard — With real issues facing Michigan’s middle class, Democrats (again from the national mothership) created this bogeyman called Project 2025, a conservative idealogue dream. What’s in? 

YOU HAVE TO READ NEARLY 1,000 PAGES TO FIND OUT! (menacing music in the background).  Conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation are literally paid to come up with this stuff all the time. Sometimes Republicans do some of it. Sometimes they don’t.  Trying to make this into some novel concept that Trump was secretly behind was not digestible. 

(Kyle Melinn is editor of the Capitol news service MIRS. Email him at melinnky@gmail.com.)