The race for Michigan's Governor

Tudor Dixon

 It is a rare thing when the contest for Michigan's governor makes national news. It is even rarer when the primary race makes news.

Earlier in this election-cycle there were ten candidates vying for the position to run against incumbent Democrat Gretchen (Big Retch) Whitmer (boo-hiss!).

The five candidates who had the most impressive resumes, including former Detroit Police Chief James Craig, were blown out of the saddle when a "random audit" of their petitions to be included on the primary election ballot were found by the Democratic Secretary of State to be invalid.

Evidence suggests that the candidates that were drummed out of the race had hired a common firm to collect signatures and the majority of those signatures were fraudulent. It has been suggested that the firm was run by Democratic operatives whose goal was to torpedo those candidates. If so, the Repubs were very handily outmaneuvered.

That leaves the Repubs fielding the second-string for the primary and it is a motley crew.

Cutting to the chase, the most conservative candidate who I believe can win against Big Retch is a woman named Tudor Dixon as long as she is smart in who she picks for the Lt. Gov side of the ticket.

I think the Dems realize this and some truly nasty ads have been circulated slamming Dixon as a RINO. Oddly, nobody is taking credit for those ads. Most candidates want to collect more votes rather than sinking a fellow candidate and evenly distributing those votes amongst all of the other candidates.

A Tudor Dixon/James Craig ticket would be a very strong ticket. A Dixon/Soldano ticket would be OK as it would beef up Dixon's lack of grass-roots support.

Dixon neatly checkmates most of Whitmer's obvious ploys...Dixon has a uterus, Dixon has daughters (four of them!). Dixon is photogenic which is a HUGE plus with the younger generations who are visually oriented and scan social media. Whitmer likes to bring up that she "cared for her mother" when her mother had cancer to "show" that she has compassion and empathy. Dixon is a cancer survivor.

Whitmer cannot point to any success. Her promise to fix the roads was back-end loaded so most of the work would be done in the election-year. That backfired as traffic is horrific and the roads are still battered strips of pavement with potholes and proud "expansion strips".

Whitmer is trying to position herself as somebody who wants to lower taxes but she wanted to raise the Michigan gas tax by 45-cents-a-gallon.

The Repubs' second-string can beat the Dems but they gotta be smart about it. They cannot pick the most conservative candidate if that candidate is on the defensive for 90% of the game and cannot exploit Whitmer's multitude of weaknesses.