New boundaries, new dynamics have Democrats hopeful in Michigan swing district

“I’d rather vote for someone like that, even if I don’t 100 percent agree with them,” said Killion, who described himself as an independent.

Even as Republican confidence about winning back control of the House grows in the final stage of the midterm campaign, races such as the one in Michigan’s 3rd Congressional District could complicate the GOP’s task. The ascent of John Gibbs, the Republican nominee in the district, was in large measure the result of Trump’s continued dominance in the party and the desire to oust members such as Meijer, who voted to impeach him. But by nominating Gibbs over the more moderate Meijer, Republicans have set up a more competitive race.

Republicans argue that economic woes in an area that has traditionally valued fiscal conservatism will make it possible for Gibbs to keep the district under GOP control.

Democrats have in turn rallied around their candidate, Hillary Scholten, who lost to Meijer in the 2020 general election. They counter that Gibbs’s embrace of Trump, his previous criticism of women’s right to vote and other inflammatory statements are incompatible with a race that requires that a candidate appeal to the district’s growing middle.

GOP’s Meijer voted to impeach Trump. Now Democrats are targeting him.

The district’s new lines — encompassing more suburban parts of Grand Rapids, as well as the lakeshore cities of Muskegon and Grand Haven — have Democrats confident they can close the six-point gap that marked Scholten’s previous loss to Meijer. Republicans also acknowledged that possibility, with several strategists who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations noting that Meijer’s moderate bona fides made him the most likely GOP candidate to keep the seat. Democrats agreed, spending millions of dollars in the primary earlier this year to boost Gibbs.

While election prognosticators agree that the district’s new boundaries favor Democrats, at least one suggested candidate quality may be more determinative in this race. The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter in August changed its rating of the race from “toss up” to “lean Democrat” once Gibbs beat Meijer.

Nowhere else in the country has a Republican primary so greatly boosted Democrats’ chances of winning a seat, said Dave Wasserman, Cook’s House editor, noting that Republicans and independents might be turned off by Gibbs’s embrace of the polarizing Trump. “Peter Meijer would’ve been in a good position to keep the district competitive. John Gibbs is not the kind of Republican who would do well here.”

A friendlier map and Democrats’ preferred opponent aren’t a sure bet that Scholten will win, of course. A recent CNN poll showed that likely voters in competitive House districts think Republicans are best suited to address their top concerns: inflation and the economy.

The pathway for Scholten to win, Democrats say, requires aggressively turning out the Democratic base and drawing in independents and voters who lean Republican. Gibbs also must win moderates and disaffected Democrats, but GOP strategists acknowledge that he has a heavier lift, since his campaign also must court Republicans who rejected Trump in 2020.

This dynamic has led to a race for the middle.

Standing before 200 Republicans gathered to greet gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon (R) this month, Gibbs tried to draw contrasts between himself and Scholten by telling voters what he thinks is at stake.

“I think there are going to be many people of all political stripes, even independents, even Democrats, they’re going to say, ‘What’s happening now is actually insane,’ ” he said.

In an interview, Gibbs said a vote for him represents a return to normalcy. He blamed Democrats for higher prices at the gas station and the grocery store and decried a litany of culture-war issues — alleged alienation of parents from their children’s education, debates about how many genders exist and support for late-term abortions.

Gibbs and Republican groups have called Scholten “dangerously liberal,” attacking her as supporting rioters during the protests after the police killing of George Floyd and donating to groups that support defunding the police. The Congressional Leadership Fund, the outside spending group affiliated with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), has run ads repeating the claims with images of rioters celebrating as buildings burn.

PolitiFact has rated as false the claims that Scholten “dismissed” the destruction that rioters caused during the George Floyd protests. At the time, Scholten put out a statement encouraging people to “continue to speak out for George and all victims of violence” but pleaded “with those who take to the streets to make that effort peaceful and to not resort to violence and destruction.”

Scholten jokes that the Republican ads have earned her a new nickname at home from her two young sons: “Agent of Chaos.”

As a fourth-generation West Michigander and deacon in her Dutch Reformed Church, Scholten says she is confident that her reputation will usurp what she describes as “baseless attacks by someone that has no connection” to the district. (Gibbs recently moved to Grand Rapids, but he was born and raised in Lansing, the state capital.)

“I think it’s almost having a boomerang effect, where people see that attack against someone like me that has such deep connection and respect in our community, and it reflects more negatively on the person that is insulting them,” she said.

“You weren’t here then,” Scholten said in response to claims by Gibbs and the GOP about the protests. “You don’t know.”

In an effort to attract the middle, Scholten also has been critical of her party, especially on fiscal issues.

“We’re doing everything to cope with rising prices, but Washington doesn’t seem to be doing anything at all,” she says in her most recent ad. “Democrats, stop the spending. And Republicans, stop putting politics before people.”

