Trump vs. the Women Who Lead Michigan: A Battle With 2020 Implications

[marmar]

(The New York Times) LANSING, Mich. — Beyond being the women leading Michigan’s state government, Gretchen Whitmer, Dana Nessel and Jocelyn Benson have a lot in common.

All three are Democratic lawyers and part of Generation X, with long lists of accomplishments. Ms. Whitmer was the first woman to lead the Democratic caucus in the State Senate. Ms. Nessel argued before the Supreme Court and helped pave the way for the legalization of same-sex marriage. And Ms. Benson, a Harvard Law School graduate, was the dean of the Wayne State University Law School in Detroit.

By 2018, the three were swept into statewide office on a wave that flipped much of Michigan’s leadership from red to blue and put three women — Ms. Whitmer, the governor; Ms. Nessel, the attorney general; and Ms. Benson, the secretary of state — in charge of running the state for the first time.

Now these women share another distinction: They’re all targets of President Trump.

Trailing in polls to Joseph R. Biden Jr. in this key battleground state, the president has taken aggressive aim at Ms. Whitmer — “that woman from Michigan,” in his words — and her counterparts, zeroing in on their mission to expand voting rights in a state where his 2016 winning margin of just 10,704 votes was the narrowest in the country. ...........(more)

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/12/us/politics/trump-michigan-whitmer-benson-nessel.html