This Senator Has A Very Midwestern Plan To Save The Democrats

“I think that the Democrats could use a little education about the middle of the country,” Elissa Slotkin said. 

It was November 2025, a year after the Democrats lost a presidential election to Donald Trump for the second time, leaving the party rudderless, leaderless and seemingly without a plan. Now, the senator from Michigan had a message for her party. In the Midwestern suburb of Overland Park, Kansas, she walked out on stage in front of a massive American flag and threw out some red meat to a crowd of nearly 500: “A little education that there is something between New York and California — and, actually, the Midwest has a lot to teach our party, right, if you’re a Democrat.” 

She cut every bit the figure of a presidential candidate but led with a patter that made her sound more like a stand-up comic. “They call it my stand-up schtick,” she told me earlier this spring in one of our many conversations over the last year.  

Over much of that year, Slotkin has been on something of a Midwestern safari, visiting out-of-the-way locales and mining their voters for insights. In Kansas, she ticked through a “quick litmus test on how I know I’m in the Midwest.” Some of those items were more banal: You people understand the art of the tailgate, right? It is totally fine if someone hands you a beer at 10 in the morning as long as it’s gameday. … You understand sports rivalries with neighbors. … How you feel about Missouri is how we feel times 10 about Ohio in Michigan. … You’re from the Midwest if you have shopped at Bass Pro or Tractor Supply.… 

The routine usually kills, but not always. In Indianapolis in June, when she was speaking to roughly 2,000 Hoosier Democrats, she improvised some new material about Michigan geography, and how Michiganders “point to the hand to show you where we’re from. I understand, Indiana, you also do such a — a little bit of a palm situation? Do I have that right?” The crowd murmured. She did not, indeed, have it right. “Oh, jeez,” she said. 

Then there was Pittsburgh, where she traveled last October. “I pulled into a parking lot to do a canvas kickoff in Pittsburgh with Josh Shapiro, and it was all Ford F-150s backed into their parking spaces,” she told me. “And I'm like, ‘You guys are fucking Midwestern. Just give it up.’” 

Beneath the surface, Slotkin is at work on a more serious project as her colleague Sen. Gary Peters rides his Harley off into the sunset. It’s one that became clearer to me as I traveled with her across Kansas, Ohio, Indiana and Michigan. She is about to take a star turn in the midterms, serving as perhaps the last neutral, major figure who could unite Michigan Democrats behind either the progressive former public health official Abdul El-Sayed or moderate Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s epochal primary to replace Peters on Tuesday. 

It’s not at all clear her brand of centrism will hold next week if El-Sayed emerges as the winner. Slotkin hasn’t endorsed either candidate, but earlier this year, Stevens posted a photo with Slotkin that some Michigan Democrats viewed as a tacit endorsement. “I’m not going to get involved in the Senate race,” she told me. 

Still, Slotkin drew some three million views in a video on X in which I asked her about far-left Twitch streamer Hasan Piker campaigning with El-Sayed. “He calls me stupid like every other week,” she said of Piker. “What normal human being would choose to go on a show when someone calls you stupid every 10 days?” 

The winner will take on the former member of Congress and FBI agent Mike Rogers, who Slotkin herself defeated by roughly 20,000 votes in the 2024 senate race, even as Trump won her state. All of which positions her as one of the most important figures in arguably the most important state for Democrats ahead of the midterms — and beyond. Whatever Slotkin is doing seems to be working for her: Private polling from another statewide Michigan candidate shared with me showed Slotkin with a favorability among Democrats of 84 percent, with just 13 percent unfavorability.

Sitting behind her family’s farmhouse last month off a dirt road in Holly — population 5,906 — she all but admitted it: As she crisscrosses the Midwest, joking about tailgates and Tractor Supply, she is workshopping material for a presidential campaign.

“I’m trying to do something different, and not the same kind of plan that everyone uses when they’re trying to run for higher office,” she told me as her two mutts, Boomer and Rocky, kept watch underfoot. “I genuinely don’t know where it will come out, but I want to certainly be in the mix.”

In 2018, Slotkin entered politics for the first time, going on to flip a seat held by Mike Bishop in southeast Michigan that was then about the same fading red as her farmhouse. It was, in fact, the same seat Rogers once held until 2015. 