Abortion once again a dividing line

Scholten also is trying to highlight differences with her opponent on abortion rights. Voters in November will decide whether to protect reproductive freedom in the Michigan Constitution or adopt a 1931 law that bans abortions except if the mother’s life is threatened and criminalizes the person who performs the procedure.

A recent CNN poll showed 54 percent of Michigan’s registered voters support the amendment that would enshrine protections for reproductive freedom.

Scholten pushed back against Gibbs’s characterization that she is in favor of abortions until birth, noting that she is “not pro-abortion” while speaking about it in personal terms. At 13 weeks pregnant, Scholten was offered an abortion by a doctor after a diagnosis of Turner syndrome. She and her husband “chose life,” Scholten said, but the fetus had died by Scholten’s 19-week appointment.

Gibbs has said he would support a 15-week federal ban on abortion, saying it is a “position based on common sense” because most European countries have more conservative laws limiting abortion. That is a slightly more moderate position than he espoused before the primary, where he downplayed the need for exceptions because, he said, medicine was sufficiently advanced to save the life of the mother. He told The Detroit News, “There are many great Americans all around the country who were actually conceived from rape, and they’re doing great things.”

In the final weeks of the election, Democrats are pushing to frame Gibbs as an extremist by pointing out college writings in which he argued that the United States “has suffered because of women’s suffrage.” House Majority PAC, an outside group affiliated with House Democratic leadership, has been running an ad with young girls reading Gibbs’s writings from 22 years ago.

In a statement made shortly after the revelations, Gibbs claimed responsibility for the website, which he said served “to provoke the left on campus and to draw attention to the hypocrisy of some modern-day feminists.”

“The idea that I would not want [women to vote] is totally crazy, and people recognize it as such. Actually, do you know, the answer I get more than anything? ‘I’m glad there was no internet when I was in college,’ ” he said during an interview.

The revelations could hurt Gibbs with suburban women, a key bloc that Republicans are trying to win back. But Gibbs said she thinks suburban women will be in his corner because they believe a GOP majority will bring down costs and fight rising crime.

Barb Parente is one of those women.

“I don’t want to hear about this other stuff,” Parente, who is retired, said at the church rally that also featured Dixon, the gubernatorial candidate. “What are you going to do about the rising food costs, the homeless, crime? I’m really concerned about all of it, not other distractions.”

The two major House GOP campaign arms, the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC) and Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), refrained from promoting Gibbs or Meijer during the primary in August, leaving Meijer’s campaign to fund his own ads that dwarfed Gibbs’s spending, according to data compiled by the ad tracker AdImpact.

The lack of ads for Gibbs left an opening for the House Democratic campaign arm to intervene. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee invested $425,000 in an ad introducing Gibbs to voters as “too conservative for West Michigan,” believing that boosting the Trump-endorsed candidate could help upend the primary and give Democrats a better chance of winning in the general election.

“Nowhere has anybody said those ads were not accurate,” House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said when pressed on the issue last month. “We wanted the American people to know what the Republican Party is becoming — and is: an extremist party. So, yes, we told people. Now the result of that was that the people in the Republican Party were extremists and voted for them.”

Many Democrats also denounced the strategy, worrying that elevating Trump-backed candidates in Michigan’s primary and five other states could backfire if they are elected in November.

“It is risky and unethical to promote any candidate whose campaign is based on eroding trust in our elections,” said a statement written in August by a group of Democrats comprising former lawmakers in Washington, two former governors and one former Cabinet secretary.

And even Scholten said the entire situation was a “frustrating and an annoying distraction” that took focus away from the campaign she and her staff were trying to run.

Todd Arney, 54, who has lived in Grand Rapids for over almost three decades, said it was “overly manipulative” of his party to interfere in the GOP primary, warning that Democrats should be “careful what they wish for.”

“It tells me that everything is razor-thin, so if you can get a percentage or two here or there, you’re going to try to do that,” he said. “It’s stupid.”

To date, Gibbs’s campaign has spent slightly over $120,000 from his own campaign to fund ads on TV and online, an exceptionally small amount in comparison with the Scholten campaign’s roughly $2.7 million of ad spending. The NRCC and CLF have invested in the general election, spending, together, slightly more than the Scholten campaign’s outlay.

Gibbs said the Democratic ads proved only that Democrats knew he would win the primary, which is why they decided to get “a head start on the attacks.” He conceded, however, that branding him as too conservative “probably did hurt us a little bit with independents.” He remains ware of the need to win over undecided moderates, often reminding those who worry that he is a copy of Trump that his story is different from the former president’s.

“If people don’t like Trump … he’s not the one on the ballot,” Gibbs said. “There are many great things which Trump did. He’s not the one that’s on the ballot this time. I’m on the ballot.”

For voters like Killion, Gibbs’s apparent attempt to distance himself from Trump may not be persuasive. He says that touting the connection to Trump “throws up an alarm” since he believes many in the Republican Party have put “blinders on” and follow only the former president.

“At the end of the day, I don’t care about who endorses you. I want to know what you plan on doing,” he said.