On the eve of the midterm election, the hotly contested race for Michigan governor between Democrat incumbent Gretchen Whitmer and GOP challenger Tudor Dixon remains a toss-up.
Though the latest polls show Whitmer in the lead, 30-year veteran Michigan political consultant Jamie Roe believes Dixon is poised to pull off an upset.
“The Democrats have a turnout problem, and they know it,” Roe said in a Nov. 7 interview with The Epoch Times.
Roe’s assertion is shared by Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey, who told reporters at a Nov. 3 press conference that she expects a 28 to 32 percent turnout this year, as opposed to the 41 percent turnout in the 2018 midterms, which helped elect Whitmer to her first term as governor.
Winfrey said of her projection, “It’s not what we wanted, but it’s what it’s looking like now.”
Detroit, a Democrat stronghold, is Michigan’s largest city with 508,000 registered voters.
According to Roe, the Democrats’ turnout woes are not confined to Detroit but appear to be statewide.
Roe stated that in the 2020 presidential election, the number of GOP absentee voters trailed Democrats voting by mail by 40 percent in Michigan. As of Nov. 7, 2022, the figure is 30 percent.
“The lack of enthusiasm among African American voters in Detroit is being mirrored by voters across the state, largely because people’s life experiences don’t correspond with the Democrat narrative.
“People haven’t seen the benefit of Democrat policies. In fact, they are being hurt by them. Voters are offended by the gaslighting,” Roe said.
Wary of what he called the “strange alchemy” of modern polling’s electorate modeling methods, Roe claimed that the strength of the Republican vote in Michigan is being underestimated.
“Studies have shown that 45 percent of people talking with pollsters have a college degree. Yet less than 20 percent of the Michigan population are college graduates.
“That alone means the polling models do not accurately represent the composition of the electorate,” he said.
According to Roe, pollsters’ jobs are being complicated by many blue-collar voters who are choosing not to talk to them.
“Those that do participate in a survey often give ‘undecided’ as their response to questions about candidate preference even though they have their minds already made up
“When you add in the conservatives who hang up the phone when they learn it’s a pollster calling because they don’t trust polls, there’s a good probability that Dixon is running stronger than people are being led to believe,” Roe said.
Whitmer, 51, describes herself on her website as a “tough, tested, and tireless” problem-solver who has guided the state through the “unprecedented crisis” of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Before winning the governorship, she served in the state House of Representatives and the state Senate.
Dixon, 45, is a former businesswoman and conservative commentator. She has never held an elective office before.
Protecting liberal access to abortion and fixing Michigan’s crumbling system of roads and bridges are two of Whitmer’s priorities.
If elected, Dixon has promised to protect the rights of parents in the raising and education of their children, improve schools to restore student test scores to previous levels, and reverse the economic decline of the Great Lakes State.