On the trail, she made a name for herself in when her Republican tracker, who at that point had followed her for months, asked her on camera for her take on Medicare for All. Rather than answering, the former CIA analyst and member of the intelligence community under former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama replied with a question that spooked the operative. “How are Sloane and Leroy?” Slotkin pried, betraying that she knew the names of the tracker’s pets. “How do you know my dogs’ names?” he responded, as she shut the door to her vehicle with a smile on her face. (It remains a mystery how Slotkin divined the names, which weren’t on social media or publicly known; a Slotkin spokesperson said he wouldn’t touch it). 

Six years later, Slotkin knocked off Rogers in one of the rare Democratic bright spots of that election. So notable was her victory that it was highlighted in the Democratic National Committee’s now infamous after-action report that was released, unfinished, earlier this spring. “Slotkin’s strong working-class credentials and presence in manufacturing communities helped her minimize losses in Trump territory,” it read.

It also highlighted that Slotkin employed a “losing better” strategy that involved cutting losses in Republican territory across the state, not just running up the score in blue Detroit and Ann Arbor. As a result, she outperformed former Vice President Kamala Harris in 68 of 83 counties. 

Last year, Slotkin’s star rose almost immediately as she arrived in the upper chamber. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer selected her to deliver the party’s response to Trump’s first joint address to Congress of his second term, which she delivered from Wyandotte, Michigan, a working-class town she and Trump both won. She focused on economic and national security, largely sidestepping cultural issues. “She’s really distinguished herself in the Senate already in a very short period of time,” Peters told me. 

By April 2025, Slotkin had released a “war plan” to “contain and defeat Donald Trump.” It outlined a number of points, from policy to legal to tonal tactics she urged her party to consider — from the concrete, like working to ensure “free and fair elections in 2026,” to the more vibes-based, like channeling the “the goddamn Alpha energy” of Detroit Lions coach Dan Campbell. 

Slotkin’s profile got a boost after she and five other Democrats last November released a 90-second video on X that would go on to score nearly 19 million views, along with drawing the ire of Trump himself. Alongside Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and Reps. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.), Maggie Goodlander (D-N.H.) and Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.), Slotkin and the others told members of the military they can “refuse illegal orders.” “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” Trump responded. 

The video vaulted both Slotkin and Kelly to the upper echelons of the Democratic resistance to Trump — perhaps, at least partially, her aim. After all, one of the components of her war plan was for Democrats to have a generationally large primary ahead of 2028 “and to start getting people kind of in circulation,” she told me at the time. 

In May, I caught up with Slotkin at the Mackinac Policy Conference, a bipartisan confab of her home state’s political elite. As the morning sun glistened off the Straits of Mackinac, I asked Slotkin if she thought her lose-better strategy could work nationwide for Democrats in 2028. 

“I enjoy math, and math tells you you need to win in swing states,” she told me. “That’s how Donald Trump just shellacked us in 2024. So, I’m interested in winning in swing states, and I’m interested in nurturing new voices out of the Midwest. So, losing better is the only way you do that in swing states and in the Midwest. So, it’s the strategy that I’ve been trying to push to all the places that I’ve been visiting.” 

There are any number of reasons that building the scaffolding of a presidential campaign by focusing on the middle of the country might not work. Last month, the DNC’s powerful Rules and Bylaws Committee eliminated Iowa, where she visited earlier this year on her tour, from the so-called early nominating window of 2028, though Michigan will vote fifth. Instead of focusing on the middle of the country, the RBC empowered the South and the Mountain West. 

Then, there is the failed Tim Walz experiment. Harris’ strategy of elevating the Menards-shopping, camo-wearing Minnesota governor and his midwestern mantle as her running mate fell flat. I pointed this out to Slotkin in our conversations as a potential weakness of her approach. 

She noted how short the campaign was, calling it an “abbreviated, strange experience.” “I don’t know how to characterize Tim, who I like a lot,” Slotkin said. “But I know that it doesn’t work to just come back to this region in the very 11th hour and think that you’re going to convince people with messages and candidates that have been grown in a test tube in Washington.” 

Beyond that, Slotkin has more urgent tests ahead of November. Whoever emerges from Tuesday’s Senate Democratic primary will rely on her to both unite fractured Michigan Democrats and take a sledgehammer to her old foe, Rogers, as she faces the very real prospect of becoming her state’s only Democrat in the Senate. When we last talked, she insisted she would keep her powder dry in the primary, even as Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer backed Stevens down the homestretch. 

