“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… [TheTopNews] Read More.
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