That was not her tack in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District, where democratic socialist candidate William Lawrence is surging in her former Trump-won district that launched Slotkin into politics eight years ago. In that primary, Slotkin recently endorsed against Lawrence, backing Matt Maasdam, the man who formerly carried the nuclear football for Obama. Her endorsement arguably changed the trajectory of the race, and now Republicans are spending $1.6 million to stop him.

It was a sign that Slotkin will weigh in on the civil war between progressives and centrists when she wants to. “She doesn’t have a lot of time for BS,” said her friend and New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill. “And a lot of times, that means standing up to people in your own party.” 

 For Slotkin, the distinction between progressives and moderates isn’t as important as the distinction between Democrats with mealymouthed messages and those with big plans that will signal serious change to voters. “The messages coming out of people — Democrat, Republican, independent — are basically, ‘We want new leadership, period, and we want bold ideas,’” Slotkin said. “And I think there’s a vacuum of that, and what you see are people on the further left of the spectrum filling that. And I don’t begrudge them. They’re responding to an across-the-board general desire. Now, that’s not to say when I go to Kansas that any individual says, ‘I want to be a socialist.’” 

The intraparty wars aren’t her only concern. She’s worried about the prospect of Trump sending uniformed military or federal agents to the polls in November and has been engaged in table-top exercises regarding how to respond. She also has introduced a bill that would bar that possibility, though Republicans are unlikely to touch it in an election year. “Besides helping elect Democrats in the House and Senate, and in my state, between now and the election, my singular focus is on exposing and preparing the American public for his attempts to skew these elections,” Slotkin said of Trump. “I do not say these things lightly.”

But in my conversations with her, what stood out most to me — and where she became most animated — is her concern Democrats might actually do well in November in spite of themselves. 

“I’m concerned that if we do well in the midterms — which, of course, I definitely want — that people are going to take that as, ‘People like Democrats again,’ when really it’s a temperature-taking on the party in power, and a totally different electorate comes out, especially in a swing state,” she said. 

What, exactly, is Slotkin up to? Was this listening tour of the vast middle of the country — she has gone as far west as Idaho — just a play to cast herself as an attractive running mate, or perhaps even as a Defense secretary or CIA director? 

“I’m going to Kansas because I want to be CIA director? That’s the criticism?” she responded. “I go to the Midwest because I think the existential threat to the country is actually not coming from abroad. It’s not Iran. It’s not China. It’s not terrorism. It’s the threat to the middle class. We cannot make good consistent decisions in this country if we’re constantly at each other’s throat and a pendulum swinging between Democrats and Republicans wildly, far left and far right. We won’t be able to make critical decisions for our country, and we certainly won't be a leader abroad unless we figure out how to sustain a middle class in America.” 

It was the kind of answer one might expect of a politician who has become something of a walking and talking autopsy of what the party got wrong in 2024. She called Democrats “weak and woke” as far back as last April in an interview with me. She also feels that Democrats need to stop ignoring Trump voters who may have soured on the president. She invited the Holly town supervisor, George Kullis, whom she calls a “Trump super fan,” to the president’s inauguration last January. Her plan for Democrats: Win over more Georges. 

When I followed her to Kansas City, Missouri, last November for a listening session organized by Majority Democrats PAC, the new group on a mission to build the broadest governing coalition possible, I heard a focus group of seven low-propensity voters administer Slotkin some tough medicine about the Democrats. “They are not doing well,” said a woman named Carie H., a homemaker in her 40s. I asked Slotkin her takeaway, and she told me: “I guess my interpretation was people vote their hopes, and when they don’t feel hope, they’re a lot less likely to make the effort to go out to vote.” 

This past June in Indianapolis, at another Majority Democrats event, I watched as she had pizza with four Trump voters. They didn’t like the Iran war. They didn’t like data centers. And they felt that both Democrats and Republicans in Washington were “dysfunctional.” 

But there was something they did like: Slotkin, and the fact that she was there, listening to them. 

“Super relatable,” one woman said. 

“For a Democrat, I thought her ideas were pretty amazing,” another woman said. “I really enjoyed talking to her. I think the fact that she has a positive outlook on the future helps me be a little bit more positive about it as well.” 

“I feel like I got my voice heard,” a man said. 

Later, I asked Slotkin about who she might lean on to staff a presidential campaign. 

“I think the idea that there would be like a playbook for how to run for president, if you think there is, and you’re just following that playbook, you’re going to lose, because the electorate is changing faster than the consultants can figure out,” she said. 

“It sounds like you’ve spent some time thinking through that,” I said.

“And traveling,” she responded.